And then they teach men that to accept an error which is of service to them – the ‘myth’ – is an undertaking which does them honor, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them.
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals
The focus of this chapter is the myths used by Zionism to rationalize the conquest of Palestine. I also try to range fairly broadly across time and space in my discussion of Zionism to illustrate the point that the same justifications typically crop up in many, if not all, conquest enterprises. The mythology of conquest is remarkably uniform – or, less charitably, banal.
This is especially so of the ‘virgin land or wilderness’ myth that I explore in the first section. From the British in North America to the Dutch in South Africa, from the Nazis in Eastern Europe to the Zionists in Palestine, every conquering regime has invoked the same claim that the territory appointed for conquest was deserted. In the second section, I discuss the myth of ‘self-defense’. Standing reality on its head, this myth typically inverts the role of besieger and besieged. In the clichéd American image, the wagons circle the pioneers as the Indians attack them. The Zionist version of this myth is neatly captured in the title of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s best-selling potboiler, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism.1 In the third section, I explore one of Zionism’s most cherished myths, ‘purity of arms’. I conclude that its practical significance was nil and as a doctrine its closest analogue was, ironically, Nazism. In the second and third sections, I use as my main foil historian Anita Shapira, the bellwether of Zionist orthodoxy. I focus on her most recent volume, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948,2 which effectively summarizes the current state of mainstream Zionist scholarship.
To compare phenomena is not to equate them. In the case at hand, it is even less to equate the scale of actual crimes committed by the respective conquest regimes. Historian Marc Bloch has in fact suggested that a primary purpose of historical comparison is the identification of differences.3 Yet, there is no point in making historical analogies if they do not bear on crucial common features; otherwise one’s findings risk being dismissed, justly, as trivial.
My own view is that the similarities I point to between Zionism and other conquest mythologies are significant; indeed, disquietingly so.
The ‘Virgin Land or Wilderness’ Myth
Historian Francis Jennings has proposed that there exists a ‘standard conquest myth’. Its core component is the belief that the territory slated for conquest is a ‘virgin land or wilderness’.4 This conviction performs a crucial rationalizing function – often retrospective – for the colonizer, inasmuch as the right of inhabitants to the place where they and their families have lived and made a life is basic.5 A refinement of this belief suggests that the territory, if not literally empty, is thinly peopled by unsettled tribes whose aboriginal rights of tenure are at best tenuous since they have not worked the land.
History has shown that this generic conquest myth possesses remarkable resiliency. Indeed, what is most striking about it is its banal repetition across time and space: the apologists of conquest cannot be credited with originality; yet, given the willful credulity of their intended audiences, they do not have to be. Consider the apparently disparate instances of the English conquest of North America, the Dutch conquest of South Africa, the Nazi conquest of eastern Europe, and the Zionist conquest of Palestine.
One of the first formal justifications for seizing Indian lands in North America was published in London in 1622. The author contended that ‘a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful’ was that, whereas England was ‘full’, North America was ‘empty, spacious, and void’. Further, its ‘few’ inhabitants ‘do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts’ and lack the ‘art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it’. Recalling the example of the ‘ancient patriarchs’ who ‘removed from straiter places into more roomy [ones], where the land lay idle and wasted and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them’, he concluded that ‘it is lawful now to take a land which none useth and make use of’.6
One already notices in the brief compass of these remarks almost all the components of the basic conquest myth: the quasi-virgin land, the nomads that merely ‘run over’ it, their near savagery (like ‘foxes and wild beasts’), the moral (England is ‘full’) and biblical or providential (the ‘ancient patriarchs’) sanction of the conquest enterprise, and the regenerative or civilizing mission it incorporates (they possess no ‘art, science, skill’ to use the land).
The Reverend Samuel Purchas, a friend of John Smith (leader of the Virginia colony), penned at roughly the same time another seminal rationalization for colonization by conquest. He urged that Christian Englishmen might rightfully seize Indian lands because God had intended his patrimony to be cultivated and not to be left in the condition of ‘that unmanned wild Country, which they [the savages] range rather than inhabite’. Jennings observes that ‘although Purchas’s “range rather than inhabite” phrase was contrary to known fact, it held the magic of a strong incantation and the utility of a magician’s smokescreen’.7
John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, argued in 1629 that the ‘Natives in New England’ could claim no legal title to the land since they had neither ‘any setled habytation’ nor ‘any tame Cattell to improve the Land by’. John Locke, whose more technical distinctions in the Second Treatise of Government (for example, between a ‘naturall’ and ‘Civill’ right to property) were anticipated by Winthrop, repeatedly adverts to the virginal state of the New World: the ‘in-land, vacant places of America’, the ‘wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry’, the ‘several nations of the Americans [that] are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i.e., a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet, for want of improving it by labor, have not one hundredth part of the conveniences we enjoy’, etc. Inasmuch as, for Locke, ‘labor, in the beginning, gave a right to property’, the unstated conclusion was that the ‘several nations of the Americans’ had no legal claim to the land.8
This justification of the conquest of North America was, early on, inscribed in judicial enactments. The Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, an eminent eighteenth-century exponent of natural law who greatly influenced American thought, rendered the classic opinion in this regard. The crucial passage, worth quoting at length, reads as follows:
There is another celebrated question to which the discovery of the New World has principally given rise. It is asked, if a nation may lawfully take possession of a part of a vast country, in which there are found none but erratic nations, incapable, by the smallness of their numbers, to people the whole. We have already observed in establishing the obligation to cultivate the earth, that these nations cannot exclusively appropriate to themselves more land than they have occasion of, and which they are unable to settle and cultivate. Their removing their habitations through these immense nations cannot be taken for a true and legal possession; and the people of Europe, too closely pent up, finding land of which these nations are in no particular want, and of which they make no actual and constant use, may lawfully possess it and establish colonies there. We have already said that the earth belongs to the human race in general, and was destined to furnish it with subsistence. … People have not, then, deviated from the views of nature, in confining the Indians within narrow limits.
Leaving aside that the Indians did make ‘actual and constant use’ of the soil, historian Albert Weinberg notes that ‘the American people, as no one denied, had at the time an extent of territory which was beyond their own capacity to cultivate’; and, even if one were to plea, as did John Quincy Adams, that Americans were entitled to territory to accommodate future generations, so too were the Indians.9
Upholding, in a landmark case of 1810, the rights of states as against the national government to the so-called western territories, Chief Justice John Marshall ignored any and all claims of the indigenous population to what he deemed ‘the vacant lands within the United States’. (Thomas Paine had earlier campaigned for the claims of the Federal government to ‘the vacant western territory of America’, similarly oblivious to the property rights of the indigenes.) In 1823, Marshall rendered another landmark decision stating that the laws that ordinarily regulate relations between conqueror and conquered did not apply in the case of North America, since the Indians were ‘fierce savages whose occupation was war and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest’. This sort of legal reasoning reached the outermost bounds of absurdity in the case of the Cherokee Indians. The Cherokees were dispossessed of their land even though they had fully adopted as their own the sedentary, agricultural way of life of the white settlers. The reason given – to quote a former US Attorney General who represented them – was ‘the strange ground … that they had no right to alter their condition and become husbandmen’.10
As the European conquerors swept westward displacing the indigenous population, the conquest myth continued to serve as the chief weapon of ideological self-defense. Andrew Jackson asked rhetorically, ‘What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms?’ William Henry Harrison likewise queried, ‘Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization, of science, and of true religion?’11
The ‘virgin land or wilderness’ image has, until very recently, dominated the historiographic literature on North America before European ‘settlement’. The first, crucial move was to reduce by perhaps as much as 90 per cent the actual population of North America in the pre-Columbian era, putting it at one million when the true figure is probably closer to ten million. Francis Parkman, perhaps the greatest of American historians, described the Indian as ‘a true child of the forest and the desert. The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial home’. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his highly influential The Frontier in American History, conceived the West as ‘free land’. Stannard, surveying a raft of recent histories, notes that the United States before European conquest is typically described as a ‘vast emptiness’, a ‘void’, as inhabited by ‘handfuls of indigenous people’ who were ‘scattered’ or ‘roamed’ across a ‘virgin land’.12
Hitler’s biographers report that the Nazi leader’s Lehensraum policy was inspired by the conquest of North America. According to John Toland, Hitler ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity’. Joachim Fest observes that Hitler’s ‘continental war of conquest’ was modeled ‘with explicit reference to the United States.’ Thus, gearing up for the war in the East, Hitler declared that ‘there’s only one duty: to Germanise this country by immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins’. Faced with unexpected resistance, he compared ‘the struggle we are waging there against the Partisans’ to ‘the struggle in North America against the Red Indians’.
