Exiled in the Homeland
J e w i s h H i s t o r y, L i f e , a n d C u lt u r e Michael Neiditch, Series Editor
Exiled in the Homeland Zionism and the Return to M a n d at e P a l e s t i n e
Donna Robin
University of Texas Press Austin
The Jewish History, Life, and Culture Series is supported by the late Milton T. Smith and the Moshana Foundation, and the Tocker Foundation.
Copyright © 2009 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). l i b r a ry o f con g r e s s c ata lo g i n g - i n - p u b l i c at i on data Divine, Donna Robinson Exiled in the homeland : Zionism and the return to Mandate Palestine / by Donna Robinson Divine. — 1st ed. p. cm. — ( Jewish History, Life, and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-71982-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Zionism—History—20th century. 2. Palestine—Politics and government—1917–1948. 3. Palestine—Emigration and immigration—20th century. I. Title. DS149.D566 2009 320.54095694—dc22 2008051749
Content<
Acknowledgments introduction
vii 3
one 19 Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams: The Meanings of Auto-Emancipation two 51 Great Britain’s Colonial Venture: The Starting Point three 76 Making Concessions: Zionist Immigration Politics four 102 Mishnah Impossible: Zionist Attempts to Transform the Jewish People five 133 No Kaddish for Exile, No Path to Redemption six 166 Unsung Heroes conclusion 199 Vital Statistics and the Statistics Vital for a Jewish State
Notes 209 Glossary 231 Bibliography 233 Index 247
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Acknowledgment<
To state that this is a book my education at Brandeis and Columbia prepared me to write might appear merely to state the obvious. But the idea for this topic began in a question I put to my beloved Brandeis teacher, Ben Halpern, about how Zionist pioneers managed to survive the hardships they encountered in the land of Israel. His answer: It was like “summer camp.” The remark stayed with me as I continued to learn about Israel and the Middle East at Columbia. I was fortunate to study the languages and history of the Middle East at Columbia at a time when there was an environment—forged by, among others, my mentor, J. C. Hurewitz—that placed a high value on analysis and scholarly rigor. My first acknowledgments, then, necessarily go to those who not only infl uenced the way I think and write about the Middle East but who also encouraged me to find my own voice. Still, I would not have been able to turn what were half-formed ideas into a book without the intellectual community of Smith College’s Kahn Institute. Not only did my Smith colleagues see something of value in the less-thancertain thoughts I presented to them on the experience of Zionist immigrants in British Mandate Palestine, they also made me realize that I had an important story to tell and that it belonged between hard covers. Thus it is a pleasure to acknowledge all those people and institutions who helped me reach this point. Some personal debts must also be highlighted. The first is to Peter Rose, Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Sociology, who directed the Kahn Project on exiles and who demanded a lot from us but also gave generously of his time and expertise. The second is to Dan Horowitz, Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies, a source of moral and critical support, who read parts of an earlier draft. I drew much insight from the comments of Alan Dowty, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Notre
Exiled in the Homeland
viii
Dame and formerly the Kahanoff Chair of Israel Studies at the University of Calgary. He reviewed the entire manuscript and offered helpful suggestions about how to refine it. Martha Ackelsberg, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government; Howard Nenner, Roe/Straut Professor Emeritus of History; Ruth Solie, Sophia Smith Professor of Music; and Mark Steinberg, Associate Professor of Sociology, all Smith faculty, provided everything from editorial suggestions to wise counsel on how to clarify and expand on my ideas. At the University of Texas Press, Humanities Editor Jim Burr has shepherded the manuscript through the editorial process with enthusiasm and sensitivity, and I thank him for his support at a crucial juncture. I can offer my thanks as well to the two people who reviewed the manuscript for their helpful comments. Finally, I am indebted to David J. Estrin for helping me bring this manuscript into publishable form. Needless to say, the flaws that remain are mine. I am, as always, grateful to my husband, Tom, and to my children, Elana and Jonas, for their love, sense of humor, and for always cheering me on.
Exiled in the Homeland
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Introduction
When the Roslan dropped anchor at the port of Jaffa in late December 1919 following its month-long journey from Odessa, Zionist leaders heralded the ship’s arrival as the dawn of a new age. They deemed its 670 passengers “pioneers” and portrayed them as absolutely dedicated to the Zionist aim to remake the Jewish people. The trouble with this view is that it was not entirely accurate: local newspaper reports told a very different story. Contemporaries described Zionism’s so-called Mayflower as filled with a wretched “refuse” escaping the deadly battlefields of civil war Russia and most emphatically not coming to Palestine possessed with Zionism’s visionary purpose. Examining the Roslan’s masthead should have further dampened the enthusiasm of Zionist leaders, who by calling the ship’s landing a milestone may have revealed more about their extraordinary capacity for wishful thinking than for accurate accounting or reporting. Compared to the situation on other ships carrying people to Palestine during 1919, fewer people aboard the Roslan (by about 10 percent) called themselves workers, and very few of those strewn across its almost unlivable decks conformed to the profile of Zionist pioneer: few were in their teens or early twenties; many were children traveling with their parents, and at least 40 percent were married.1 But despite the abundant evidence, the Zionist narrative that shaped how Israelis understood the origins of their state and society did not incorporate the Roslan’s real story. Although the gap between Zionism’s national building paradigm and the historical narrative of events—the difference between myth and reality—has drawn considerable scholarly attention, it has not resolved the puzzle of how idealism and balance-of-power considerations mobilized the resources vital for the establishment of a Jewish state. Most analyses
Exiled in the Homeland
4
have focused narrowly on either ideals or power politics, as if a choice between them must be made. Despite decades of revisionist history, there are still two rather distinct models of the Jewish nation-building experience in Palestine, and scholars seem more attentive to the differences between them than to their points of intersection.2 Without ignoring the differences, Exiled in the Homeland aims to show how one perspective can invigorate the other. When Israel was established in the midst of war and hardship, most of its citizens accepted the Zionist paradigm and viewed their nation as the embodiment of ideals and as the template for social advances that would one day come to all peoples. They viewed the country’s pre-state era as a heroic period overflowing with pioneers who poured energy and sweated labor into building communities grounded in the shared ideals of freedom and equality. Presumably only their determined quest for social and political justice enabled these early Zionists to endure the suffering necessary for creating the economic and political basis for Jewish sovereignty.3 In the conventional wisdom, the development of a Jewish state is depicted as a process of binding people through a joint commitment to a set of sacred principles: freedom, love of the land, physical labor, and revitalizing the Hebrew language—and was all seemingly accomplished by sheer will power—yesh me-ayin (creating something from nothing). The idea of Israel’s existence supposedly resonated with proof of what could be done with a combination of personal altruism and unshakeable national commitment. In themselves, Zionist ideals were not exceptional, particularly in the context of the interchanges of culture and politics in nineteenth-century Europe. They derived from nationalist and socialist principles well known across the continent.4 But when these principles were applied to the Jews, something new did emerge. And when they were implemented in Palestine, an ambitious enterprise was launched that was substantially different from its European counterparts. Fusing the political with the cultural, Zionism could claim success only if its adherents’ dedication to the movement’s ideals matched the scope of the project.5 Zionist ideals were intended to empower a people, long the object of hatred and violence, to act upon the world and chart its own collective future. Jews could remake their world—Zionists contended—and establish a state, but only if they devoted their minds and bodies to the cause. Zionist immigrants to Palestine were supposed to see themselves not simply as leaving their homes but rather as rejecting them in order to create a community that
Introduction
5
would not succumb to the ordinary injustices and confl icts found in other societies. Zionist history, from the start, was cast as an inspirational story whose beginning promised and seemed to culminate in a transcendent conclusion in 1948. Stirred by an acute sense of the heroic images of their past, Israelis, for a long time, believed their forebears—called Halutzim (pioneers)—developed a society and polity in accordance with their ideals and through their own exemplary behavior and altruism.6 Perhaps because Israel, in its first decades, encountered and successfully dealt with more than the average number of crises attendant upon the creation of a new state, it fended off for quite a long time the kind of scrutiny that would later call into question the conventional narrative of its founding. But the assumption that because people held fast to their beliefs and were willing to risk their lives for the fulfillment of their mission, the Jewish state-building process proved successful, has now been dismissed either as naïve or as shackled by a dogma that self-consciously ignores the real forces harnessed to secure Zionism’s victory. With access to declassified material, and trained in new methodologies, scholars have lifted the veil dropped around the actions taken by the country’s leaders to mobilize the resources for a Jewish state. Some of the most imaginative scholarship today focuses on the lives and contributions of those people who were typically ignored in the well-known story of Israel’s creation—Arabs, women, Jews from the Middle East, non-Zionist Jews living in what they considered the Holy Land—and refutes the narrative woven by the country’s leaders and founders.7 The familiar image drawn from poems, songs, and paintings that was once presumed to personify the Zionist nationbuilding project has faded under the intellectual assaults mounted by scholars who have mined recently opened archives and probed the data with new questions in mind. Even economics has been turned against Israel’s image. In a recent study called Not by Spirit Alone, the title itself suggests that the making of the Jewish state marched forward together with the flow of private investments and of public economic resources.8 But although the axiomatic principles of Israel’s founding have been challenged, and Israelis have grown more reluctant to celebrate and venerate the people and events once safely tucked into their pantheon of heroes and turning points, revisionism has produced its own truisms. Formerly affirming their pre-state era as the implementation of a vision through sheer force of will, Israelis are currently disposed to seeing their past as a simple point of origin marking the beginning of a state-making path filled with confl ict and fragmentation not only across the Arab-Jewish divide
Exiled in the Homeland
6
but also around the fault lines separating capitalists and socialists, Middle Eastern and European Jews, men and women, residents of towns and countryside. The notion that a Zionist redemptive vision worked itself out in Israel’s nation-building experiences has been abandoned as fully as the ideal of the purported moral purity of the country’s founders. Maintaining the concept of a people initially bound together by idealism and by a shared set of norms—so long a resonating theme in Israel’s self-understanding—is, of course, impossible today. But should it be entirely discarded? Several recent examinations of the historical record have brought to the surface interactions between Zionist ideals and policy realities, but such fresh perspectives have left us wondering how these twin factors operated and how they infl uenced actions on the ground. If Zionist idealism doesn’t speak for itself, does that mean it didn’t speak at all in the course of developing a homeland in Palestine? Revisionist scholarship has snapped open the connection between ideals and reality, but it has also apparently rendered it unfit for critical analysis. But without that connection, it is impossible to understand how a national identity settled into the minds of Jews in Palestine. It is this connection that serves as the organizing theme for Exiled in the Homeland, a book exploring the experiences of Zionist immigrants during the early years of Great Britain’s Mandate (1918–1948), when the country was mapped for the first time and when every passenger ship reaching Palestine’s ports brought some people willing to take on the self-conscious task of building the Jewish national home and of elaborating its meaning. To return to the Roslan and to the topic of its welcome by Zionist leaders and the disdain it received from most of Palestine’s residents, then, is to witness not the denial of Zionist senses but rather the deployment of discourse as a political instrument. It is not difficult to imagine a number of reasons why early leaders invented a tale so easily undone by the facts. The story composed by Zionist leaders is, in fact, a perfect document of the cultural and political challenges they faced in 1919. When Zionists secured global power backing for their project in the form of Great Britain’s wartime declaration of support for building a Jewish national home in Palestine in 1917, they had not yet achieved a broad-based Jewish consensus for their aims. Desperate to prove that Jews, under the right circumstances, could rally to their nationbuilding cause, Zionists focused on demonstrating to the British, however fl imsy the evidence, that their grandiose claims carried weight. Great Britain’s endorsement of a Jewish national home thus proved to be both an achievement and a frightening challenge for the Zionist movement. To meet the expectations that resulted from Great Britain’s sup-
Introduction
7
port, Zionists had to attract large numbers of Jews to Palestine’s shores, mobilize vast amounts of money for economic investment, and build an autonomous infrastructure to serve as the authority for a future Jewish state. The disjunction between a recognized diplomatic status and an ambivalent position across Jewish communities had a profound effect on the theory and practice of Zionism. Zionists had to present a unified front and claim state-building authority for their political institutions before Great Britain and the world, while at the same time confronting the reality of their own organizational diversity. Further, they had to deal with the fact that the attitudes displayed by most Jews toward their identities were not at all congruent with Zionist goals. Consider the starting point. For Jews, the very words for Palestine— Holy Land—conjured up images not of life but rather of death. Jews were often buried with small packets of soil from the Holy Land, and some were said to come to die rather than to live in Palestine.9 Zionists had to contend with this widespread folk conception before they could convince Jews to see the land of Israel as a site of national rebirth rather than as a cemetery for their people.10 Zionists had to change the Jewish imagination. They had to convince Jews to describe themselves not sometimes as a people and at other times as a religious group, seemingly adapting their terminology to the actions of others and not to their own absolute convictions. Rather, they had to present themselves as only a nation. Partly by designating Hebrew as the national language, Zionists made this nation the heir of an ancient civilization detained in its current domiciles by a chain of events beyond its control. Nationalisms typically look backward to a reconstructed past to define identity and forward to an imagined future to secure it. In fusing memory to vision, Zionism drew on Judaism’s biblical text for its primary historical traditions, claiming the stories of ancient glory as proof of a correlation between political dominance in the land of Israel and the production of everlasting cultural achievements, a generative power supposedly lost as Jews were scattered across the globe and dispossessed of a homeland. Rhetorically and ideologically, then, the Zionist nationalist narrative was selective, offering a lofty interpretation of the most remote and unknowable periods of Jewish history while disparaging the most verifiable record of achievements in what to most Jews was the most familiar of circumstances. A national solidarity tied to Judaism’s ancient history and to its classical textual language was a hard call for Zionists to issue. It devalued what Jews shared with one another—religion and language—and demanded
Exiled in the Homeland
8
that they accept a vision whose meaning was so new and different that it could not be instantly apprehended. Thus, Zionism could not avoid bearing an anomalous relationship to the societies from which it emerged and from the population that was expected to respond to its call for national rejuvenation. The claim that without a land of their own, Jews had no capacity for action or creativity was, at the very least, inconsistent with the expectation that Jews, by a collective act of national will, would be able to bring their global dispersion to an end. Zionists insisted that the European Jewish culture in which they were raised and nurtured could not furnish a normative model for the rehabilitation of Jewish life. Zionists dreamed “of transforming the Jewish self into something utterly other.”11 But could the new Jewish society be totally unlike and detached from the civilization that gave it life and purpose? Although Zionists frequently asserted that the new Jewish society in the land of Israel was being fashioned in accordance with their vision and not molded by the customs and habits acquired in the countries of their birth, political configurations are not transcribed literally from theories, and societies are not founded without the imprint of earlier traditions. Even those Jews who recognized the corrosive and menacing effects of their dispersion could not so easily abandon the way of life of their fathers and mothers. Palestine’s Zionist leaders, in particular, were more often prepared to define what set them apart from their Diaspora Jewish roots than to acknowledge the many fateful connections. Rejecting the Diaspora was so strong an article of Zionist faith that even when the principle was being flouted, it never ceased being invoked. Still, Zionists faced a dilemma: how to reconcile their repudiation of the Diaspora with an absolute dependence on its population as potential immigrants and on its capacity for generating revenue. The dilemma was compounded by the Zionist determination to produce in Palestine an active and autonomous Jewish citizenry, not dependent for its sustenance on the charity of Diaspora Jewry. In Tel Aviv, a city that idealized financial independence and sought investment and not charity, its longtime mayor, Meir Dizengoff, found a creative way to address the dreadful conditions for the poor without literally compromising principles. In an era of dark times, he invited the city’s rabbis to meet the director of a large Jewish philanthropy and instructed them “not to ask for money but not to refuse it either.”12 Although the idea of rejecting the Diaspora—or exile, as Zionists put it—may have been a consistent theme in Zionist ideology, it was obviously countered in practice by a variety of sustained interactions that extended
Introduction
9
well beyond the point of immigration. In standard Zionist historiography, exile is central to the assessment and description of the developing Jewish national home in Palestine. Rather than project a clear vision of home, Palestine’s Zionist leaders continually looked backward and organized the ways they described the Jewish society being formed in Palestine in reference to exile and to the societies and cultures they presumably rejected and certainly denounced. Exile, in fact, took on much of its modern connotation in the process of reshaping Jewish society in Palestine. Intending to generate a unified Jewish culture in the land of Israel, Zionist discourse, partly because of its preoccupation—some might say, obsession—with exile, more often than not exposed many of its own cultural contradictions and fault lines. Historical Borders The Zionist project I survey in this book concentrates on the period when Jews believed that moving to Palestine lifted them up to a new kind of solidarity, moral development, and social coherence. I have chosen the first decade of British rule (1919–1929) as the temporal borders for this study because it was a formative time for developing a Jewish national home and can hold up a mirror to Israel’s conventional nation-building narratives.13 Thus, I am able to show not only how Zionists settled into Palestine when resources were severely limited but also how much they relied on their visionary hopes and expectations when circumstances provided no cause for optimism. The 1920s—a coherent period from the point of view of British colonial policy and the development of Palestine’s Jewish community—affords an ideal opportunity to examine whether the encounter of Zionists with the land of Israel lived up to their expectations and to reflect on both the accomplishments and shortcomings of the Zionist effort to mold a new national identity and to transform the Jewish people. A scholarly engagement with the desires, values, decisions, and reflections of the early generations who created the economic and political structures for the Jewish state means following the individual men and women who crossed continents and seas to make Palestine their home.14 Not forced to move to Palestine, immigrants during the 1920s made choices even when their options narrowed as the decade wore on. And during this first decade of Great Britain’s Mandate, faith in the Zionist project, however differently defined, supplied the motivation for a significant number— albeit not all—of the people who made their way to Palestine’s shores.15
