PART SEVEN

Zion

The Holocaust and the new Zion were organically connected. The murder of six million Jews was a prime causative factor in the creation of the state of Israel. This was in accordance with an ancient and powerful dynamic of Jewish history: redemption through suffering. Thousands of pious Jews sang their profession of faith as they were hustled towards the gas chambers because they believed that the punishment being inflicted on the Jews, in which Hitler and the SS were mere agents, was the work of God and itself proof that He had chosen them. According to the Prophet Amos, God had said: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.’¹ The sufferings of Auschwitz were not mere happenings. They were moral enactments. They were part of a plan. They confirmed the glory to come. Moreover, God was not merely angry with the Jews. He was also sorrowful. He wept with them. He went with them into the gas chambers as he had gone with them into Exile.²

That is to state cause and effect in religious, metaphysical terms. But it can also be stated in historical terms. The creation of Israel was the consequence of Jewish sufferings. We have used the image of the jigsaw puzzle to show how each necessary piece was slotted into place. As we have seen, the great eastern massacres of 1648 led to the return of a Jewish community to England, and so to America, thus in time producing the most influential Jewry in the world, an indispensable part of the geopolitical context in which Israel could be created. Again, the massacres of 1881 set in motion a whole series of events tending towards the same end. The immigration they produced was the background to the Dreyfus outrage, which led directly to Herzl’s creation of modern Zionism. The movement of Jews set in motion by Russian oppression created the pattern of tension from which, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration emerged, and the League of Nations Palestine mandate was set up to implement it. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was the last in the series of catastrophes which helped to make the Zionist state.

Even before the Second World War, Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy had the unintended effect of greatly strengthening the Jewish community in Palestine. Hitler eventually came to see the Jewish state as a potential enemy, a ‘second Vatican’, a ‘Jewish Comintern’, a ‘new power-base for world Jewry’.3 But for a time in the 1930s the Nazis actively assisted the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. Not only did 60,000 German Jews thus reach the national home, but the assets of these German Jews played an important part in establishing an industrial and commercial infrastructure there. It was the war, bringing with it not only Hitler’s outright physical assault on the Jews as his prime enemy, but the chance for Jews to hit back at him with the Allies, which activated the last phase of the Zionist programme. From the outbreak of war in 1939, the creation of the Israeli state, at the earliest possible moment, became the overriding object of the Zionists and spread gradually to the majority of the world Jewish community. The obstacles to a Zionist fulfilment were still considerable. It was not enough to defeat Hitler. It was also necessary to remove any objections from the three victorious Allies, Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia. Let us look at each in turn.

Initially, Britain was the most important, because it was the power in possession. Moreover, the 1939 White Paper policy had, in effect, repudiated the Balfour Declaration and projected a future in which no predominantly Jewish Palestine could emerge. The Jews were Britain’s ally in the war. But at the same time they had to overthrow British policy for Palestine. Ben Gurion thought the aims were compatible: ‘We must fight Hitler as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no Hitler.’⁴ He was right, provided the British would allow the Jews to fight the war as a coherent unit, which could later be used to determine events in Palestine. The British authorities, military, diplomatic and colonial, were hostile to the idea for this very reason. Indeed, after the Alamein victory late in 1942 removed the German threat from the Middle East, British HQ there looked with suspicion on any Jewish military activity. But the Jews had one powerful defender: Churchill. He favoured Weizmann’s proposal to form a Jewish striking-force from existing small-scale Jewish units. The British army repeatedly blocked the scheme, but Churchill eventually got his way. ‘I like the idea’, he minuted to the Secretary of State for War, 12 July 1944, ‘of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow countrymen in Central Europe. It is with the Germans that they have their quarrel…. I cannot conceive why this martyred race scattered about the world and suffering as no other race has done at this juncture should be denied the satisfaction of having a flag.’5 Two months later, the Jewish Brigade, 25,000 strong, was formed. Without Churchill the Jews would never have got it, and the experience of working together at this formation level was critical to the Israeli success four years later.

All the same, the British had no intention of reversing their Palestine policy. Overthrowing Hitler impoverished them and made their Middle Eastern oilfields more, not less, important; they had no intention of permitting a level of Jewish immigration which would turn the Arab world implacably hostile. Nor were they ready to move out of Palestine until they could do so in a manner which retained their Arab friendships. So they prevented illegal Jewish immigrants from landing, and if they got through efforts were made to capture and deport them. In November 1940 the Patria, about to sail for Mauritius with 1,700 deportees on board, was sabotaged by the Haganah. It sank in Haifa Bay and 250 refugees were drowned. In February 1942 the Struma, a refugee ship from Rumania, was refused landing permission by Britain, turned back by the Turks, and sank in the Black Sea, drowning 770.

These tragic episodes did not shake Britain’s resolve to maintain her immigration limits throughout the war and even after, when there were 250,000 Jews in DP camps. Nor did the accession to power in 1945 of the British Labour Party, theoretically pro-Zionist, make any difference. The new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, bowed to the arguments of the diplomats and generals. At that time Britain still ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface. She had 100,000 men in Palestine, where the Jews numbered only 600,000. There was no material reason why the Zionists should get their way. Yet eighteen months later Bevin threw in his hand. As Evelyn Waugh, in his book on Jerusalem, bitterly observed of British conduct: ‘We surrendered our mandate to rule the Holy Land for low motives: cowardice, sloth and parsimony. The vision of Allenby marching on foot where the Kaiser had arrogantly ridden, is overlaid now by the sorry spectacle of a large, well-found force, barely scratched in battle, decamping before a little gang of gunmen.’⁶ How did this happen?

The answer lies in yet another Jewish contribution to the shape of the modern world: the scientific use of terror to break the will of liberal rulers. It was to become a commonplace over the next forty years, but in 1945 it was new. It might be called a by-product of the Holocaust, for no lesser phenomenon could have driven even desperate Jews to use it. Its most accomplished practitioner was Menachem Begin, former chairman of Betar, the Polish youth movement. He was a man in whom the bitterness generated by the Holocaust had become incarnate. Jews formed 70 per cent of his home town, Brest-Litovsk. There had been over 30,000 of them in 1939. By 1944 only ten were left alive. Most of Begin’s family were murdered. The Jews were forbidden even to bury their dead. That was how his father died, shot on the spot digging a grave for a friend in the Jewish cemetery.7 But Begin was a born survivor, and a revenger. Arrested in Lithuania, he was one of the very few men to survive, unbroken, an interrogation by Stalin’s NKVD. at the end of it, his interrogator said with fury: ‘I never want to see you again.’ Begin commented later: ‘It was my faith against his faith. I had something to fight for, even in the interrogation room.’⁸ Begin was sent to a Soviet slave-camp in the Arctic Circle near the Barents Sea, building the Kotlas-Varkuta railway. He survived that too, benefited from an amnesty for Poles, walked through Central Asia and made his way to Jerusalem as a private in the Polish army. In December 1943 he took over control of the Revisionists’ military arm, the Irgun. Two months later he declared war on the British administration.

Among the Jews there were three schools of thought about the British. Weizmann still believed in British good faith. Ben Gurion, though sceptical, wanted to win the war first. Even after it he drew an absolute distinction between resistance and terrorism, and this was reflected in Haganah policy. On the other hand there was an extremist breakaway from the Irgun, known as the Stern Gang after its leader Avraham Stern. He disobeyed Jabotinsky’s instructions for a cease-fire with the British on the outbreak of war, and was killed in February 1942. But his colleagues, led by Yizhak Shamir and Nathan Yellin-Mor, carried on an unrestricted campaign against Britain. Begin took a third course. He thought the Haganah too passive, the Stern Gang crude, vicious and unintelligent. He saw the enemy not as Britain but the British administration in Palestine. He wanted to humiliate it; make it unworkable, expensive, ineffective. He had 600 active agents. He rejected assassination but he blew up CID offices, the immigration building, income-tax centres, and similar targets.

Relations between the three groups of Jewish activists were always tense and often venomous. This had grave political consequences later. On 6 November 1944 the Stern Gang murdered Lord Moyne, the British Minister for Middle East Affairs. Haganah, appalled and infuriated, launched what was called the Saison against both Sternists and Irgun. It captured some of them and held them in underground prisons. Worse, it handed over to the British CID the names of 700 persons and institutions. At least 300 and possibly as many as 1,000 were arrested as a result of information supplied by the Zionist establishment. Begin, who got away, accused the Haganah of torture too, and issued a defiant statement: ‘We shall repay you, Cain.’ But he was too shrewd to get into a war with Haganah. It was during these months, when he was fighting both the British and his fellow Jews, that he created an underground force almost impervious to attack. He believed Haganah would have to join him to get rid of Britain. He was proved right. On 1 October 1945 Ben Gurion, without consulting Weizmann, sent a coded cable to Moshe Sneh, the Haganah commander, ordering him to begin operations against the British forces.9 A united Jewish Resistance Movement was formed. It began its attacks on the night of 31 October, blowing up railways.