Typically, Hitler depicted Eastern Europe as a virgin land or wilderness: ‘thinly settled’, ‘desert’, ‘desolate’, ‘wide spaces’, ‘immense spaces’, ‘huge open spaces’, ‘empty spaces’, etc. Behind the Nazis’ very coinage for this area – ‘Eastern Space’ (Ostraum) — was an intent ‘to show the average German that he would move into a historical–cultural vacuum which he would have to model for the first time in modern history’ (Weinreich). Bracing, however, for the practical exigencies of conquest, Hitler dropped the ‘virgin land’ pretense. ‘The history of all ages’, Hitler lectured his generals at a closed-door meeting in 1937, ‘proved that expansion could only be carried out by breaking down resistance. … There had never in former times been spaces without a master, and there were none today; the attacker always comes up against a possessor.’ Indeed, Hitler knew full well that, far from being wilderness, the East was ‘notoriously overpopulated’ (Weinberg). To resolve this ‘demographic problem’, Hitler’s grand design called for the Slavs to be in part exterminated, in part expelled (‘transfers of population’), the remnant confined to undeveloped enclaves (‘we will isolate them in their own pig-sties’), serving the German master race as a helot population. Meanwhile, millions of ethnic Germans would be relocated to the East until ‘our settlers are numerically superior to the natives’.13
In Mein Kampf, Hitler offered a rationale for his ‘continental war of conquest’ that was eerily reminiscent of the apologetics for the North American conquest. Noting that it ‘can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another’, Hitler exhorted Germans not to ‘let political boundaries obscure the boundaries of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live in, let us be given the soil we need for our livelihood.’ Recall that the Swiss jurist Vattel had similarly maintained that, inasmuch as the ‘people of Europe [are] closely pent up’ and the Indians have ‘more land than they have occasion of–, Europeans ‘have not … deviated from the views of nature, in confining the Indians within narrow limits’. After all, ‘the earth belongs to the human race in general, and was destined to furnish it with subsistence’.14
The comparison between Hitler and his European and American precursors can be made still more exact. In his so-called Secret Book, Hitler lucidly spelled out the ultimate logic of his Social Darwinist views. The ‘earth’, he wrote,
is awarded by providence to people who in their hearts have the courage to conquer it, the strength to preserve it, and the industry to put it to the plough. Hence every healthy, vigorous people sees nothing sinful in territorial acquisition, but something in keeping with nature. … The primary right of this world is the right to life, so far as one possesses the strength for this. Hence, on the basis of this right, a vigorous nation will always find ways of adapting its territory to its population size.
Yet, Hitler’s defense of conquest was but an anemic facsimile of the one given by the man who coveted not the East but the West. Theodore Roosevelt mused that the extermination of the American Indians and the expropriation of their lands ‘was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable’. ‘Such conquests’, he continued in an evocation of Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’, are ‘sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with the weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.’ Hitler could not have put it better.15
Indeed, Hitler explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long trajectory of European racial conquest. The ‘white race … established for itself a privileged position … [and] economically privileged supremacy’, Hitler accurately observed in a speech deserving of extended quotation:
in the closest of connections to a political concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white race … for many centuries and which it has upheld as such to the outer world. … England did not acquire India in a lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regard to the natives’ wishes, views, or declarations of rights; and she maintained this rule, if necessary, with the most brutal ruthlessness. Just as Cortés or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central America and the northern states of South America not on the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn feeling of superiority. The settlement of the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus the right of the white race. If I imagine things without this frame of mind which, in the course of the last three or four centuries of the white race, has conquered the world, then the fate of this race would in fact be no other than that, for instance, of the Chinese: an immensely congested mass of people in an extraordinarily restricted territory – overpopulation with all its inevitable consequences. If Fate allowed the white race to take a different path, it was because this white race was of the conviction that it had a right to organize the rest of the world.
‘Regardless of what external disguise this right assumed in a given case’, Hitler concluded, ‘it was the exercise of an extraordinarily brutal right to dominate. From this political view there evolved the basis for the economic takeover of the world.’ Hitler’s simple plea was that Germans – belonging as they after all did to the same racial family of ‘inborn superior value’ – be granted as well ‘the exercise of an extraordinarily brutal right to dominate’.16
The earliest Dutch officials and Cape colonists did not doubt that the indigenous African population had lived in southern Africa from time immemorial. Yet Afrikaner political mythology eventually came to maintain that Africans did not arrive in South Africa much – if at all – before the first Dutch settlers. One standard nineteenth-century claim had it that they originated among ‘nomadic’, ‘Bedouin’ tribes of the Arab world and only ‘in relatively recent times have reached the South Coast of Africa over land’. Consequently, they had no valid claim to the land. In the words of one important scholarly treatise, A Historical Geography of the British Colonies (1897), ‘The ownership which the Bantu tribes could claim had no deep roots in the past. It was won by force, and as it was won and as it was upheld, so it could with no glaring injustice be swept away.’
This mythology has endured to the present day. As the Afrikaner National Party began to apply its policy of apartheid in 1948, the official South African Yearbook series included elaborate chapters on ‘The Peoples of South Africa’ which argued, inter alia, that the Africans had no greater historical claim to the land than whites because ‘the Blacks started settling in the northern part of the country more or less at the same time as the first White people began settling at the southern tip of the country during the 17th century’. The tenure claims of these alleged recent arrivals were yet more flimsy inasmuch as they never actually worked the land. Typical was the assertion of the South African Digest (1980) that the
Black settlements in South Africa were not purposive or permanent in the Western sense. All tribes relied heavily on hunting and their cattle. … They selected the best-watered regions for their cattle, and as soon as one parcel of cultivated land was exhausted they moved on in search of virgin soil.
Standard South African textbooks continue to present the voortrekkers (European immigrants) as heroic figures whose ‘task was to tame the wilderness’ as they migrated into an ‘empty land’. There were – as one official formulation puts it – ‘no native blacks in South Africa, only some nomadic tribes, including the Hottentots, who were of Arabic origin’.17
Until World War I, Israel Zangwill’s slogan ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’ typified Zionist propaganda on Palestine. The influential Zionist publicist Moshe Smilansky recalled in 1914 that, ‘From the first moment of the Zionist idea, Zionist propaganda described the land to which we were headed as desolate and forsaken, impatiently waiting for its redeemers’; a ‘feeling of certainty’ was created ‘that Palestine was a virgin country’. (For Smilansky, this myth accounted for the ‘attitude of contempt’ which the Zionist settlers harbored for the indigenous population.)
Such propaganda, however, was meant mostly for foreign Zionist consumption. (It was also not taken seriously abroad outside Zionist circles.) Zionists who had already settled or sojourned in Palestine were keenly aware that it was not a ‘land without a people’ and the internal debates of the Zionist movement even at this early date reflected such an awareness. In ‘Truth from Palestine’ (1891), Ahad Ha’am observed that, contrary to Zionist myth, Palestine was not desolate and all the land available for cultivation was already being worked by the indigenous Arab population. In ‘A Hidden Question’ (1905), Yitzak Epstein sarcastically chided the Zionist leadership for ‘overlooking a rather “marginal” fact – that in our beloved land there lives an entire people that has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered leaving it’. In ‘The Crisis’ (1905), Hillel Zeitlin charged that what the Zionists bent on settlement in Palestine ‘forget, mistakenly or maliciously, is that Palestine belongs to others, and it is totally settled’. Indeed, according to Anita Shapira, already in the early 1900s, the ‘worst problems’ of the Zionist movement bore on the purchase of land owned and worked by the Arab indigenes (pp. 42, 45, 46, 50–1, 58, 62; emphasis in original).
Between the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and the Israeli declaration of independence, Palestine’s indigenous population loomed large in all Zionist fora: it could hardly have been otherwise, given the intensity of the conflict that unfolded during those years between the Arab indigenes and the Zionist colonizers who sought to displace them.
After Israel’s establishment, Zionist literature systematically and with considerable effect rewrote the history of Palestine – in particular, by writing the Arabs and the Arab presence out. The mythology served a double, interrelated, purpose: it delegitimized any Arab claim to Palestine, and it validated the central Zionist dogma of a sui generis connection between Jews and Palestine in that only the Jewish people could establish an authentic, organic bond with the ‘Land of Israel’ and cause it to blossom forth. This genre had its roots in the Yishuv in the 1930s when, according to Shapira, ‘it became popular to maintain that the Arabs in Palestine had forfeited any right to the land because they had neglected it, allowing it to become a desolate wasteland’ (p. 215).18 The view of Palestine as a virgin land or wilderness during the 1,800 years of Jewish ‘exile’ was also a staple of the ideological preparation of the socialist-Zionist youth then. Palestine, they were told, had turned into a wasteland and lost its fertility: ‘summer droughts, desolation of generations, eternal swamps’. The new Jewish settlements were said to have ‘redeemed’ the land; the areas ‘densely populated by Arab villages’ were regarded – in Shapira’s words … ‘as though they were empty of inhabitants’ (pp. 271–4).
