In Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology, Yosef Gorny has provided the most authoritative study to date on the crucial period when the Zionist movement made its first contacts with, struggled against and ultimately prevailed over Palestine’s indigenous Arab population.1 As its subtitle indicates, the focus is Zionist ideology. Gorny reveals in fascinating detail both the variousness of possibilities in the Zionist idea and its intransigent kernel that precluded any modus vivendi with the Palestinian Arabs.
Defining the Zionist Enterprise
Gorny begins by identifying the ‘ideological consensus’ within which most, if not the full gamut, of Zionist thinking unfolded. One element of this consensus, he stresses throughout the study, was at the core of Zionist belief and proved to be the principal obstacle to any reconciliation with the Arabs – namely, that Palestine should one day contain a Jewish majority.
Within the Zionist ideological consensus there coexisted three relatively distinct tendencies – political Zionism, labor Zionism and cultural Zionism. Each was wedded to the demand for a Jewish majority, but not for entirely the same reasons.2
The touchstone of the French Revolutionary liberal idea was that a rational and just social order could and ought to be constructed on shared political – i.e. democratic – values. Hence, the nation-state was conceived above all else as a consensual relationship and the citizen as its irreducible unit and building block. Originating in the post-French Revolution reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism, political Zionism’s point of departure was the presumed bankruptcy of the democratic idea.3 Romantic nationalists argued that more profound bonds both ‘naturally’ united certain individuals and ‘naturally’ excluded others. Ideally, they concluded, each such organically connected community ought to be endowed with an independent state. Having located the thinking of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, in such ‘German sources’, Hans Kohn, probably the most eminent authority on modern nationalism (and himself a Zionist at one time), goes on to observe:
According to the German theory, people of common descent … should form one common state. Pan-Germanism was based on the idea that all persons who were of German race, blood or descent, wherever they lived or to whatever state they belonged, owed their primary loyalty to Germany and should become citizens of the German state, their true homeland. They, and even their fathers and forefathers, might have grown up under ‘foreign’ skies or in ‘alien’ environments, but their fundamental inner ‘reality’ remained German.4
Analogous assumptions informed the distinctive Zionist approach to the Jewish Question. Throughout the Diaspora, its adherents argued, Jews constituted an ‘alien’ presence amidst states ‘belonging’ to other, numerically preponderant, nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the natural impulse of an organic whole ‘infected’ by a ‘foreign’ body (or too obtrusive a ‘foreign’ body).
In effect, the Zionist analysis of the Jewish Question duplicated the reasoning of anti-Semitism, which invoked the same argument to justify Jew-hatred. Indeed, the prescription it proposed for the Jewish predicament was inscribed in the logic of anti-Semitism as well. Political Zionism sought, not to combat anti-Semitism – which was viewed as, at best, a quixotic undertaking – but to achieve a modus vivendi with it. It proposed that the Jewish nation resolve the Jewish Question by (re-)establishing itself in a state that ‘belonged’ to it. To achieve this, Jews would have to constitute themselves somewhere as the majority: for, wasn’t the statelessness of the Jews pointed up precisely in the fact that, everywhere in the Diaspora, they formed a numerical minority? Majority status would consequently ratify the Jews’ constitutional title to a state. The Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who stood well within the Zionist ideological consensus (p. 165; all page references are to Gorny’s book) therefore stated that ‘the creation of a Jewish majority … was the fundamental aim of Zionism’, since ‘the term “Jewish state” … means a Jewish majority’, and Palestine ‘will become a Jewish country at the moment when it has a Jewish majority’ (pp. 169, 170–1, 233).5