Even so, disagreements on targets remained. The Haganah would not employ terror in any form. It would employ force only in what could plausibly be called a military operation. Begin always rejected murder, such as the cold-blooded killing by the Sternists of six British paratroopers in their beds on 26 April 1946. He repudiated, then and later, the label ‘terrorist’. But he was willing to take moral risks, as well as physical ones. How could the Promised Land have been secured in the first place without Joshua? And was not the Book of Joshua a disturbing record of how far the Israelites were prepared to go to conquer the land which was theirs by divine command?

Begin was a leading figure in two episodes which were instrumental in inducing Britain to quit. On 29 June 1946 the British made a dawn swoop on the Jewish Agency. Some 2,718 Jews were arrested. The object was to produce a more moderate Jewish leadership. It failed. Indeed, since Irgun was untouched, it strengthened Begin’s hand. He got Haganah to agree to blow up the King David Hotel, where part of the British administration was housed. The agreed object was to humiliate, not to kill. But the risk of mass murder was enormous. Weizmann got to hear of the plot and threatened to resign and tell the world why.¹⁰ Haganah told Begin to call it off but he refused. At lunchtime on 22 July 1946, six minutes ahead of schedule, about 700 lb of high explosive demolished one wing of the hotel, killing twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs and seventeen Jews, plus five other people. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl gave a warning phone call as part of the plan. There is a conflict of evidence over what happened next. Begin always insisted that adequate warning was given and blamed the British authorities for the deaths. He mourned the Jewish casualties alone.¹¹ But, in such acts of terror, those who plant the explosives must be held responsible for any deaths. That was the view taken by the Jewish establishment. The Haganah commander Moshe Sneh was forced to resign. The Resistance Movement broke up into its component parts. Nevertheless the outrage, combined with others, achieved its effect. The British government proposed a tripartite division of the country. Both Jews and Arabs rejected the plan. Accordingly, on 14 February 1947, Bevin announced that he was handing over the whole Palestine problem to the United Nations.

That did not necessarily mean a rapid British withdrawal, however. So the terror campaign continued. A further episode, for which Begin was again responsible, proved decisive. He was opposed to Sternist-type assassinations but he insisted on Irgun’s moral right to punish members of the British armed forces in the same way as Britain punished Irgun members. The British hanged and flogged. Irgun would do the same. In April 1947 three Irgun men were put on trial for an attack on the Acre prison-fortress, which freed 251 prisoners. Begin threatened retaliation if the three were convicted and hanged. They were, on 29 July. A few hours later two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been captured for this purpose, were hanged on Begin’s instructions by Irgun’s operations chief, Gidi Paglin. He also mined their bodies. This gruesome murder of Martin and Paice, who had committed no crime, horrified many Jews. The Jewish Agency called it ‘the dastardly murder of two innocent men by a set of criminals’.12 (It was even worse than it seemed at the time, for it emerged thirty-five years later that Martin had a Jewish mother.) It caused unrestrained fury in Britain. A synagogue was burned down in Derby. There were anti-Jewish riots in London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester–the first in England since the thirteenth century. These in turn produced critical changes in British policy. The British had assumed that any partition would have to be supervised and enforced by them; otherwise the armies of the Arab states would simply move in and exterminate the Jews. Now they decided to get out as quickly as possible and leave Arabs and Jews to it.¹³ Thus Begin’s policy succeeded, but it involved appalling risks.

The extent of the risks depended to some extent on the two superpowers, America and Russia. In both cases the Zionists benefited from what might be called luck or divine providence, according to taste. The first was the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. In his last weeks he had turned anti-Zionist, following a meeting with King Ibn Saud after the Yalta Conference. The pro-Zionist presidential assistant, David Niles, later asserted: ‘There are serious doubts in my mind that Israel would have come into being if Roosevelt had lived.’¹⁴ F.D.R.’s successor, Harry S. Truman, had a much more straightforward commitment to Zionism, part emotional, part calculating. He felt sorry for Jewish refugees. He saw the Jews in Palestine as underdogs. He was also much less sure of the Jewish vote than Roosevelt. For the coming 1948 election, he needed the endorsement of Jewish organizations in such swing-states as New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Once the British renounced their mandate, Truman pushed for the creation of a Jewish state. In May 1947 the Palestine problem came before the UN. A special committe was asked to submit a plan. It produced two. A minority recommended a federated binational state. The majority produced a new partition plan: there would be Jewish and Arab states, plus an international zone in Jerusalem. On 29 November 1947, thanks to Truman’s vigorous backing, it was endorsed by the General Assembly, 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions.

The Soviet Union and the Arab states, followed by the international left in general, later came to believe that the creation of Israel was the work of a capitalist-imperialist conspiracy. But the facts show the reverse. Neither the American State Department nor the British Foreign Office wanted a Jewish state. They foresaw disaster for the West in the area if one were created. The British War Office was equally strong in opposition. So was the US Defense Department. Its Secretary, James Forrestal, bitterly denounced the Jewish lobby: ‘No group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.’15 The British and American oil companies were even more vehement in opposing the new state. Speaking for the oil interests, Max Thornburg, of Cal-Tex, said that Truman had ‘extinguished the moral prestige of America’ and destroyed ‘Arab faith in her ideals’.¹⁶ It is impossible to point to any powerful economic interest, in either Britain or the United States, which pushed for the creation of Israel. In both countries, the overwhelming majority of her friends were on the left.

Indeed, if there was a conspiracy to create Israel, then the Soviet Union was a prominent member of it. During the war, for tactical reasons, Stalin suspended some aspects of his anti-Semitic policies. He even created a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.¹⁷ From 1944, for a brief period, he adopted a pro-Zionist posture in foreign policy (though not in Russia itself). His reason seems to have been that the creation of Israel, which he was advised would be a socialist state, would accelerate the decline of British influence in the Middle East.¹⁸ When Palestine first came before the UN in May 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, caused surprise by announcing that his government supported the creation of a Jewish state, and by voting accordingly. On 13 October Semyon Tsarapkin, head of the Soviet delegation to the UN, offered members of the Jewish Agency the toast, ‘To the future Jewish state’, before voting for the partition plan. At the decisive General Assembly vote on 29 November the entire Soviet bloc voted in the Israeli interest, and thereafter the Soviet and American delegations worked closely together on the timetable of British withdrawal. Nor was this all. When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and President Truman immediately accorded it de facto recognition, Stalin went one better and, less than three days later, gave it recognition de jure. Perhaps most significant of all was the decision of the Czech government, on Stalin’s instructions, to sell the new state arms. An entire airfield was assigned to the task of air-lifting weapons to Tel Aviv.19

Timing was absolutely crucial to Israel’s birth and survival. Stalin had the Russian-Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels murdered in January 1948, and this seems to have marked the beginning of an intensely anti-Semitic phase in his policy. The switch to anti-Zionism abroad took longer to develop but it came decisively in the autumn of 1948. By this time, however, Israel was securely in existence. American policy was also changing, as the growing pressures of the Cold War dissolved her mood of post-war idealism and forced Truman to listen more attentively to Pentagon and State Department advice. If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.

However, if Begin’s ruthlessness was responsible for the early British withdrawal, it was Ben Gurion who brought the state into being. He had to take a series of decisions each of which could have produced catastrophe for the Jewish people of Palestine. Once the UN partition vote was taken the Arabs were bent on destroying all the Jewish settlements and began to attack them immediately. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said on the radio: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.’²⁰ The Jewish commanders were confident but their resources were small. By the end of 1947 the Haganah had 17,600 rifles, 2,700 sten-guns, about 1,000 machine-guns and between 20,000 and 43,000 men in various stages of training. It had virtually no armour, heavy guns or aircraft.²¹ The Arabs had collected a Liberation Army of considerable size but with a divided leadership. They also had the regular forces of the Arab states: 10,000 Egyptians, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Lebanese, plus the 4,500-strong Arab Legion of Transjordan, a formidable force with British officers. By March 1948 over 1,200 Jews had been killed, half of them civilians, in Arab attacks. The Czech arms were beginning to arrive and were deployed over the next month. The British mandate was not due to end until 15 May. But early in April Ben Gurion took what was probably the most difficult decision in his life. He ordered the Haganah on to the offensive to link up the various Jewish enclaves and to consolidate as much as possible of the territory allotted to Israel under the UN plan. The gamble came off almost completely. The Jews occupied Haifa. They opened up the route to Tiberias and the eastern Galilee. They took Safed, Jaffa and Acre. They established the core of the state of Israel and in effect won the war before it started.22

Ben Gurion read out the Scroll of Independence on Friday 14 May in the Tel Aviv museum. ‘By virtue of our national and intrinsic right,’ he said, ‘and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which shall be known as the State of Israel.’ A provisional government was formed immediately. Egyptian air raids began that night. The next day, simultaneously, the last British left and the Arab armies invaded. They made little difference, except in one respect. King Abdullah’s Arab Legion took the Old City of Jerusalem for him, the Jews surrendering it on 28 May. This meant that Jewish settlements east of the Holy City had to be evacuated. Otherwise the Israelis made further gains.