With the effective expulsion of the indigenous population from what became Israel and the systematic physical destruction of its former presence, the post-1948 Zionist literature reiterated these themes with renewed force and confidence. In David Ben-Gurion’s monumental A Personal History, Palestine on the eve of Zionist colonization is described as ‘in a virtual state of anarchy … primitive, neglected, and derelict’. Jewish settlements ‘revitalize’ the ‘Land of Israel’ as they are built on ‘desolate tracts, on swamps and sands, on deserted and barren hillsides’. The indigenous population barely figures in Ben-Gurion’s ‘personal history’ even of the Mandate period, except as ‘rioters’ and an ominous, if ungrounded, ‘Arab problem’.19
In The Jews in their Land, Izhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, provides a copiously detailed accounting of the Jewish communities – minuscule and overwhelmingly anti-Zionist, although one would never know it from this record – in Palestine during the pre-Mandate period. The Arabs, generally cast as bedouins, are variously depicted as ‘ransacking’, ‘looting’, ‘pillaging’, ‘robbing’, ‘cheating’, ‘vandalizing’, ‘plundering’ or ‘terrorizing’ the Jews. The one thing that they apparently did not do is live and labor in Palestine, which must await the Jewish colonists to be ‘rebuilt’.20
Abba Eban recalls in My Country that the ‘physical link’ between Jews and Palestine was ‘never broken’ as ‘a thin but crucial line of continuity had been maintained by small Jewish settlements’. On the other hand, Palestine ‘never became the cradle of another independent nation’ and ‘the association of the land with Jewish history was never obscured or superseded’. Indeed, Palestine on the eve of Zionist colonization is described by Eban as ‘a backward and desolate place … stagnant … constantly ravished by malaria and pestilence … squalid … unpromising, almost repellent’ – aside, presumably, from that ‘thin but crucial line’ of Jewish ‘continuity’.21
Even in Zionist literature more sensitive to the presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population, the emphasis remains on the unique Jewish connection to Palestine and the tenuousness of the Arab one. In his authoritative A History of Zionism, Walter Laqueur states that the departure point of any discussion of Zionism is the ‘central place’ of Palestine ‘in the thoughts, the prayers, and the dreams of the Jews in their dispersion’; and that ‘physical contact between the Jews and their former homeland was never completely broken’. Yet, although much space is given over to the ‘Unseen [Arab] Question’, Laqueur still describes pre-Mandatory Palestine as ‘in a state of utter decay’, a ‘desolate province’. One is reminded of Jennings’s paradox that the very same historians who launch their narratives with the encounter between the European colonist and the indigenous Indian population go on to ‘repeat identical mythical phrases purporting that the land-starved people of Europe had found magnificent opportunity to pioneer in a savage wilderness’.22
Nonetheless, it took the unique moral climate of the American Jewish intellectual community to produce that ne plus ultra of the conquest genre, Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial. Marshalling nearly 2,000 footnotes and a wealth of exacting demographic data, Peters purported to prove with all the rigors of scholarship what Zionist propaganda had hitherto only bandied as a rallying cry or suggestively hinted at: that Palestine was, literally, ‘uninhabited’ on the eve of Zionist colonization; and that if the Arab population did not materialize, literally, ex nihilo in Palestine, it did surreptitiously enter to exploit the economic opportunities that the Jews created when they made the ‘desert bloom’.23 The upshot of Peters’s thesis, then, was that the 4.5 million souls calling themselves Palestinian had, each and all, falsified their genealogies. The only lacuna in her massive tome was the modalities of the conspiracy’s parturition. Did a cabal of ‘elders of Araby’ converge on a graveyard in the dead of night as per another ‘conspiracy’?
From Time Immemorial was quickly shown to be a threadbare hoax – what else could it have been? – but that did not prevent Israel’s more prominent American ‘supporters’ from catapulting it into best-sellerdom. The reception they accorded Peters’s book recalls an observation by Norman Cohn in his classic (and remarkably pertinent) study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ‘The Protocols’, he wrote, ‘are such a transparent and ludicrous forgery that one may well wonder why it was ever necessary to prove the point’, yet ‘multitudes of people who were by no means insane took them perfectly seriously’.24 New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, for example, exulted that Peters’s book contained not a single factual error – which was true, but only in the trivial sense that it contained no facts period; and that, if widely read, it could alter the ‘history of the future’ – which, alas, From Time Immemorial did not do, although it did alter the ‘history of the past’, indeed, impressively so.25
By pushing the ‘virgin land or wilderness’ myth to its logical conclusion, Peters and her cronies performed the useful, if unwitting, service of exposing its sheer absurdity. Paradoxically, no single work more conclusively established the existence of an indigenous population in Palestine displaced by Zionist conquest. As Zionism embarked on a new round of colonization in the West Bank and Gaza, it was almost inevitable that the ‘virgin land or wilderness’ myth would be resurrected. One index of the current effort’s farcicality, however, is that Peters’s volume is being touted as the authoritative text.26
The Myth of ‘Self-Defense’
In Land and Power, Israeli historian Anita Shapira remains faithful to the conventional view of Palestine on the eve of Zionist colonization. Thus, it is depicted as ‘a wild landscape devoid of trees and shade … where the inhabitants were strange and alien, wild like the land itself’, as ‘desolate under Arab rule’, etc. (pp. 53, 214). Nonetheless, the focus of Shapira’s book is the encounter between the Zionist settlers and the indigenous Arab population. As a result, the myth of the ‘virgin land or wilderness’ does not figure prominently in her history.
Rather, Shapira’s main aim is to validate another of Zionism’s conquest myths. The mainstream, labor Zionist movement long publicly maintained that it did not anticipate or intend resorting to force against the indigenous population to achieve its aims, but only did so as the result of an accumulation of intractable circumstances. Shapira does not put the myth of Zionism’s ‘peaceful intentions’ – or, as she dubs it, ‘defensive ethos’ – in quite such crude terms. Indeed, she cannot; even within the dwindling circle of Zionist faithful, it carries less and less conviction with time. Thus, she repeatedly qualifies and contradicts her main thesis. The result is a book at war with itself: on the one hand, sustaining the myth of Zionism’s ‘defensive ethos’, but on the other, conceding that the ‘defensive ethos’ was simply a mask for what was, from the inception, a mission of conquest.
This internal conflict is, I think, the main significance of Shapira’s book. It contains no original research, makes little use of recent scholarship, and extensively resorts to such dubious sources as the official History of the Hagana.27 Even as a work of interpretation or synthesis, Land and Power offers few original insights. The main outline of Shapira’s story – Zionism’s initial strategy of gradual settlement and its eventual resort to outright armed conquest – has been described many times before. Shapira writes in the wooden, bombastic style of most official histories. Hers is the overwrought prose of the Zionist initiate – endlessly repetitious and barely coherent, often impenetrable and replete with arcane references.28 In a word, Land and Power is in all respects a party-spirited work. Yet, that is precisely what makes it so interesting. It vividly captures the crisis of Zionist ideology – or, at any rate, the withering of another of Zionism’s central myths.29
Shapira places the Jewish settlement of Palestine within the framework of the Zionist idea. Zionism, Shapira observes, originated in the ‘Romantic-exclusivistic’ (also: ‘German’, ‘volkisch’) brand of nationalism that purported that ‘blood ties, common ethnic origin’, etc., not citizenship or ‘agreement’, were the proper foundations of community. Accordingly, its aim from the outset was to create a Jewish state in ‘all of Palestine’, that is, to ‘alter the demographic, economic, and cultural balance of power’ so that Jews would be its ‘rulers and masters’, ‘lords and masters’ (also: ‘to change the character of the land from an Arab country to a Jewish one’). The minimum requirement for such a state was a Jewish majority that would ‘rule over’ the Arabs. The ideal was a state that was homogeneously Jewish, since Zionism’s ultimate purpose was ‘to liberate Jews from the burden of living in the midst of another people’ (also: ‘liberation from a multinational situation … from the obligation to take the existence of others in their country into consideration’) (pp. 6–7, 84, 112, 125, 138, 170, 280, 283, 321).30
Throughout Land and Power, Shapira puts on an equal ethical plane – or, at any rate, makes no ethical distinction between – the Zionist aim to transform Palestine into a Jewish state and the resistance of the indigenous Arab population to such a conquest mission. Hence she refers to ‘rivals laying claim to the land’; to Jews as the ‘other contenders for Palestine’; to the Arabs as a ‘second full claimant of the land’; to the ‘struggle between two national movements for one and the same piece of territory’; to a ‘fundamental clash between two national movements fighting to gain sovereignty and control over the same country’; and so on (pp. 107, 115, 117, 125, 356). For Shapira, the conflict was essentially a clash between ‘two rights’, more or less equal. This puts her ahead of mainstream Zionist historiography, which typically attaches a far greater value to the Zionist claim – but behind what I think any objective valuation shows.
The Zionist claim to Palestine rests on one or a combination of the following arguments: (1) divine right, (2) historical right, (3) compelling need. None of these can withstand close scrutiny, however.
Shapira makes little if any mention of the Jewish people’s providential claim to Palestine – rightly so, I think, especially since colonizing projects have typically invoked the same rhetoric of a ‘divinely-ordained mission’, ‘chosen people’, etc., and the same authority of the Old Testament to justify themselves. In the case of the United States, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the new national seal should show the children of Israel led by a pillar of light from the heavens, since he was ‘confident that Americans were the new chosen people of God’. In later years, the same pretense was captured in the doctrine of ‘Manifest Destiny’, which – in the words of the journalist who coined the phrase – signalled that the North American continent was ‘allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. Arnold Toynbee once observed that it was the same ‘biblically recorded conviction of the Israelites that God had instigated them to exterminate the Canaanites’ that sanctioned the British conquest of North America, Ireland and Australia, the Dutch conquest of South Africa, the Prussian conquest of Poland, and the Zionist conquest of Palestine.31
The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed the ‘historical right’ (Shapira also refers to it as the ‘proprietary right’) of the Jews to Palestine. It was a ‘right that required no proof … a fundamental component of all Zionist programs’. Steeped in German Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only – and only Jews could … establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil there. Noting its ‘German source’, Shapira points to the ‘recurrent motif’ in Zionism of the ‘mysticism that links blood and soil’, the ‘cult of heroes, death and graves’, the belief that ‘graves are the source of the vital link with the land, and they generate the loyalty of man to that soil’, and that ‘blood fructifies the soil (in an almost literal sense)’, and so on. Even so sober a thinker as Ahad Ha’am could aver that Palestine was ‘a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs’. The veteran Zionist leader, Menahem Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that ‘the Arabs recognize unconditionally the historical title of Jews to the land’ (pp. 40–1, 45, 47, 73–4).32
This sort of ‘historical right’ was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East.33 Germany was said to have legitimate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was ‘already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times’, ‘fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood’, ‘germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav set foot there’, ‘teutonic-German Volksboden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula. … In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outwards from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land … – admittedly only for a few hundred years’, etc. The Slavic ‘interlopers’, by contrast, were seen as ‘history’s squatters’ who merely ‘existed’ in surroundings that they ‘could not master’. Only the remnant or newly settled German communities were supposedly able to ‘shape’ the environment and by so doing make it ‘their own’ in the course, ephemeral as it was, of Slavic rule. Poland under the Slavs, for example, was depicted as an artificial entity, more a melange of inchoate nationalities than a cohesive nation, that had fallen into a state of abject decay – ‘untitled fields surrendered to the thorny clutches of wild nature, desolate farm buildings, soil erosion’ – with the notable exception of the German enclaves that managed to endure and even thrive despite all. Substitute the proper nouns and one could be reading any standard Zionist history of Palestine. Indeed, so profound is the affinity of these two literatures that it is registered even in specific phraseology. Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe’s ‘defender’ and ‘bulwark’ against the ‘East’, and the ‘bearers of civilisation’ against ‘barbarism’. A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe’s ‘wall of defense against Asia’, and ‘an outpost of civilization against barbarism’.34
In any event, Zionism’s ‘historical right’ to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic ‘mysticism’ of ‘blood and soil’ and the Romantic ‘cult’ of ‘death, heroes, and graves’ (the quoted phrases are Shapira’s).