Exiled in the Homeland
10
Immigration was a decisive element in the national life of Palestine’s Jews even though its nature and significance continue to puzzle scholars who seek to know it well. Immigration to the land of Israel was deemed, even by secular Zionists, a quasi-sacred act, and was vaunted as a powerful idiom for legitimating the Zionist idea that Jews properly belonged in this ancient land. Migrations to the country followed patterns, and each cycle seemed to be touched with special significance and specific characteristics—labor Zionist idealism for the Third Wave or Aliyah (1919–1923) and petty capitalism for the Fourth (1924–1929). The conventional historical focus on immigration created the impression that each wave was relatively homogeneous in interests, habits, political affiliations, and its distinctive contributions to the national home. Conventional renditions of Israel’s pre-state history are typically organized around eras that supposedly accord not only with immigration cycles but also with the flow of the country’s history. When immigration was halted for one reason or another, recorded Zionist history, itself, seemed to be on “pause.” The British Mandate, which provided Palestine with a geography, also supplied Jews with an incentive to project an image of a polity so stable and unified as to be worthy of sovereignty. But the immigrants most energized by Zionist visions were also those with the deepest engagement in Diaspora-based Zionist movements, and they often arrived in Palestine committed to diverse ideologies and, more important, infused with quite different political cultures. These immigrants had more than a passing acquaintance with change, as the organizations with which many were affiliated had often unleashed challenges to the inherited structures of authority in their Diaspora hometowns. Imagine the reactions of these Zionist activists upon arrival when they discovered how little they had in common with their peers from other towns and villages, let alone other countries, and how quickly they felt alienated from their comrades, all of whom shared a common discourse but whose experiences in Palestine often quickly set them apart or in confl ict with one another. Often the robust Diaspora organizational life that gave Zionism its appeal inhibited those Zionists who reached Palestine from making common cause. Surprised, perhaps, by the range of “Zionisms,” immigrants had to be shocked by how much freer they were to imagine radical change than to produce it. For many immigrants, Palestine presented a strange if not hostile environment far different from what they expected. Interaction among people and cultures was intense and fraught with the potential for suspicion and
Introduction
11
misunderstanding. Immigrants had to learn Hebrew and find work. In these quests, prospects would sometimes hinge on contacts established in hometown youth movements or with extended kin. Drawing a disproportionately large number of males, the Zionist community’s social structure in Palestine was not, initially at least, dominated by family units. A person’s passage to Palestine was sometimes made possible by parents left behind in the Diaspora. Respected movement leaders typically arrived with their friends or classmates rather than with parents or siblings. Where immigration necessarily dissolved the warm embrace of families, Zionist terminology extended the intimacy of kinship to networks of comrades, friends, and neighbors.16 But unlike familial ties, these depended heavily on continuing to endorse a common set of political principles and to conform to a prescribed list of regulations. Deviation in thought or behavior could dissolve relationships or turn comrades into enemies. No wonder that leaving the country—even if provoked by starvation and illness—grew to be interpreted as an act of treason. Even when viewed with sympathy, emigration was often felt as a form of personal betrayal.17 No degree of ideological indoctrination seemed sufficient to bring absolute unity to a people fragmented by economic interests and radically different individual desires. Proponents of transformation themselves not only disagreed on their objectives but also on the significance of their daily activities. According to one report prepared by a delegation of International Poale Zion in 1920, “in the course of its work, in the face of the contingencies of life, each kvutza [small agricultural collective] has sought its own set of values, and built its internal life according to its own feelings and the desires of its members.” This description differs markedly from that provided in 1924 by Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson, who saw in these same settlements what he called a sound basis for unity.18 But Katznelson may have discerned commonalities precisely because he so ardently wished to generate them, not because they actually existed. Finally, British sovereignty over Palestine meant that mandatory policies set the course of nation-building in Palestine for Jews as well as for Arabs. Failing to bring Jews and Arabs together in a unified countrywide legislative framework, mandate rulers authorized the creation of institutions with limited autonomy by downgrading the two communities from national to religious entities. Although Zionists originally intended Jewish nation-building to supply the passion and experience to detach Jews from their religious roots, they were impeded in their battle for a secular public realm by the very structure of mandatory rule in Palestine. Zionists could
Exiled in the Homeland
12
operate their institutions only because, on some level, they accepted the classification of Jews as one of Palestine’s recognized religious groupings, although that rubric contradicted the founding principles of their movement. During these years, most Zionists thought religion to be moribund and doomed for extinction. Mandate policies also continued the Ottoman practice of delegating to religious officials authority over matters of personal status, thereby making it impossible for Zionist practices to match Zionism’s transformative vision of a secular Jewish society. Throughout this book, I try to make visible the differences between Zionist prescriptions and Zionist policies while indicating how the development of a Jewish national home both complicated and changed the relationship. The development of a national home in Palestine divided the Zionist movement from left to right in ways that could not have been imagined at the time Great Britain adopted the policy enunciated in its 1917 Balfour Declaration. Nor could anyone have predicted the difficulties of simultaneously accommodating the needs and interests of Jews in the Diaspora and in Palestine. Even the labor Zionist movement could not ignore the confl icting pressures, although it tried to press its adherents into a single mold. Z i o n i s t I m m i g r at i o n a n d J e w i s h I m m i g r a n t s From the standpoint of their public discourse, Zionists identified the number of Jews choosing to live in Palestine as evidence for the strong Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and to the idea, however understood, of transforming Jewish life. Zionists could not march forward without those Jews, but they quickly saw them more as heavy burdens than as transformers of Jewish destiny. Calculations and sentiments typically pointed in different directions. About 100,000 Jews came to Palestine between 1919 and 1929, anticipating that British rule would guarantee them security and economic opportunity.19 Contrary to expectations, the experience of immigration even under the administration of Great Britain was all too familiar. When accompanied by sufficient capital, immigration stimulated economic growth. When the numbers of people ran ahead of the resources available for aid, financial shortfalls, however minimal, had disastrous and cascading effects. The pressures of a large unemployed population strained local relief systems to the point of collapse. A severe depression— but not Palestine’s first—set off in 1925 by the devaluation of Poland’s currency instantly turned small capitalists in the country into impoverished
Introduction
13
immigrants and forced many back to Europe. The volatile economy of Palestine’s Jewish community provoked euphoria in boom times and a deep sense of gloom in the all-too-frequent cycles of depression. For the Zionist creed, immigrants posed a special set of contradictions. Affirming the Zionist argument about the appeal of Jewish nationalism, immigrants could also be carriers of what Zionists labeled a Diaspora disease whose symptoms fixed Jews as permanent victims of oppression and deprived them of any potential for genuine creativity. Zionists were determined to wipe out this old-world mentality and its attendant behavioral patterns. A new culture, it was asserted, could not be formed without destroying the old. But in trying to overturn deeply rooted attitudes and patterns of action, Zionist terminology often alienated the very people it was supposed to indoctrinate. The distinction between immigration and immigrants explains how Zionists could consider immigration essential and a positive act and, at the same time, often hold immigrants themselves in contempt. Recent sociological research provides a complex and mixed picture of the motivation and affiliations of the immigrants during the period of the Third Aliyah (1918–1923) and of the pattern of their absorption into Palestine’s Jewish society. Less than one-third of the total (about ten thousand) could be described as genuine Halutzim committed to social and political transformation. Of those, only a small percentage actually worked on the land as agricultural laborers. Although glorified in literature and song, many who joined agricultural communities did not remain for very long. For all their professed enthusiasm for the land, most immigrants (80 percent) flowed into Palestine’s cities, quickly spilling into the adjacent neighborhoods that became Palestine’s first garden suburbs. Apart from their desires or expectations, immigrants typically had trouble finding agricultural jobs. They had to compete with better-trained, cheaper Arab laborers for salaried work on private farms or be prepared to wait for many years before finding a place on the agricultural collectives and cooperatives already heavily dependent on subsidies and unable to absorb additional immigrants without incurring devastating financial risks. Although these agricultural communities increased in number and in population, they were subject to high rates of attrition because many immigrants could not adapt to the harsh working conditions or to a life so far away from Palestine’s urban centers of culture. Presumably the same desires that led Jews away from Palestine’s countryside also drew them away from a radically new occupational struc-
Exiled in the Homeland
14
ture. Most of Palestine’s Jewish residents continued to work as artisans and shopkeepers, jobs that had sustained their families for generations in Europe. Labor union surveys in 1922 estimate that 19.9 percent of the Jewish labor force worked on the land, 18.4 percent in industry, 14.5 percent in construction, and 52.8 percent in other occupations, including a high number (47.2 percent) in services.20 Some found work in road construction projects financed by the mandatory government. On the road, many immigrants organized themselves into collectives, pooling resources and creating communal housing arrangements. The Gedud ha-Avodah (Labor Battalion), with a strong core of committed socialists, was the largest of these grassroots collectives. But what gave the Gedud ha-Avodah its distinctiveness as a relatively large and well-organized commune also weakened its ideological power. The Gedud’s leaders themselves complained that “many of the new immigrants stayed in it long enough to become acclimatized to the country, learn the language, and get a basic training in a trade that they, then, practiced elsewhere,” presumably without the same dedication to socialism’s redemptive vision.21 Zionism’s call for auto-emancipation was presented not only as a solution for persecuted and ghettoized Jews but also as a means to usher in a society that reflected the highest ideals and the hopes of an oppressed people seeking liberation in the promised land. Zionism posited that not only the Jewish problem but also most human problems could be resolved rationally with benevolent rule and progressive social policies. Poverty would be eradicated if inequality was ended. But the attempts to bring about a utopian future ignited unexpected suffering and difficulties. Even the young radical renegades from religious homes felt an irreparable loss at holiday times that their egalitarian collectives and newly adopted workers’ identities and consciousness could not repair. The Book Exiled in the Homeland examines the immigration of Zionists to Palestine during the 1920s in years when their experiences were turned into myth and when their struggle to make the land of Israel their home was ignored. The textbook version of Israel’s pre-state history emphasizes immigration as informing the political, social, and economic development of Palestine’s Jewish community, implying that the Zionist vision was, in large measure, put into practice. There is much to be said for this approach. It has encouraged the analysis of immigrants from the “outside” by isolat-
Introduction
15
ing the forces propelling Jews to leave their European homes for Palestine. It has nurtured the study of these immigrants from the “inside” with the scrutiny of official records to disclose the age, gender, marital status, and occupations of those entering Palestine. Israeli history has benefited enormously from investigations of the socioeconomic structure, political affiliations, and level of education of those coming to build the Jewish national home.22 This study builds on that research but expands on it as well to look closely at the daily lives of the men and women who came to live in Palestine during the first decade of the British Mandate and to consider the benefits they received and the costs they paid for their Zionist commitments. In one sense, the people whose lives I examine are not ordinary; they left a written record of their ideas, feelings, and experiences in memoirs, essays, and newspaper articles. But in another sense, these were the ordinary people living in Palestine’s Jewish community whose thoughts and actions shaped and consolidated the Jewish national home while their lives offered up selective material used to sustain Zionism’s progressive narrative. By examining the gap between the expectations and experiences of Zionists in what they deemed their rightful homeland, I am deliberately taking an unconventional approach. Instead of replicating the conventional wisdom and thinking about Zionist immigrants in purely sequential terms, I want to discuss their lives as a series of graded examples on a visionary spectrum moving from those possessed of the ambition for radical personal and national transformation to those motivated by the dream of simply finding a better life. The book’s comparative approach depends on and departs from a generation of important studies on pre-state Israeli history that take labor Zionist hegemony as both an explicit topic of research and as a given. Interestingly, whether criticizing labor Zionism for failing to forge the policies promulgated by its theory or lauding the movement for its capacity to help expand the economy and design a democratic political system, almost all scholars seem to acknowledge its institutions—the Histadrut, the umbrella labor organization, and the several labor Zionist political parties—as the dominant powers in Palestine’s Jewish community.23 Crucial as this scholarship is, it anchors its findings more in discourse than in an examination of the extent to which labor Zionist ideologies actually propagated a corresponding set of behaviors. Labor Zionism may have dominated culture and rhetoric, but it did not necessarily exert the same infl uence over policies and activities.
Exiled in the Homeland
16
Thus, I begin my study with a discussion of Zionist views of immigration and of the various interpretations offered for the general movement of Jews across frontiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although scholars regard the mass migrations in these decades as the reasons for the subsequent economic and social successes of Jews,24 the immigrants themselves described their journeys quite differently: they felt uprooted from kin and community, and prey to new forms of exploitation and moral deviance. What appears, in retrospect, as the extraordinary capacity of Jews for creative adaptation seemed at the time to be working to their detriment. Classical Zionist theories were developed partly as a response to what was perceived as the multiple crises of family and faith triggered by the fact that so many Jews were on the move. I follow this opening analysis with two chapters on immigration policies, one on the immigration regulations forged by the mandatory administration in Palestine and the other on how the World Zionist Organization attempted to realize its goal of Jewish independence while trying to render it compatible with Great Britain’s imperial interests. These two policy chapters (Chapters 2 and 3) concentrate on the first decade of British rule, when both mandatory procedures and Zionist operations were defined. Both also draw connections between internal domestic constraints in England and in Palestine and the demands and expectations of colonial rule. My account of the Zionist role in the immigration process highlights the dissonance between the movement’s proclaimed values and its actual practices. Each of the book’s next three chapters—4, 5, and 6—offers a distinct view of the many ways in which immigrants worked out the relationship between the theory and practice of Zionism. In Chapter 4, I look at some attempts to structure communities around a set of values and ideals that would transform the very nature of their members and dissolve their individual interests and desires into a collective solidarity. Chapter 5 focuses on immigrants whose visions echoed the values of the visionaries analyzed in the previous chapter but whose actions made bargains with a unionism protective of capitalist interests and indifferent to class solidarity. The shifting tactics and many complicated negotiations between the representatives of labor and capital in Palestine often generated troubled relations within the labor Zionist fold. Ordinary workers sometimes called the actions of their labor Zionist leaders “shameful sellouts,” while leaders, in turn, frequently tried to enforce organizational discipline on their vulnerable members, who might not find work if they lost their union card.
Introduction
17
Finally, in Chapter 6, I turn my attention to the people who saw themselves not as visionaries but rather as simply newcomers to the promised land. They did not proclaim their allegiance to a clear transforming vision of change for the Jewish people, but they did subscribe to the central Zionist principles about work, language, and communal solidarity, and although not fully incorporated into the Zionist narrative, they were significant contributors to Palestine’s Jewish economy and society. In Exiled in the Homeland, I have combined the practices of several disciplines, although my training as a political scientist disposes me to develop arguments supported by the largest number of sources possible. I have immersed myself in the history of the period, and drawn from a wide range of autobiographies, memoirs, and newspaper accounts of these years. The published memoirs are sufficiently candid and numerous to provide an outline of the parameters within which individual lives took shape and the several ways in which people either surmounted Palestine’s difficulties or were defeated by them. I also integrate popular sources— poems and songs—that were very important in describing and, in some cases, molding national identity in Palestine. I do not presume to be able to register, with any precision, the extent to which the various Zionist visions informed Jewish nation-building in Palestine. But I can, perhaps, suggest how they seeped into the consciousness and lives of immigrants to the country. I can also show the nature of the circumstances against which these immigrants measured their commitment to these visions. Although I am sensitive to chronology, I believe that pairing and juxtaposing investigations across what have been taken as conventional time periods demonstrates not only the differences and confl icts among the peoples who created the national home for Jews but also how and under what circumstances they accommodated one another. The measurable economic and political developments required to produce statehood for the Jews often undermined if not destroyed the possibility for creating the kind of humanistic community idealized in Zionist visions. And although these visions continued to be deployed to describe the quality of place and identity unfolding for Jews in Palestine, they may have angered and alienated as many people as they inspired. If Benedict Anderson is correct that a nation is more than a political entity and is, rather, an imagined community, then Jewish immigrants in Palestine lived in their national homeland without necessarily feeling that they fully belonged there.25 This disjunction between national visions and national realities is my primary concern. Both the Zionist discourse on immigra-
Exiled in the Homeland
18
tion and the actual immigrant experiences shaped Palestine’s Jewish community and prepared it for statehood. Exiled in the Homeland explores these often contradictory state-making and nation-building trends and explains how movements of Jews could be viewed as both agents of renewal and sources of instability. The double-edged meaning of crossing borders did not begin in our age of globalization, but Palestine is a good place to examine the tensions unleashed by changes in population and by populations trying to change their understanding of where they truly belonged.