A month’s truce was arranged on 11 June. During it the Arab states heavily reinforced their armies. But the Israelis secured great quantities of heavy equipment, not only from the Czechs but from the French too, who provided it chiefly to anger the British. When the fighting resumed on 9 July, it quickly became apparent that the Israelis were in control. They took Lydda, Ramleh and Nazareth and occupied large areas of territory beyond the partition frontiers. The Arabs agreed to a second truce within ten days. But there were occasional outbreaks of violence, and in mid-October the Israelis launched an offensive to open the road to the Negev settlements. It ended in the capture of Beersheba. By the close of the year the Israeli army was 100,000-strong, and properly equipped. It had established a military paramountcy in the area it has never since lost. Armistice talks were opened in Rhodes on 12 January 1949 and were signed with Egypt (14 February), Lebanon (23 March), Transjordan (3 April) and Syria (20 July). Iraq made no agreement at all, and the five Arab states remained in a formal state of war with Israel.

The events of 1947-8, which established Israel, also created the Arab-Israeli problem, which endures to this day. It has two main aspects, refugees and frontiers, best considered separately. According to UN figures, 656,000 Arab inhabitants of mandatory Palestine fled from Israeli-held territory: 280,000 to the West Bank of the Jordan, 70,000 to Transjordan, 100,000 to Lebanon, 4,000 to Iraq, 75,000 to Syria, 7,000 to Egypt, and 190,000 to the Gaza Strip (the Israelis put the total figure rather lower, 550,000-600,000). They left for four reasons: to avoid being killed in the fighting, because the administration had broken down, because they were ordered to or misled or panicked by Arab radio broadcasts, and because they were stampeded by an Irgun-Stern Gang massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948.

The last merits scrutiny because it is relevant to the moral credentials of the Israeli state. From 1920 until this point, the Jews had refrained from terrorist attacks on Arab settlements, though the innumerable Arab ones had sometimes provoked heavy-handed reprisals. When the fighting began in the winter of 1947-8, Deir Yassin, an Arab quarrying village of less than 1,000 people, made a non-aggression pact with the nearby Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul. But two Jewish settlements nearby were overrun and destroyed, and the Jewish desire for revenge was strong. The Stern Gang proposed to destroy Deir Yassin to teach the Arabs a lesson. A senior Irgun officer, Yehuda Lapidot, testified: ‘The clear aim was to break Arab morale and raise the morale of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, which had been hit hard time after time, especially recently by the desecration of Jewish bodies which fell into Arab hands.’23 Begin agreed to the operation but said a loudspeaker van must be used to give the villagers a chance to surrender without bloodshed. The local Haganah commander also gave his reluctant approval, but laid down further conditions. There were eighty Irgun and forty Sternists in the raid. The loudspeaker van fell into a ditch and was never used. The Arabs chose to fight and were actually stronger and better armed. The Irgun-Sternists had to send for a regular platoon with a heavy machine-gun and 2-inch mortar, and it was these which ended Arab resistance.

It was at this point that the raiding force moved into the village and went out of control. A Haganah spy who was with them described what followed as ‘a disorganized massacre’. The raiders took twenty-three men to the quarry and shot them. An Arab eye-witness said ninety-three others were killed in the village, but other accounts put the figure of those killed as high as 250. Begin, before he knew the details of the battle, sent out an order of the day in the spirit of the Book of Joshua: ‘Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…. As at Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou hast chosen us for conquest.’24 News of this atrocity, in exaggerated form, spread quickly and undoubtedly persuaded many Arabs to flee over the next two months. There is no evidence that it was designed to have this effect. But in conjunction with the other factors it reduced the Arab population of the new state to a mere 160,000. That was very convenient.

On the other hand, there were the Jews encouraged or forced to flee from Arab states where, in some cases, Jewish communities had existed for 2,500 years. In 1945 there were over 500,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Between the outbreak of the war on 15 May 1948 and the end of 1967, the vast majority had to take refuge in Israel: 252,642 from Morocco, 13,118 from Algeria, 46,255 from Tunisia, 34,265 from Libya, 37,867 from Egypt, 4,000 from Lebanon, 4,500 from Syria, 3,912 from Aden, 124,647 from Iraq and 46,447 from the Yemen. With a total of 567,654, Jewish refugees from Arab countries were thus not substantially smaller in number than Arab refugees from Israel.²⁵ The difference in their reception and treatment was entirely a matter of policy. The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the UN, kept the Arab refugees in camps, pending a reconquest of Palestine which never came. Hence, as a result of natural increase, there were more Arab refugees in the late 1980s than there had been forty years before.

This contrasting attitude towards refugees itself sprang from a fundamentally different approach towards negotiations. The Jews had been for two millennia an oppressed minority who had never possessed the option of force. They had therefore been habitually obliged to negotiate, often for bare existence, and nearly always from a position of great weakness. Over the centuries they had developed not merely negotiating skills but a philosophy of negotiation. They would negotiate against impossible odds, and they had learned to accept a negotiated status, however lowly and underprivileged, knowing that it could later be improved by further negotiations and their own efforts. The paramountcy of settlement, as opposed to force, was built into their very bones. That was one reason they found it so difficult, even when the evidence became overwhelming, to take in the magnitude of Hitler’s evil: it was hard for them to comprehend a man who wanted no settlement at all with them, just their lives.

The Arabs, by contrast, were a conquering race whose sacred writings both inspired and reflected a maximalist position towards other peoples, the despised dhimmi. The very concept of negotiation towards a final settlement was to them a betrayal of principle. A truce, an armistice might be necessary and was acceptable because it preserved the option of force for use later. A treaty, on the other hand, appeared to them a kind of surrender. That was why they did not want the refugees resettled because it meant the final disposal of a moral asset. As Cairo Radio put it: ‘The refugees are the cornerstone in the Arab struggle against Israel. The refugees are the armaments of the Arabs and Arab nationalism.’26 Hence they rejected the 1950 UN plan for resettlement without discussion. Over the subsequent quarter century they refused even to receive repeated Israeli proposals for compensation. The result was disastrous for the refugees themselves and their progeny. It was a source of instability for the Arab states also. It came near to destroying Jordan in the 1960s. It did destroy the finely balanced structure of Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.

The different approach to negotiating played a still more important part in determining Israel’s frontiers. For Jews there were three possible ways of looking at their recreated country: as a national home, as the Promised Land and as the Zionist state. The first can be quickly disposed of. If all the Jews wanted was a place where they could be safe, it might be anywhere: Argentina, Uganda, Madagascar, for instance, were all proposed at one time or another. But it quickly became clear that few Jews were interested in such schemes. The only one with the slightest practical appeal was the El Arish proposal, precisely because it was near Palestine.

So we move on to the second notion: the Promised Land. In one way or another, this had a theoretical appeal to all Jews, secular and religious, except to pious Jews who insisted that any return to Zion must be part of a messianic event, and assimilated Jews who had no intention of returning anywhere. But what exactly was this land? As we have already noted, when God gave it to Abraham he did not define it with any precision.²⁷ Was it then to consist of the territories the Israelites had actually occupied? If so, at what period? There had in fact been two commonwealths as well as two temples, the Davidic and the Hasmonean. Some Zionists saw (and see) the state as the Third Commonwealth. But to which was it the successor-state? David’s kingdom (but not Solomon’s) had included Syria. The Hasmoneans had also ruled at one time over a vast territory. Both ancient commonwealths had been mini-empires at their greatest extent, and had included subject people who had been only semi-Jewish or not Jewish at all. They could scarcely serve as models for a Zionist state whose primary purpose was to provide a national home for Jews. On the other hand there was a strong emotional belief in the Jews’ right to claim those parts of Palestine where they had been predominant in antiquity. This found expression in the plan put forward by the Zionists to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It gave the Jews the whole coast from Rafah to Sayda and both banks of the Jordan, the eastern frontier running just west of the Damascus-Amman-Hijaz railway.28 The plan, as expected, was turned down, but its claims lingered on in the programme of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists.

We turn then to the Zionist state as such, the territory which in practice Jews could acquire, settle, develop and defend. This empirical approach was the one the main Zionist bodies adopted and which became in practice the policy of the state itself. It was a sensible approach because it offered the widest possible scope to Jewish negotiating skills. It allowed the Jewish leaders to say that they would settle for any frontiers which included the areas occupied by Jews and which were themselves coherent and defensible. Hence at every stage, during the mandate and after, the Jews were flexible and willing to accept any reasonable partition proposal put to them. In July 1937 the Peel Commission Partition Plan offered them only Galilee from Metulla to Afula, and the coastal strip from a point 20 miles north of Gaza up to Acre, the latter being broken by a corridor to a British-held enclave round Jerusalem.²⁹ The Jews were reluctant but they accepted it. The Arabs, who would have been given three-quarters of Palestine, turned it down without discussion.