The Zionist claim as against the indigenous Arab population also rested on compelling need. This argument took two, overlapping forms. The first was the ideological, Romantic one that the Jewish ‘nation’ suffered persecution on account of its ‘homelessness’; and only the ‘restoration’ of the Jewish ‘nation’ to a state of its ‘own’ in its ‘ancestral homeland’ would end the persecution. Yet, the claim of Jewish ‘homelessness’ is founded on a cluster of assumptions that both negates the liberal idea of citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the state belongs to the majority ethnic nation. In a word, the Zionist case for a Jewish state is as valid or invalid as the anti-Semitic case for an ethnic state that marginalizes Jews.35
The non-ideological, humanitarian kernel of the above argument was that Jews suffering persecution needed and were entitled to a place of refuge. Why shouldn’t Palestine, which was surely able to accommodate an influx of Jews, have served as such a haven? Why shouldn’t the indigenous Arab population have shared Palestine with the Jews suffering persecution?
Shapira makes the most of this argument. The Arabs are repeatedly cast as making an ‘exclusive claim to Palestine’ and the Jews as merely demanding ‘their right to settle side by side with the Arabs in Palestine’. Yet, as we have seen, she also acknowledges – indeed, often on the very same pages! – that the Zionist aim was to create a Jewish state in ‘all of Palestine’ that would at minimum politically ‘rule over’ the Arabs and ideally physically displace them altogether so as to ‘liberate Jews from the burden of living in the midst of another people’. Even Berl Katznelson – the revered ‘living conscience’ of Labor Zionism – ‘denied’, according to Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell, ‘the Arabs a collective right to the land on which they lived’ and ‘considered the view that … two national movements had equal claim’ to Palestine an ‘existential threat to Zionism’ (pp. 115–16, 134, 138–9, 356).36
One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it;37 one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet, as Shapira forthrightly acknowledges, the latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement.
In this connection, consider Shapira’s murky discussion of the partition and ‘transfer’ issues. Regarding the 1937 partition proposal of the Peel Commission, Shapira juxtaposes the ‘Arab side’ which ‘rejected [it] out of hand’ because ‘they still viewed themselves as the exclusive owners of Palestine’, against the ‘Jewish side’ where ‘a stormy debate developed’ between proponents and opponents of partition. She does admit that ‘at least a segment’ of the Zionist proponents of partition viewed the creation of a Jewish state as a ‘bridgehead for continuing the expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine’ (p. 271). In fact, as shown above, the mainstream Zionist movement was as united in its exclusivist claim to all of Palestine as the Arab side. For example, Ben-Gurion – the central advocate of partition – viewed it as merely a ‘stage’ along the ‘path to greater Zionist implementation’, a ‘means toward’ the ‘final aim of Zionism’.
Shapira further maintains that the ‘topic of force was marginal’ to the Zionist debate surrounding the partition proposal, with all sides desiring above all ‘to avoid the need for the use of force’ (p. 271). Yet as noted in Chapter 1, Ben-Gurion observed on the eve of the twentieth Zionist congress in 1937 that the Jewish state being offered them by the British ‘will consolidate in Palestine, within the shortest possible time, the real Jewish force which will lead us to our historic goal’. The Jewish Agency Executive was similarly apprised by Ben-Gurion in 1938 that, ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine’. Recall also that in his private correspondence, Ben-Gurion anticipated that the Jewish state ‘would have an outstanding army … 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’.38
For a study that is centrally concerned with the ‘Zionist resort to force’ (the book’s subtitle) and is nothing if not verbose, Shapira’s work gives the crucial topic of ‘population transfer’ in Zionist thinking remarkably short shrift. Shapira dispatches it in a little over one page (pp. 285–6). By comparison, fully twenty pages are devoted to the early Zionist frontier settlement of Tel Hai. This is all the more noteworthy inasmuch as the culmination of the ‘Zionist resort to force’ was, after all, a massive ‘transfer’ of the indigenous Arab population in 1948.
Shapira’s discussion of the Zionist ‘transfer’ conception is, for all its brevity, remarkably disingenuous. She contextualizes it as ‘based on what was assumed as [the] positive experience’ between Turkey and Greece, and of the Volga Germans and Tartars by the Russian government. There is not even a hint at the terrifying brutality that accompanied the ‘positive experience’. Another enlightened antecedent she points to was ‘the lesson of the 1930s’ that ‘states should aspire to ethnic uniformity’ – indeed, Hitler’s lesson. One is hard-pressed to reconcile these precedents with Shapira’s asseveration that Zionist leaders like Berl Katznelson were committed only to a ‘peaceful transfer of population based on mutual agreement’. In fact, Katznelson repeatedly placed himself on record as ‘with an absolutely clear conscience’ favoring the compulsory ‘transfer’ of the Palestinian Arabs. Ben-Gurion is said by Shapira to have ‘firmly opposed the idea of an imposed transfer plan’ in the 1940s. Yet, as seen in Chapters 1 and 3 above, already in the late 1930s Ben-Gurion openly declared himself a strong partisan of an ‘imposed transfer’. When the opportunity for such an expulsion arose in 1948, he showed no scruples about implementing it; rather the contrary.39
Shapira concludes that the ‘traditional’, ‘mainstream’ Zionist view was that there was ‘enough room’ in Palestine for Jews and Arabs. ‘Transfer’ was thus viewed as merely a ‘good thing’ that one could just as well ‘do without’. Yet the benign spin that Shapira puts on Zionist thinking is not supported by recent scholarship. Historian Benny Morris observes, for example, that, from the mid-1930s, ‘transferring the Arabs out’ was seen as the ‘chief means’ of ‘assuring the stability and “Jewishness” of the proposed Jewish State’.40
We have seen that none of the Zionist movement’s standard rationales – divine right, historical right, compelling need – could justify its aim to transform Palestine into a Jewish state. A violent conflict with the indigenous Arab population was thus inevitable. As the dissident Zionist intellectual Judah Magnes succinctly put it, ‘The slogan Jewish state … is equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews on the Arabs.’41 Yet, it is Shapira’s central contention that, until the late 1930s, the mainstream Zionist movement was animated by a ‘defensive ethos’ which had as its ‘fundamental supposition’ that ‘the realization of the Zionist project would not require the use of force’ (p. 175). She enumerates the main components of the ‘defensive ethos’ as follows:
The Jews have no aspirations to rule in Palestine – they are coming to colonize the wilderness and to develop regions that to date have gone unploughed. They bring tidings of progress and development to the land, for the benefit of all its inhabitants. The clash of interests between Jews and Arabs is not the product of a genuine contradiction of interests between two peoples. Rather, it is the result of agitation and incitement by the reactionary elements among the Arab people, who are motivated by the fear of the progress and change now being ushered in by the Zionist colonization. In addition, the ruling power, guided by imperialist motives, has acted to undermine relations between the two peoples in Palestine: In order to maintain power, it is pursuing a policy of ‘divide and rule’. (p. 117)42
Shapira’s discussion of the ‘defensive ethos’ reveals her deep ambivalences about the justice of the Zionist enterprise. Especially in the book’s conclusion, she admits that the ethos was a sham from start to finish. She states that it disguised the ‘reality’ that ‘European[s]’ were ‘usurping the rights of the native population’ and ‘blurred the fact that there was a basic clash of interests in Palestine between the Jewish immigrants and the people already settled there’. Zionism is similarly described as not only a national movement but also ‘a movement of European colonization in a Middle Eastern country’ that ‘had to be prepared to enter into confrontation with another people and to demand [its] national rights, even at the point of a gun’. ‘Aggressiveness,’ she concludes, ‘was an integral component of the process’ (pp. 356, 355).43
Accordingly, Shapira suggests that the ‘defensive ethos’ served simply as a cynical public relations device to assuage world and especially British opinion as well as the concerns of potential Jewish immigrants, and a psychological defense mechanism to salve the conscience of labor Zionism, which was in theory opposed to colonialism. She quotes the Zionist leader Tabenkin to the effect that ‘Political necessities are forcing the leaders of Zionism to foster the illusion that we can settle the land peacefully and in agreement with the Arabs.’ The pretense that Zionism would bring ‘progress’ to Palestine is described as ‘self-persuasion’ to deny the inevitability of conflict with the native population. The claim that anti-Semitism, effendi agitation and British machination, not basic interest, lurked behind the mass Arab opposition to Zionism is said to have been motivated by a need to ‘strengthen the conviction about the righteousness of the movement against all its contenders, to preserve the sense of inner truth’ (pp. 49, 51, 115, 122–3, 126, 185, 227, 229).