For labor Zionism, the Jewish Question was not only the absence of a state but the class structure of the Jewish nation, which had become lopsided and deformed in the course of its long dispersion: Galut (exile) had created a surfeit of Jewish middlemen, marginal petty entrepreneurs and Luftsmenschen, and a deficit of Jewish laborers. Part of Zionism’s mission was to lay the basis for a healthy state by reconstituting the Jewish working class. Since the interests of this class (here labor Zionism was evidently borrowing from and adapting for its own purposes a page in Marx) required a socialist Jewish state, this was the only true solution to the Jewish predicament. Labor Zionism thus represented less an alternative than a supplement to political Zionism. The class struggle and economic development would unfold, ideally, in a field purified of ‘alien’ elements. In Ben-Gurion’s words,
The right to independent national existence, to national autonomy, which no reasonable person could regard as conflicting with solidarity between peoples, means above all: independent national existence on the basis of an independent national economy. (pp. 137–8)6
Labor Zionism imbued the demand for a Jewish majority with a dual significance: first, it would ratify the Jews’ right to claim title to the state and, second, it would signal their right to radically alter the demographic balance in Palestine, clearing the way for the territorial concentration of the Jewish nation. To quote Ben-Gurion again: ‘[T]he majority is but a stage along our path, albeit an important and decisive stage in the political sense. From there we can proceed with our activities in calm confidence and concentrate the masses of our people in this country, and its environs’ (p. 216; emphasis added).7
In general, the Zionist movement’s demand for a Jewish majority was grounded in a cluster of assumptions that gainsaid the liberal idea. Cultural Zionism, however, did not explicitly deny the desirability (or viability) of a democratic polity. Its demand for a Jewish majority represented not so much a categorical rejection of liberalism as a solution for certain alleged limits within it, especially in the domain of culture.
Cultural Zionists wished to resolve not the ‘problem of the Jews’ but the ‘problem of Judaism’ in the modern world. In their view, the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people was threatened less by anti-Semitism than by an increasingly secular civilization that rendered them anachronisms. The real danger was not the Gentiles’ icy rejection but, rather, their seductive embrace. The most pressing task of Zionism, therefore, was to elaborate a Weltanschauung relevant to the contemporary world yet still bearing the unmistakable impress of the Jewish people’s resplendent legacy. The success or failure of this enterprise would determine whether the Jewish nation survived.
This new national synthesis could not unfold, however, while Jewry remained scattered throughout the Diaspora. It required a ‘spiritual center’ which could concentrate and unify the energies of the Jewish nation and, ultimately, serve as a centripetal force for it. To create this center, Jews had to constitute themselves as the numerical majority in some state, since the crucial cultural institutions in any society are subordinate to the state and the state always bears the imprint of the majority nation. Even in the most democratic of states, the cultural life of the minority cannot but be – in the words of the outstanding theoretician of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha’am – ‘cribbed and crammed’ (pp. 102–3).8
Cultural Zionism thus conceived a Jewish majority as the conditio sine qua non, not for a state of the Jews, but for the unbridled spiritual renaissance of the Jewish nation. Palestine, with its Jewish majority, would eventually serve as a spiritual beacon for world Jewry; it would not, however, be a state to which all Jews were, perforce, politically bound.9 Yet, the status of the demand for a Jewish majority was, for all practical purposes, defined by the hegemonic sectors of the Zionist movement. For them, the Jewish majority and the Jewish state were inextricably linked: a Jewish majority was the means and a state constitutionally beholden to world Jewry the end.
Gorny’s meticulous and exhaustive analysis of the documentary record convincingly demonstrates that, for all its tactical flexibility, the Zionist leadership never wavered in its devotion to the idea of a state of the Jewish nation. What this leadership offered Palestine’s indigenous Arab population was, at best, institutional safeguards that its ‘civil’ rights would not be violated once the Jewish state was established; but such protections for the future Arab minority did not preclude – indeed, they presupposed – that, in principle, the prospective state would belong to the Jewish people.