At the time of the next partition proposal, by the UN in 1947, settlement had moved on and the plan reflected it. It did not give the Jews Acre and western Galilee, which were then mainly Arab, but it added to the Jewish portion almost the whole of the Negev and part of the Dead Sea area. Whereas Peel had given the Jews only 20 per cent of Palestine, the UN now gave them 50 per cent. It was not the Promised Land by any definition because it excluded Judaea and Samaria, the whole of the West Bank and, above all, Jerusalem itself. But the Jews, however reluctantly, accepted it. Their empirical philosophy was lucidly explained by the former Oxford academic, Abba Eban, who was for many years to be the Foreign Minister and chief negotiator of the new state. The Jews agreed to lose areas of religious and historical significance to them, he said, because there was ‘a partitionist implication inherent in the development of Jewish statehood’ from the very moment when it became ‘a concrete political prospect’–that is, the League mandate. Zionist settlement policy was ‘based on the idea of avoiding any conflict with existing demographic realities. The idea was to settle Jews where Arabs were not in firm possession.’ Since Arab settlements followed ancient Israelite ones, the modern Jews went to the old coastal plain of the Philistines and the valley of Jezreel, which the Arabs had avoided because of malaria. ‘The principle of Jewish settlement’, said Eban, ‘was always empirical and contemporary, never religious and historical.’ Hence in the UN negotiations,

We relied on the general premise of a historical connection, but made no claims whatever for the inclusion of particular areas on our side of the Partition boundary on the grounds of ancient connections. Since Hebron was full of Arabs, we did not ask for it. Since Beersheba was virtually empty, we put in a successful claim. The central Zionist thesis was that there existed sufficient room within Eretz Israel for a densely populated Jewish society to be established without displacing Arab populations, and even without intruding upon their deep-rooted social cohesion.30

This philosophy led the Jews to accept the UN partition plan even though the state thereby delimited would have been extremely awkward to run and defend. But the Arabs again rejected the plan, which would have given them a Palestinian state, without any discussion at all and immediately sought the arbitration of force. As a result of the war that followed, and the Israeli conquests between June and November 1948, the Israeli state ended with 80 per cent of Palestine and frontiers which, though still awkward, made a state which was workable and could be defended. The Palestinian Arabs ended with no state at all: just the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank run by Jordan.

Despite their earlier experience of Arab unwillingness to negotiate, the Israelis attempted, on the basis of the 1949 armistice lines, to get agreement on permanent frontiers. This would have meant surrendering some territory. That would have been acceptable if, in return, Israel could have secured a final settlement. But such a bargain was never on offer. The Arabs refused direct talks with the Israelis. Various talks conducted through the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission made it clear that the Arabs insisted that Israel retire behind the 1947 UN partition lines (which they had never accepted or recognized) without even, in return, granting the new state recognition. Whereas Israel saw the armistice as a prelude to peace, the Arabs saw it as no more than a truce, and a prelude to war when it should become convenient to them. Moreover, the Arab states were unwilling to keep to the terms of the various armistice agreements. They were used as a protective screen behind which fedayeen raids and terrorism could be launched against Israel’s citizens, and boycotts and blockades organized against her economy. For the Arabs, armistice was the continuation of war by other means. Hence in a real sense Israel has been at war with most of her Arab neighbours from November 1947 until this day.

This brought about a fundamental reappraisal of the nature of the Zionist state. The secular pioneers had seen it as a pacifist, collectivist Utopia. The religious pioneers had seen it as a holy theocracy. Now both were alike obliged to invest their energies in a maximum-security state. In a sense the development was natural. The modern settlers had always been obliged to put up perimeter fences guarded against Arab marauders. In the inter-war period these had gradually become more elaborate and professional. But what had to be accepted from 1949 onwards, albeit slowly and reluctantly, was that security must become the overriding and permanent priority of the entire state. Not only had the Israelis to devise increasingly elaborate internal security measures to meet the growing sophistication of Arab terrorism, but they also had to adopt a multi-power standard of external defence: their armed forces had to be capable of meeting an assault from all the Arab states at once. These considerations determined the new state’s budget; they dominated its external relations.

Indeed, for the first thirty years of its existence, 1948-78, Israel had a constant and sometimes vertiginous struggle for her existence. The armistice proved worthless. In its first seven years, over 1,300 Israelis were murdered during Arab raids and Israel’s retaliatory attacks against terrorist bases became increasingly severe. On 20 July 1951 the last of the Arab moderates, King Abdullah of Jordan, was assassinated. On 23 July 1952 a military junta ousted the Egyptian monarchy, leading in turn (25 February 1954) to the populist dictatorship of Gamal Abdul Nasser, dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Stalin had broken off relations with Israel in February 1953, a month before he died. From September 1955 onwards, with the signature of the Egyptian-Czech arms agreement, the Soviet bloc began to supply a growing quantity of modern weapons to the Arab forces. With the security this new ally gave him, President Nasser put into motion a plan for the strangulation and extinction of Israel. Though the practice was condemned by the UN Security Council in September 1951, Egypt had always refused Israeli ships the right to use the Suez Canal. From 1956 Nasser denied them access to the Gulf of Aqaba too. In April he signed a military pact with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in July he seized the Suez Canal and on 25 October he formed a unified military command with Jordan and Syria. Feeling the noose tightening round its neck, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on 29 October, dropping paratroops to seize the Mitla Pass in Sinai. During the brief war that followed, and in conjunction with Anglo-French forces landed in the Canal Zone, Israel conquered the whole of Sinai, took Gaza, ended the fedayeenactivities and opened up the sea route to Aqaba.31

The Sinai War demonstrated the ability of Israel to preserve its security even against the new Soviet weapons, though its military significance was obscured by Anglo-French involvement. The agreement which followed the end of the fighting was again inconclusive. Israel undertook to withdraw from Sinai provided Egypt did not remilitarize it and UN forces formed a protective cordon sanitaire. This arrangement, however unsatisfactory, lasted a decade. But raids and terrorism continued. Syria too was armed by the Soviet bloc. In 1967 Nasser, his forces reorganized and re-equipped, decided to make another attempt. On 15 May he remilitarized Sinai, moving in 100,000 men and armour and ordering out the UN force (which complied). On 22 May he again blockaded Aqaba by closing the Tiran Straits to Israeli shipping. Eight days later, the noose was tightened when King Hussain of Jordan signed a military agreement in Cairo. The same day Iraqi forces took up positions in Jordan. Hence on 5 June the Israelis again felt compelled to launch a pre-emptive strike. That morning they destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Jordan and Syria were misled about Israel’s success and duly entered the war on Egypt’s side. In reply, Israel felt at liberty to remove the (to her) worst anomalies left by the War of Independence. On 7 June she took the Old City, thus securing the whole of Jerusalem as her capital. By the end of the next day she had occupied the entire Left Bank. During the next two days she stormed the Golan Heights in Syria and established positions only 30 miles from Damascus. At the same time she reoccupied all Sinai. As a result of the Six Day War, Israel had obtained defensible frontiers for the first time, as well as the capital and a famous portion of her historic heritage.³²

Yet this celebrated victory did not bring security. Quite the contrary. It induced a mood of illusory confidence and a false dependence on fixed-line defences such as the so-called Bar Lev Line east of the Suez Canal. Nasser, who had won every public-relations battle and lost every military one, died and was succeeded by a more formidable colleague, Anwar Sadat. To increase his freedom of action Sadat threw out Egypt’s Soviet military advisers in July 1972, though this in no way cut Egypt off from Soviet equipment. He dispensed with Nasser’s spectacular politico-military alliances with other Arab powers, contenting himself with secret co-ordinations of plans. Hitherto, Israeli forces had been theoretically inferior. Israel had therefore felt herself obliged, in April 1948, in October 1956 and in June 1967, to attack pre-emptively, with all the tactical advantage of surprise. Now she believed herself superior, and it was Sadat, in concert with the Syrians, who struck without warning on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur (6 October) 1973, achieving complete surprise in turn.

Both the Egyptians and the Syrians broke through the Israeli lines. An element of technological surprise in the effectiveness of Arab anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles enabled them to inflict disturbing losses on Israeli planes and armour. For the first time in the quarter-century of the state’s existence, Israel faced the possibility of a major defeat and even of a second holocaust. But the Syrian advance had been stemmed on 9 October; the next day, in response to desperate Israeli pleas, the American President, Richard Nixon, began an emergency airlift of advanced weapons. Two days afterwards the Israeli forces began an audacious counter-attack on Egypt, crossing on to the West Bank of the Canal, and threatening to cut off all the advancing Egyptian forces in Sinai. This was the turning-point and Israel moved swiftly towards a victory as decisive as that of 1967, when a cease-fire came into force on 24 October.33

Israel’s willingness to accept a cease-fire was dictated more by political and psychological than by military factors. In each of the four wars there was a complete lack of symmetry. The Arab countries could afford to lose many wars. Israel could not afford to lose one. An Israeli victory could not win peace. But an Israeli defeat meant catastrophe. Israel had always regarded Egypt as her most dangerous enemy, the one most likely to deliver the knock-out blow. But Egypt was also the most synthetic of Israel’s opponents. Her people were not true Arabs. She was in the struggle to make good her claims to Middle Eastern leadership and to secure prestige rather than from any deep emotional commitment. The Egyptian territory Israel held, however useful (a substantial oilfield was developed there 1967-73), was not part of the historic heritage of the Jews. For all these reasons a peace with Egypt was possible. What prevented it was Egypt’s bruised sense of military honour. But this was healed by her initial success in 1973, which time and propaganda could make seem more substantial than it was.