Half-hearted as it is (see below), Shapira’s concession that the rhetoric of socialist-Zionism during the Mandate years was an exercise in cynicism and more or less conscious self-deception is still remarkable for a historian plainly beholden to the mainstream, labor Zionist tradition. She is not the only one to make such an admission, however. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s current biographer, devoted a companion study to Ben-Gurion’s evolving views on the Arab question during the Mandate years. For nearly two hundred pages, Ben-Gurion is cast as heroically and guilelessly wrestling with formulae to reconcile Arab and Jewish interests in Palestine. In the epilogue of his much-acclaimed book, however, Teveth abruptly discounts Ben-Gurion’s posturings as sheer opportunism:
A careful comparison of Ben-Gurion’s public and private positions leads inexorably to the conclusion that this twenty-year denial of the conflict was a calculated tactic, born of pragmatism rather than profundity of conviction. The idea that Jews and Arabs could reconcile their differences … was a delaying tactic. Once the Yishuv had gained strength, Ben-Gurion abandoned it. This belief in a compromise solution … was also a tactic, designed to win continued British support for Zionism.
Yet, Teveth seems blissfully unaware that this acknowledgment cancels the value of his book, save as a study in the cynicism of Zionist diplomacy: Ben-Gurion’s public positions which Teveth so minutely scrutinizes were, by Teveth’s own admission, never meant seriously.44
Shapira likewise wants to have it both ways. She denies in one breath what she concedes in the next. Thus, the bulk of Land and Power is given over to proving the authenticity of the ‘defensive ethos’. She argues that mainstream Zionism was, from its inception until World War II, not a ‘conquest’ movement but one committed to gaining Palestine ‘by virtue of labor’. The embodiment of this approach was supposedly the example of Tel Hai, an early Zionist settlement attacked by Arabs. Its martyred Jewish defenders quickly emerged as the main subject of Zionist iconography. According to Shapira, Tel Hai ‘had a clearly defensive message’ summed up by her as ‘We have no aspirations for the domain of others or to conquests by the sword. The Hebrew worker came to Tel Hai with the plough, was driven out from there by the sword, and returned to Tel Hai with the plough.’ And again: Tel Hai ‘symbolized … that Palestine would not be conquered … by the sword. The land would be “conquered” by settling it, by making a stubborn stand in each and every place’. (Note the inverted commas around the word ‘conquered’.) In this reckoning of Shapira’s, the Zionist – or, for that matter, British – recourse to armed force becomes not ‘aggression’ but rather the ‘necessity’, ‘obligation’, ‘moral duty’, etc. of ‘self-defense’ against the ‘waves of Arab assault’ (pp. 98, 106, 108, 180, 223; emphases in original).
It may be true that labor Zionism was wont to view matters in this way. That scarcely alters the factual reality, however, that Tel Hai was part and parcel of a conquest enterprise made possible in the first place by the ‘foreign bayonets’ (Ben-Gurion’s phrase) of Great Britain in which ‘Europeans’ were ‘usurping the rights of the native population’ (Shapira). Settlements were not in lieu of but an integral means to that conquest. Shapira suggests that Tel Hai’s ‘clearly defensive message’ is shown by its central image of the pioneer who also fights as against ‘the fighter, whose only craft is warfare’ (p. 254). Yet in The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt invokes the identical image of the ‘early settlers’ whose ‘only two implements’ were the ‘axe and rifle, for they were almost equally proud of their skill as warriors, hunters, and wood-choppers’, of these ‘hunters, woodchoppers, and farmers’ who were also ‘their own soldiers’, etc. Yet Roosevelt – unlike Shapira – frankly admits that ‘this great westward movement of armed settlers was essentially one of conquest, no less than of colonization’. Indeed, as he formulated plans for ‘pushing out the population that’s there [in the East] now’, Hitler instructed that ‘the German colonist will be the soldier-peasant’.45
Consider even Shapira’s description of Tel Hai’s symbolic meaning. It captured the Jewish settler’s willingness to relocate in regions of ‘considerable Arab presence’ that were ‘remote from the main centers of Jewish settlement’ in order to establish the ‘principle of settlement in general’ and stake out the ‘frontiers’ of a future Jewish state. One may excuse, I think, the indigenous Arab population for being blind to the ‘clearly defensive message’ of Tel Hai (pp. 106, 108, 254).
Every mission of conquest conceives its use of force as a justifiable act of ‘self-defense’ against ‘aggression’. Thomas Jefferson defensively declared that, if ‘constrained’ by the Indians resisting American expansion to ‘lift the hatchet …, we will never lay it down till the tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi’. Adlai Stevenson told the United Nations Security Council that the US invasion of South Vietnam was actually a case of resisting ‘internal aggression’. Albert Camus defended the French war against Algeria on the grounds that the revolt of its North African colony was really an integral part of a ‘new Arab imperialism’ led by Egypt and an ‘anti-Western’ offensive orchestrated by Russia to ‘encircle Europe’ and ‘isolate the United States’. No single phrase appeared more frequently in Nazi publications after September 1939 than ‘the war that was forced upon us’. Hitler claimed that his attack on the Soviet Union was a preemptive strike against the threat posed by ‘Bolshevik barbarism’. Indeed, the Nazis justified the genocide against the Jews as an act of self-defense. Thus, amidst the Nazi holocaust in 1942, Hitler recalled in apparent extenuation his earlier ‘prophecy’ that ‘if Jewry should plot another world war in order to exterminate the Aryan peoples of Europe, it would not be the Aryan peoples which would be exterminated, but Jewry’. Himmler, in his infamous Posen speech on the Nazi extermination campaign, declared that ‘we had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us’. Even the murder of Jewish children was rationalized by Himmler in another speech on defensive grounds: ‘We as Germans, however deeply we may feel in our hearts, are not entitled to allow a generation of avengers filled with hatred to grow up with whom our children and grandchildren will have to deal because we, too weak and cowardly, left it to them.’46 One may also recall in this regard Joseph Schumpeter’s crucial insight in The Sociology of Imperialism that a characteristic, indeed unique, feature of the modern world is precisely that ‘every war is carefully justified as a defensive war by the government involved, and by all the political parties, in their official utterances’.47
There is, moreover, no a priori reason not to credit the ‘sincerity’ of these defensive protestations. Raul Hilberg observes that ‘in Hitler’s eyes, the Jews were Germany’s principal adversary. The battle he fought against them was a “defense”.’48 And the Zionist leader Moshe Sharett perhaps truly believed that ‘preventing Arab rule in Palestine is defense’ (p. 287). Noam Chomsky has noted that it is not unusual for policy makers to get ‘caught up in the fantasies they spin to disguise imperial interventions’ and even for the ‘delusional system’ to ‘present a faint reflection of reality. It must, after all, carry some conviction’. Yet the point of the serious historian, Chomsky pertinently observes, is ‘to disentangle motive from myth’. Shapira is, for the most part, unwilling or unable to do so, however. For her, Zionism, whose aim was to transform ‘all of Palestine’ into a Jewish state that would at minimum ‘rule over’ the Arabs, was nonetheless not a movement of ‘conquest’ but one committed to gaining Palestine ‘by virtue of labor’ as typified in the ‘clearly defensive message’ of Tel Hai, where force was used only when ‘necessary’ in ‘self-defense’. Ironically, Ben-Gurion himself had no difficulty disentangling the rhetoric of self-defense from the reality of conquest. Thus in 1938, he stated:
When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves – that is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves. … But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.49
Aside from the ‘clearly defensive message’ of Tel Hai, the only piece of evidence Shapira adduces for the genuineness of the ‘defensive ethos’ is Ben-Gurion’s allegedly tireless efforts to ‘forge an alliance between Arab and Jewish workers’. Shapira would have it that Ben-Gurion served as the ‘tribune’ for the ‘revolutionary idea’ of a ‘joint union’ that would ‘vault national lines, underscoring the superiority of class identity over national identity’ (pp. 135–8, 182–3, 283). Yet, as Shapira also half admits, his support for a joint union with the Arabs was purely pragmatic. Ben-Gurion was a veteran of the Second Aliya, which was fully committed to the principle of Jewish labor – i.e. to the ‘building of a Jewish society by Jews alone, from foundation stone to rafter’ (p. 64; cf. p. 220). The main obstacle posed to the ‘conquest of labor’ by Jewish workers was the competition of cheap Arab labor. In the sectors of the Palestinian economy financed by Jewish capital, the principle of Jewish labor was eventually established – more often than not, coercively – by the Histadrut. Especially in public works and government service under the auspices of the British Mandate administration, however, such a discriminatory principle could not be imposed by the Yishuv. In this exceptional instance, Ben-Gurion proposed to free up spaces for Jewish workers with higher wage demands by organizing the Arab workers as well, thereby making Jewish labor more competitive. The ‘revolutionary idea’ of a ‘joint union’ was plainly not a principled commitment to ‘vault’ national lines. It did not contradict the labor Zionist aim of an exclusively Jewish economy in an exclusively Jewish state. The ‘joint union’ was merely a lesser evil where the principle of Jewish labor could not – yet – be enforced. And, in any event, almost nothing ever came of it. Indeed, so little was labor Zionism committed to ‘vaulting’ national lines in the interests of ‘class solidarity’ that it was given to ‘stressing the national component of the Jewish–Arab conflict’ in order to dissuade Jewish landowners from using Arab labor (p. 67, emphasis in original).50
The ‘defensive ethos’ was never the operative ideology of mainstream Zionism. From beginning to end, Zionism was a conquest movement. The subtitle of Shapira’s study is ‘The Zionist Resort to Force’. Yet, Zionism did not ‘resort’ to force. Force was – to use Shapira’s apt phrase in her conclusion – ‘inherent in the situation’ (p. 357). Gripped by messianism after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement sought to conquer Palestine with a Jewish Legion under the slogan ‘In blood and fire shall Judea rise again’ (pp. 83–98). When these apocalyptic hopes were dispelled and displaced by the mundane reality of the British Mandate, mainstream Zionism made a virtue of necessity and exalted labor as it proceeded to conquer Palestine ‘dunum by dunum, goat by goat’. Force had not been abandoned, however. Shapira falsely counterposes settlement (‘by virtue of labor’) to force (‘by dint of conquest’). Yet, settlement was force by other means. Its purpose, in Shapira’s words, was to build a ‘Jewish infrastructure in Palestine’ so that ‘the balance of power between Jews and Arabs had shifted in favor of the former’ (pp. 121, 133; cf. p. 211). To the call of a Zionist leader on the morrow of Tel Hai that ‘we must be a force in the land’, Shapira adds the caveat: ‘He was not referring to military might but, rather, to power in the sense of demography and colonization’ (p. 113). Yet, Shapira willfully misses the basic point that ‘demography and colonization’ were equally force. Moreover, without the ‘foreign bayonets’ of the British Mandate, the Zionist movement could not have established even a toehold, let alone struck deep roots, in Palestine.51 Toward the end of the 1930s and especially after World War II, a concatenation of events – Britain’s waning commitment to the Balfour Declaration, the escalation of Arab resistance, the strengthening of the Yishuv, etc. – caused a consensus to crystallize within the Zionist movement that the time was ripe to return to the original strategy of conquering Palestine ‘by blood and fire’.52
Mainstream Zionism adapted its tactics to accommodate new contingencies.53 But force was a constant throughout. Zionism did not come to use force despite itself. The recourse to force was not circumstantial. It was ‘inherent’ in the aim of transforming Palestine, with its overwhelmingly Arab population, into a Jewish state.