Consider the ‘compromise’ formulae put forth by the Zionist movement in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots, when the fortunes of the Zionist enterprise had reached their lowest ebb to date. Weizmann proposed the principle of parity – that is, total equality in the administrative representation of both peoples – but his intention (in Gorny’s words) was ‘to guarantee the civil status of the Arabs’ within a state whose ‘proprietorship’ would be Jewish (p. 206). Likewise, the ‘compromise’ Ben-Gurion favored at this time was not a bi-national state but a bi-national regime, in which (in Gorny’s words) ‘the Jewish people would have ownership rights over Palestine and the Arab community would have the right to reside therein’ (p. 212).10 Finally, Jabotinsky promised to Palestine’s Arab inhabitants full and equal rights as a national entity, in accordance with the finest traditions of Austro-Hungarian socialist thought, yet on the principle of a Jewish majority/Jewish state he would entertain no compromise (pp. 233–4).
The Zionist leadership’s devotion to the principle of a Jewish state of the Jewish nation found concrete and unambiguous expression in its insistence that, vis-à-vis the future state, diasporan Jews would have to be accorded a privileged status. Ben-Gurion, for example, denied that a Jewish state necessarily implied domination of the (Arab) minority (pp. 306–7). The minority could still enjoy full civil and national equality, and autonomy in education, culture and religion; indeed, a member of the minority might even be elected president or premier of the state. True, the Jewish majority would determine the cultural ‘image’ of the state, but that was (even) true in all democratic states. However, what would distinguish the Jewish state, in his view, was its orientation towards the entire Jewish people: ‘The state will exist not only for its own inhabitants … but in order to bring in masses of Jews from the Diaspora and to assemble and root them in their homeland.’11
We have thus far identified the trends in Zionism that fell within what Gorny designates the Zionist ideological consensus. Gorny also devotes considerable space to those elements in the Zionist movement that stood outside the ideological consensus but were nonetheless committed to some version of Zionism.
Generally speaking, what attracted these dissidents to Zionism was its cultural dimension; politically, they favored a bi-nationalist resolution of the Palestine conflict, in which the ‘total equality of political rights of the two peoples’ would be recognized (p. 119). What especially interests us here, however, is not their programs and perspectives per se (of which there were many and all of which underwent crucial revisions over time). For, although the dissident Zionist circles (e.g. Brit-Shalom, Ihud) could count in their ranks some of the most eminent members of the Movement, including the distinguished sociologist Arthur Ruppin, first president of the Hebrew University Judah Magnes, and the renowned philosopher Martin Buber, they were, nevertheless, numerically weak and politically marginal. Rather, it is their critique – sometimes implicit, more often explicit – of the Zionist mainstream. This critique is noteworthy because it was both internal to the Zionist movement and thus not easily dismissed and, on any accounting, exceptionally cogent and incisive. Indeed, it is as pertinent today as it was when first elaborated.
The Zionist dissidents denied that the success of the Zionist project – at any rate, as they defined it – hinged on the Jews constituting themselves as the majority in Palestine. They were not in principle opposed to Jews becoming at some point the numerically preponderant element; what they objected to was the meaning conferred on the idea of a Jewish majority by their adversaries in the Zionist movement. The dissidents argued that behind the demand for a Jewish majority lurked the intention to establish a superior claim to the prospective state, one which would confer on Jews an ‘advantage in rights’ and implied the domination and suppression of the Arabs of Palestine (pp. 120, 145, 284). Hugo Bergmann of Brit-Shalom deftly exposed the regressive assumptions of mainstream Zionism:
The contradiction between the political outlook of Brit-Shalom and that of its opponents is not anchored in our stand on the Arabs alone. It is much more fundamental and deep-rooted. Our political convictions stem from the perceptions of Judaism. We want Palestine to be ours in that the moral and political beliefs of Judaism will leave their stamp on the way of life in this country, and we will carry into execution here that faith which has endured in our hearts for two thousand years. And our opponents hold different views. When they speak of Palestine, of our country, they mean ‘our country,’ that is to say ‘not their country.’ This viewpoint is borrowed from Europe at the time of its decline. It is based on the concept of a state which is the property of one people. … Thus several European States today believe that the existence of a State implies that one people, among the peoples residing there, should be granted priority right. … They justify this injustice by means of the sacred egotism of the State. (pp. 122–3; emphasis in original)
Bergmann also denounced the concept of ‘the people of the country’ which, in his words, ‘award[ed] prior right to one people over another, as if the one were the native son and the other a stepchild’ (p. 123). In effect, it controverted the democratic principle of citizenship.