There was another obstacle. Israel had been ruled since its inception by a Labour-dominated coalition whose flexibility on frontiers was expressed by the pragmatic philosophy already summarized in Abba Eban’s words. But the Opposition maintained the Jabotinsky maximalist tradition on frontiers. Peace with Egypt would involve heavy Israeli territorial sacrifices, actual and potential. That in turn would require a national consensus. The Opposition would deny it. Hence, when Labour’s coalition lost the May 1977 elections and handed over power for the first time to the Revisionists in the shape of Begin’s Likud, the change, by a paradox familiar to democratic societies, made peace more likely. Begin, precisely because of his maximalist commitment, was in a position to trade land for security in a manner which no Labour leader since Ben Gurion would have dared.

Sadat, the first Arab realist since Abdullah, recognized this key point. Less than six months after Likud’s victory, on 9 November 1977, he offered to negotiate peace terms. The peace process was long, complex and hard. It was stage-managed by President Jimmy Carter and underwritten financially by the generosity of the American taxpayer, an indispensable element. It culminated in a marathon thirteen-day session, beginning on 5 September 1978, at the presidential summer home, Camp David–what Begin characteristically called ‘a concentration camp de luxe’. It required a further six months to embody the agreement reached there in a detailed treaty.

The compromise reached was a genuine one; hence it endured. Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist, provided cast-iron guarantees for Israel’s southern border, in effect withdrew from the military equation and thus for the first time gave Israel some measure of genuine security. In return Israel handed over Sinai, including its oilfields, air-bases and settlements, all of profound emotional significance to her. She also undertook to negotiate away much of the West Bank and even to make concessions over Jerusalem, in return for a complementary treaty with the Palestinians and the other Arab states. But these last sacrifices were not, in the event, exacted. Camp David offered the Palestinian Arabs their best chance since the UN partition plan of 1947. Once more they threw it away without even attempting to negotiate. That left Israel with Judaea and Samaria, albeit as ‘occupied territories’ still, rather than internationally recognized freeholds. The treaty, as such historic compromises will, demanded heavy sacrifices from its signatories too. It cost Begin some of his oldest political friends. It cost Sadat, most dangerous-treacherous and courageous-generous of Israel’s enemies, his life.34

In a historical context, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was of incalculable importance not only in itself but in its timing. From the 1920s, the source of Arab power, both economic and diplomatic, had always been the oilfields of the Persian Gulf and upper Iraq. In the second half of the 1970s this oil power increased dramatically. Demand for oil had been rising faster than supply in the 1960s. In 1973 this trend was radically reinforced by political actions of the Middle Eastern oil states in response to the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices tripled, from $3 a barrel to $10. By the end of 1977 the price had risen to $12.68; in 1979-80 it tripled again, reaching a price of $38.63 a barrel at the end of 1980. By raising Arab oil revenues more than tenfold, the oil-price revolution made available huge sums for Arab arms-purchases and for financing anti-Israeli terrorism. It also increased Arab diplomatic leverage with both Western and Third World nations. France, for instance, built Iraq an advanced nuclear reactor, whose rapidly developing war-potential obliged Israel to destroy it by a bombing raid on 7 June 1981. Some Third World states, in response to Arab pressure, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. At the UN there was an extraordinary growth in Arab influence. As a result, in 1975 the General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racialism. The mufti’s successor, Yasser Arafat, leader of the main Arab terror group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, was accorded head-of-government status by the UN and by numerous states hitherto friendly to Israel. There was a real danger of Israel being driven into an international ghetto occupied solely by South Africa.

Against this background, the Egyptian peace-treaty and the fact that it was fully implemented on both sides was the great sustaining force of Israel’s position on the world scene. Had the Palestinians negotiated seriously at this time, there can be little doubt that Israel would have been obliged to yield most of the West Bank. But the chance was missed in favour of fruitless terrorism and the window of opportunity closed. From 1981 to 1985 the oil price drifted slowly downwards as supply came into balance with demand. By January 1986 it was $25 a barrel and in April that year it went below the $10 mark, less–allowing for inflation–than it had been before the Yom Kippur War. The balance of economic and diplomatic power once more began to shift back in Israel’s favour. By this stage, in the late 1980s, Israel had been in possession of the West Bank for twenty years and her frontiers, though ‘temporary’ in places, had begun to acquire an air of permanence.

Indeed, the underlying assumption beneath the Arab refusal to negotiate, that time was on their side, not Israel’s, and the misleading analogy with the medieval Crusader states which they were fond of adducing, were both falsified by the first forty years of Israel’s existence. Israel had become a successful maximum-security state without sacrificing her basic aim or freedoms, and while retaining the negotiating flexibility and empiricism of her founding fathers. Time had proved to be on the side not of the Arabs but of the Israelis. Moreover, the very fact that the Arabs continued to prefer the option of war encouraged the habit of thinking, to be found even among Israeli empiricists, in terms of Israel’s historic frontiers. The official Government Year Book 1951-2 had noted: ‘The state has been established in only a portion of the Land of Israel.’ There were many Jews who saw Israel’s repeated victories as a moral mandate for wider boundaries. For pious Jews it was the hand of providence, for secular Jews a form of manifest destiny. In 1968 the Sephardi Chief Rabbi argued that it was a religious obligation not to return the newly conquered territories. The same year the Kibbutz Dati, representing the religious collectives, intoned a prayer for Independence Day: ‘Extend the boundaries of our land, just as Thou hast promised our forefathers, from the river Euphrates to the river of Egypt. Build your holy city, Jerusalem, capital of Israel; and there may your temple be established as in the days of Solomon.’ Dr Harold Fisch, rector of Barllan University, insisted: ‘there is only one nation to whom the land belongs in trust and by covenant promise, and that is the Jewish people. No temporary demographic changes can alter this basic fact which is the bedrock of the Jewish faith; just as one wife does not have two husbands so one land does not have two sovereign nations in possession of it.’35 The 1967 victory also produced a multi-party movement known as the Land of Israel, which argued that it was not within the moral authority of the Israeli state, representing only Israeli citizens, to give up any conquered portion of the Promised Land, since this was the property of the entire Jewish people, and must be preserved for their eventual ingathering or Aliyah. This form of neo-Zionism, which could quote in its support from Herzl and Ben Gurion as well as Jabotinsky, argued that only one-fifth of world Jewry was yet settled in Israel. The ultimate aim of Zionism must be the return of the entire nation; and to accommodate them the entire land was required.³⁶

This of course was hyperbole and ideological politics of the kind which, in practice, Israel always rejected. On the other hand, in some respects the Israeli state was constitutionally idealistic. It accepted the inescapable duty to receive as an immigrant any Jew who wished to come as an oleh, defined as ‘a Jew immigrating to Israel for settlement’. This was the primary purpose of its creation. It was so laid down in the original Basel Programme of 1897, in Article 6 of the 1922 mandate, in the Declaration of Independence, 14 May 1948, and formally enacted in the Law of Return of 1950.³⁷ Section 4B of the Law defined a Jew as ‘a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion’. But settling in practice who was a Jew was not easy. It was one of the most vexed problems of Jewish history, from the time of the Samaritans onward. With the growth of secularism it became even more difficult. In modern Europe Jews were often defined not by themselves but by the anti-Semites. Karl Lueger used to say: ‘A Jew is anyone I say is a Jew.’ Most modern Jews agreed that a Jew was someone who felt himself Jewish. But that was not good enough for the courts. Halakhic law insisted on the religious element. This meant that in Israel the offspring of a mixed marriage where the mother was non-Jewish, though an Israeli citizen, speaking Hebrew, educated in the spirit of Jewish history, and serving in the Israeli army, could not legally be called a Jew without going through a specific process of conversion. On the other hand, halakhic law laid down that even a converted Jew remained a Jew. The inability to achieve a purely secular definition of a Jew led to cabinet crises and litigation. When a born Jew, Oswald Rufeisen, who had converted and become a Carmelite as ‘Brother Daniel’, sought entry under the Law of Return, the case went to the Supreme Court (Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior, 1962). Judge Silberg (for the majority) held that the Law of Return was a secular enactment. For its purposes, a Jew was defined not according to halakhah but as Jews in general understood the term: ‘The answer to this question is in my opinion sharp and clear–a Jew who has become a Christian is not deemed a Jew.’38

But in the overwhelming majority of cases there was no problem of definition. Israel was thrown open to the oleh from her inception. She had to receive not only the refugees from Arab countries but all the Jewish DPS of Europe who wished to come. In Israel’s first three and a half years a rush of 685,000 immigrants, 304,000 from Europe, doubled the population. There was a second great wave of immigrants (160,000) in 1955-7, a third (215,000) in 1961-4. The Six Day War stimulated the immigration figures yet again. Jews from Arab lands were balanced by Jews from Europe, nearly 600,000 European Jews reaching Israel in the twenty-two years 1948-70. The largest group came from Rumania (229,779), the next from Poland (156,011), but there were big contingents from Hungary (24,255), Czechoslovakia (20,572), Bulgaria (48,642), France (26,295), Britain (14,006) and Germany (11,522). There were also 58,288 Jews from Turkey, over 60,000 from Persia and about 20,000 from India. Russia continued to be the great reservoir of would-be immigrants, but the numbers who actually came from there depended on fluctuations in Soviet policy. In the period 1948-70, only 21,391 Jews reached Israel from Russia, but in the four years 1971-4 more than 100,000 were released.³⁹

In its first quarter-century, largely through immigration, Israel’s population rose from the initial 650,000 to well over three million. Receiving, housing, educating and employing the new arrivals became a priority second only to basic security and, after defence, the biggest item in Israel’s budget. Getting Jews out of what were termed ‘lands of stress’ sometimes involved special efforts, such as the sea- and air-lift which brought 43,000 Jews out of the Yemen in a single year, June 1949-June 1950, or the secret air-lift of 20,000 Falasha Jews from Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.