ONE
Di<po<<e<
No idea was more fundamental to Zionism than the ingathering of Jews in the land of Israel and the ending of their exile.1 Those who came to live in the land of Israel were thought to have embarked on a transcendent journey interpreted by Zionism as not simply leaving the lands of their birth but rather as rejecting them and the oppressive conditions they imposed on Jews. Such a passage could not simply be described as immigration, and the modern Hebrew term Aliyah, invented for this homecoming, conferred both a direction—ascending—and a sense of undertaking a national mission. But to conclude that the ending of exile simply required a change of address and physical contact with the land of Israel would be far too simple. For the term exile carried burdens of reference so deeply rooted in the personality of Diaspora Jewry that nothing short of negating the Diaspora as symbol, culture, and system of authority could truly bring Jews back to their home and to themselves as fully emancipated human beings. Although Zionism’s core idea of rejecting the Diaspora required the movement of Jews across continents and oceans, it inspired no explicit philosophical engagement with the problems necessarily unleashed by changes in population and by populations changing not only their dwellings but also their views of where they truly belonged. Not that the Zionist canon was indifferent to immigration but rather that it could not anticipate, openly and easily, the special kind of displacement Jewish immigrants would experience in Palestine. Because Zionists believed the land of Israel to be their historic homeland, they expected Jewish immigrants to Palestine to fit in instantly and without problems. But instead of feeling at home, many were thrown back upon a sense of their ties to the cities and
Exiled in the Homeland
20
towns they left behind. The fact that Jewish immigrants in Palestine, many of them former Zionist activists, still focused on their birthplaces strained the limits of all Zionist ideologies that attempted to find explanations for a phenomenon so at odds with their assumptions and worldview. Zionists did realize and acknowledge that “exile” was as much a psychic as a physical event and that exchanging domiciles did not necessarily eliminate or erase all of the Diaspora’s negative traits. But exile’s psychic contours could not be totally mapped because the loneliness of immigrants often had a concrete numerical source that could never be publicly mentioned. Many of Palestine’s Jewish residents came from densely populated Jewish centers. By immigrating to Palestine, these Zionists had transported themselves from areas of Europe with heavy concentrations of Jews to a geographic space where Jews often comprised a small percentage of the local non-Jewish—Arab—population and where the question of demography had to be shrouded in silence and dealt with, if at all, only by indirection and implication. Zionists could not afford to draw attention to an issue that might compromise the legitimacy of their struggle for Jewish independence or confound it with old-fashioned European colonialism. Great Britain’s support for a Jewish national home as a condition of assuming the burdens of governing Palestine only pressed more powerfully on Zionist theorizing to bury or sideline the demographic issue. By positing the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel as not only desirable but also inevitable, Zionism had to avoid grappling explicitly with the considerable gap in the size of the Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine. Although Palestine’s Jewish population rose during the period of British rule, Jews never caught up to the Arabs, whose numbers increased more by what were understood as natural processes—longer life expectancy and higher birth rates—than by man-made and presumably artificially contrived political forces. Moreover, the numerical relationship of Jewish immigrants to their former densely populated homes in Europe and to the significantly larger stream of Jews from their hometowns moving westward intensified the general unease in Palestine’s Jewish community about its future and reinforced the tendency of its leading thinkers to insulate Zionism’s central tenets from some of the grueling questions a direct and explicit engagement with the demographic issue would undoubtedly raise. It is with the notion of demography as subtext that I come to consider some of the major works of Zionist theory. The demographic issue took refuge in several linguistic shelters, the first and most important that Zion-
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
21
ism was concurrently an ideology of national liberation and of radical transformation.2 Here was the contradiction: the intensely felt need to rescue masses of Jews from poverty and discrimination by bringing them to the land of Israel to form an independent political community clashed with the equally profound Zionist commitment to create in Palestine a new kind of Jewish nation. Many of Zionism’s classical texts embodied the contradictory objectives even as they claimed to reconcile them in their “imagined communities.” In the end, two quite different logics governed discussions of immigration and often worked at cross-purposes. National independence presupposed a number of subordinate principles concerning mass migration and economic development, whereas national transformation suggested presumptions about the characteristics and abilities of individuals as setting the criteria for selecting suitable immigrants. Immigration was at the service of either a political struggle or a vision of radical change. The two objectives effected a contradiction, with the second potentially canceling out the first by implying that the ordinary writ of numbers might not be an absolute requirement for state-building, and that quality could indeed replace quantity. It also shifted the thinking about the impetus for immigration away from individual choice to a process of selection. At its origins, Zionism aimed to alter, in the most fundamental sense, the meaning of being Jewish. The world seemed to be falling apart before the very eyes of Jews who lived in the areas of Eastern Europe where Zionism originated even before it had a name or a political structure.3 The specter of disintegration and atomization was very real to Jews who were leaving their homes, in increasing numbers, to escape a politics that confined them to poverty, exposed them to constant humiliation, and rendered them helpless when attacked. What would put their world back together again? This was a question the fixed ideas and customary habits of the Jewish people could not answer. Nor could they explain how to come to grips with the changes tearing apart so many Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, thus reinforcing the sense that the times had either abrogated or rendered irrelevant the religious rules organizing Jewish life. From the first, it appeared to many—who would soon be labeled Maskilim, or proponents of Enlightenment (Haskala)—that Judaism rather than antiSemitism was the problem. In this understanding, Jews could alter their condition only by overcoming their fears of cultural exchange with non-Jewish society and by
Exiled in the Homeland
22
forging alliances with its progressive forces. Proponents of Enlightenment expected that even in Russia, Jews would eventually be granted full rights and citizenship, since liberal reforms were already gathering force under Czar Alexander II. In return for acceptance and access to modern education, Jews would bring their artistic and literary creations as offerings to a Russia with global ambitions. But the Enlightenment project depended, of course, on circumstances beyond the control of Jews. Many Jews did not see the benefits of moderating their religious and cultural differences in a place whose leaders were, at best, highly ambivalent about welcoming them into their mainstream, especially at a time when there appeared to be attractive alternatives: the United States, for one, beckoned and seemed ripe with opportunity. But emigration to the United States destabilized Jewish existence by radically altering their residence and the very grounds of their communal ties. Zionism thus emerged as one of many competing strategies put forward as Jews struggled for survival in an era of profound upheaval but also of promise, albeit not one easily redeemable. No one imagined that Zionism’s goal to transform the Jewish people was to be quickly achieved. Although the road to a better life in America seemed more easily traveled, it, too, had its stumbling blocks, particularly for Jewish identity. Like Zionism, the Haskala proposed a new Judaism focused on culture and the revival of Hebrew as a basis for creative interactions between Jewish writers and their non-Jewish counterparts. But unlike Zionism, the Haskala posited that Jews would find their liberation and fulfillment in the lands of their birth. Still, the Haskala confounded expectations by attributing the debilitating weakness of Jews to their own traditions. Zionism, however, pushed further by imagining Jews possessed of the power to preserve their collective identity, but only if they remade it by regaining sovereignty in their ancient homeland. Yet imagining Jews living and working in the land of Israel was radically different from actually thinking about how to move them from one continent to another. It is no surprise, then, that from the moment Zionism asserted a Jewish national identity as the basis for its political ambition, its discourse was filled with inconsistent references to the nature of the political community whose interests it claimed to represent. A Jewish national identity was affirmed and not yet formed. The new society to be created in the land of Israel would be modern but also traditional. It was events that forced Zionism to recast discourse into blueprint and provide a comprehensive program for developing Palestine. The defeat of
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
23
the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the 1917 proclamation of Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration in support of the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home provided an extraordinary opportunity for Zionists to turn their dreams into reality. But they also triggered problems Zionism had not anticipated and was not fully prepared to resolve. After forming a Zionist Commission “to survey the situation and plan for the future,”4 Great Britain soon discovered that there was no Zionist consensus on such matters of central importance as immigration. Trying to forge a united stance on immigration during the British Mandate period stirred controversies not only because of principles firmly rooted in opposing Zionist ideologies, but also because the very concepts and idioms structuring debates always held something back, having been forged to manage contradictions, not to resolve them or to establish priorities. That such language controlled deliberations long after it was invented suggests that it had become part of an important cultural legacy. Zionist ideologies, now so thoroughly mapped by historians of political thought on a range of economic and social issues, have not been probed extensively in reference to the issues of demography and immigration. It is symptomatic that the foundational texts of the Zionist national creed— Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s Jewish State—could be written with only passing comments on immigration, even though the notion of returning to a homeland was so deeply embedded in the logic of the Zionist argument that some asserted it as a Jewish natural right. Any examination of how immigration and demography infl uenced the development of Zionist thought must begin, therefore, with an inquiry into classical texts for the ideas and vocabulary deployed in the Zionist canon that formed the linguistic grid used to describe, interpret, and judge the meaning and importance of Jewish immigration to Palestine. leon pinsker and theodor herzl When misery in Russia prompted open calls for Jewish emigration, they came from two quite distinct directions. One is best represented by Leon Pinsker, who created the first Zionist framework for supporting a small number of land purchases as the basis for Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation focused attention on immigration by noting that Russian Jews were a population already on the move but without a clear communal direction. Pinsker attributes “this lamentable outcome of the emigration from Russian and Roumania . . . to the
Exiled in the Homeland
24
momentous fact that we were taken by it unawares; we had made no provision for the principal needs, a refuge and a systematic organization of the emigration.”5 Pinsker characterized the emigration as chaotic and absolutely aimless. Now we wander as fugitives and exiles with the foot of the ruffianly boor upon our necks, death in our hearts, without a Moses for our leader, without a promise of land which we are to conquer by our own might. We are driven through the lands of all rulers; here we are escorted further with all politeness, in order that we may not introduce a plague; there fortune grants that we are provided for anywhere and anyhow, in order that we may freely and unmolested—deal in old clothes, make cigarettes, or become incompetent farmers.6
The 1881 hostilities in Russia that supposedly triggered the massive migrations and wreaked havoc with traditional institutions and values also, he claimed, foreclosed options for independence and security for Jews wherever they sought refuge. “And even for the few who were so happy as to reach the goal of their desires, the longed-for haven, found the latter no whit better than the dangerous road. Wherever they came, people tried to get rid of them. The emigrants were soon confronted by the desperate alternative of either roaming about without shelter, without help, and without a plan in a strange land, or wandering back shamelessly to their no less strange and loveless home country. This emigration was for our people nothing but a new date in martyrology.”7 Jews would discover that no political system, however democratic, could guarantee them protection against discrimination because Jew-hatred, Pinsker contended, was not triggered by a particular form of government, nor was it capable of being suppressed in societies where power resided with the masses. Rather, it erupted because of the highly anomalous condition of Jews in the modern world as a nation without a land of its own. “To sum up what has been said, for the living, the Jew is a dead man, for the natives an alien and a vagrant, for property-holders a beggar, for the poor, an exploiter and a millionaire, for patriots a man without a country, for all classes, a hated rival.”8 By redefining the purpose of emigration, Pinsker posited a way out of the disorder and Jewish displacement, for he saw in the cumulative power of individual voluntary decision-making the possibility of turning the realm of self-development and self-realization into a means of winning
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
25
respect from the world and of ending anti-Semitism. Although describing a shared Jewish fate, Pinsker grounded his expectations in the idea that individuals would take charge of their own fate. At a minimum, Zionism would establish a framework for organizing this mass movement of what he called “surplus Jews.” Ideally, Pinsker hoped to endow the act of migration with national significance by presenting it as heir to the Enlightenment protest against the discourse of religious fate that explained and justified Jewish suffering.9 Thus did Pinsker conclude that “the proper, the only remedy, would be the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews; their emancipation as a nation among nations by the acquisition of a home of their own.”10 The publication of Auto-Emancipation proved to be as much of an event as a dissemination of a philosophic argument. Its publication generated the momentum for the establishment of a Zionist movement by planting in Jewish consciousness the idea of the reasons for the deep and persistent global rage known as anti-Semitism. Pinsker showed how Jews “in the midst of the nations among whom . . . [they] reside . . . form a distinctive element which cannot . . . be readily digestible by any nation.”11 They are the perpetual “Other”—for capitalists, the Jews are communists; for communists, the Jews are inherently bourgeois; for Poles, the Jews are Russified, whereas for Russians, the Jews constitute a nationalist threat.12 This anomalous position destabilized all the countries where Jews lived because complete national unity cannot be effected with them within any known recognized borders, and violence and chaos erupt across borders when they are forced out. For Gentiles, Jews brought to awareness their own failures and insecurities about the inadequacies of their societies. For Jews, the rage against them produced all sorts of rationalizations for oppression which are incorporated as truthful and deserved. In iconography across the centuries, Jews were accused of “crucifying Jesus . . . [drinking] the blood of Christians . . . [poisoning the] wells . . . [taking] usury . . . [and exploiting] the peasant.”13 These are charges aimed against a whole people, prime suspects in crimes that can neither be confirmed nor denied through a judicial system. As long as human beings are insecure, they will ascribe to other people feelings of alienation they can neither abide nor accept in themselves, and Jew-hatred will be part of the collective fabric of the social order. Trying to stop what is virtually an unending state of war against Jews through legislation or through the spreading of democracy is a hopeless quest for a purity that can never be forged in the public domain for a problem that essentially operates secretly within the self.
Exiled in the Homeland
26
In distributing responsibility for this condition, however, Pinsker turned directly to Jews, who were shamed into passivity by their experiences of oppression. Apart from convincing Jews that they could, indeed, change their situation, he also tried to grant them a way to give themselves what they needed most: self-respect. Jews would be perpetual victims in a psychic warfare that provides false comfort to the perpetrators of violence unless they assumed responsibility for their own personal and national liberation. Although Pinsker’s call for a Jewish national liberation led to the unification of local Zionist associations into a single framework, known as Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion), it did not change the destination for most Jews leaving the lands of their birth for a better life. David Vital made explicit Hibbat Zion’s marginal impact when he wrote: This will to pursue purposes which, on the plane of the material and the concrete, were wildly disproportionate to the manifest needs and demands of the people out of whom they emerged, whose condition they knew better than anyone, and whose fate and interests, when all is said and done, were their principal, state public concern, was a salient feature of Hibbat Zion.14
For most Jews, the formal establishment of the first Zionist movement in 1882 had little meaning, and more than a decade later, the mighty tide of Jewish immigrants from Russia still turned westward, whereas a trickle headed east to the land of Israel. This juxtaposition convinced Theodor Herzl not to reject the Zionist idea but rather to reconfigure and repossess it.15 Herzl saw in the turmoil engendered across countries in Europe by the many displaced Jews the need to instill in Zionists a new kind of political consciousness. Pinsker may have imagined the Jewish nation as a political construct, but he did not stipulate that its existence warranted concerted political action. By contrast, Herzl insisted that only if Zionism produced a clear political program and instructed its leaders to engage in diplomacy with all relevant and powerful nations could it secure a homeland that would make a difference for the majority of Jews and for the Jewish people as a nation. Herzl identified Zionism’s logic and dynamic as depending not on individual consciousness or will, as it had for Pinsker, but rather on an entirely new mode of political action. “Those Jews who fall in with our idea of a State,” he wrote, “will attach themselves to the Society, which will thereby be authorized to confer and treat with Governments in the name of
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
27
our people. The Society will thus be acknowledged in its relations with Governments as a State-creating power. This acknowledgment will practically create the State.”16 Surprisingly, Herzl calculated that the Jews had a strong negotiating position. The Society of Jews will treat with the present masters of the land, putting itself under the protectorate of the European Powers, if they prove friendly to the plan. We could offer the present possessors of the land enormous advantages, take upon ourselves part of the public debt, build new roads of traffic, which our presence in the country would render necessary, and do many other things. The creation of our State would be beneficial to adjacent countries, because the cultivation of a strip of land increases the value of its surrounding districts in innumerable ways.17
If Zionists earlier eschewed contact with global politics, Herzl elevated it to a central tenet of his activity. Herzl reasoned that if the existence of the Jewish nation was beyond question, then its political rights must be asserted until fully and formally acknowledged and until enacted and safeguarded. The Zionist program must be breathtakingly ambitious: nothing short of fulfilling the political claims advanced on behalf of all Jews. Emigration marked one of the portentous developments for Eastern European Jews in the nineteenth century, both as a cause and as an effect of social dislocation and anguish. Driven by poverty, masses of Jews who sought employment in the industrializing democracies or even in the newly developed cities and towns in an expanded Russia found themselves possessed of new power to make their own decisions, but also drained of their customary mainstays of support. The once tight braid of social, economic, and religious authority came untwined for Russia’s Jews, who were blessed with high birthrates but oppressed by poverty and a harsh regime. Many Jews failed to rise above the level of poverty of their ancestors, and many fell below that level. Russia’s Jewish population grew faster than any of the country’s other groups and confronted more challenges than the old traditions seemed able to handle. Jewish religious culture devolved into a variety of subcultures, turning small differences into what appeared to the people experiencing them enormous, even unbridgeable gaps. Because religious leaders, like others, no longer exercised absolute moral leadership, they could also not restore unity to the community. It was thus not difficult for many Jews, especially in the aftermath of pogroms, to believe they had no future in Russia.18
Exiled in the Homeland
28
An immense migration that fragmented families and communities not only doomed an old way of life; it also imperiled the possibility of a future with a recognizable Jewish social order, particularly for families dispersed across continents. Sensitive to the emotional costs of emigration, Herzl observed that although “our cradles we shall carry with us—they hold our future, rosy and smiling. Our beloved graves we must abandon.”19 Confronting the unfolding disorder, Herzl extended the Zionist idea and sought to use it as a substitute for all other conventional Jewish responses to what Derek Penslar has aptly called “the immigration crisis of the 1880s.”20 Convinced that these migrations left people standing alone without the superintending authority of institutions and leaders, Herzl also believed that Jews would welcome new modes of community and control over the direction of their lives. Political Zionism could work as a means of national survival and as an antidote to social and moral fragmentation. Here Herzl introduced some powerful claims. “But we shall give a home to our people. And we shall give it, not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by transplanting them carefully to a better ground. Just as we wish to create new political and economic relations, so we shall preserve as sacred all of the past that is dear to our people’s hearts.”21 Not surprisingly, Herzl expressed hostility to the relief work undertaken by Jewish charities in response to the suffering of refugees. The industrialization and democratization of England and America gave hundreds of thousands of Jews a destination for their fl ight, but the movement of so many poor Jews across Europe, particularly in port cities, triggered such an acute and ongoing series of humanitarian crises as to compromise the material incentives. Confronting masses of Jewish refuges in Western Europe and in the United States put all citizens of these countries on the defensive, with needs and demands clearly outstripping the capacity of local institutions to meet them. Herzl acknowledged the reasonableness of nations’ concerns about maintaining order and control threatened by the flood tides of refugees. But going even further, he ominously insisted that Jews would have to reckon with more than the normal turmoil engendered by immigration. For large-scale Jewish immigration to the democracies of Western Europe and the United States would infuse into these countries new forms of hostility against Jews as significantly larger Jewish populations swept people away from practices of enlightened tolerance and led them into typical patterns of discrimination. Jewish citizens of these democracies would eventually encounter the same hatred characteristic of despotisms.