The scant evidence that Shapira marshals to demonstrate a rupture in mainstream Zionist ideology – its mutation from a ‘defensive’ to an ‘offensive’ ethos – proves just the opposite. She purports that a new, more militant ‘myth of Hanita’ displaced the ‘myth of Tel Hai’ in the late 1930s. To illustrate the ‘change that had taken place’, she points to ‘Hanita’s distance from any other point of Jewish settlement and its location in an area of danger’ in ‘the heart of an Arab area’ (p. 253). Yet, she earlier described Tel Hai as ‘remote from the main centers of Jewish settlement’ in a region ‘characterized by dubious government control and considerable Arab presence’ (p. 108).
According to Shapira, ‘up until the world war, the only organization that regarded physical force as a decisive factor in the “conquest” of Palestine’ was the Revisionists (p. 283). It is true that Jabotinsky viewed as inevitable a violent clash with the indigenous Arab population in Palestine. In 1923, he observed that
[t]here can be no kind of discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future. … Everyone, with the exception of those who were blind from birth, already understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority.54
Yet, how different is the sentiment expressed in these words written five years earlier, in 1918?
Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to the question. No solution! There is a gulf and nothing can fill this gulf. It is possible to resolve the conflict between Jewish and Arab interests [only] by sophistry. I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews. … We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.
The author was David Ben-Gurion.55
The Myth of ‘Purity of Arms’
A second major theme of Land and Power is the metamorphosis in the Jewish attitude to physical violence from a ‘self-image’ that ‘abhors violence in any form’ to one that is ‘identified with military might’ and ‘does not hesitate to resort to force when deemed necessary’ (p. viii).
It is true that, in this regard, the Zionist movement traversed a considerable distance in a brief time span. One may recall Sartre’s classic depiction of the modern European Jew as ‘often as not a weak creature who is ill-prepared to cope with violence and cannot even defend himself’.56 Yet by 1948, the Jew was able not only to ‘defend himself’ but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israel army archives, ‘in almost every Arab village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’. The number of large-scale massacres (more than 50 murdered) is put by the archivist at a minimum of 20 and small-scale massacres (an individual or a handful murdered) at about 100. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs’.57
Land and Power points to several sources for the – in modern Jewish history – unprecedented facility with violence demonstrated by the Jews who conquered Palestine. I will address two here: racism and the variety of socialism espoused by labor Zionism.
Shapira maintains that, in Palestine, unlike colonial encounters elsewhere, ‘hatred of the “natives” among immigrants … did not surface except among certain fringe groups’ (p. 130; cf. pp. 305, 310). Yet, the evidence of her study suggests that the Zionists succumbed to the typical paternalistic contempt of the ‘natives’ that easily glided into hatred when the ‘natives’ resisted encroachment. The humanist ideals of socialist Zionism no more mitigated these racist attitudes than, say, France’s humanist ideals mitigated them in Algeria. Indeed, what was Ben-Gurion’s peroration in the 1920s that the task of the ‘Hebrew worker [is to] stand at the vanguard of the movement of liberation and reawakening of Near Eastern peoples’ – Shapira heralds it as ‘the great socialist mission … the challenge of advancing the lot of the Arab worker’ – except the ‘mission civilisatrice’ in socialist guise (p. 135)?58
Shapira reports that already the first Zionist settlers in 1882 acted as if ‘they were the rightful lords and masters of this land’. Their ‘first impression’ of the Arab was ‘that this stranger respected strength and that the language of physical force was the only idiom he understood’. Accordingly, the ‘tendency of colonists’ was ‘to reach quickly for the whip and beat the offender for every transgression, large and small’. A correspondent from Palestine in 1886 wrote that his Zionist comrades did not ‘regard the fellahin as human beings; and for every small thing, they beat and punish them with whips’. Ahad Ha’am similarly observed in 1891 that ‘[t]hey behave hostilely and cruelly toward the Arabs, encroaching upon them unjustly, beating them disgracefully for no good reason, and then they do not hesitate to boast about their deeds’; and in 1903 that ‘the attitude of the colonists toward their land tenants and families is really very much like their attitude towards their animals’. Negative stereotypes of Arabs as ‘sly’, ‘underhanded’, ‘cruel’, ‘cunning’, ‘immoral’, ‘lazy’, etc. were pervasive. Arabs were typically described as ‘a people like a donkey’, echoing the Talmudic description of the Canaanite slaves. On disembarking at Haifa harbor, the eminent Hebrew writer Y.H. Brenner reflected ‘So … once again … there’s another sort of alien in the world that one must suffer from. … Even from that filthy, contaminated lot, you have to suffer.’ Shapira adds that, ‘for Brenner, the dirt and filth symbolized the characteristic feature of that society’ (pp. 43, 53–9, 69, 77, 377, note 14; emphasis in original).59
In the 1920s, Uri Zvi Greenberg was at one and the same time the preeminent ‘author of a Hebrew hate literature against Arabs’ and ‘one of the most outstanding poets and publicists of the Labor movement’. He stereotyped the Arab as ‘a murderer, knife honed and dipped in poison’ and the Arab fields abutting Jewish settlements as ‘boils’. According to Shapira, socialist Zionist leaders like Tabenkin and Ben-Gurion were
not repelled by the inherent violence of Greenberg’s style or even by his maliciously malevolent descriptions of Arabs. … Even if, as committed socialists, they professed the brotherhood of all peoples and advocated universalist ideas, still in the Jewish sphere, Greenberg’s manichaean description of the world answered to their ‘gut perceptions’ of reality.
Tabenkin apparently divided his time between lectures on the importance of the struggle for peace, on the one hand, and the barbarism of the Arabs who ‘understood only one thing, namely, force’, on the other (pp. 100, 143–6, 150–2, 259).
As the conflict between the Jewish settlers and indigenous Arab population reached new peaks of violence in 1929 and 1936, the labor Zionist press ‘endlessly’ denounced the Arabs as ‘murderers’, ‘bands of robbers’, ‘bloodthirsty rioters’, ‘desert savages’, ‘jackals’, ‘highway robbers’, ‘treacherous murderers’, ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’, ‘shedders of blood’, etc. Even Eliezer Yaffe, an avowed anarchist who first conceptualized the idea of the moshav and an acknowledged moral authority of the Yishuv, viciously condemned the Arabs in Palestine:
You trampled my peace for many generations, as savages of the desert, who live by the sword, by robbery. … And you retreated to your deserts, like jackals in the morning light. … [When Rome attacked Judea,] once more you came out from your holes and attacked us, you wagged your tails before pagan Rome. … Extend your hand and be a good neighbor in my land.
Shapira reckons these last words as a ‘vision … of peace’ since, inter alia, Yaffe ‘would not have seen’ the ‘negative characteristics he attributed to the Arabs … as a biased view but, rather, as the plain and simple truth. … They expressed the internal truth of a socialist – a man known to be sensitive to moral issues, with pacifist leanings’ (pp. 181, 214–15, 237). One comprehends more fully the spirit of Shapira’s above-cited claim that labor Zionism was unique among colonial movements inasmuch as ‘hatred of the “natives” … did not surface’. It was not hatred, it was the ‘internal truth … ‘.