In the business of blending this new national community together the two most important instruments were the army and Hebrew. The Israel Defence Force, thanks to Arab intransigence, succeeded the kibbutz as the most characteristic product of the Zionist state, and was most influential in transforming the world’s vision of the Jew. It also became the means whereby the children of immigrants achieved emotional equality within society. The acceptance of Hebrew was an even more remarkable achievement. Until late in the nineteenth century no one at all spoke Hebrew as his or her first language. Indeed as a spoken language it had been succeeded by Aramaic (except for liturgical purposes) in late Biblical times. It remained of course the primary written language of Judaism. Jewish scholars meeting in Jerusalem found they could speak it to each other, though the varying Ashkenazi and Sephardi pronunciations made understanding difficult. The Zionist state might easily have spoken German or Yiddish, both of which would have proved disastrous. Eliezer ben Yehuda (1858-1922), who went to Palestine in 1881, made the adoption of Hebrew possible by his vigorous campaigning. When he and his wife, born Deborah Jonas, arrived in Jaffa, he insisted that henceforth they spoke only Hebrew to each other. Theirs was the first Hebrew-speaking household in the country (indeed in the world) and Ben Yehuda’s first son, Ben Zion, was the first Hebrew-speaking child since antiquity. Hebrew succeeded as a modern tongue, where many other linguistic revivals, such as Irish, failed, partly because Judaism, working in Hebrew, had always dealt in infinite detail with practical matters: work, housing, cooking, lighting and heating, travelling and living. Of course its main power was as a language of prayer, but it was also a language of conduct. Once people forced themselves to speak it they found it met the needs of everyday life remarkably quickly and soon displayed an organic capacity to grow. Its development as an official language of government was dramatically assisted by the British decision (1919) to give it equal status with English and Arabic under the mandate. The rival claims of German were destroyed by Hitler, and of Yiddish, spoken by over ten million Jews in the late 1930s, by the mass immigration of Sephardi Jews from Arab countries after 1945. Hebrew worked because the new army spoke it. The army worked because it spoke Hebrew. Thus Israel went against all the laws of modern linguistic sociology and made the revival into a self-sustaining process.

There was some bullying, especially over names. Of course since Abraham’s time Jews had been inured to name changing, in order to make religious, patriotic or cultural points. Ben Yehuda began the new Hebrew practice, changing his own name from Perelman. Many of the settlers in the first three Aliyahs followed suit at the same time as they began to learn Hebrew. Thus David Gruen, or Green, became David Ben Gurion. Later an element of compulsion was added. There were poignant ironies in this. In the nineteenth century German- and Austrian-ruled Jews had been forced to Teutonize their names. Hitler reversed the process. In 1938 German Jews were forbidden to change their family names and forced to resume Jewish ones. For given names, Jews were limited to ‘official Jewish names’, 185 for men, 91 for women. These excluded certain Biblical names fancied by German non-Jews, such as Ruth, Miriam, Joseph and David. Jews with forbidden names had to assume in addition the name Israel if male, Sarah if female. The Vichy regime in France and the Quisling regime in Norway passed similar laws. But none of this deterred Ben Gurion, whose vigorous, indeed belligerent, support for Hebrew was one of the factors that ensured its success. Hearing that a visit to South Africa had been paid by an Israeli ship commanded by a Captain Vishnievsky, he laid it down that from then on ‘no officer will be sent abroad in a representative capacity unless he bears a Hebrew family name’.40

The Israeli ruling establishment followed Ben Gurion’s lead. Moshe Sharett changed his name from Shertok, Eliahu Elath from Epstein, Levi Eshkol from Shkolnic. A Commission for Hebrew Nomenclature was set up and produced lists of Hebrew names, together with rules for changing, for instance, Portnoy into Porat, Teitelbaum into Agosi, Jung into Elem, Novick into Hadash and Wolfson into Ben Zev. The iniquities of malevolent Austrian bureaucrats were expunged by changing Inkdiger (lame) into Adir (strong) and Lügner (liar) into Amiti (truth-teller). Given names were Hebraized also. Pearl became Margalit, for instance. Jews proved less willing to change their given than their surnames. Goldie Myerson, in accordance with Israeli Foreign Office practice, changed her surname to Meir when she became Foreign Minister in 1959, but she refused to switch to Zehavah, simply turning Goldie into Golda. The need for Hebrew given names led to a scouring of the Bible for novelties. Thus Yigal, Yariv, Yael, Avner, Avital and Hagit came into fashion, and even Omri and Zerubavel. There were also invented names: Balfura after Balfour, Herzlia after Herzl. According to Rabbi Benziob Kaganoff, the leading expert on Jewish names, the Biblical revival led to deliberate defiance of many Judaic taboos, especially the ban on Biblical names before Abraham. Israelis broke this by calling their children Yuval, Ada, Peleg and, above all, Nimrod, referred to in the Talmud as one of the five wickedest men in the entire history of mankind. Other ‘wicked’ names which became fashionable were Reuma, Deliah, Ataliah and Tzipor. Begin himself was called after Menachem, of whom the Bible said: ‘And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.’

Hebrew was not just a binding force. It prevented Israel from developing a language problem, the curse of so many nations, especially new ones. This was fortunate, for Israel had many other fundamental fissures. The fact that, in the Warsaw ghetto in late 1942, the Jewish political parties could argue bitterly on how they were to resist the Nazis gave some indication of the depth of the ideological divisions, all of which (and more) were endemic in Israel too. The basic division between the Labour Party (sometimes called Mapai), with its Histadrut trade union wing and its Haganah military arm, and the Revisionists, who in other incarnations were called Herut, Gahal and finally Likud, had been envenomed (as we have noted on page 446) by the Arlosoroff murder in 1933 and its aftermath. They worsened still further as a result of a shocking episode during the War of Independence. Ben Gurion had feared all along that Begin, who rejected the UN partition frontiers, would fight to enlarge them if the Irgun was allowed to operate as a separate force. Begin agreed to merge Irgun with the national army on 1 June 1948 but he maintained his own arms supply. When, during the first truce, the Irgun arms-ship Altalena arrived off Tel Aviv, the government denied him its contents. Ben Gurion told the cabinet: ‘There are not going to be two states and there are not going to be two armies…. We must decide whether to hand over power to Begin or tell him to cease his separatist activities. If he does not give in we shall open fire.’41 The cabinet instructed the Defence Minister to enforce the law of the land. Fighting broke out on the beach and Begin scrambled aboard to protect his arms. Yigal Allon, commander in chief of the Haganah’s full-time force, the Palmach, and his deputy Yitzhak Rabin, directing operations from the Ritz Hotel, decided to shell the ship and sink it. Begin was forced to swim ashore, fourteen Irgun men were killed, and it was the effective end of the organization. Begin called the Labour coalition ‘a government of criminals, tyrants, traitors and fratricides’.42 Ben Gurion called Begin simply ‘Hitler’.

Thereafter the Labour Party and its allies ruled Israel until 1977. With the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, the Haganah and their dominance within the Jewish Agency, they had formed the establishment under the mandate. After Independence they continued to form the establishment, controlling the armed forces, the civil service and, through the trade union holdings, Israeli industry. Israel inherited from the mandate many British political, constitutional and legal institutions. But in one respect it was quite unlike Britain. It drew from the socialist parties of eastern Europe the notion of the party becoming the state. In this respect it was more like the Soviet Union. The distinction between professional politicians and professional civil servants, so salient to the British style of parliamentary democracy, scarcely existed in Israel. Allon went from the Palmach command to become a minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Rabin was Chief of Staff of the IDF and later Prime Minister. Two other IDF chiefs, Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar, also came up through the Labour movement. Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated of all the IDF commanders, rose through the Mapai youth movement, or Zeirim, as did Shimon Peres, who ran the Defence Ministry bureaucracy under Ben Gurion and in time became Prime Minister himself. A man might be in turn a member of the Knesset, a general, a cabinet minister, an ambassador and head of the state radio. Israel was a party state though never a one-party state. The most important decisions were not necessarily taken inside the cabinet. Civil service appointments were based, as a rule, on a party spoils system which distributed them according to electoral strength. Each party tended to decide who served and who did what and who was promoted in the ministries it controlled. The Labour movement as a whole formed an agricultural-industrial settlement complex embracing much of the arms industry, housing, health insurance and distribution. It dominated, through its own machinery, huge areas of what would normally be government functions: labour relations, education, public health and immigration. Much of this arose through the way the land was settled under the mandate.⁴³ In its post-Independence structure Israel had some of the weaknesses of a typical Third World ex-colony which came into being through resistance, a dominant nationalist movement, even terrorism, and then transformed itself into a regime.