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
29
Democracy afforded no permanent protective shield against antiSemitism, since the rise of nationalism and populism worked interactively to extend and invigorate Jew-hatred. For newly independent European states, uncertain how to define their own collective identities but deluged with tendentious myths of homogeneity, a sizable Jewish population seemed both invidious and backward. But even for democracies, concentrations of Jewish populations with their distinctive lifestyles could not be brought comfortably together with visions of the modern nation-state. It is, perhaps, not stretching the argument too far to note that Herzl found potential for Jewish survival in the very hatred and violence that made the people’s lives precarious. Is it true that, in countries where we live in perceptible numbers, the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors, technicians, teachers, and employees of all descriptions becomes daily more intolerable? True, that the Jewish middle classes are seriously threatened? True, that the passions of the mob are incited against our wealthy people? True, that our poor endure greater sufferings than any other proletariat? I think that this external pressure makes itself felt everywhere. In our economically upper classes it causes discomfort, in our middle classes continual and grave anxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair. Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase: Juden Raus! [Out with the Jews].22
For Herzl, the persistence of this hatred was as striking as the survival of the Jewish people. Because Jews lived outside the reach of most social orders, they were indeed what anti-Semites had always charged—a people set apart. But the stubborn remoteness of Jews that threatened the world also supplied a resource for the people’s emancipation. Seen through the prism of the impoverished Jewish masses, isolation had little to recommend it, but for Herzl, it held a fascination and the elements of a new and grand scheme to resolve the Jewish problem, one that would both summon deeply felt sentiments and project a better future. If national feelings empowered Jews but endangered non-Jews, then a program to end Jewish dispersion in lands where Jews were considered foreign but that also granted them a territory and national home of their own ought to find broad support. Conceding the anti-Semitic charge that Jews did not fully fit into any of the political entities in which they were dispersed, Herzl was confident that providing Jews with an independent
Exiled in the Homeland
30
state of their own was the only logical response. Thus, for Herzl, Zionism’s greatness emerged in the multiple functions it discharged: ordering the massive disruptions caused by uncontrolled emigration, ensuring stability in a world organized into nation-states, responding to a populism that could not accommodate the Jewish people, and promising a new kind of social unity to a people weakened by the unintended consequences of powerful political and economic forces. Herzl was not alone in beckoning Jews to embrace their nationhood, nor was he the first to appropriate the right to speak for the people as a whole. But he dismissed the Zionist efforts thus far as a “tea-kettle phenomenon”23 because they did not embody a strategy for reaching the Jewish masses. Herzl assailed Zionist achievements of the past decade, most notably the agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, as permeated with the values of Jewish philanthropy, providing intermittent aid for the few while ignoring the ongoing plight of the many. Such Zionism failed to address the underlying causes of anti-Semitism, thereby obscuring the possibilities for ending it. Nor could such Zionism appreciate how Jew-hatred might very well be deployed as a weapon to safeguard Jewish interests and as a needed agent of change for the Jewish people. Underlying Herzl’s proposal for a Jewish state, then, was the conviction that it would eventuate in a massive Jewish immigration. A political charter granting Jews the right to establish a state would presumably shape economic destiny as well. International guarantees would offer Jews of all classes opportunities for productive employment and profitable investment. First, immigrants would lay down a modern infrastructure, and second, with foundations in place, entrepreneurs could proceed to develop an industrial base to bring wealth to the country as a whole. We must not imagine the departure of the Jews to be a sudden one. It will be gradual, continuous, and will cover many decades. The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconcerted plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own habitations; their labor will create trade, trade will create markets, and markets will attract new settlers, for every man will go voluntarily, at his own expense and his own risk. The labor expended on the land will enhance its value, and the Jews will soon perceive that a new and permanent sphere of operation is opening here for that spirit of enterprise, which has heretofore met only with hatred and obloquy.24
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
31
Without a political charter and international recognition of Jewish national rights, Zionism had no credible future, according to Herzl. The slow pace of achievements in Ottoman Palestine and the ever-intensified rate of Jewish suffering convinced Herzl that earlier generations of Zionists had their intentions compromised by a wrong-headed apolitical strategy. Land settlement and economic development in Palestine should follow, not precede, international guarantees. . . . the WZO’s Basel Program called for “the programmatic promotion of settlement of Jewish farmers, artisans, and tradesmen” in Palestine. Since it was written by a committee of both political and practical Zionists, it is obvious that this program could mean different things to different people. To the politicals, Herzl, among them, the program called for planned settlement after a charter had been attained from the Ottoman Empire, not for immediate activity.25
Although the differences between Herzl and his opponents were typically expressed in their attitudes toward the linkages between economic and political developments, they were also reflective of their diverse perceptions of the possibility or desirability of a mass immigration as the basis of a national home. For where Herzl asserted a nexus between the political and economic—the public and private—others harbored a strong suspicion of official authority and of the possibility of a massive Jewish immigration to Palestine. Many Zionists could only imagine a tiny fraction of the Jewish world ever making its way to the land of Israel. Herzl’s program reflected a faith in the future and in politics that many of his Zionist opponents simply could not muster. A convergence of events before the outbreak of war in 1914 brought enough bad times to dampen the ebullience of even the most ardent of political Zionists: Herzl’s untimely death came in 1904, and periodic Ottoman ordinances restricting immigration to Palestine made land purchases ever more difficult and expensive. Finally, and most important, with little Ottoman imperial control over credit and business, entrepreneurs had to act on their plans without the expectation of adequate financing or of generating the factors for sustained economic development. Failures multiplied faster than success stories in these years, and disappointed Zionists searched for relevance and perhaps solace in precisely the kinds of activities Herzl deemed inappropriate or premature. Shortly after Herzl’s death,
Exiled in the Homeland
32
the World Zionist Organization broadened its support for urban and agricultural settlements and for the educational projects that had always provoked far-reaching controversy with Zionism’s Orthodox members. These activities had a positive impact on the membership of the Zionist organization still recovering from the loss of their most effective leader and attempting to maintain a spirit of hope even without being able to list significant accomplishments. Ahad Ha ͗am Framed by European theories of social engineering, the sponsorship of colonies in Palestine was buoyed by beliefs that planning indeed meant progress.26 And Zionist cultural schemes generated new possibilities for creative work from journalism and literature to art and architecture. Culture itself became an important conduit of the Zionist message as the scale of Hebrew literary production enlarged.27 New books expanded the canon of Hebrew literature. Hebrew newspapers widened their circulation. Palestine’s Jewish schools employed teachers increasingly committed to using Hebrew in their classrooms for all subjects.28 To many Zionists, culture now seemed to be the principal instrument of nation-building,29 and no one could explain that development better than Ahad Ha ͗ am, who had pondered, for many decades, profoundly and systematically, the relationship between cultural and national activities. Ahad Ha ͗ am believed that only a minority of Jews would ever live in the land of Israel, but depending on their cultural productivity, their infl uence could radiate well beyond their numbers. Present at Zionism’s founding, Ahad Ha ͗ am was also its most consistent critic. Both the modest objectives of Hibbat Zion and the grandiose schemes of Herzl’s World Zionist Organization drew Ahad Ha ͗ am’s ire and some of his most critical assessments and vituperative comments. With its earlier stress on improving the material circumstances followed by the subsequent emphasis on achieving political rights, Zionism tried to minimize the physical suffering of the Jewish people while asserting a feeling of national belonging without properly attending, according to Ahad Ha ͗ am, to the forces necessary to produce it.30 Simply alleviating economic distress and political subordination would not resurrect and secure the identity of the nation. Zionism’s claim to represent the national interests of the Jewish people could be validated only if its activities maintained the community against
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
33
the economic, political, and cultural forces that had already begun to disperse them. Putting the problem in that way explains why Ahad Ha ͗ am unleashed criticism of the very first Zionist efforts at small-scale settlement. Modern forces had already weakened the infl uence of religion and of local associational life for Jews. Having lost their sense of a common purpose as defined by their religious tradition, Jews would not be directed to follow another arduous course simply as a matter of national obligation. Finding little merit or consolation in the idea of the traditions of their ancestors, Jews were now unlikely to find the idea of national duty compelling. Modern Jews were replacing the idea of communal obligation with the notion of personal ambition. Thus the full mobilization of Jewish sentiments for national tasks could no longer draw on the Jewish notion of communal obligation. An effective Zionism had to find a way to join individual interest to national service. “Thus has the core of the nation’s soul been turned upside down. Love of the nation is no longer pure; it is no longer given independently. The highest purpose pursued by our people is the private and they pursue the interests of all the people only when they intersect with their own.”31 Ahad Ha ͗ am noted that modernity had altered settled traditions and people in many different ways, but among the most important, it had opened up hitherto enclosed enclaves to the idea that they could move across countries and find homes without communities. Jews left small villages for large cities; they walked away from family and community and what they once considered life’s certainties—a shared religious faith and set of obligations. Their bewilderment about who they were as human beings and as a people could not be easily rectified, and certainly not with proclamations imposing on them a set of national obligations to replace the once tightly worn mantle of religious observance. When Zionists spoke about raising the standard of living or embracing freedom, they were encouraging Jews to live in the United States, mused Ahad Ha ͗ am. By contrast, when they focused on strengthening the elements of Jewish identity—or on the process of converting ancient religious texts into a modern literature—Zionists were addressing, with honesty, the real Jewish problem by admitting, in effect, that their nation was as yet not fully formed. To Eretz Israel or to America? . . . Those singing the praises of Eretz Israel admitted to their opponents that it could not, at present, absorb the mass of people moving from their countries of birth, especially merchants and
Exiled in the Homeland
34
craftsmen looking for an immediate source of sustenance who do not have the energy to prepare everything required for working the land and waiting for the fruit of their labor. . . . The economic side of the Jewish question needs to be answered in America.32
No longer tied tightly to religious values, subject to constant challenge from current intellectual fashions or bound to the traditional ordering mechanisms under assault from the rise of new political forces, Jews were confused about the nature of their identity and either deeply suspicious of the modern world or totally ignorant of their heritage. For Ahad Ha ͗ am, Zionism actually represented the culmination of a century-old process of destabilizing religious authority and devaluing traditional institutions. For years, educated Jewish writers had been equating rabbinical strictures with fanaticism and insensitivity to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community. New opportunities for education and work were already leading many Jews to question the values that made it difficult for them to gain access to the full benefits of the world unfolding before them. Although the new intellectual modes had shifted outlooks and principles, emerging political forces had weakened—or in some countries, even dismantled—local structures of authority. The nation-state, with its centralized bureaucracies, left little room for communal autonomy. Ceasing to see themselves as part of a world ruled by God through ordained law, Jews were in desperate need of new ways of understanding themselves. Zionism offered the nation as the solid reference point, but, as Ahad Ha ͗ am observed, without producing programs for transforming Jewish religious tradition into a modern culture and for molding a consciousness of community that embraced rather than retreated from modernity, it would not be effective or resonate with meaning for Jews.33 It was on these grounds that Ahad Ha ͗ am found much of conventional, mainstream Zionist practice through Herzl’s tenure both naïve and superficial. Ahad Ha ͗ am considered Zionism’s initial preoccupation with material conditions misplaced. As heady as their members were about their growth, the Jewish agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine hardly foreshadowed the social transformation many Zionists predicted. Religious Jews residing in the holy land, criticized by Zionists for their dependency, seemed ever more so in the new agricultural colonies. Ahad Ha ͗ am warned Zionists not to be beguiled by the prospect of either economic gains or political achievements.34 Despite the rhapsodic reports about conditions in Palestine, the country had an unpromising economic
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
35
future. Romantic descriptions of life in the new agricultural colonies may have promoted Jewish immigration, but contributed little to economic growth or to the development of an autonomous community. Farmers still operated with a crushing burden of debt; workers lived on the edge of poverty; roads did not go very far inland and were often impassable in the rainy season. And just as the economic balance of world Jewry would always tilt away from the small and poor communities in the land of Israel because the distribution of the world’s natural resources did not favor Palestine, so, too, would the demographic relationship never be significantly different. Jews in Europe had high fertility rates and would replenish their numbers as quickly as people left their homes. “Between 1881 and 1914 more than 2.5 million Jews migrated from Eastern Europe to the West, but their population in Eastern Europe increased too.”35 For that reason, a national home, comprising only a small percentage of the world’s Jews, could not end anti-Semitism. The act of cultivating ties to the land of Israel as an expression of national identity could not proceed either from naïve ideas about combating Jew-hatred or from false information about the society. To that end, “Truth from the Land of Israel,” one of Ahad Ha ͗ am’s most famous essays, concluded that a movement with political claims could not discount Palestine’s Arab population. From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake. . . . The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand, since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their future. . . . However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place.36
Ahad Ha ͗ am’s searing critique of Zionist movement activities recognized that the movement’s focus on securing international support and on building a material base could easily persuade Zionists that a state and a sound economy would be sufficient for Jewish renewal. To Ahad Ha ͗ am, Herzl’s stress on politics looked even more ominous than the rosy beliefs about the meaning and impact of the few agricultural colonies planted by Hibbat Zion. Despite Herzl’s impressive organizational achievements, all
Exiled in the Homeland
36
efforts to secure a political charter for Jewish settlement led only to rejection and disappointment. Simply transferring Jews to the land of Israel would do little to instill vibrancy into the community because it left intact behavioral patterns formed in the context of subordination and discrimination. Juxtaposing material and spiritual developments was not intended to suggest that attention be directed to one or the other exclusively but rather that even dramatic economic improvements could not bring about the cultural renaissance Jews so desperately needed. Embracing a cultural past without redefining and changing it would not resolve the heart of the Jewish question. On the subject of the moral character of the Jewish people, Ahad Ha ͗ am did not mince words: “Whoever has not seen how land is now bought and sold in Eretz Israel has never seen vile and vicious competition. All that goes on among the small shopkeepers and middlemen of the ‘Pale’ are justice and virtue compared to what goes on currently in Eretz Israel.”37 Given the obstacles to change, how could such a poor and weak Jewish people achieve the act of retrieval Zionists, such as Ahad Ha ͗ am, insisted was necessary? By establishing a spiritual center in the land of Israel, Jews could rely not on winning political rights or on attracting the Jewish masses to build a strong economy, but rather on the kind of cultural activities to which they were historically and perhaps instinctively drawn. Revitalizing a population that numbered in the millions, most of whom had little formal education and who varied enormously in language, was a project without any real precedent. Herzl had posited that a single political action would produce the decisive change. But Ahad Ha ͗ am saw this change as unfolding in a slow, laborious process involving education, religion, the arts, and daily life. And when we add to this the general obstacles, material and moral, that any mass immigration of people coming to settle in a new country encounter in their path—and even more when their intent is to change their entire way of life, to transform themselves from merchants into workers of the soil—then, if we truly and seriously seek to achieve our end in the land of our fathers, we will no longer be able to conceal from ourselves the fact that we are setting forth in a massive war and that such a war requires extensive preparations: it requires clear and detailed knowledge of the condition and features of battlefield, it requires overall planning to delineate in advance all future actions, and it requires good weapons—not sword and spear, but a mighty will and total unity—and
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
37
above all it requires skilled leaders, suitably trained, who will go before the populace, who will bring together and organize all the activities in accord with the requisites of the goal, and no one will defy them. Only under these conditions can we hope that, despite all the obstacles, the doable will be done and we will be well able to overcome, because nothing can stand against the will and unity of an entire people.38
Ahad Ha ͗ am’s Zionism aimed at nothing less than the renovation of Jewish popular culture both within a spiritual center in Palestine and across all the lands where Jews resided. Its success would be measured not simply by what was established in the land of Israel but also by what evolved in the Jewish Diaspora. Although Ahad Ha ͗ am wished to change the very character of the Jewish people by altering its customs, morals, and practices, he did not believe it possible or desirable to do this only within the limited territorial space of a spiritual center. Zionism ought to insure a harmony of interests and unity of purpose among all Jews. If Ahad Ha ͗ am’s spiritual center represented a radically transformed way of ordering the Jewish world, it nonetheless retained crucial similarities to the traditional religious structures it sought to displace. Like religious law, Hebrew was invested with sacredness and charged with the task of not only revitalizing a language but also building a nation. The perfect language, once thought the creation of God, would now be developed and spread by an educated, rather than by a religious, elite, and through the modern media, rather than by poring over classical texts. Ahad Ha ͗ am endorsed the idea of a small national center that, by dint of its creativity, would exercise significant spiritual infl uence on Jews dispersed across the globe. The national home would be a spiritual center for all Jews because of the cultural activities produced by an elite with literacy in classical texts and in the best of recent humanistic studies. Zionist culture would be disseminated in Hebrew and would enable Jews to withstand the onslaughts of modernity without losing their identity. The union of people, however small in numbers, and on their ancestral land, as the base for the revival of language was critical for Zionism and for Jewish survival. Indeed, Jewish identity would be reconstituted, but not by the common people, who lacked the skills and talent to find within the religious tradition the elements from which to build a modern Jewish culture. The language Ahad Ha ͗ am marshaled to describe his own stance revealed that his confrontation with the Zionist mainstream had as much
Exiled in the Homeland
38
to do with power as with principle. Although the creation of the Zionist movement was hardly the work of the Jewish people themselves, the debates among leaders introduced two languages of power—one dismissive of the criteria that had historically conferred rank and privilege in Jewish society, and the other reflective of traditional divisions. Herzl effectively implanted the first set of linguistic resources—the notion of common and equal political rights—into Zionist discourse by insisting that a Jewish state could serve as a national home for the Jewish masses. Zionism had always asserted a Jewish national identity, but since its activities encompassed only a small percentage of the population, the movement provided little opportunity for empowering a new kind of elite. In terms of social class or cosmopolitan sophistication, Herzl could hardly be considered typical of the Jewish masses, but in terms of Jewish education and religious knowledge, he did have more in common with the people than with the traditional elite that possessed fl uency in Hebrew and the expertise necessary to parse religious legal texts. Although Herzl’s social vocabulary acknowledged class differences—contrasting entrepreneurs and workers—his political terminology fostered a broad sense of the Jews as a people. The radical implications of Herzl’s political language were not lost on his Zionist colleagues. The call to reject Herzl’s populism came with particular force from Ahad Ha ͗ am, who argued that fl uency in the Hebrew language joined with a vision of cultural transformation could serve as a solution to the Jewish problem and ought to be a requirement of legitimate political authority in the reconstituted society. Even Ahad Ha ͗ am’s goal to standardize Hebrew and purge it of all grammatical irregularities and confusions owed its extraordinary vigor to a sense of mission that would animate its principal agents. Ahad Ha ͗ am’s language reform could only be developed in print and not in word because it was necessary for a new educated elite to define and control the rules, a linguistic approach with affinities to the traditional structure of Jewish power. Ahad Ha ͗ am did not find the use of Hebrew in print and Yiddish in speech at all troubling. Remarking that for him, Yiddish held “no terrors,”39 Ahad Ha ͗ am showed distinct contempt for the early Zionist efforts to revitalize Hebrew as a spoken language. In 1893, after a visit to Palestine, he wrote: He who hears how the teachers and the students stammer, for lack of words and expressions, will immediately realize that such “speech” cannot evoke in the speaker’s or the listener’s heart any respect or love for
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
39
the limited language, and the child’s young mind (who learns also French) feels even stronger the artificial chains imposed on him by the Hebrew speech.40
In effect, then, Ahad Ha ͗ am challenged Herzl in a language steeped in a vernacular of hierarchy and intellectual rank imported from an earlier era. To a people once bound together by the religious strictures interpreted by rabbis as authorized leaders, Ahad Ha ͗ am’s proposal to join Jewish religious texts to modern humanistic studies was revolutionary and unsettling. But the subversive nature of Ahad Ha ͗ am’s call for cultural change, which on some level threatened the social order, also preserved aspects of a traditional distribution of power with dominance reserved for an educated elite. The theoretical confl icts over Jewish priorities or over how to reconstruct a nation in despair were also a struggle over structures of power. Zionist discourse, then, contained not only different visions of political development but also quite diverse languages to advance these claims. Battles may have been pitched over priorities, but ultimately they were about the criteria for exercising legitimate power. Ahad Ha ͗ am’s idea of cultural transformation had an enormous impact on Zionist politics, but its roots in an old elitist model of power had a disquieting effect. Many who were enthusiastic about cultural change were ambivalent or even hostile to hierarchy and dominance as a template for political rule. Particularly for the young Labor Zionists coming to Palestine in the aftermath of the violence and turmoil resulting from the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, the decision to speak only Hebrew demonstrated that culture was as important as work to the structure of their lives, but even as it echoed Ahad Ha ͗ am’s spiritual Zionism, it also signaled a commitment to the concept of a common citizenship and shared power. In our day, when the book has become common property, no literature can exist for just a few. Nor does Hebrew literature have the features of aristocratic literature. It lives in everyone and hence wants to find a way to everyone. And it is also out of the question to agree that most of the nation will hear about the most precious and original intellectual activity of the nation either from its friends or from its enemies. And, although Hebrew is not yet everyone’s reading language, it is already the spoken language. . . . This is the war of survival of the Hebrew language. . . . The language created by Mendele and Bialik will save us from the dominion of foreign languages, and the New Hebrew Man will speak the language
Exiled in the Homeland
40
of Brener and Gnesin. Just as music requires a fitting resonance to be understood, so a great work of literature requires comprehending readers and many readers.41
Hebrew thus acquired ideological charges before Jews possessed a framework for a national home. Hebrew gave Zionists a way to connect to their past not so much through tales of ancient glory as through knowledge of their land. “The infl uence of the Bible on the Second Aliya,” observed Labor Zionist activist Yitzhak Tabenkin, “served as a tangible link to the whole country, reviving the threads that connect the immigrant to every spot in the land, through associations evoked from childhood ( Jerusalem, Judea, Shomron, the Galilee, the Jordan, mountains and valleys). The Bible served as a kind of birth certificate, helped to break the barrier between man and the land, and nourished a sense of homeland.”42 The dedication to the Hebrew language formed part of the process of shaping the Yishuv’s public realm, a process that encompassed Jews who resided in Palestine’s towns as well as in its agricultural settlements. The 1918 Zionist census stated that 40 percent of Palestine’s Jewish community claimed Hebrew as their native language, and more significantly, the percentage grew among the younger residents, reaching a peak of 75 percent of the population in Tel Aviv, Palestine’s newly founded Jewish town.43 On this view, the decision by teachers, parents, and students to mount sustained protests in 1913 against the use of German as the language of instruction in a new technical school to be opened in Haifa was not altogether unexpected. Nor was the commitment of Tel Aviv’s founders to record its public documents in Hebrew. Reviving Hebrew as a spoken language commemorated a past and a course of action for the future. It marked the dawning of a new age even if economic and political goals seemed totally beyond reach. Hebrew belonged as much to a glorious ancient political history traced in classical scriptures as it did to a male religious elite. But the language was open to appropriation to divergent uses and to a multitude of users. In claiming the language, young secular Zionists could profess their Jewish identity, their nationalist political ambitions, and even radical social objectives while implicitly recalling a distinctly deferential traditional culture. Hebrew showed how Zionism could work in different directions both for preservation and for radical change. Hebrew embodied and emboldened an ideology that appeared to make consensus the basis of Zionism.