Justifying the Zionist Enterprise
Zionism sought to establish a state that the Jewish people could claim fully as their own. In a state thus conceived, non-Jews, even if enjoying full rights of citizenship, could hope to figure, at best, as an excrescence on the body politic. The realization of the Zionist project in Palestine thus, in effect, implied the transformation of the indigenous Arab population into a gratuitous presence living on the sufferance of the Jewish majority.
All its apparent – or public – optimism notwithstanding, the Zionist leadership harbored few illusions that the Palestinian Arabs would ever acquiesce to such an eventuality. Jabotinsky mocked the idea that the roots of Arab objections perhaps lay in their imperfect understanding of the Zionist enterprise: the Arabs understood it only too well, which was why they were so vehemently opposed even to its modest beginnings (pp. 165–6). During the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, Weizmann conceded to his comrades assembled at the Zionist Congress that ‘If I were an Arab, I would undoubtedly think as they do, although I would certainly act somewhat differently’ (p. 249).12
Concomitantly, the Zionist leadership did not suffer from any illusions that its project would not have to be imposed on Palestine’s overwhelmingly Arab majority or that its implementation could be accomplished without the egregious violation of democratic norms. Several days before his death, Berl Katznelson, for instance, admitted to a meeting of young people that a Jewish state meant forcing the will of the Jews on the Arabs, that this was reprehensible from the point of view of pure democratic morality, but that all Zionist actions had been carried out against the wishes of the majority (p. 303). Gorny also cites Jabotinsky’s highly pertinent observation that ever since Herzl first proposed the idea of a charter, the Zionist movement had acted on the premise that until the Jews formed the preponderant element in Palestine, the democratic principle of majority rule would have to be honored in the breach there.13 Nonetheless, the mainstream Zionist movement never doubted its ‘historical right’ to impose a Jewish state through the ‘Right of Return’ on the indigenous Arab population of Palestine.
Zionism grounded its preemptive right to establish a Jewish state in Palestine – a right that, allegedly, superseded the aspirations of the indigenous population – in the Jewish people’s supposedly unique claim to that land. To fully understand this argument, we must first step briefly back to the genesis of Zionist ideology.
Modern anti-Semitism combined two conceptually distinguishable – if, in practice, overlapping – discourses, each of which disputed from a different angle the liberal understanding of the relationship between nation and state:
1.A political discourse, which suggested that the state/political superstructure belonged, not to its citizens, but to the nation (organic community) with the numerical majority. This was the basic contention of ‘Romantic’ anti-Semites such as Fichte in Germany.
2.A topographic discourse, which suggested that the state/territorial unit belonged, not to its inhabitants per se, but only to the nation (organic community) that could establish a singular historical-spiritual connection with it. This was the basic contention of the Romantics, as well as the ‘integral’ anti-Semites such as Barres in France.
We have already seen that Zionism replicated the reasoning of the anti-Semitic political discourse and followed its logic to conclude that the resolution of the Jewish Question required a polity ‘belonging’ to the Jewish nation. In effect, Zionism also replicated the reasoning of the anti-Semitic topographic discourse in reaching the conclusion that resettling Jewry in its ‘historical’ (‘organic’, ‘integral’, etc.) homeland was the way to resolve the Jewish Question. The obvious candidate for such a homeland was, of course, Palestine (‘Land of Israel’), with its manifold resonances for the Jewish people. Ideologically, the implications of incorporating Palestine into a discourse that depicted it as the ‘historical’ homeland of the Jewish people were twofold. In the first place, it rendered the Jewish people ‘alien’ to every other state/territorial unit, thus sanctioning the claims of anti-Semitism.14 Second, and more importantly for our purposes here, it rendered Palestine of only incidental importance to its resident Arab population.