The multi-party structure preserved democracy. But parties were in constant osmosis, splitting, regrouping, renaming themselves, forming ad hoc coalitions. Between 1947 and 1977 Mapai-Labour never fell below 32.5 per cent of the vote but never rose over 40 per cent. The result was a high degree of instability within the general structure of Labour movement dominance, with difficult coalition bargaining after each election and often between elections. Ben Gurion was Prime Minister 1948-63, except for a brief period 1953-5 when he made way for Moshe Sharett. Many of his most arbitrary dismissals or appointments–of generals, for instance–were in reaction to internal political manoeuvres. His long vendetta against Pinhas Lavon, a Defence Minister whom Ben Gurion held responsible for a costly intelligence fiasco in Egypt, was prompted as much by internal party as by public factors. Parties were interests as well as ideological entities. They recruited accordingly, especially among the immigrants. This went back to the inter-war period when land settlement was largely a party function. In the early 1930s there was an inter-party agreement for the division of scarce land. After Independence there was really enough land for all with agricultural leanings, so the party officials toured the transit camps to get people. There were unofficial carve-ups on an ethnic-religious basis. The Rumanians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, for instance, went to the secular parties (chiefly Mapai), the North Africans to the religious group, Mizrachi, which formed part of the coalition. Thanks to the skill of Mapai’s Yemeni agents, the party established a virtual monopoly over Yemeni immigrants, though after a Mizrachi protest its share was reduced to 60-65 per cent. Mapai and Mizrachi also did a deal over 100,000 Moroccan immigrants, Mapai organizing the emigration from the South Atlas area, Mizrachi from the North Atlas. A revolt of some of the Moroccans, who resented being owned and indoctrinated, brought this arrangement into the open in 1955.44

Weizmann hated all this aspect of Zionist politics. When the state was formed he became its first president but lost the battle to secure presidential powers on American lines. Hence he was not in a position to uphold the state-public interest against the party. The job was left to Ben Gurion and, to do him justice, he tried to fight the party system. He had been a professional party activist all his life and he remained, to the last, an aggressive political bruiser. But as Prime Minister he did his best to effect a separation between party and state, to rescue the state from the party grip, to fight the Labour movement machine (most of which he had created himself) over policy, appointments, and not least the investigation of abuses. He wrenched the Prime Minister’s office, the Defence Ministry, the army and the schools out of the party’s possession. But he failed with the health system, which the Histadrut in effect retained. In the end he grew disgusted with his political colleagues, created a new party of his own (1965) and, when it failed, retired to an angry internal exile at his kibbutz of Sedeh Boker.45

Unlike Herzl, Weizmann and even Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion did not see himself as a European but as a Jewish Middle Easterner. He placed his trust in the sabras, the Israeli-born natives of pioneer stock, who would transform Israel from a European colony into a genuine Asian state, albeit one which was unique. He was a Moses with a grim message, offering his people blood and tears, toil and sweat. ‘This is not a nation, not yet,’ he said in 1969 at the end of his life.

It is an exiled people still in the desert longing for the flesh-pots of Egypt. It cannot be considered a nation until the Negev and Galilee are settled, until millions of Jews emigrate to Israel and until moral standards necessary to the ethical practice of politics and the high values of Zionism are sustained. This is neither a mob nor a nation. It is a people still chained to their Exilic past–redeemed but not fulfilled.⁴⁶

Yet the animating spirit of the Labour movement remained European socialism. It was a party of city intellectuals whose kibbutzim were their weekend cottages. It was university-educated, culturally middle class. To the workers, especially to the Afro-Asian Sephardi immigrants, it turned a face of well-meaning condescension, patiently explaining what was good for them, rather as Rosa Luxemburg had once tried to lecture the German proletariat. They were the natural aristocrats of the new state, or perhaps one should call them a secular cathedocracy. Gradually an illuminating sartorial distinction appeared between the government and the opposition. Labour statesmen affected a rustic informality of open-necked shirts. Begin’s Likud sported smart suits and ties. It was the difference between a socialist intelligentsia and instinctive populists.

After Ben Gurion’s retirement the Labour movement’s dependence on European-stock support, a diminishing asset, became more pronounced. By contrast the new arrivals from the Arab territories drifted towards the opposition. This dated back to the inter-war period. Jabotinsky had always drawn a following from the Sephardis of the Levant. He learned to speak Ladino. He stuck up for the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew. Begin fell effortlessly into this tradition. As a Polish Jew, one of a tiny remnant, he had a natural affinity of circumstances with Jews who had been brutally expelled from Arab lands. Like them, he felt no need to apologize for being in Israel. He shared their hatred of the Arabs. He too put Jewish interests before any other consideration, by the moral right of suffering. Like the oriental Jews, he regarded the notion that the Arabs had the choice of granting or withholding Israel’s right to exist as an insult to the dead. ‘We were granted the right to exist by the God of our fathers,’ he insisted, ‘at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization nearly 4,000 years ago. For that right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of the nations.’47 In strict contrast to the Labour establishment, he and the oriental Jews had a common and precious characteristic: a complete absence of any feelings of guilt.

Labour’s grip on the regime was immensely strong and only slowly loosened. Begin must have been the only party leader in history to lose eight elections in a row and retain his post. But under successive Prime Ministers, Levi Eshkol (1963-9), Golda Meir (1969-74), Yitzhak Rabin (1974-7), Labour’s electoral support gradually declined. Towards the end of its long rule, and not surprisingly, granted its refusal to heed Ben Gurion’s warning and separate party from state, there were several major scandals. Hence at the May 1977 elections Labour at last lost its paramountcy. It dropped 15 per cent of its vote and emerged with only thirty-two seats. Begin’s Likud had forty-three and he had no real difficulty in forming a coalition government. He won the following election too in June 1981. After his retirement Likud fought the Labour movement to a draw in 1984, leading to an arrangement in which a Labour-Likud coalition, with alternating premiers, governed the country. Thus Israel eventually acquired a two-party system of a kind and the dangers of a permanent one-party regime were avoided.

At bottom, however, the differences between Israel’s political parties, however deep and poisoned by violent historical events, concerned secular matters and thus in the end always yielded to pragmatic compromises. More serious was the chasm between the secularity of the Zionist state and the religiosity of Judaism itself. The problem was not new. The demands of the Law and the demands of the world produced tensions in any Jewish society. They broke to the surface in open conflict immediately Jews were given charge of their own affairs. That was why many pious Jews believed it was preferable for Jews to live under gentile sovereignty. But this left them at the mercy of gentile goodwill. The experience of modern times showed that it could not be relied upon. The new Zion had been conceived in response to nineteenth-century anti-Semitism and born in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. It was not a blueprint for a Jewish theocracy but a political and military instrument for Jewish survival. In short the situation was fundamentally the same as in the prophet Samuel’s day. Then the Israelites were in danger of extermination by the Philistines and had turned to monarchy to stay alive. Samuel had accepted the change with sorrow and misgivings because he saw clearly that the monarchy, or as we would say the state, was in irreconcilable conflict with rule by the Law. In the end he was proved right. The Law was defied, God angered, and the Babylonian Exile followed. The Second Commonwealth ran into exactly the same difficulties and likewise perished. Thus the Jews went into the diaspora. It was the essence of Judaism that the exile would be ended by a metaphysical event, in God’s good time, not by a political solution devised by man. The Zionist state was simply a new Saul. To suggest it was a modern form of the Messiah was not only wrong but blasphemous. As the great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem warned, it could only produce another false Messiah: ‘The Zionist ideal is one thing and the messianic ideal another, and the two do not touch except in pompous phraseology at mass rallies, which often infuse into our youth a spirit of new Shabbateanism which must fail.’48 It is true that the Zionists, who were mostly non-religious or even anti-religious, invoked the aid of Judaism. They had no alternative. Without Judaism, without the idea of the Jews as a people united by faith, Zionism was nothing, just a cranky sect. They invoked the Bible too. They drew from it all kinds of political morals, campaign rhetoric and idealistic appeals to youth. Ben Gurion used it as a guide to military strategy. But that was merely an eastern European form of the Jewish enlightenment. Zionism had no place for God as such. For Zionists, Judaism was just a convenient source of national energy and culture, the Bible no more than a State Book. That was why from the start most religious Jews regarded Zionism with suspicion or outright hostility and some (as we have noted) believed it was the work of Satan.