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
41
Indeed, fostering the revival of Hebrew as the only authentic language in which to express Jewish nationalist feelings submerged confl ict over other divisive political and economic issues. At the same time, for the groups embracing Hebrew, it became a strategy for relocating Zionist leadership to Palestine from Europe,44 to the new generation of immigrants, and to workers rather than to the social engineers. T h e D i s c o u r s e o n I m m i g r at i o n i n t h e C o n t e x t o f B u i l d i n g t h e J e w i s h N at i o na l H o m e : h a i m A r lo s o r o f f a n d M o s h e S m i l a n s k y Ironically, among Zionists, the establishment of the Jewish national home in 1918 provoked as much controversy as hope. Securing international recognition seemed proof of Herzl’s political approach, although it was also taken as evidence that the incremental method of the practical Zionists seemed to work. In one sense, these disagreements carried over from earlier years, but in another, they foreshadowed future debates over economic and political policies and over relations with Great Britain as mandatory power. But in responding to the challenge of turning discourse into practice, Zionists found themselves confronting the issues of immigration either as focus or subtext of policy stances. Insightful commentaries on immigration are sprinkled through the journals, published articles, and letters of many Zionist leaders, but I wish to direct my attention to the work of two significant figures in Palestine’s Jewish community—Haim Arlosoroff and Moshe Smilansky—both of whom participated in the public realm during the period of British rule and wrote essays pondering the issue of immigration and its role in Jewish national development. Both also understood that world and regional politics brought the question of Jewish immigration to a new contested pitch, making it impossible for Zionist leaders simply to repeat the ritualistic pieties of the past. Four interrelated areas reveal the extent and limits of Zionist efforts to restructure their public realm: territorial boundaries, land ownership, agricultural settlement, and culture. Great Britain’s sponsorship of a Jewish national home in Palestine changed the configuration of power and forced Zionists to devise new strategies of action to advance their interests. How Zionist groups came to embrace these new strategic calculations was no simple story and was mediated not only by events but also by ideologies and acts of interpretation. Because Zionists inherited a set of concepts
Exiled in the Homeland
42
that were the outgrowth of earlier controversies, they had to rework them in light of the pressures of simultaneously promoting immigration and economic and political development. And as they forged their views on immigration, Zionists sometimes unwittingly gave new and contradictory meanings to such core concepts as work, freedom, and national identity. Second, Great Britain defined internationally recognized boundaries that acted as a stimulus to economic development. The mandatory power also established a security infrastructure, adding government muscle to the Jewish drive for land and linking what were once far-fl ung agricultural outposts into large settlement communities. Finally, recognition of Hebrew as one of Palestine’s official languages significantly expanded the ambit of cultural goals and activities. Both Arlosoroff and Smilansky put the equation of demography and economic development at the heart of the process by which a Jewish national home could be secured, but they drew strikingly different conclusions from the linkage. Arlosoroff stressed the need for selective immigration and controlled development. For him, the demographic issue was not a simple matter of counting the numbers of Jews and Arabs in Palestine but rather of calculating their respective productive forces. Shifting attention away from the communal, Smilansky underscored the nexus between personal initiative and expansion, implying that the national home’s success would be measured by Jewish demographic growth. But although demographic questions in earlier Zionist debates always revolved around the numbers living in the land of Israel as a percentage of the masses of needy and impoverished Jews worldwide, those same questions, for Smilansky, were directed to the population balance between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab residents. Arlosoroff ’s theoretical essays partly reflected his adherence to a nonMarxist version of Labor Zionism, but they also extended that ideology. Not the lofty, profitable achievements of private capitalists but the humble efforts of manual laborers and farmers could be expected to produce sustainable economic development and a genuine community. “A person who is not productive is not part of the community,” wrote Arlosoroff in his attempts to tease out the components of community from physical labor. “Only those who sow the earth with their own hands, plant themselves, body and soul, in the land.”45 Compelling as the success stories of entrepreneurs were, they did not necessarily increase the wealth of Palestine’s Jewish community, according to Arlosoroff, or add to its social enrichment. Particularly if entrepreneurs
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
43
operated on a capitalist model, ever hard-pressed to extract a higher return on their investments, they were necessarily disposed to lowering labor costs as much as possible and to hiring Arab rather than Jewish workers. The Arab economy was thereby strengthened by the capital investments of Jewish entrepreneurs, and so the imperatives of capitalist enterprise inhibited rather than promoted Jewish immigration and population growth. The vision of the land of Israel as holding a special destiny for the Jewish people could be fulfilled only if national institutions exercised control over land purchases and agricultural settlement. Like many of his colleagues, Arlosoroff incorporated the idea of labor into a new discourse on moral improvement, on national duty, and on recovering the true and authentic meaning of life. When Haim Arlosoroff proclaimed, “Neither by claims of historical rights, nor by diplomatic efforts, certainly not by military might or even by numerical superiority, can the Jewish people succeed in its national war of liberation in Palestine,”46 he was not simply extending the classical Zionist debate about how to create a Jewish national home or even about how to establish a socialist Jewish society, he was also infusing it with new meaning. What he had in mind was a national home “achieved only through the hard and constant energy of settlement and economic reconstruction which will strike roots for all eternity in the soil of our land for the community of Jewish workers and settlers.”47 Because such core Marxist categories as class, capital, and proletariat did not structure the Jewish experience, they could not, according to Arlosoroff, serve as principles shaping the new society. Capitalism could not be the model for developing a viable economic base for a national home precisely because its operations would not attract the kind of reliable Jewish immigration that would stick to its commitments in good times and in bad. Inspired by the idea of creating a society sustained by values of justice and fairness, Arlosoroff was also convinced that the pattern of development he endorsed made good economic sense. First, Arlosoroff noted that Palestine offered few opportunities for profitable investment. Second, he questioned whether capitalist assumptions would encourage Palestine’s few entrepreneurs to embrace inventive development strategies and novel modes of organizing work that would widen opportunities for employment and put labor’s interests on an equal footing with those of business. Third, truly private property, which could be bought and sold at will, would complicate the Zionist need to purchase and hold land not only for its stored value but, more important, for its power to strengthen Jewish
Exiled in the Homeland
44
national rights and claims. In an economic system that allowed all people to buy and sell property at will, Jews might acquire land, if they could afford the price, during periods of economic expansion, but in downturns, they would be easily tempted to sell. Varying cycles of well-being and distress would not create the conditions for sustaining a large population of immigrants whose material needs and expectations were fairly high. Such an uneven course would not even support the spiritual center envisioned by Ahad Ha ͗ am. Even a cultural center, Arlosoroff insisted, “could not be established without a relatively large and stable community. Culture cannot be created in a laboratory; it emerges as a result of organic growth only from the midst of the natural and creative actions of the people.”48 The costs of such investments in land and agricultural settlement were so high that Arlosoroff imagined raising these sums only by soliciting financial contributions from Jews all across the globe. Such massive financial aid would provide sufficient capital to build the economic foundations of a genuine national home, one that could transform Jewish artisans and peddlers into farmers and laborers and thus ensure victory for the Zionist cause. The national home could not simply be a refuge for the uprooted. Without economic and social transformation, a Jewish national home had little value. “Does this not mean that we are renewing the economic structures known to us from the countries of the Jewish Galuth—that inverted social pyramid, perched on its narrow tip and in danger of being upset by every wind and by anyone’s ten fingers? How could there emerge, as such a basis, a self-sustaining national home, a Jewish commonwealth?”49 Within Arlosoroff ’s Labor Zionist ideology, political power was primarily an agency for shaping economic and social relations. Here in this passage he explicitly rejects the idea of an ordinary polity as a legitimate Zionist goal. The essence of our endeavour does not extend to organizing a state apparatus or to inaugurating a machinery of government; luckily, we do not have to equip an army or paint fortifications in blue-and-white. We bear, however, the much more difficult task of creating an integrated society on our land, of bringing about the emergence of a settled, active population in a country with productive conditions of life, or laying the foundations of our national economy as well as of our national culture.50
Arlosoroff ’s language of politics was rooted not in nouns like sovereignty or government but rather in verbs and adjectives of action—work, toil,
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
45
productive. Labor Zionists should acquire power in Palestine’s Jewish community in order to map a social and moral order entirely different from that of the Jewish Diaspora. Arlosoroff believed that the vertical rankings and dominance based on wealth and status, so typical of Diaspora communities, should be erased and replaced with a society that enlarged opportunities for those who added to the nation’s productive base. Not aiming to produce a coherent body of democratic thought, but rather to describe a mode of behavior intended to generate solidarity and a unity of interests, Arlosoroff believed that responsibility for defining Jewish character had passed down the social ladder from rabbis and the wealthy to Zionist institutions. Where the traditional rabbinic elite wished to establish Jewish identity upon the basis of religious law, the Labor Zionist elite sought affirmation of its purpose in celebrating the workers’ contributions to Palestine’s productive forces. To Arlosoroff, the Yishuv’s departure from Diaspora Jewish norms had enormous appeal and would be secured when independence and labor resonated widely in the country and when workers generated their own cultural artifacts. “Allow workers to develop their own culture and they will not want to study in universities,” observed Arlosoroff.51 The building of the Jewish national home required not intellectuals but rather workers possessed of a consciousness that they were making the land their home. From laborers and their struggles would come the perspective and elements of a new national Jewish culture—expressed in the new-old language of the Jewish people, Hebrew, and without the limitations of vision ingrained in earlier texts and cultural artifacts. Arlosoroff required that Zionists abandon their fixed ideas of settled identity authorized by religious tradition. Become different, he said, and the fate of the Jewish people, living everywhere in fear or in discomfort, will be different. Not everyone favored Arlosoroff ’s approach. Revisionists, for one, found the impetus for their critique of Labor Zionism supplied by Great Britain’s mandatory authority, which they claimed amounted to a promise to grant Jews sovereignty. As a corollary of future statehood, Revisionists demanded unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine.52 But Revisionist efforts on behalf of such grandiose political claims did not infl uence mandatory policy-making predisposing the members of this movement to confronting rather than accommodating mandatory powers. Perhaps because their world seemed so hostile, Revisionists promoted attitudes that failed to explain how ordinary daily activities could be transformed into the extraordinary accomplishments of nation-building.
Exiled in the Homeland
46
Challenges to Labor Zionism thus came from many different directions, but few were mounted simply on grounds of economic logic. It was in the essays of Moshe Smilansky that the capitalist contribution to Jewish economic development in Palestine received rich, complex, and sympathetic treatment despite the fact that his theories, too, stand as artifacts of a political culture dominated by Labor Zionist rhetoric. Smilansky heaped praise on the agricultural collectives and cooperatives, but not as models of economic development. An economy, subject to demographic and political pressures that inevitably pitted one ethnic group against another, might reasonably contain private and publicly owned enterprises. By taking note of the presence of both capitalism and socialism in Palestine’s Jewish economy, Smilansky validated both as crucial factors of production. “National capital was necessary for investment in projects that will not guarantee large profits and to lay the groundwork for subsequent private investments that ultimately insures prudently expended funds.”53 Despite its economically primitive status, Palestine did offer incentives for private investment, according to Smilansky. Access to relatively cheap land and to a reasonably large European market for crops enabled Jewish farmers to build a profitable agricultural economy that offered employment to significant numbers of immigrants. Although Labor Zionism ruled public discourse, social behavior seemed shaped by a culture of capitalism that invested in housing and in raising the standard of living rather than in productive enterprises. Contradicting both Arlosoroff ’s analysis and the dominant currents of thought which left capitalists bereft of a role in the national narrative, Smilansky’s essays constituted a powerful account of the culture of capitalism as embodying enterprise, service, and progress. Unwilling to cede the language of production and national commitment to laborers, Smilansky contended that capitalists as well as workers helped productivize society and create jobs, or, in his words, “Petah Tikvah generates capital; Degania consumes it.”54 Reporting on a meeting of the World Zionist Organization, Smilansky described the characteristics of Hebrew immigration to Palestine as “a matter of right and not of pity that can be limited only by the country’s economic absorptive capacity— which is not close to being reached.” He went on to explain how “immigration, itself, expands that capacity. In the world there are two kinds of immigrants: the ones who go to America happy to close the door behind them since it widens their opportunities. But our immigrant has only one objective: not only to support himself but also to create opportunities for others who will then be able to immigrate and find work.”55
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
47
Palestine’s Jewish capitalists were also Zionist pioneers. No matter how extensive, national capital alone, Smilansky insisted, could not bring development to Palestine. For a vibrant economy, private investment was indispensable, and the decisions of private capitalists in Palestine, Smilansky hastened to point out, generally accorded not with some abstract mode of operation but rather with Zionism’s national goals. Capitalists, as well as workers, came to Palestine stimulated by a vision, not simply by the possibility of making money. In the devastating depression of the mid-1920s, Labor Zionist institutions displayed more volatility than those in the private sector. Although this economic downturn hurt private entrepreneurs, it was an unmitigated disaster for Labor Zionism’s central organizations. The depression drove Solel Boneh, a pillar of the labor movement, into bankruptcy, and it damaged the fiscal structure of the worker’s umbrella structure, the Histadrut. Unemployment spread in major urban centers, and many workers found themselves engulfed by poverty and facing starvation. In the midst of this crisis, Smilansky noted, the Yishuv’s private farmers increased their productivity and offered jobs to the unemployed. Consider the following statement, which quite explicitly makes the connection between private enterprise and the capacity to absorb masses of immigrants: “Security will come to the land of Israel only through the purchase of millions of dunams of land and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.”56 By the 1930s, for a variety of reasons, Zionism’s public institutions were able to increase the scope of their investments in land and in agricultural settlement and partly reconfigure the economic order. Although far from the collective economy envisioned by Labor Zionist policy-makers, Palestine’s Yishuv experienced several years of growth resting on an increasingly well-funded institutional base. But many public organizations found economic salvation primarily through philanthropic largesse as migration from a Europe threatened by Nazism increased both the flow of immigrants to Palestine and the flow of charitable funds to Zionist institutions. Smilansky welcomed these developments not as signs of a debilitating capitalism but rather as consequences of an increasingly diversified economy that could accommodate different interests. But to Smilansky, this economic trend had its dark side because growth was achieved through charitable contributions and the economy was in danger of being dominated by outside organizations. The term philanthropic carried negative connotations and was steeped in the Diaspora culture of subordination. “Each time aid was extended to private farmers without strings that
Exiled in the Homeland
48
allowed them to make their own decisions, the Yishuv grew and flourished. Each time a bureaucracy was created to control the actions of the recipients of aid, a philanthropic atmosphere was created which erected obstacles to growth and only led to losses.”57 If radicals on the right and left found it impossible to agree on a program for economic development, Smilansky never tired of reminding his readers that many capitalists and socialists actually worked together in harmony. Although strikes and even violence erupted in a few communities over the issue of employing Arab agricultural laborers, the vast majority of private farms, as Moshe Smilansky observed, provided the majority of Jewish immigrants with their first jobs in Palestine. By contrast, “some of the workers’ agricultural communities were so tightly knit that they did not extend employment to any salaried workers, including immigrants.”58 Smilansky emphasized that Jewish agricultural productivity sustained the Yishuv’s economy primarily through exports and by creating a secure land base. Moreover, private entrepreneurship attracted a mature immigration and nurtured autonomy and independence of spirit, two important Zionist cultural imperatives. By contrast, unprofitable ventures funded through Zionist national institutions often placed workers in new forms of dependency. I d e o lo g y v e r s u s R e a l i t y Zionists had more of an ambivalent attitude toward immigration to Palestine than they were willing to acknowledge. They eulogized Jewish immigration, elevating it to a religious act by linguistic fiat and by treating the right of every Jew to live in the land of Israel as self-evident and natural. But throughout Zionist history, the process of immigration was complicated by contradictory policies, confl icting priorities, and ambiguous expectations regarding the people who would participate: would they add value to or subtract value from the economy? The success of Zionism’s ambitious project depended on its capacity to create the conditions in Palestine for the establishment of a Jewish state. But identity for most Jews—even those coming to live in the land of Israel—was still powerfully shaped by their religious heritage. Given their long historical experience of living in many lands, most Jews found it difficult to see themselves as part of a distinct nation-state in a single territory. Thus, Zionists had to convert Jews to nationalist norms before they could convince them to participate in their state-building efforts in Palestine.