As Gorny vividly illustrates, the above argument formed the keystone in the arch of Zionist ideology as well as the Movement’s first, last and only line of rhetorical defense as the opposition of Palestine’s indigenous Arab opposition escalated.15 As formulated by the Zionist leadership during the period covered by Gorny’s study, world Jewry’s preemptive right to Palestine derived from three interrelated ‘facts’: (1) the Jewish people’s bond with the land of Palestine was sui generis; (2) the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, even if they did constitute a nation, were not a separate nation but, rather, part of a greater Arab nation, for which Palestine had no distinctive resonances; ergo (3) the Jewish people had a ‘historical’ right to Palestine whereas the indigenous Arab population could lay claim, at best, to mere ‘residential’ rights there.
The cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am was (in Gorny’s words) ‘firm in his insistence that both peoples in Palestine be treated justly’, but he ‘saw the historical rights of the Jews outweighing the Arabs’ residential rights in Palestine’ (pp. 103–4). Max Nordau declared that Palestine was the ‘legal and historical inheritance’ of the Jewish nation, ‘of which they were robbed 1900 years ago by the Roman aggressors’; the Palestinian Arabs had only ‘possession rights’ (p. 157). Jabotinsky asserted that since the Arab nation incorporated ‘large stretches of land’, it would be an ‘act of justice’ to requisition Palestine ‘in order to make a home for a wandering people’; the Palestinian Arabs would still have a place to call their own, indeed, any of fully nine countries to the east and west of the Suez (pp. 166, 168–9). In Ben-Gurion’s view, Palestine had a ‘national’ significance for Jews and thus ‘belonged’ to them; in contrast, Palestinian Arabs, as constituents of the great Arab nation, regarded not Palestine, but Iraq, Syria and the Arabian peninsula as their ‘historical’ homeland – Palestine was of only ‘individual’ importance to them, the locale where they happened to dwell presently. The Jewish people were therefore entitled to concentrate in Palestine whereas the Palestinian Arab community should enjoy merely those rights redounding on residents (pp. 210–12, 217–18).16
Within the ranks of the Zionist movement, only the small circle of dissidents took exception to these formulations. The Brit-Shalomist Ernst Simon, for example, held that Zionism’s ‘historical right’ to Palestine was ‘a metaphysical rather than a political category’. Relating as it did to ‘the very inner depths of Judaism’, this ‘category … is binding on us rather than on the Arabs’. Hence, he ‘emphatically’ denied that it conferred on Jews any right to Palestine without the consent of the Arabs (p. 197).17
Zionism’s preemptive claim to Palestine bore directly on two policy issues that loomed large during the British mandate period: partition and population transfer.
For the Zionist movement, the Jewish people’s ‘historical’ homeland incorporated the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. Given the supra-historical – indeed, fantastical – nature of this ‘historical’ writ, no mundane agreements could cancel it. Partition was consequently seen as a provisional compromise, useful until conditions were ripe for full realization of the Zionist endziel. Ben-Gurion thus carefully qualified his acceptance of the partition scheme put forth by the British in the late 1930s:
The Jewish State now being offered to us is not the Zionist objective. Within this area it is not possible to solve the Jewish question. But it can serve as a decisive stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation. It will consolidate in Palestine, within the shortest possible time, the real Jewish force which will lead us to our historic goal. (p. 259; emphasis in original)
In his private correspondence, Ben-Gurion amplified this point. The Jewish state, he wrote his son, would have ‘an outstanding army – I have no doubt that our army will be among the world’s outstanding – and so I am certain that we won’t be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, whether out of accord and mutual understanding with the Arab neighbors or otherwise’ (p. 260; Gorny cites only a part of this quote).