It is generally assumed that labor Zionism was fettered by the ethical imperatives of its socialist ideology. Yet, as Shapira notes, the brand of socialism embraced by the Yishuv leaders was inspired by Stalinist Russia. Effectively this meant that, for them, ‘a historical mission liberates its bearers from the restrictions of simple morality in the name of higher justice’, the ‘use of force’ was legitimate ‘for the sake of generating the desired revolutionary change’, ‘every revolutionary ideology harbors within it the legitimation for the use of violence, since the end justified the means’, etc. Terror was thus explicitly condoned as a legitimate ‘means of struggle’. The highly respected kibbutz leader Yitzak Tabenkin was fond of quoting that favorite Stalinist stand-by, ‘when trees are felled, the chips will fly’ (pp. 70, 203, 299, 301, 349, 351, 364, 367).60
Shapira concludes that labor Zionism and the dissident right-wing Zionist organizations were in basic accord so far as the deployment of physical force against the Arabs was concerned. One need hardly stress that, coming as it does from a mainstream Zionist historian, such an acknowledgment is remarkable. Shapira reports that, during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, the Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in ‘uninhibited use of terror’; ‘mass indiscriminate killings of the aged, women and children’; the execution of Jews ‘suspected of informing, even though some of these persons were totally innocent’; ‘the extortion of funds and acts of robbery … in the Jewish community in order to finance their actions’; ‘attacks against British without any consideration of possible injuries to innocent bystanders, and the murder of British in cold blood’, etc. (pp. 247, 249, 350). Yet Shapira observes that, although labor Zionism’s approach to violence ‘was more “civilized” than’ the Irgun’s, ‘they did not differ in essential respects’ (p. 252). Comparing the elite labor Zionist shock troops of the Palmah and the Irgun, she again maintains ‘It is doubtful whether [the] external differences in framework and patterns of behavior were sufficient to create a different attitude toward fighting or to develop “civilian” barriers to military callousness and insensitivity’ (p. 365).61
The reality of labor Zionism’s fabled ‘purity of arms’ is pointed up in Shapira’s discussion of Yishuv policy during the Arab Revolt. As is well known, Ben-Gurion initially urged a policy of ‘self-restraint’ (hiavlaga) that barred attacks on innocent Arab civilians. In accordance with recent historiography, Shapira concludes that ‘pragmatic’, not moral considerations were ‘the decisive element’ in shaping this policy – namely, to force the British to fulfill the terms of the Mandate or, at any rate, not to provide them with a pretext for abandoning it. As Ben-Gurion succinctly put the issue, ‘Arab terror is directed toward achieving the Arab objective’ of terminating the British Mandate, whereas ‘Jewish terror contradicts the Jewish objective’ of preserving it (pp. 234–6, 247).62
Yet, Shapira significantly adds that ‘the policy of self-restraint underwent various modifications and changes over the course of the three years of the Arab revolt’. In fact, with British sanction, it was effectively abandoned. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate, who ‘rumor had it used to line up in a row villagers suspected of murder and then select every tenth one to be executed’, recruited field squads from the labor Zionist settlements for ‘merciless raids’ on Arab villages.63
The ‘approach prevalent among the ranks of the fields squads’ was that ‘if a village had served as a hiding place for an Arab gang, it was permissible to place collective responsibility on the village.’ The ‘boundaries of the permissible and impermissible in the treatment of these villagers’ was ‘vague and intentionally blurred’. As we have seen, Shapira concludes that, in practical effect, these boundaries did not differ from the avowedly terrorist Irgun’s (pp. 249, 251–2).
Ideologically, labor Zionism’s approach to violence was distinguished by the kindred values of impersonality and rationality. Shapira suggests that these sensibilities rendered labor Zionism, if not practically different, still morally superior to the Revisionist movement. Thus she favorably contrasts labor Zionism with Revisionism for not ‘consciously cultivating hostile feelings toward Arabs’, ‘rejecting education to inculcate hatred of the enemy’, ‘a pedagogical conception that was not intended to teach young people to hate’, etc. Indeed, she credits labor Zionism with ‘misgivings’ as it executed its unsavory, if appointed, tasks (pp. 76, 251, 300, 305, 310). Similarly, Shapira suggests that labor Zionism is deserving of praise because, unlike Revisionism, it curbed ‘excesses,’ ‘abuses,’ ‘indiscriminate’ violence, etc., as a premium was put on the ‘efficiency of power.’ In the words of one Palmah veteran of the 1948 war quoted by Shapira, ‘We were not thirsty for blood and did not turn death into a value. We were efficient based on a sense of conviction’ (pp. 157, 242, 252, 348–9, 357, 365).
A canonical text of labor Zionism’s distinctive ethos is The Seventh Day, an oral history of the June 1967 war based on the ‘soldiers’ talk’ of ‘a group of young kibbutz members’.64 An overarching theme of the volume is that the Israeli soldier did not harbor any personal animus toward – indeed, was tormented by the violence he inflicted on – the Arabs. The appointed task was a dirty one but, alas, had to be done. The book’s moral anxiety is due not to the effects of the violence on the victim, however, but the victor: the corruption of the Jewish soul.
Barely a page of The Seventh Day passes without one kibbutznik or another avowing that he ‘didn’t hate’ the Arabs, in fact, ‘above all, felt pity for the poor wretches’. They take pride that ‘we fight decently and morally, suppressing the sadism and the instinct to kill which is in all of us’, indeed, in a manner ‘so humane and kind-hearted’, even ‘“abnormal” in the sensitivity … expressed’, that ‘it cost us quite a bit’. Accordingly, the soldiers ponder ‘if we were really educated properly’ for war. But they also recognize that circumstances force them to be ‘strong, strong to the brink of tears … efficient … quick, strong, and silent, like fiends’.
These are fate’s reluctant, tragic warriors. One notes that the visions of Jewish martyrdom ‘compel us to fight and yet make us, ashamed of our fighting. The saying, “Pardon us for winning” is no irony – it is the truth.’ Another observes that
we fought the enemy because it was vital to do so – but we don’t hate them. … I felt an awful repugnance about pulling the trigger. There were times when it was almost absurd; times when it was absolutely essential and when I still hesitated. I’m convinced that it had nothing to do with fear; it was simply an unwillingness to kill. You felt that both you and the enemy were taking part in some clash of forces on a much more generalized scale. When he fired at you or you fired back, it wasn’t meant personally.
A third soldier suggests that ‘one of the things that characterizes us is the tragedy of being victors. We’re simply not used to it. It’s got something to do with our education’. A fourth opines that ‘the whole business of war is terrible’, especially for Jews who are ‘not a people that glories in war’, yet reluctantly concludes that ‘anyone who wants right to be something more than simply an abstract idea – anyone who wants to live by that right – has to be strong’.
Asked how it felt to be ‘conquerors in Gaza’, a soldier replies:
It’s an absolutely lousy feeling … a really stinking feeling. … I remember, as soon as they told us our objective was to capture Gaza, spontaneously, right that minute, most of the men said: ‘Give us anything else to do, any other positions to take. We’re prepared to do anything rather than be policemen!’ … Later, the second-in-command of the brigade came over and asked what I thought of it all. ‘I’m only asking for one thing,’ I told him, ‘Get us out of here. It’s a horrible job, really, horrible. I’m a kibbutznik. It’s not for us, we haven’t been brought up to it. We haven’t been trained for it.’
A soldier ordered to ‘evacuate’ an Arab village finds evidence of a ‘Jewish consciousness’ in the ‘very uncomfortable feeling’ he experienced. ‘It’s very hard, simply on the human level. … I agreed that it had to be done. I just couldn’t stand being on the spot. I took my jeep and drove off, there and back.’ His interlocutor concurs that, although the Arabs were expelled, ‘the fact that this moral conflict exists is very important’.
The ethical qualms of The Seventh Day arise not from what Israel may have done to the Arabs, however, but from what it may have done to itself. Indeed, the soldier is seen as the war’s salient victim, the one truly deserving of pity. The book’s editor points to the constantly recurring theme of the ‘fear of the brutalizing effects of war, and the danger of “losing the semblance of man”’. The hesitant conqueror of Gaza laments that, ‘Above all, it destroys human dignity. It destroys the semblance of man.’ The soldier anguished by his expulsion of Arab villagers fears that ‘Our people, our soldiers, have a special spirit that’s liable to be distorted under the conditions of a conquering nation.’ The ultimate expression of this sentiment is given by writer Amos Oz (one of the interviewers), who chastises the Arabs for corrupting Israel’s soul by forcing it to hate them:
The question is how long we, as ordinary flesh and blood, can bear it. Can we go on holding the sword in one hand only? … Can you imagine living this way and still being the same person, the same nation in a few years’ time? Can it be done without our getting to the stage in which we’ll quite simply hate them? Just hate them. I don’t mean that we’ll take a delight in killing or turn into sadists. Simply deep bitter hatred for them for having forced such a life on us.
We have seen that, for Shapira, the ethos exemplified in The Seventh Day morally redeemed labor Zionism. Yet (1) its practical moral significance was nil, and (2) the same ethos informed Nazism.