Dispossession, Displacement, and Dreams
49
Complicating Zionist aims was the tidal wave of Jews already on the move, crossing borders that had once held them tightly in check and in place.59 Jews in Eastern Europe overwhelmingly preferred what was often a laborious journey toward the West rather than the seemingly less promising trip to Palestine, particularly since so many of the people who found their way to the holy land seemed motivated by a religious fervor Jews may have admired but increasingly thought alien. Beckoned by opportunities in the West or even on their home fronts, significant numbers of Jews managed to leave the small towns and villages of their birth for universities and for jobs opening up in the cities, where they acquired positions in centers of finance and commerce. The challenge for Zionists, then, was not only to exercise control over the vast numbers of Jews leaving their homes, but also to ensure that the people it brought to Palestine’s shores would serve as agents of national renewal and not as tools for replanting the structure and values of the Diaspora. Once the need to gather more people was conceded, the question of what kind of people they should be took priority. Zionist debates over immigration reflected political divisions within the movement, but they also revealed to Jews a great deal about the kind of community Zionists wished to create. More important, perhaps, defining the community of the present and the future prompted serious discussions about how Jewish identity might be refashioned. Some Zionists, like Smilansky, became convinced that immigrants would assimilate to the identity they found in Palestine, including some of its Arab elements, and would change that identity, paradoxically, only by assimilating.60 Worried about the flexibility of such a process, others, like Arlosoroff, insisted that although the new identity would be presented as having been recovered or regenerated, it would also be designed and entrenched through education, work, and political action. Although there was widespread and general agreement among Zionists on the centrality of immigration for developing the Jewish national home in Palestine, there were important disagreements on the kind of population growth necessary for the achievement of Zionism’s statemaking and nation-building goals. Two opposing tendencies were operating, both characteristic of unstable times. One was inclined to draw from the capitalist economic and social trends already under way; the other was disposed to experimentation and to tailoring policies to fit national visions. Important as was the clash between them, there were assumptions buried beneath these contrasting views that were equally formidable.
Exiled in the Homeland
50
Herzl and Smilansky shaped their reasoning on the subject of immigration around concern for the impoverished Jewish masses and with the demographic prerequisites of statehood in mind. Both seemed to believe that modern education, modern science, and technology would spark the entrepreneurial spirit and capacity necessary to move Jews in Palestine away from their traditions and toward freedom and prosperity. For Ahad Ha’am and Arlosoroff, by contrast, the very idea of a homeland had to resonate with a radically new conception of the nation in order to be meaningful. They were not content to let ordinary Jews forge the nation on their own, leaving the outcome undefined and unclear. But pairing Ahad Ha’am and Arlosoroff does seem problematic. The former disparaged the Zionist focus on economic statistics rather than on Jewish cultural creativity, whereas the latter’s constant references to bread-and-butter factors made his appeal sound as if it were grounded in reality. Both men, however, felt comfortable with developing an elite to serve as guardians of Jewish national development. Both imagined or recommended crafting an immigration system, not so much to maximize the numbers brought to Palestine but rather to select Jews based on their demonstrated adherence to Zionism’s program for radical national transformation. Both came to see Zionism not as a natural development but rather as a cultural and historical construct, and one that, like all such constructs, embodied principles of an ideological kind about the nature of history and, perhaps most important, about language and its role in shaping the very assumptions often taken for fact. Thus the conventional wisdom—that in Palestine’s Jewish community consensus reigned on matters pertaining to immigration, and that controversies had a negligible effect in politics—misses the point. Precisely because the nation was imagined in categories open to a variety of meanings, debates resounded with similar talk but with no real resolution of differences. If they were not so deeply submerged, opposing approaches to political and economic development might have created the impression that Zionism lacked common ground. For although Zionist thinking recognized the need to connect immigration to national development and debated long and hard about the possible ways to do so, ironically, it could produce no creedal orthodoxy on the subject of immigration.
TWO
Great Britain’< Colonial Venture t h e s ta r t i n g p o i n t
Great Britain declared its support for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home certain that such a policy would justify its incorporation of the Eastern Mediterranean coastline into its empire, but uncertain about every other implication of Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour’s 1917 Declaration. What was a Jewish national home? What obligations did Great Britain assume in backing the Zionist project? How did this proclamation comport with Great Britain’s strategic objectives in the region? How would a Jewish national home in Palestine affect the area’s Arab population and the possibilities for organizing a system of rule supportive of British interests? Examined from the point of view of the World War I battlefield, Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild seemed less a guarantee of British military victory than an echo of prewar European rivalries. British politicians wanted to end the war without having to engage in serious competition over Middle Eastern terrain while simultaneously cutting its wartime ally, France, down to size. British politicians seemed more concerned with the potential for French colonial expansion after hostilities ceased than with the consequences of deploying Zionism as an instrument to fortify the empire. But without totally denying “their manifest destiny,” John Darwin wrote, the British “dared not accept more than a limited liability.”1 In 1918, Great Britain’s military victory was both extensive and costly. “A sharply reduced version of what it had been promised in 1916”2 in the former Ottoman domain was eventually handed to France partly as fulfillment of earlier diplomatic agreements and partly as divestiture of what had unexpectedly become some rather complex imperial predicaments. For despite Great Britain’s initial belief that military successes could deter-
Exiled in the Homeland
52
mine subsequent political developments, they actually brought to the surface across the Ottoman lands resistance to the imposition of a new geography and to its attendant system of client states. Notwithstanding the decisive defeat of Ottoman forces, new turmoil seemed to foreshadow a protracted military engagement to ensure regional stability. The potential political and financial costs of turning its military power against the many people on the rampage in the Middle East forced Great Britain to scale back its imperial dreams and to look for drastic economies where they appeared feasible. Because Great Britain paid a high price for its military victory in 1918, its citizens fully expected to be able to put the sacrifices of war behind them and find peace and prosperity at home. Successive British governments needed imperial domination on the cheap, precisely because they could not afford it any other way. David Stevenson noted that the country’s “debt service accounted for 30 per cent of spending in the first post-war . . . budget,” indicating the scope of Great Britain’s financial difficulties.3 Nevertheless, the road to empire ran unbroken from the war. “The First World War provided a vast bargain basement for empire builders,”4 but the costs were not easily calculable simply by reckoning the price of the initial conquest. Preoccupied with heavy burdens of debt and political and economic instability, postwar governments insisted that empire be a source of and not a drain on public funds. High levels of unemployment at home, beginning with the demobilization of soldiers, kept British politicians focused on what they considered “sound finance and responsible government,”5 a slogan predicated upon the assumption that public expenditures considered necessary during war could be slashed and the ambit of government action circumscribed. But the war could not avoid generating a renewed imperial dynamic, partly because such a large number of the soldiers serving in the army came from Great Britain’s possessions. By the end of the war there were more than a quarter of a million Indian native troops in what became known as the Mesopotamian Command covering Mesopotamia itself, Persia and the detachments in the Caucasus and TransCaspian regions of South Russia. . . . Nearly one million white troops from the dominions had rallied to the flag during the war along with 1,400,000 Indian recruits.6
Empire also presumably rescued the country’s economy during war by securing its trade within the imperial ambit. “As the costs of the con-
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
53
fl ict drained Britain of its investments and dried up its markets, it became increasingly reliant on the empire to supply the agricultural and mineral resources it consumed and to purchase the manufactured goods it produced.”7 World War I also significantly altered the structure and scope of Great Britain’s government. Internationally, Great Britain faced new tests of its capacity to wage war across several continents while meeting domestic needs made more pressing by the duration of the confl ict. The war brought . . . profound changes to the internal workings of the British state. A political system that had appeared on the brink of disintegration in August 1914 proved—perhaps not surprisingly—unequal to the demands of total war. As problems mounted in the production of munitions, the provision of raw materials, the distribution of essential commodities and, above all, the supply of manpower, politicians began to grope for new ways to meet the unparalleled challenges they faced. Their efforts led to the dramatic growth in the size of the bureaucracy and the duties it performed.8
The pressing need for mobilizing masses of workingmen into the army made massive social spending drawn from public funds both conceivable and necessary. But scaling back the substantial benefits introduced under the pressure of a prolonged war, however, would not be so easy, precisely because they had reached what Susan Pedersen called such “an unprecedented scale.”9 Converting the economy to peacetime production and reducing state benefits sparked massive labor unrest, conjuring up a vision of “Moscow on the Thames” in the minds of political leaders, who quickly sought to finesse the militancy by pacifying the demonstrators. Unemployment benefits were extended, and the government continued to manage industrial relations. After extinguishing the threats to public order, budgetary discipline became the core principle for all interwar leaders, whatever their political party affiliation. “Both parties agreed that financial policy should be ‘knave proof,’ that is subject to the impartial discipline of . . . balanced budgets” and “responsible government.”10 Phasing out government subsidies was, however, easier to proclaim as principle than to implement as policy. Years marked by either recession or economic slump provided the urgency for empire as a source of economic recovery and a reason not to pursue a course of action that threatened the supremacy of party over
Exiled in the Homeland
54
“interests.” Because a sort of mutual agreement on empire could be brokered among dominant groups, the appearance of harmony on matters abroad coexisted with fragmentation and alienation on the political turf at home. The stark contrast between this concord in foreign affairs and discord over domestic issues compelled British politicians to try to prevent problems in the empire from spilling over and sparking local controversy. Imperial policies were so tightly structured around an imagined consensus that granting some of the newly emerging nationalist demands was preferable to allowing these issues to be conveyed into the home front political arena. A complex network of interrelated strategic calculations led British political leaders to believe that Palestine could carry the burden of pivotal imperial functions. Support for a Jewish national home in Palestine was expected to guarantee the region’s stability and the peaceful transit of ships traversing Britain’s imperial domains. In a combustible empire inflamed by Irish, Indian, and Egyptian nationalisms and “an alarmingly high level of domestic unrest . . . in the northwest frontier in India,”11 Palestine, even with its periodic riots, was easily governed and quickly restored to order. A distended military budget appeared to aggravate, not alleviate, high rates of unemployment and business failures. A country wishing to return to normalcy and prosperity after enduring years of wartime hardships had to confront another decade of economic dislocation as a series of nationalist uprisings raised the costs of holding an empire that no longer produced tangible benefits. In ordinary circumstances policing abroad did not confer obvious safety at home. Because sustaining imperial order could not be easily sold to a skeptical public fearing a loss of jobs and income, political leaders pursued stability—sometimes by deferring to nationalist demands, at other times by training local police forces to replace military garrisons, and above all, by trying to keep imperial politics from shaping partisan confrontations. Although the “post-war imperial ambitions of Britain collided with the political aspirations of the peoples it sought to control,”12 these clashes did not set in motion a retreat from empire. Imperial aims may have been scaled back but they were not surrendered, and strategies of control were revised, not relinquished. Essential to understanding the formation of mandatory policy-making in Palestine, then, is to recognize it as first and foremost a process responding to a number of different strategic objectives, diplomatic constraints, and domestic imperatives. Backing the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was intended to achieve several interrelated and mutu-
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
55
ally reinforcing goals. Strategically, a British position on the Mediterranean’s eastern coastline protected navigation through the Suez Canal as well as British forces in Egypt. Palestine reinforced an imperial linkage between Great Britain’s two most important possessions—Egypt and India. The search for local and trusted allies led the British to the Zionists, who expected Palestine’s Jews to build their national home in accordance with imperial rules, interests, and principles. Historians have provided many detailed and highly useful studies of policy statements, particularly when violence triggered reassessments of Great Britain’s role in sponsoring a Jewish national home.13 They have also produced analyses of the broad range of mandatory efforts to establish structures of authority that would bridge the gaps between Zionist and Arab demands. Most studies focus their analyses on Great Britain’s strategic objectives. In some sense, this chapter covers well-trodden historical ground, but it does so from a new perspective. My aim is to bring together two often separate spheres of policy-making—domestic and foreign— because Great Britain’s consideration of its position in Palestine always unfolded within the context of the country’s domestic problems and the incompatibilities present across different sectors of society that set the terms for the struggles for electoral power. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the logic by which Great Britain continued its policy of support for the development of a national home for Jews in Palestine despite fierce and unrelenting opposition from the overwhelming majority of the country’s Arab inhabitants. Many scholars have explained the reasons for issuing the Balfour Declaration, but not many have offered accounts of why Great Britain sustained this policy until 1939. And whether or not fully implanted in the consciousness of the time, establishing a national home in Palestine put immigration, including its scale and makeup, at the center of mandatory policy-making and of its constant problems. Staking so much on the Jewish homeland and on its economic development meant, however, that Great Britain’s Palestine policy was not easily amenable to rapid and radical change. Several principles guided British imperial policy considerations. First, there was a commitment to the empire as an element of sustaining the country’s prosperity. One diplomatic historian argues that politicians turned to empire to deflect attention away from the country’s serious economic difficulties and as a vision of hope rather than as a strategy of effective action. “To restore balance by domestic measures alone would mean savage retrenchment or tax increases at a time of acute social confl ict.
Exiled in the Homeland
56
Given that these internal budget deficits were accompanied by equally alarming external balance-of-payments ones it was natural for the European Allies to seek redress abroad.”14 But the notion that empire provided substantial financial benefits was considered an axiom of British economic reasoning. If the economic bond between Great Britain and its dominions had come to the country’s rescue during war, it could surely deliver salvation during the perilous moments to come during peace. “[T]hese far-fl ung imperial possessions came to be seen by Britain’s leaders as more valuable than ever as the world slipped into economic autarky and political anarchy, which accounts for their unprecedented efforts to persuade the public of its varied benefits.”15 Second, because of the enormous expectations vested in the empire as a means of national regeneration after the devastations of war, there was the equally strong disposition to prevent imperial policy from becoming a topic of political contention, particularly in the context of postwar power struggles and internal party fragmentation.16 While designing a postwar international order conducive to British economic and strategic interests dominated diplomatic activity during World War I, recovering prosperity and sustaining unity at home preoccupied all policy-making, foreign and domestic, once hostilities ended. All too often, scholars writing about Palestine between the wars have effectively set policy-making for that mandatory regime apart not only from the larger imperial framework of rule but also from the general arena and array of problems confronting every government. I intend to shift this perspective. Rather than looking at Great Britain’s Palestine policies as a reflection of a unique set of imperial circumstances, I emphasize its affinities to practices in other parts of the British domain and show how these measures were forged in the matrix of domestic political struggles. That domestic politics became the common point of departure for foreign policy-making informed two guidelines for government officials: first that the empire should produce and not consume revenue, and second that imperial governance should reinforce moral unity at home and produce stability abroad. Notwithstanding their widely different worldviews or ideologies when out of power, officials in power tended to adopt similar policy stances. Differences brewed in the crucible of party politics often dissolved once leaders were elected to government offices. Ideologies were never literally translated into policies, and when they surfaced as factors forging new policy directions, they did not remain infl uential for long. Although radical disagreements over economic policies fragmented
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
57
political parties from within and often led to inconsistent and ineffective measures for economic recovery, a strong consensus shaped the strategies governing empire. The structure of colonial administration also infl uenced the organizing principles guiding Great Britain’s Palestine policies. Both the Colonial and Foreign Offices had roles in securing effective governance for Great Britain’s overseas colonies. Policy continuity was sometimes a by-product of a governmental structure dividing responsibilities for policy and generating disagreements on how to devise a plan or chart a new direction, particularly if imperial interests and electoral power hung in the balance. Structural fragmentation reinforced the notion of Palestine as exceptional and not to be treated as an ordinary part of the Middle East. Policies for Palestine were also forged in isolation from the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe.17 Only as diplomatic tensions in Europe mounted in the mid1930s and as Italy’s Abyssinian conquest struck up against Great Britain’s sphere of influence in the Middle East did a new strategic logic begin to take hold. A belief in the certainty of renewed warfare triggered among British officials an intense search for powerful allies in the Middle East, rendering the country’s alliance with Zionism increasingly problematic.18 Significant infl uence over policies came as well from the high commissioners. Some of Great Britain’s earliest and most infl uential policy statements reflect Herbert Samuel’s views of how to structure opportunities for the development of Palestine’s Jewish national home, how to define its limits, and how to build bridges of agreement between the country’s Arab and Jewish inhabitants. According to Evyatar Friesel, Samuel’s contribution to all the important policies in the Mandate’s first years was unparalleled. Well before his appointment as High Commissioner, Samuel had a hand in the formulation of the draft of the British mandate for Palestine. Paradoxically, shortly afterwards he was the main author of the document aimed to “explain” (in fact, to limit) the Zionist clauses of the mandate draft, namely, the Churchill Memorandum of June 1922. Later he tried to bring about the creation of a Legislative Council in Palestine (February 1923) and of an Arab Agency (October 1923), but both initiatives failed.19
Although subsequent high commissioners left less clear imprints on specific policies, they were the first people consulted about conditions and the first to put forward the policy options.