Zionism’s claim to the whole of Palestine not only precluded a modus vivendi based on partition with the indigenous Arab population, it called into question any Arab presence in Palestine. This was especially so, given that, in practice, the Zionist discourse on Palestine merged with the Zionist discourse on a Jewish polity. Both these discourses posited that (1) to ‘normalize’ their condition, Jews needed to relocate to a state (polity/territorial unit) that ‘belonged’ to them, and (2) non-Jewish inhabitants, even citizens and long-term residents, of the Jews’ state (polity/territorial unit) were not intrinsically ‘of’ it.18 The political and topographic discourses in Zionism thus run parallel; they are mutually reinforcing and validating. The result is a radically exclusivist ideology which renders non-Jews at best a redundant presence and easily lends itself to schemes favoring population transfer – and expulsion.
For most Zionists, Gorny observes, a mass exodus of the indigenous Arab population was always the optimum resolution of the Palestine conflict (pp. 303–4).19 Labor Zionists, for example, did not view ‘the idea of a mass transfer … as morally deplorable at any time, and their hesitations related only to its political effectiveness’ (p. 305). In the late 1930s, the revered labor Zionist Berl Katznelson avowed publicly that he could, in all good conscience, support a British-inspired proposal to forcibly uproot the native Arab population:
A distant neighbor is better than a close enemy. They will not suffer through the transfer, and we most certainly will not. In the last analysis, this is a political settlement reform benefiting both parties. I have thought for some time that this is the best of all solutions, and during the riots I became more convinced that it must happen some day. (p. 258)
Even the extreme left of the Zionist labor movement agreed that there was nothing morally objectionable in the notion of a compulsory population transfer. True to his Zionist convictions, Aharon Zisling thus said that T do not deny our moral right to propose population transfer. There is no moral flaw to a proposal aimed at concentrating the development of national life; the contrary is true – in a new world order it can and should be a noble human vision.’ Zisling’s only reservation was pragmatic: its implementation could result in an all-out war with the neighboring Arab states (p. 262). On the other end of the mainstream Zionist spectrum, Jabotinsky likewise did not consider population exchange an historical injustice, even if forcibly applied (pp. 270–1).20
Implementing the Zionist Enterprise
We have seen that the root cause of the Palestine conflict was – to quote Gorny – the Zionist aspiration ‘to restore full or partial sovereignty over Palestine to the Jewish people’ (p. 13). The Zionist movement sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine – that is, a state in which non-Jews would figure, at best, as a superfluous presence. Zionist leaders were fully cognizant that the indigenous Arab population of Palestine would view with alarm any and all efforts to create such an exclusivist state. We turn now to the strategy that they elaborated to cope with the anticipated – and, subsequently, actual – resistance. Such an inquiry is useful not only for its intrinsic historical interest but also because it reveals the deep sources of present-day Israeli strategic thinking.
Within the Zionist movement, strategic consensus on the Arab Question was remarkable.21 Essentially, this consensus was informed by three interrelated premises:
1. The Zionist movement should neither expect nor seek the acquiescence of the Palestinian Arabs. In his seminal series of articles, aptly entitled ‘The Iron Wall’, Jabotinsky insists that ‘a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable, now or in the foreseeable future … precisely because they are not a mob, but a living nation’ (pp. 165–6). We have seen that, notwithstanding their public protestations to the contrary, most Zionist leaders concurred in this view. Thus, Ben-Gurion conceded that, between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, ‘there is indeed a conflict which is hard to overcome’ (p. 228). What was more, the Palestinian Arabs were not even viewed as the relevant party for reaching a settlement of the Palestine conflict. As noted above, the Zionist movement regarded the indigenous Arab population’s claims on Palestine as tentative at best. Accordingly, Gorny observes, Weizmann ‘did not regard the Palestinian Arabs as partners in negotiations on the future of Palestine’ (p. 114).