But just as Samuel agreed to anoint Saul, so religious Jews had to recognize the existence of Zionism and take up attitudes towards it. There were several streams of thought, each modified over time. All were Orthodox. Reform Judaism played no part in the settlement of Palestine and the creation of Israel. The first Reform synagogue was not built in Jerusalem until 1958. But Orthodoxy varied in the degree to which it acknowledged Zionism. Just as Zionists used Judaism to create their state, so some pious Jews believed the Zionist national spirit could be exploited to bring Jews back to Judaism. Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), appointed European Chief Rabbi with Zionist support, took the view that Torah observance could be fuelled by the new patriotic spirit among Jews provided observant Jews organized themselves. So after the 10th Zionist congress (1911) decided in favour of secular as opposed to Torah schools, the first religious political party, the Mizrachi, came into being to fight for the Torah within Zionism. Hence it worked with the Zionists throughout the mandate and was a partner in government from the inception of the state. It was instrumental in avoiding a complete breach between secular and religious Jews in Israel but it tended to be more of an intermediary between the two camps than a religious force in itself.

In response to the ‘treason’ of Mizrachi, the Orthodox sages founded the Agudist movement in 1912. It did not become organized and active until the British took over Palestine. Under Turkish rule the old system of delegating power to minorities through their religious leaders had been maintained, and this naturally favoured the Orthodox. But under Article 4 of the 1922 mandate, the British handed the political representation of all Jews to the Zionists. Their National Council was firmly in secular hands, and it simply syphoned off the religious aspects of its work to the Mizrachi. In response the Agudists formed in 1923 a mass movement, run by a ‘Council of Great Men of the Torah’, whose branches trained observant Jews to exercise their votes in favour of its nominees. So a second religious party developed. In eastern Europe it was extremely powerful, with its own press and lobbies, and remained strongly anti-Zionist. But in Palestine it was forced to compromise after the rise of Hitler set up a panic demand for immigrant visas. These all went through the Zionist Jewish Agency, which also controlled the central funds to finance new settlement. The truth is, like the Israelites faced with the Philistines, Agudah did not know how to maintain its principles in the face of Hitlerism. Might not the Balfour Declaration be a divinely ordained mode of escape? In 1937 one of its leaders, Issac Breuer, a grandson of the famous Rabbi Hirsch, asked the Council of Great Men a formal question: did the Balfour Declaration impose a divinely ordained task on the Jews to build a state, or was it a ‘satanic contrivance’? They could not agree on an answer so he worked one out for himself, against the background of the Holocaust, which produced still more compelling reasons for coming to terms with Zionism. Breuer’s eventual argument, that the state was Heaven’s gift to martyred Israel and could be ‘the beginning of the Redemption’ provided it was developed under guidance from the Torah, became the basis of Agudah’s ideology.49

Hence when the state was about to be founded, Agudah demanded that it should have a Torah legal basis. This was rejected. The Jewish Agency wrote to Agudah, 29 April 1947: ‘The establishment of the state requires the confirmation of the UN and this will be impossible without a guarantee of freedom of conscience in the state for all its citizens and without it being made clear that it is not the intention to establish a theocratic state.’ The state had to be secular. On the other hand the Agency agreed to bow to the religious viewpoint on the Sabbath, food laws and marriage, and to allow full religious freedom in the schools. This compromise made it possible for Agudah to belong to the Provisional Council of Government at the inception of the state and, as a member of the United Religious Front, to form parts of governing coalitions 1949-52. The Agudah viewpoint was set out as follows (10 October 1952):

The world was created for the sake of Israel. It is the duty and merit of Israel to maintain and fulfil the Torah. The place where Israel is destined to live and, therefore, to maintain the Torah is Israel. This means that the raison d’être of the world is the establishment of the regime of the Torah in the land of Israel. The foundation of this ideal has been laid. There are now Jews living in their homeland and fulfilling the Torah. But completion has not yet been attained, for all Israel does not yet live in its land and [not even] all Israel is yet fulfilling the Torah.50

In short, Agudah pledged itself to use Zionism to complete the ingathering and transform the result into a theocracy.

Just as Mizrachi’s compromises produced Agudah’s, so Agudah’s in turn produced a rigorist group which called itself the Guardians of the City (‘Neturei Karta’). This broke away from Agudah in 1935, opposed the foundation of the state root-and-branch, boycotted elections and all other state activities, and declared that it would rather Jerusalem were internationalized than run by Jewish apostates. The group was comparatively small and to the secular mind extreme. But the whole history of the Jews suggests that rigorous minorities tend to become triumphant majorities. Like Judaism itself, moreover, its members exhibited (granted their initial premise) strong logical consistency. The Jews were ‘a people whose life is regulated by a supernatural divine order…not dependent on normal political, economic and material successes or failures’. The Jews were not ‘a nation like any other nation’, subject to the factors ‘which cause all other nations to rise and fall’.⁵¹ Hence the creation of the Zionist state was not a Jewish re-entry into history, a Third Commonwealth, but the start of a new and far more dangerous Exile, since ‘full licence has now been given to tempt through the success of the wicked’. They frequently quoted the statement of a group of Hungarian rabbis who, on their arrival at Auschwitz, acknowledged the justice of their punishment from God for their too feeble opposition to Zionism. The Zionist masqueraders, pretending to represent the people of Israel, were incinerating Jewish souls, whereas Hitler’s ovens only burned their bodies and released their souls for eternal life. They deplored alike the Sinai and the Six Day Wars as calculated, by their glamorous success, to lure Jews to Zionism and so to eternal destruction. Moreover, such victories, being the work of Satan, would merely culminate in colossal defeat. The Guardians rejected the ‘deliverance and protection’ of Zionism, together with its wars and conquests:

We do not approve of any hatred or hostility and above all any fighting or war in any form against any people, nation or tongue, since our Holy Torah has not commanded this of us in our Exile, but the reverse. If, through our many sins, we are apparently joined in the destiny of these rebels [against God], Heaven forbid! All we can do is to pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, that He may release us from their destiny and deliver us.

The Guardians saw themselves as a ‘remnant’ who ‘refused to bow the knee to Baal’ as in ‘the time of Elijah’, or to ‘dine at Jezebel’s table’. Zionism was ‘a rebellion against the King of Kings’ and it was implicit in their theology that the Jewish state would end in a catastrophe worse than the Holocaust.

Hence from its inception the secular Zionist state faced a tripartite religious opposition: from within the government coalition, from outside the coalition but within the Zionist consensus, and from outside the consensus but within the country. The opposition took an infinite variety of forms, from the childish to the violent: sticking stamps on letters upside down and omitting ‘Israel’ from the address; tearing up identity cards; boycotting elections; demonstrations; full-scale riots. The Israeli state, like its Hellenistic and Roman predecessors, faced a section of the population, especially in Jerusalem, easily and often unpredictably outraged by minor and unconsidered government decisions. As a rule, however, religious power expressed itself by fierce bargaining within the Knesset and especially within the cabinet. In Israel’s first four governments no less than five cabinet crises were provoked by religious issues: in 1949 over importing forbidden food, in February 1950 over the religious education of Yemeni children in transit camps, in October 1951 and again in September 1952 on the conscription of girls from Orthodox homes, and in May 1953 over schools. This pattern continued for the first forty years of Israel’s existence, religion proving a far greater source of coalition disharmony than differences over ideology, defence or foreign affairs.

The Jewish religion being rich in strict moral theology, the area of conflict was very wide. Thus, on the Sabbath, which was given legal and constitutional status, there are thirty-nine principal and many subsidiary categories of forbidden work, including riding or travelling in a vehicle, writing, playing an instrument, telephoning, turning on a light or touching money. Moreover, the commonest of Judaic codes states that ‘everyone who openly desecrates the Sabbath is like a non-Jew in all respects, his touch causes wine to be forbidden, the bread that he bakes is like the bread of a non-Jew, and his cooking is like that of a non-Jew’.52 Hence the Sabbath law, with its knock-on effect, raised serious problems in the armed forces, the civil service and the huge public and collective sector of industry and agriculture. There were bitter battles over Sabbath milking of cows in kibbutzim and TV broadcasting, massive legislative enactments and conflicts of bye-laws. Thus buses ran in Haifa but not Tel Aviv; cafés were open in Tel Aviv but not in Haifa; Jerusalem banned both. There was another cabinet crisis over El-Al, the state airline, flying on the Sabbath. There was an even more protracted struggle within the government over the serving of non-kosher food on the state shipping-line, the food laws being a fertile field for political rows. Hotels and restaurants needed a ‘certificate of correctness’ from the rabbinate. Under a law of 1962 pig-farming was banned except in Christian Arab areas near Nazareth or for scientific purposes; and in 1985 a legislative campaign began to ban the sale and distribution of pork products also. Government and rabbis alike examined the credentials of the East Indonesia Babirusa hog, declared by its breeders to be a mammal, have hooves and chew the cud. There were cabinet rows over autopsies and over burials in consecrated ground.