Exiled in the Homeland
58
The fundamentals of Great Britain’s strategic doctrine were laid out in the decade after World War I. There was a common conviction that the path to good relations lay in avoiding the extremes: rejecting highly exploitative measures on the one hand, and radical programs that might uproot the social order on the other. Officials were encouraged to negotiate compromises by satisfying divergent interests. The conviction that moderate humane policies could avoid provoking sharp and extreme nationalist challenges to the imperial system crossed party lines.20 Policy-makers in Great Britain believed that sustaining the empire in the aftermath of World War I required ingenuity rather than brute force, although Great Britain often deployed its military force against those challenging its authority.21 Even as battles raged, Great Britain’s policy-makers recognized that the postwar imperial order had to be viewed as a force for progress, particularly because the U.S. administration whose military power had been critical in breaking the stalemate in favor of an allied victory strongly supported the principle of national self-determination. “The Fourteen Points became the basis on which the armistice with Germany was signed and formed the initial terms of reference for the Peace Conference in the following year.”22 The establishment of the League of Nations reinforced the imperative of preserving international stability through imperially dominated nation-building. Great Britain’s political leaders were also conscious that the country did not possess sufficient force to put down the wide range of violent challenges to its rule.23 The new system of League of Nations mandates, reflecting both nationalist goals and imperialist interests, required a balancing role between European resources and local political aims. Their proclaimed temporary status and the explicit promise of future self-government for newly defined states were expected to hold in check the most extreme of nationally based oppositions. Great Britain justified bringing Palestine into its strategic orbit as a mission to aid the downtrodden, beleaguered Jewish people, but this beneficence had to adhere to budgetary constraints and not impose prohibitively high economic costs on the country’s taxpayers. The Jewish national home was expected to be built without derailing Great Britain’s delicate process of rebuilding its economic power and prosperity. Consolidating a stable world often seemed unrelated to the immediate needs and interests of the local British electorate, who bore the financial costs of enforcing order. Putting down insurgencies was expensive and seemingly endangered economic health at home while increasing vulnerabilities abroad.
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
59
P o l i c y P r i n c i p l e s a n d J e w i s h I m m i g r at i o n Policies for Palestine had to meet the economic tests for empire and contribute to domestic prosperity. With Palestine considered something of a backwater in the Ottoman Empire and containing few valuable natural resources, it was difficult to imagine how the country could be pressed into this kind of imperial service. The logic of empire trained attention on Jewish immigration to Palestine as a means of bringing development to the country and of generating revenue. British officials seized on many of the traditional idioms of imperial benefits and anchored them around the momentum for investment that would presumably be unleashed by immigration. Nothing was considered more pivotal to Palestine’s growth and financial stability than Jewish immigration.24 Five years after the 1922 census, the Jewish population had almost doubled. By 1945, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown by more than 412 percent.25 Without Jewish immigration, no progress in developing a national home could be expected. And with it, Palestine’s economy became highly volatile, subject to alternating periods of “boom” and “bust.” “Busts” instantly turned into panics and always raised questions about the longterm viability of the nation-building project. Jewish immigration proved to be at once the most essential and the most problematic pillar of Great Britain’s backing of a Jewish national home. A steady flow of Jews to Palestine made it possible to expect a stream of funds to purchase land and expand an economy that offered far too few opportunities for employing the new arrivals. How else could the Jews make Palestine their “home”? But how to devise an immigration policy that produced incentives for growth without draining an already severely tight mandatory budget bedeviled the administration from its first days. Immigration was considered a critical factor behind Zionist fundraising plans. Zionism’s most infl uential wartime and interwar leader, Chaim Weizmann, posited that the World Zionist Organization had to mobilize millions of dollars, particularly in the United States, to develop Palestine’s economy. Only the prospect of sustained Jewish immigration could mold these contributions into productive enterprises and investments in development. Unfortunately for the Zionists, immigrants arrived well before the money could be raised. Great Britain’s official support for Zionist interests in Palestine was a huge achievement, but there were no guarantees that its imperial principles would be transformed into actions. Nor did the Balfour Declaration instantly rally world Jewry to the Zion-
Exiled in the Homeland
60
ist political cause. Particularly in the United States, where Zionist leaders courted increasing contributions to their nation-building enterprise, they also encountered substantial resistance. Known for their wealth and philanthropy, U.S. Jews had proffered vital aid to the Jewish community in Palestine during World War I through committees organized and led by the country’s Zionists. But the postwar period exposed tensions and differences between U.S. and European Zionists that the horrors of war had submerged. The United States’s preeminent Zionist, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, argued that the sound development of a Jewish national home could not rely simply on U.S. altruism. Rather, Brandeis and his colleagues insisted that only a streamlined—low-cost, low-budget—Zionist organization could nurture conditions ripe for investment, which necessarily had to come from individuals expecting dividends. Brandeis advocated a capitalist model of development consistent with the unfettered functioning of market forces while holding Zionist organizations to the strictest standards of fiscal accountability and transparency. For Weizmann, although desperate to increase U.S. financing for economic expansion in Palestine, the possibility of decentralized development without top-down Zionist control seemed politically unwise and even dangerous. Jehuda Reinharz characterizes Weizmann’s views rather bluntly. “Weizmann expected to be the channel through which all Zionist funds invested in Palestine would flow.”26 The World Zionist Organization and its several affiliate structures could not afford simply to chart an efficient and effective development strategy. Allocations, according to Weizmann, had to generate new recruits for Palestine and strengthen the attachment and loyalty of Jews to the idea that only a state of their own could protect their interests. The Zionist administration had to be first and foremost a framework in which all Zionist socioeconomic programs and ideologies had representation and validation.27 Although Weizmann’s side prevailed, the differences weakened the organizational power of U.S. Zionists and diminished their capacity to raise funds, however compelling the need to create and fund a strategy of development.28 A wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine had already gathered momentum as soon as the guns on the battlefields were silenced, partly the result of the ease with which visas could be secured from British consuls stationed in Eastern Europe—there were few criteria for denying entry to members of Zionist organizations—and partly buoyed by a renewed faith in a Zionism linked to British imperial logic. And at this
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
61
time, Great Britain’s regulations governing immigration were as unclear as the country’s general policies for building the Jewish national home. The many young immigrants who trekked through the devastated battlegrounds of Europe to enter Palestine found themselves challenged— indeed, often undone—by the grinding poverty and sheer absence of possibilities for employment in Palestine. The number of immigrants needing financial assistance quickly outpaced the capacity of any of the Zionist institutions to ease the distress. The mandatory administration stepped into the breach simply to stave off starvation. But this intervention was necessarily limited in scope and duration and could not extend into underwriting substantial development projects. The mandatory government would not allow itself to become the agent of reconstruction for a nationalism promising to relieve Great Britain of this burden. Immigration procedures were constructed with economics in mind: capital had to match labor. A potential agent of development, immigration could also have a deeply unsettling impact on a country whose residents only recently suffered mightily from the savagery of war. As one observer put it, “a cardinal principle of the policy laid down in 1922 . . . [is] . . . that immigration should not exceed the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine to absorb new arrivals and that it should not have the result of depriving any section of the present population of their employment.”29 Anyone possessing the requisite financial resources had “the right to enter the country.” There were also no practical restrictions placed on those who received assurances of maintenance. Although the regulations were altered several times, the underlying principles were sustained. One provision introduced in 1925 increased—from £500 to £1,000—the minimal amount required to qualify for unrestricted entry, whereas the 1933 revision essentially set forth a branching series of financial requirements as establishing a right to unimpeded immigration to Palestine.30 By 1933, “persons of independent means” were described with specificity: Members of liberal professions in possession of a capital of not less than £500; provided that the Director, Department of Migration, is satisfied that the need exists in Palestine for additional members of such professions; skilled craftsmen in possession of a capital of not less than £250 provided that the Director, Department of Migration, is satisfied that the economic capacity of Palestine is such as to allow such persons to be absorbed in the practice of their trade or craft; persons with a secured income of not less than £4 a month, exclusive of earned income; persons
Exiled in the Homeland
62
in bona fide possession and freely disposing of a capital of not less than £500; provided that the Director, Department of Migration, is satisfied that the capital of such persons is sufficient to ensure them reasonable prospects of success in the pursuit which they intend to enter, that they are qualified and physically fit to follow their proposed pursuits, and that their settlement in Palestine will not lead to the creation of undue competition in the proposed pursuits.31
Jews without the required capital resources but seeking employment in Palestine were subject to restrictions in accordance with the “economic absorptive capacity” of the country, determined through biannual negotiations between an agency of the World Zionist Organization and mandatory officials. Director of Immigration Albert Hyamson described the process of determining these quotas in painstaking detail: . . . in the preparation of a new immigration schedule the Zionist Executive [or the Jewish Agency] was expected to submit a sum in the following form: Prospective new employment in detail, less existing unemployment and prospective reduction of labour (in detail) in consequence of approaching completion of contracts. The balance was the number of new working immigrants for whom employment was foreseen in the coming schedule period. While the Zionist Executive was preparing this statement the Government Immigration Department was preparing a similar one. This latter was based to some extent on the same sources of information as that of the Zionist Executive, but the Government had also others at its disposal. To the total of the anticipated calls for new and increased employment of which the Department of Immigration was aware, there were two arbitrary additions: (a) a reserve of say 10 per cent for new demands which could not be foreseen and (b) a similar reserve for unemployed, since under no system could it be anticipated that every man and woman would at all times be employed.32
The belief in immigration as an economic stimulus directed attention to the kind rather than to the raw number of immigrants during the Mandate’s first decade. Indeed, the procedures adopted to award certificates to laborers reinforced the perception that “effective practical control” over immigration had “passed into the hands of a political organization”33 and that Labor Zionism exercised hegemony over the distribution of certificates. One official report noted:
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
63
From the initial selection of the immigrants, down through finance and technical departments to the choice of the men to be settled, the place where they are to be settled, the resources placed at their disposal, the plan to be followed in establishing them, the apportionment of funds as between different classes of settlers, the Labour Federation [Histadrut] has governed the situation. In other words, the body which is technically and ostensibly responsible for the work has not in practice effectively controlled that work: power has been, more or less completely, divorced from responsibility.34
Labor Zionism had its affiliates (He-Halutz) spread across the Jewish Diaspora committed to mobilizing and preparing young men and women for productive labor in Palestine. That mission struck a responsive chord with mandatory officials, who accommodated the movement in a mutually beneficial interaction. Because of its eagerness to expand and transform Palestine’s traditional agricultural economy and create a diverse class of modern Jewish laborers, Labor Zionism gained influence over the immigration process long before it won power and authority in Palestine’s selfgoverning institutions and in the World Zionist Organization. I m m i g r at i o n R e g u l at i o n s Palestine’s High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel, crafted the first formal immigration ordinance, opening residence in Palestine to those people “in a position to obtain the means of supporting . . . [themselves] and any dependents who desire to enter.”35 The instructions sent to consuls stipulated that visas be issued to those recommended by the World Zionist Organization or to those who were clearly self-supporting or had evidence of the likelihood of employment in Palestine. The relatively loose eligibility requirements came under scrutiny as Jews arriving in the country found themselves without the prospect of employment and without funds sufficient for maintenance. The credibility of the immigration policy was strained by the knowledge that many stratagems were used to misrepresent financial records and prospects of employment. Less than a year after the institution of a civil administration, Palestine’s Arabs drew attention to what appeared to be an unregulated flow of Jewish immigrants—particularly to those waving the communist banner in 1921 May Day demonstrations—by unleashing attacks and initiating a wave of violence against
Exiled in the Homeland
64
the country’s new residents and its settlements. Even before the commission investigating the cause of the 1921 riots produced its findings, Samuel suspended immigration.36 In revised regulations and in consultation with Zionist leaders, Samuel defined the qualifications for certificates more precisely and attempted to check the unbridled infl uence over the immigration process of the World Zionist Organization. In response to the May 1921 attacks against the Jews, the mandatory government’s efforts to exercise control over the size and nature of immigration led it to adopt measures that diminished the infl uence of the World Zionist Organization, and to expand the role of the High Commissioner at the expense of the country’s consuls stationed in Europe. By shifting authority from Europe to Jerusalem, Samuel also moved the Department of Immigration from the mandatory administration’s periphery to its center. These 1921 regulations introduced three key changes into the process. First, they linked opportunities for immigration to occupation and profession. Second, they transferred responsibility for guaranteeing support for laborers from the World Zionist Organization to specific employers. Third, they introduced a new paradigm of control over numbers and kinds of immigrants, with the World Zionist Organization holding a coordinating rather than a dominant role.37 Until the 1921 riots, the Department of Immigration and Travel had only a marginal position in the mandatory administrative hierarchy. But immigration policy remained predicated upon the conception of the potential for an expanding economy in Palestine. Those in need of communal support after landing on Palestine’s shores were divided into two categories. The first consisted of those laborers with offers of employment in Palestine and in receipt of guarantees of maintenance from business owners. The second included laborers without firm or clear possibilities of employment for whom the World Zionist Organization accepted responsibility. Partly for that reason, Zionist officials were highly attuned to the kinds of individuals who were strong enough to survive the rigors of adapting to the hardships of living without comfort and substantial financial aid, and who would not embarrass the Zionist leadership by promoting policies subversive of Great Britain’s imperial interests. Backing the establishment of a Jewish national home did not convey to British authorities a blueprint for how far such a writ of support should run. The 1921 May Day riots showed Herbert Samuel the depth of Arab hostility and convinced him to urge Zionist leaders to moderate their rhetoric and demands and to extend the timeline for achieving their
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
65
goals. Samuel believed that the basis of popular and political support for a Jewish national home in Great Britain was fragile enough not to survive sustained public controversy. Some have argued that Samuel withdrew his backing for Zionist interests in favor of the dual obligation principle positing comparable commitments to Palestine’s Arabs and Jews. But Samuel’s distribution of substantial material benefits to Palestine’s Arabs, as well as his attempt to win their support for participation in a binational framework of rule for Palestine, was intended to mitigate the hostility of Palestinian Arabs to the British commitment to developing a Jewish national home, not to alter the country’s strategic approach.38 Immigration regulations may have been tightened, but they were still viewed as the essential mechanism of economic growth for Palestine. The infl uence of the World Zionist Organization over the immigration process may have been weakened, but it was by no means eliminated. The mandatory immigration regulations gave the World Zionist Organization flexibility and power. In forging a structure to ensure steady flow of the “right kind” of Jewish immigrants while excluding the wrong kind (communists and people unable to work), Great Britain’s policy-makers evidently perceived only two alternatives: a system controlled by the World Zionist Organization, or one heavily infl uenced by it. The new procedures introduced by Samuel in 1921 facilitated coordination between the mandatory department of immigration and the World Zionist Organization as long as demand for immigration certificates fell well below supply and financial aid for supporting the process of absorption was severely limited. And Palestine’s Jewish economy, notwithstanding its volatility, stimulated the production of surpluses for the mandatory government. Even when Zionist institutions hovered on the brink of insolvency and depression produced high unemployment rates, mandatory budgets continued to record surpluses. No wonder that the mandatory administration was locked into a strategy of encouraging Jewish immigration to justify Great Britain’s control of the territory and to underwrite its costs. The financial record of the Government of Palestine is one of which any administration would have good reason to be proud. In the early years of the Administration, revenue barely balanced expenditure, although at that time the whole of the cost of the maintenance of the military units in Palestine was defrayed by His Majesty’s Government and—between 1922 and 1926—the cost of the British Gendarmerie was borne from a grant-
Exiled in the Homeland
66
in-aid provided by His Majesty’s Government. In more recent years, the Palestine Government accumulated huge surplus funds, the greater part of which they have utilized for extinguishing by purchase the share of the Ottoman Public Debt allocated to the country by the Treaty of Lausanne. They have repaid to His Majesty’s Government—partly out of loan funds and partly out of revenue—sums approaching 1,500,000 pounds, they have defrayed 5/6 of the cost of the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, a military unit raised locally and intended for the common defense of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, and since the first of April, 1927, they have repaid to His Majesty’s Government on a scale which at least compares favorably with that obtained from any other debt or country.39
Although sums necessary to qualify for entry to Palestine under the capitalist category were raised, the principle of welcoming those who could fend for themselves and contribute to expanding the economy remained firm until 1939. Still, although immigration played a pivotal role in triggering economic development, it also flooded the country with people who could not advance Palestine’s productive capacity. Some of these people entered the country legally. For example, dependents and family members constituted an important immigration category. Families could include siblings as well as nieces and nephews, and according to Director of Immigration Albert Hyamson, many self-declared spouses dissolved their marriages once safely in the country.40 This category provided an avenue of entry for significant numbers of Jewish immigrants. Some, however, bypassed the regulations by traveling to the country as tourists and simply ignored the expiration date on their visas. As long as the supply of immigration certificates exceeded demand, not much attention was directed to illegal immigration, particularly to those who falsely claimed to be entitled to residence under the family reunification provision. Because illegal immigrants could exercise no claims for aid against either the World Zionist Organization or the mandatory government, there were few incentives to mobilize the resources for their expulsion.41 V i o l e n t R e s i s ta n c e a n d t h e I n t e r s e c t i o n o f L a b o r a n d C a p i ta l Arab opposition to the core principles of British rule in Palestine remained steadfast and sparked periodic episodes of violence and eventually, in 1936, a countrywide revolt. Although the Arab Revolt (1936–1939) failed to pro-
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
67