As noted above, labor Zionism was not averse to breaking any moral threshold in fulfillment of its ‘historical mission’. Its ethos meant only that the violence used must be suited to the desired end and impersonally administered. The decisive point is nicely, if perhaps unwittingly, made by the scholar Robert Alter in a review of Shapira’s book in The New Republic. Alter credits Ben-Gurion with condemning the ‘gratuitous torture’ of Arabs during the 1948 war. He observes that ‘the abuse of force, as Ben-Gurion understood, was nothing less than a betrayal of Zionism’. The key word is ‘gratuitous’: torture was permissible, but not ‘gratuitous’ torture, which was an ‘abuse of power’.65 Only the ‘gratuitous’ use of torture was, for Ben-Gurion (and presumably Alter), a ‘betrayal of Zionism’.66
Consider now Nazi ideology. Historian Heinz Höhne observes that, contrary to widespread belief, abusive force was not truly integral to the Final Solution. ‘The fact that brutes and sadists made use of the extermination machine does not mean that they were typical of it. Sadism was only one facet of mass extermination and one disapproved of by SS head-quarters.’ ‘Himmler’s maxim’, he continues, ‘was that mass extermination must be carried out cooly and cleanly; even while obeying the official order to commit murder the SS man must remain “decent”.’ Historian Joachim Fest similarly comments that ‘the new type of man of violence recruited by Himmler was concerned with the dispassionate extermination of real or possible opponents, not with the primitive release of sadistic impulses’. Sadism was seen as an example of ‘human weakness’ that contradicted the ideal type. Himmler’s ‘perpetually reiterated moral admonishments’, notes Fest, were ‘in no way a merely feigned moral austerity not “meant seriously”: they are founded on the principle of rational terrorism’. Ideological concerns also meshed with pragmatic ones as Himmler worried that sadistic ‘excesses’, if left unchecked, would undermine military discipline and competence. ‘Efficiency’, writes Hilberg, ‘was the real aim of all that “humaneness”.’
‘We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear’, Himmler told an assembly of Nazi murderers at Posen. His lieutenants were exhorted to be ‘hard’ but ‘not become hardened’, and to ‘intervene at once’ should ‘some Commander exceed his duty or show signs that his sense of restraint is becoming blurred’. The SS leader even issued definite instructions forbidding his subordinates to indulge in gratuitous torture. An order of August 1935 laid down that ‘any independent, individual action against the Jews by any member of the SS is most strictly forbidden’. Concentration-camp guards had to sign a declaration every three months that they did not mistreat prisoners. In autumn 1942, Himmler declared that, in the case of ‘unauthorised shootings of Jews’, ‘if the motive is purely political there should be no punishment unless such is necessary for the maintenance of discipline. If the motive is selfish, sadistic or sexual, judicial punishments should be imposed for murder or manslaughter as the case may be’. And he did on occasion actually have SS sadists punished. In effect, there were two distinct categories of murder: the Final Solution, which, however ghastly, was sanctioned by Germany’s ‘historical mission’, on the one hand, and the gratuitous torture of prisoners or ‘excesses’, on the other. ‘Against the latter category’, according to Höhne, the ‘SS judicial machine [was] set in motion’.67
In his postwar memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz, the exemplary ‘ultra-Nazi’ Rudolf Hoess underlines that he ‘never personally hated the Jews’, indeed, that ‘the emotion of hatred’ was ‘foreign’ to his ‘nature’. He reports never having sanctioned the ‘horrors of the concentration camps’ – by which he evidently intends, not the systematic mass extermination supervised by him, but the sadistic outbursts he claims to have ‘used every means at my disposal to stop’. Hence, he continues, ‘I myself never maltreated a prisoner, far less killed one. Nor have I ever tolerated maltreatment by my subordinates.’ ‘I was never cruel, and I have never maltreated anyone, even in a fit of temper.’
Repeatedly, Hoess professes profound disgust at those SS guards who gratuitously tortured camp inmates. ‘They did not regard prisoners as human beings at all. … They regarded the sight of corporal punishment being inflicted as an excellent spectacle, a kind of peasant merrymaking. I was certainly not one of these.’ He notes that his ‘blood runs cold’ as he recalls the ‘fearful tortures that were enacted in Auschwitz’. Unfortunately, he confides, ‘Nothing can prevail against the malignancy, wickedness and brutality of the individual guard, except keeping him constantly under one’s personal supervision.’ Special contempt is reserved for the prisoner collaborators given to orgies of violence: ‘They were soulless and had no feelings whatsoever. I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts. … It was simply gruesome.’
Hoess delineates the SS ideal negatively as to act from neither ‘criminal intent’ nor from ‘pity’. Both these last motives were seen as ‘equally reprehensible’. In his own case, the internal battle is to achieve ‘self-mastery and unbending severity’ despite an instinctive sympathy for the wretched victims. In the SS, Hoess observes, ‘“hard necessity” must stifle all softer emotions’. Yet, he returns again and again to the war within himself between the ideal and his own inner fragility. ‘I should have … explained that I was not suited to concentration camp service, because I felt too much sympathy for the prisoners … [But] I did not wish to reveal my weakness … that I was too soft.’ ‘I never grew indifferent to human suffering. I have always seen it and felt for it. Yet because I might not show weakness, I wished to appear hard, lest I be regarded as weak, and had to disregard such feelings.’ ‘In the face of Eichmann’s grim determination I was forced to bury all my human considerations as deeply as possible. … I had to continue this mass murder and coldly to watch it, without regard for the doubts that were seething deep inside me.’68
For the Nazis, Germany had been singled out for a fate at once cruel and glorious. It was the appointed instrument of a task as grisly as it was imperative. Himmler, for instance, viewed his role in the Nazi Judeocide as a ‘personal sacrifice’ for Germany’s ‘great historical mission’. At public meetings, the SS leader typically declared that the ‘Final Solution’ had become ‘the most painful question of my life’; that he ‘hated this bloody business’ that had aroused him to the ‘depth of his soul’, but everyone must do his duty, ‘however hard it might be’; that ‘we have completed this painful task out of love for our people’; that it was ‘the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses’; that ‘we have been called upon to fulfill a repulsive duty’ and he ‘would not like it if Germans did such a thing gladly’; etc. To assuage his unhappy executioners as they performed their ‘heavy task’ in the East, Himmler pointed to the moral conflicts that wracked them as evidence of an elevated ‘German consciousness’:
I can tell you that it is hideous and frightful for a German to have to see such things. It is so, and if we had not felt it to be hideous and frightful, we should not be Germans. However hideous it may be, it has been necessary for us to do it and it will be necessary in many other cases.69
Accordingly, the Nazi mass murderers imagined that they, not the Jews, were the war’s authentic victims. ‘While mowing down their Jewish victims’, Höhne writes, ‘the Einsatzgruppen believed that they were entitled to the sympathy of all good Aryans.’ As he proceeded with mass murder in Serbia, Gruppenführer Turner lamented that ‘the job is not a pretty one’. Paul Blöbel, leader of Einsatzkommando 4A, maintained after the war that the real unfortunates were the liquidators themselves: ‘The strain was far heavier in the case of our men who carried out the executions than in that of their victims. From a psychological point of view they had a terrible time.’ Himmler praised the Einsatzgruppen for preserving their humanity – the ‘semblance of man’, as it were – despite the terrible ordeal they had been put through:
Most of you will know what it means to see a hundred corpses – five hundred – a thousand – lying there. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness [i.e. sadism] – to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written.70
Hoess records that he was ‘deeply marked’ and ‘tormented’ by the ‘mass extermination, with all the attendant circumstances’ of ‘this monstrous “work”’. Regarding the ‘Extermination Order’ for the Gypsies – ‘my best-loved prisoners, if I may put it that way’ – the Auschwitz commandant muses, ‘Nothing surely is harder than to grit one’s teeth and go through with such a thing, coldly, pitilessly and without mercy.’ Forced to bear personal witness to the Final Solution yet suppress the paroxysms of guilt and disgust convulsing him, Hoess’s suffering scales exquisite peaks of tortured sublimity. Like a latter-day St Augustine, he confesses:
I had to exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost doubts and feelings of oppression from becoming apparent. I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions got the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers, with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers. … My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.71
One need not entirely gainsay the moral anxiety of the Nazis72 to recoil at their repulsive, perverted sanctimoniousness. For, beyond the grotesque pretense they made of being victims, let alone the preeminent victims,73 what were the Nazis’ cloying public displays of angst if not duplicitous exercises in self-extenuation and self-exculpation? Höhne excoriates the ‘spurious self-pity’ and ‘ineradicable … philistine self-righteousness’ of the Nazi executioners that ‘prevented them [from] regarding themselves as murderers’, indeed, ‘enabled them seriously to believe that in fact they were tragic figures’. ‘From their grotesquely exaggerated sense of righteousness in the fulfillment of their civic duty’, he continues, ‘sprang the notion that basically in the midst of all this murder they were men of compassion who had every sympathy with those who must die.’
Recalling Hoess’s avowal in his memoir that he ‘never grew indifferent to human suffering … I have always seen it and felt for it’, Fest scathingly comments that ‘what he believed to be sympathy for his victims was nothing but sentimental pity for himself, who was ordered to carry out such inhuman acts’. ‘Thus’, Fest further notes, ‘he was able to claim merit for a completely self-centered sentimentality, which placed him under no obligation to take any action, and to credit himself with the mendacious self-pity of the “sorrowful murderer” as evidence of his humanitarianism.’74
In an essay on Israeli ‘kitsch’, Hebrew University philosopher Avishai Margalit points to the egregious example of The Seventh Day. ‘The clear but unstated message of the book’, he observes, ‘was one of rueful moral self-congratulation: we are beautiful, but we must shoot to kill – but not before we go through an agonizing search of our tormented soul.’ We may now add that the ‘soldiers’ talk’ of the ‘group of young kibbutzniks’ was as unoriginal as it was revolting. Indeed, as Dostoyevsky long ago recognized, ‘the most refined shedders of blood have been almost always the most highly civilized gentlemen’, to whom all the official terrorists ‘could not have held a candle’.75