2. The success of the Zionist enterprise was dependent on the support of one (or more) Great Power(s). Given the anticipated – and, later, the real – resistance of Palestine’s indigenous population to the Zionist project, Movement leaders recognized that they could never gain a firm foothold in Palestine without the backing of one (or more) Great Power(s). As Jabotinsky succinctly put it, ‘Settlement can [only] develop under the protection of a force which is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down’ (p. 166). To win the support of a Great Power for its enterprise, the Zionist movement evidently had to offer a quid pro quo. This was especially so, given that Zionism intended to establish the Jewish state in Palestine – a region that, at the dawn of the New Imperialism in late nineteenth-century Europe, figured crucially in every Great Power’s strategic thinking.22 In effect, before any Great Power would agree to facilitate a colonizing enterprise in Palestine, the colonizers would have to subordinate their project to its strategic interests. This is exactly what the Zionist movement set out to do from early on.
As the conflict between the Ottoman Turks and the Arabs unfolded in the early twentieth century, Jabotinsky proposed an alliance with the Turks to undermine the unity and homogeneity of the Arab world. It was Jabotinsky’s insight that the Turkish imperial policy of divide and rule was congruent with Zionist interests, and that the fiercer the political competition between Turks and Arabs, the more likely the former would be ‘to regard with growing favor the increase in our numbers in Palestine. The growth of Arab power will gradually increase Turkish sympathies with us’ (p. 53). Jabotinsky’s proposal constitutes a kind of precedent for Zionist thinking in the wake of World War I, when Great Britain replaced Turkey as the dominant power in the Middle East. Whatever disappointments and frustrations it may have given the Zionist movement along the way, from the Balfour Declaration until the termination of the Palestine mandate, the British Empire served as the ‘iron wall’. Gorny stresses that Weizmann’s strategy ‘was based, above all, on the assumption that the alliance with Great Britain was the sole external guarantee for the achievement of Zionist goals’ (p. 108). He goes on to observe that, ‘In this respect there was a consensus from the first within the Zionist movement, encompassing all sectors, from Weizmann through the labor movement, to Jabotinsky and the Revisionist movement at a later date (ibid.; see also p. 176).
In effect, Zionism represented a double advantage to the imperialist overseers: on the one hand, it could serve as an imperial bridgehead in a strategically crucial but politically volatile region and, on the other, it could serve as a lightning rod for local popular discontent, thereby deflecting attention from the imperial power. Essentially this – the Jewish state as ‘strategic asset’ – was the quid pro quo that the Zionist movement offered the British. Gorny observes that Weizmann, who handled the external affairs of the Zionist movement, devoted his ‘untiring efforts’ to ‘persuad[ing] the British Government of the identity of interests between the national goals of the two peoples’ (p. 108). He thus argued that a Jewish Palestine could serve as a regional garrison to defend the Suez Canal, as well as a loyal political base amidst the newly independent Arab states. He contrasted the total devotion of the Jewish population to the British Empire with the political fickleness of the Arabs, whose movement was anti-European in orientation (pp. 114, 207). Similarly, Jabotinsky, who formulated strategy for the quasi-autonomous Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, asserted that, ‘if there is one outpost on the Mediterranean shore in which Europe has a chance of holding fast, it is Palestine, but a Palestine with a Jewish majority’ (p. 234).
3. The Palestine conflict should be resolved within the framework of a regional alliance subordinate to the interests of the Great Power(s). In Jabotinsky’s view, the Jewish state idea was so antithetical to Arab sensibilities that the Zionist movement could count only on the British to support its endeavors (p. 166). Less extreme Zionist leaders, however, articulated a more nuanced approach to the Arab world, distinguishing between the Palestinian Arabs and their brethren who were not directly affected by the Zionist enterprise. The neighboring Arab regimes, they believed, could be convinced – however reluctantly – of the advantages of a partnership with Zionism. The Zionist movement would facilitate the Arab renaissance in exchange for the right to exercise sovereignty in a small corner of the vast territory over which the Arab people claimed jurisdiction. The Palestine conflict would thus find its resolution in an enlarged regional framework. On the one hand, once isolated from Arab politics in general, its significance would be dramatically reduced. As Weizmann put it in a letter to Balfour, ‘the issue known as the Arab problem in Palestine will be of merely local character and, in effect, anyone cognizant of the situation does not consider it a highly significant factor’ (p. 110). On the other hand, the Palestinian Arabs could realize their national aspirations in their ‘authentic’ homeland – i.e. the region that lay between the three points of the Mecca-Damascus-Baghdad triangle – which, with Zionist assistance, would soon be experiencing a rebirth. Hence, Ben-Gurion’s optimistic suggestion that there was no ‘inevitable contradiction’ between Jewish and Palestinian Arab national aspirations, so long as the problem was viewed in its full regional scope (p. 228).
In effect, the Zionist movement was proposing to provide the linchpin of a pan-Arab confederation subordinate to the interests of the British Empire (pp. 110–11, 260). The Jewish state would both serve as Great Britain’s regional gendarme and bolster the local Arab regimes. Zionism’s fundamental reliance on the British to establish and maintain its foothold in Palestine restricted its options vis-à-vis the Arab world. It could only enter into negotiations that were consistent with the interests of Great Britain (pp. 86–7). In practice, this meant that the regional alliances that Zionism forged would have to be with dependent and therefore feckless, unpredictable and domestically unpopular Arab elites. Yet, given the very nature of Zionism’s project – i.e. the intent to implant an exclusivist Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world and at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs – only the more corrupt Arab elites could, in any case, be expected to align themselves with it.23 Clearly, alliances built on so fragile and unstable a foundation would do little to mitigate Zionism’s dependence on a Great Power. Indeed, the Zionist movement’s identification with, and identification of Zionism with, the most regressive and barren social forces in the Arab world (an unavoidable consequence of the alliances),24 would tend, ultimately, to increase its regional insecurity and exacerbate its dependence on a Great Power. These considerations help to account for Ben-Gurion’s deep forebodings about the fate of a Jewish state in the Arab world even in the event of a conclusive Jewish-Arab settlement on a regional basis and his injunction that such a hypothetical settlement would still have to (in Gorny’s words) ‘operat[e] in accordance with the interests of the British Empire’ (p. 260; see also pp. 227, 255).
Just as the Zionist dissidents took exception to the endziel and the ideological rationalizations of the mainstream Zionist movement, so they took exception to its strategic modus operandi. An August 1931 Brit-Shalom editorial charged that in its quest for a Jewish majority and Jewish state, the Zionist movement had associated itself with (in Gorny’s paraphrase) ‘reactionary and imperialist forces against the resurgent East’ (p. 194).25 Sounding this same theme in a subsequent number of the association’s journal,26 the distinguished Brit-Shalomist Gershom Scholem suggested that the Zionist movement would one day regret the alliance it had forged with British colonialism against the oppressed peoples in the Arab world: ‘either it will be swept away with the imperialist nations or burned in the furnace of the revolution of the renascent East’. The one alternative was to recast the Zionist project in such a way that the Zionist movement could identify with the ‘forces of revolution’. ‘If it must fall’, he admonished, ‘it is better to fall with those who are on the right side of the barricades’ (pp. 195–6).
The Zionist movement did not heed the reprovals of its dissidents, with consequences which are all too painfully familiar today. Indeed, the scope of the Zionist enterprise has, by now, been reduced to its modus operandi. Israel has not resolved the Jewish Question; if anything, the enthrallment of the self-described ‘Jewish state’ to Western imperialism and its local satraps has exacerbated it. Israel has not become the spiritual beacon for world Jewry; indeed, it is arguably less fecund culturally than the Jewish communities in so-called Galut.27 Israel has not remade the Jewish people into a ‘working nation’; if anything, it is transforming Israeli Jews into a parasitic class – pieds noirs battening off cheap Arab labor and massive foreign subventions.28
The means have become the ends. What is the raison d’être of Zionism in the contemporary world save as an outpost of ‘reactionary and imperialist forces against the resurgent East’?