duce a decisive realignment of military power, it did convince Great Britain to withdraw its support for the continued expansion of a Jewish national home. But this policy shift in the midst of protracted communal violence and the coming of another European war is not surprising. The question is not so much what circumstances produced such a transformation in Great Britain’s strategic thinking as what reasons kept policy evaluations static for so many years. All acts of violence prompted formal reevaluations of the policies supportive of developing the Jewish national home, but only in the late 1930s did the imminence of a European war enable political leaders to understand how the Palestine confl ict might act as a regional vortex of opposition to Great Britain’s global position. Without the threat of a European war, domestic politics, rather than the urgency of foreign affairs, set the terms of Great Britain’s Palestine policies. Many argue that the problem for Great Britain derived from its contradictory commitments to Palestine’s Arabs and to Jews—fulfilling the one automatically entailed nullifying the other. At the same time, connecting immigration to economic growth meant that Great Britain’s backing for the Jewish national home was unlikely to be reversed unless equally plausible and profitable alternatives could be imagined. Consider the 1929 disturbances and their minimal impact on subsequent British immigration policies to Palestine. The 1929 riots were not the first but they were the most devastating attacks in Palestine since Great Britain assumed responsibility for governing the country. Violence in 1929 came at a time of mounting political and cultural fragmentation in both Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine, a fragmentation it dramatically increased. Years of economic disorder for Zionist institutions led to emigrants, in record-breaking numbers, returning to the lands of their birth in Europe despite an anti-Semitism on the rise there. The magnitude of the migrant flows out of Palestine combined with the decline of the labor movement’s economic enterprises generated a new and rather aggressive Zionist political dynamic in the country.42 For Palestine’s Arabs, this was also a moment of intense instability. Some of Palestine’s Arab leaders claimed their nationalist struggle was a war over the future of Islam. Intense religious ties to Palestine’s holy sites drew into the confl ict faith communities from across the globe, littering the environment, particularly in Jerusalem, with suspicions, insecurities, and dangers. Many Palestinians, having learned their politics during the aftermath of World War I in Syria, protested the strategic course of nationalist action adopted by the community’s leaders, who were inclined
Exiled in the Homeland
68
to cooperate with mandatory officials and who counseled compliance with regulations in such areas as trade, taxation, and employment.43 Tension began in 1928 over the relatively minor issue of whether or not a screen could be placed to separate men and women worshippers at the “Wailing Wall” on Yom Kippur. What initially appeared a matter of religious observance ended as a nationalist provocation. Palestinians were convinced, partly by right-wing Zionist demonstrations, that the screen constituted a threat to their authority over Muslim holy sites. For their part, many Palestine Jews were alarmed at what appeared to be the appeasement policies of their leadership, who seemed unwilling to assert unconditional claims to Jewish statehood and who evinced too little concern for Jerusalem’s religious significance.44 Convinced that the time was ripe to press their interests, Arabs embraced a campaign of attacks against Jews, unleashed with special brutality throughout Palestine’s holy cities. “Jews had been massacred in Jerusalem, and later in Safed, Hebron and other places. In Hebron, where the Jews had been living for generations, a large part of the community had been very cruelly killed and the survivors had been forced to abandon the town.”45 Arab attacks generally held the initiative until stopped by British forces, “with difficulty . . . [and only] after additional military forces had been brought in.”46 Riots convinced the British to appoint a commission of inquiry. The commission itself called for further investigations into the impact of Jewish immigration and land settlement on the Arab population, and particularly on the peasants who traditionally worked the land.47 In Great Britain, political and economic disorder was particularly acute as well during these years. The turbulence in Palestine heightened political tensions in Great Britain while exposing the limitations of Great Britain’s commitments and of the policy instruments at the government’s disposal to ensure equilibrium within the imperial domain. Great Britain’s Palestine policies were driven, as always, by a double crisis—economic and strategic—compounded by the confl icting perspectives generated by a policy forged within different governmental structures. Given unremitting Arab opposition to the principled basis for British rule, equilibrium in Palestine depended on outweighing inducements to violence with deterrents. The number of soldiers and police as well as the quality of their training were crucial factors in preventing violence. But such crude methods of coercion were costly, and Great Britain had steadily reduced its military garrisons in Palestine during the first decade of the Mandate.48 Once the brink of hostilities had been breached in the summer
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
69
of 1929, checking violence required time and money and still could not quickly arrest what appeared at the time a shocking loss of life. The 1929 carnage prompted High Commissioner John Chancellor to urge that Great Britain abandon support for the Jewish national home and instead encourage Palestine’s Arabs to build self-governing institutions as the framework for independence and sovereignty. Chancellor’s far-reaching proposals included amending all provisions of the Mandate that gave or appeared to give the Jews “a privileged position.”49 Although recommending that increased numbers of soldiers be deployed in Palestine, he also insisted that the “disturbances were neither an expression of inherent lack of faith in Britain, nor an outcome of religious agitation— they were an outburst of enmity toward the yishuv, generated by a considerable growth of nationalist feeling within the Arab community.”50 The violence convinced Chancellor that Jewish economic and political activities in Palestine had to be limited rather than continually encouraged and expanded. Colonial Office officials, however, struck a different note, characterizing Chancellor’s memorandum as not only unwise but also dangerous to Great Britain’s position in Palestine and to its imperial status in the region. Charging that Chancellor had swept away Great Britain’s reason for holding the Palestine Mandate, one official wrote that the High Commissioner had effectively consigned the imperial regime to the marginal duty of guarding a few holy sites. That H. M. G. should voluntarily throw up the Mandate seems out of the question because, if as a result of Arab and pro-Arab opinion, Chancellor’s recommendations were to be adopted, the Agency might threaten to abandon the establishment of the Jewish National Home. Even as a piece of bluff this might be most damaging to us [because] with the National Home policy eliminated, our excuse for remaining in Palestine would be reduced to little more than that of the importance of a territory containing the Holy Places.51
But Chancellor’s recommendations could not simply be either ignored or dismissed as an explanation for the violence and as a set of remedies. They helped place the question of Great Britain’s Balfour policy squarely before the several commissions set up to investigate the reasons for the 1929 eruption of violence. Domestic and international political pressures forced Great Britain to examine the causes for the disturbances, and sub-
Exiled in the Homeland
70
sequently to evaluate whether Jewish economic development in Palestine had destroyed the viability of Arab society. In a series of inquiries on the violence and on the economic impact of Jewish immigration and land settlement, some officials urged political leaders to proclaim that the mandatory regime’s obligations to establish a Jewish national home had been met and that it would not continue with an immigration policy that sparked an unstoppable momentum for statehood.52 Confirming Chancellor’s call for clarity and for limiting the Jewish nation-building enterprise—but without challenging the Jewish right to a homeland in Palestine—the Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, believed he had constructed a balanced position in the White Paper issued by his office in May 1930.53 British obligations to Jews and Arabs embodied “equal weight,” the Passfield White Paper asserted. Without having to amend any of the Mandate’s provisions—as Chancellor’s memorandum suggested—the 1930 statement proclaimed that “there remains no margin of land available for agricultural settlement by new immigrants,”54 hinting at the formation of stricter controls on land sales and Jewish immigration. Lord Passfield’s statement of policy not only deepened political divisions within the World Zionist Organization; it also triggered domestic opposition in England to a government already in trouble for its management of the economy. The World Zionist Organization denounced the White Paper as a betrayal of past commitments and validly negotiated international agreements. Shattering the presumed consensus on colonial affairs could have been the engine of destruction for Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald’s minority government and the Labour Party’s increasingly shaky hold on power. There were also serious international repercussions for Great Britain if it could not demonstrate that its forces could play the decisive role in managing if not in resolving this confl ict. Foreign Ministry officials were much relieved when the Commission of Inquiry attributed the violence to the Jewish rather than to the British presence in Palestine. Great Britain feared that the 1929 disturbances might very well cut the ground out of its trusteeship because it rested so heavily on a continental consensus supervised through the League of Nations. Charges of failure might provide a focal point and justification for serious international scrutiny, if not intervention, in the operations of Great Britain’s imperial domain, a possibility not discounted but strongly opposed by politicians across party lines.55 To the extent that Great Britain’s political leaders had to respond to these pressures threatening imperial security and stability and give greater clarity to their Palestine policies, they found themselves confronting controversy not only abroad but also on their turf at home.
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
71
The Labour Party came to office in 1929 with a preference for the ideals of trusteeship and of the principles endorsed by the League of Nations: to safeguard local economies while preserving their benefits for their populations; to preserve indigenous structures of “indirect rule” while also gradually ceding self-governing powers.56 Despite its political party platform, once in power, Labour cabinets, too, remained suspicious of commitments that might embroil the nation in sacrifices for very questionable returns, particularly because Great Britain’s power still suffered from the staggering losses and costs of the First World War. Plagued with failures to stem the tide of prolonged economic downturns, Great Britain’s political party system seemed hobbled to devastating effect in 1930 by the possibility of a serious foreign policy crisis in Palestine. Most programs for economic recovery had generated entrenched confl ict between the traditional constituency interest groups of the major political parties, making it almost impossible for any political party to consolidate its authority through general elections. The Liberal Party declined but did not disappear. The Labour Party secured sufficient votes to win elections, but not enough power to bring disparate groups together around a coherent program of economic reform. Worsening economic conditions in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929 heightened Great Britain’s fiscal distress and seemingly placed severe limits on the scope of action available to a government unable to form an agreement on an economic plan or hold out hope for a rebound. Rather than devising a common strategy with its own populist voters, Labour leaders were galvanized into a coalition with the Conservative Party by the perceived need to rush to the defense of the country’s fiscal integrity. Only substantial cutbacks in government spending would protect the economy, and only a coalition of political forces in a national government could overcome the social and political forces opposed to substantial budgetary retrenchment. Thus, faced with a backlash from its core union constituents over decreased unemployment benefits, the Labour Party had little enthusiasm for the additional high-stakes turmoil unleashed by changing the government’s Palestine policy. Prime Minister Macdonald decided to end the domestic controversy over Palestine by writing a very public letter to World Zionist President Chaim Weizmann. In that letter, Macdonald denied that the government was about to introduce new prohibitions against land sales to Jews or to impose restrictions on immigration. Without any reference to the principle of a dual obligation to Arabs and Jews as presented in the 1930 White Paper, Macdonald effectively reconfirmed that no concrete action would
Exiled in the Homeland
72
be taken to block the central policy tools for expanding Palestine’s Jewish national home and, not incidentally, for continuing the stream of revenue flowing to the Treasury. A Zionist campaign in Great Britain and the United States may not have melted all resistance to the building of a Jewish national home, but it did help stay the hand of its adversaries.57 In the end, Macdonald’s letter not only quashed a simmering public debate, it also faced down a series of overweening officials representing the confl icting views and interests of their several departments in what had become a fractured bureaucracy. The proposals for substantial Palestine policy revisions were decisively undone in the interplay of competing branches of the administration. Consolidating an imperial outpost on Arab self-government in Palestine did not seem financially feasible to the Exchequer while it violated the norms on foreign policy held in common by many in the Colonial Office.58 Anticipating that the United States’s crash would produce a deep and protracted economic crisis in Europe, treasury officials insisted that the country lacked the resources to produce an Arab economic and political infrastructure capable of serving Great Britain’s imperial needs. Insofar as the several official recommendations for a new Palestine policy demanded lavish British investment, they were necessarily stillborn.59 At a time when the costs of empire had to be reduced, British political leaders could only regard the Zionist project as essential to the maintenance of imperial dominion at a reasonable cost. Additionally, as a national entity, Arab Palestine seemed to many British officials barely to exist. “The Arab community in Palestine was conceived even after 1936, as a loose, and therefore manageable, conglomeration of competing and confl icting factions. A Palestinian national revolt was ruled out. The British were mostly apprehensive of riots with religious undertones rather than on national grounds . . . [and] certain that difficulties with that community could be confined to the local level.”60 Despite the rhetorical momentum of the inquiries and the several recommendations in favor of a radical revision of Great Britain’s Palestine policies, mandatory authorities admitted a large number of Jewish immigrants into the country in 1932 even before the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany. “By approving larger Labour Schedules [Colonial Secretary] Cunliffe Lister hoped to transform Palestine into a self-sufficient economic unit which would become, as a result of larger Jewish capital imports, [even] less dependent on the British tax-payer’s purse.”61 The controversy over Great Britain’s policy of support for the establishment of a Jewish national home was one of the most protracted dis-
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
73
putes of the interwar years, but Palestine itself, in the reckoning of policymakers, was hardly worth the hours of debate or the cost of commissions and reports. Even as politicians became more and more aware of political and economic exigencies on the home front, they were obliged to continue a policy that kept their imperial aims unclear and produced only interim precariously based equilibriums. Clarity only brought controversy and intensified domestic political instability. Unwilling to establish themselves in the wreckage of Palestine’s Arab economy, British politicians seemed equally reluctant to commit to a set of Zionist goals that could only be implemented by a willingness and capacity to deploy massive force. If, as official commissions of inquiry consistently observed, British policy intentions regarding the ultimate future of a Jewish national home were particularly unclear, they were increasingly purposely vague. Initially, lack of clarity derived from ignorance; by the mid-1930s, ambiguity resonated as a tactic to minimize confl ict and as the best of all alternatives to avoid creating challenges to Great Britain’s imperial domination. Changes in the international balance of power, however, forced policymakers to clarify their country’s mission in Palestine even as the new clarity represented both triumph and defeat for British imperialism. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, opening a campaign of high-pitched propaganda and terror aimed first at excluding Jews from public life, next at weakening their economic power, and finally, at taking from them all political and human rights. The Nazi seizure of power made itself felt in Palestine in three ways: first, before suffering the full measure of Nazi hatred, German Jews, in increasing numbers, immigrated to Palestine. Second, because of an agreement negotiated by the Jewish Agency allowing German Jewish immigrants restricted access to their capital if they transferred it to Palestine for the purchase of goods manufactured in Germany, Palestine’s Jewish economy expanded. Third, Nazi ambitions deepened the conviction of British policy-makers that the future would bring war. War reinforced Palestine’s strategic value and exposed its vulnerability. Policy-makers who took Nazi propaganda literally, and carefully watched Hitler’s preparations for war, became acutely sensitive to Palestine’s military insecurities, particularly as communal violence erupted once again in 1936. The Palestine that exploded in flames in 1936 was not secured until 1939. Large numbers of troops had to be sent to the country, the major burden of which was borne by the British taxpayer. This turmoil forced British policy to break with its own precedents. And the prolonged vio-
Exiled in the Homeland
74
lence shifted the policy-making process from a joint Colonial–Foreign Office venture to an enterprise directed from the Foreign Office as part of the government’s general preparations for war. The initial mandatory government’s response to the Revolt was typical and consistent with past practice—to suspend Jewish immigration. But the political momentum in 1936 supporting Jewish immigration as a means of saving lives and as a vital engine of economic growth was too strong to shut down completely. Thus mandatory and colonial officials quickly concluded that the hopes and grievances of both peoples required a totally new approach. The Colonial Office attempted to end the violence and reconcile the confl icting national claims to the land by offering to partition Palestine into two separate states—Arab and Jewish. But after more than a year of consultations and the renewal of even more lethal levels of violence, the two nationalist movements were no closer together. Architect of a new policy direction, the Foreign Secretary insisted that British policy-makers declare that “no workable [partition] scheme could be produced.” In effect, the government had concluded that support for a Jewish national home in Palestine was too volatile a diplomatic burden to carry as war clouds gathered. In a stunning reversal, the British Government redefined, in a White Paper issued in 1939, the purpose for its mandate as a commitment to an independent Palestine assured of an Arab majority by limiting Jewish immigration and by restricting Jewish land purchases. For Great Britain, the time had come to mobilize allies for war in a region of central military value. British policies in Palestine continued to reflect contradictory pressures, but war had changed their balance. To many policy-makers, support for a Jewish national home was expected to bring a trouble-free and costeffective imperial domination of the eastern Mediterranean. Despite periodic outbursts of violence, Great Britain was not caught in the fire between the dual nationalist struggles until 1936. British mandatory administrations established order despite fierce Arab resistance to a Jewish national home. Comparing military duties in Palestine and Ireland, one high officer remarked that “Palestine was a rest cure after Ireland.”62 Although some military and political officials identified the dual commitments as the crucible for Britain’s eventual failure in Palestine, others found reason for hope that Jewish economic development would radiate benefits to the entire population, offering Palestine’s Arabs opportunities for a higher standard of living and providing them with concrete reasons to be reconciled to the idea of a Jewish state. Under international obligation to
Great Britain’s Colonial Venture
75
develop possessions governed as mandates, British policy-makers understood that support for a Jewish national home sustained capital investment in Palestine’s economy. Properly understood, Great Britain’s obligations as mandatory power entailed a commitment to develop Palestine’s economy. Without the World Zionist Organization raising capital investment funds, the financial burdens for Great Britain of holding Palestine would be raised by significant amounts. Economic development provided a frequent point of contact between Zionist and mandatory officials. What a government could or could not do to drive the wheels of commerce and development began with enforcing order, securing the rule of law, and creating or discovering regulations that generated incentives for planning and investment. Enlarging the productive capacity of Palestine served British and Zionist interests. Organizational changes designed to assist impoverished and landless peasants, such as surveying land and turning collectively owned plots into private property, also helped Zionists expand their control of land, Palestine’s most precious economic and political resource. Even when British policy-makers were convinced by the force of circumstance and by international threat to alter the principles of their Palestine policy, important considerations warranted significant overlap between British and Zionist aims. The eruption of violence in 1936 and the subsequent three-year civil war convinced the British to back away from their commitments to a Jewish national home, but they also became crucial points of cultural contact for Zionists and the British military. A discipline of order and security brought arms and military training to Palestine’s Jewish community. The British military trained young Zionist men and women and helped them acquire the tactical skills necessary to confront and defeat an indigenous rebellion possessing demographic superiority. Even as the Arab strategy of violence ended Great Britain’s official support for expanding the Jewish national home, it also caused enormous suffering and weakened the Palestinian community’s political, social, and economic structures. Palestine’s political leaders, dispersed either in exile or in prison, were ever more dependent after the Revolt than before on the heads of state of neighboring Arab countries. Few Palestinians could see a burgeoning sense of the possibilities in Great Britain’s 1939 White Paper because they were too weak to make their demands felt directly on mandatory policy, and by then, Zionism’s momentum was too strong to be stopped by mere proclamations.
three
Making Conce<
Zionists could not imagine their way toward independence without immigration, yet they could not function easily with it. Because the World Zionist Organization had to embrace Great Britain’s support for the development of a Jewish national home, it also had to be integrated into a process of policy-making with regard to immigration that frequently ran counter to its cherished principles. Zionist efforts to bring Jews to Palestine could not ignore or flout mandatory immigration regulations whether or not they resonated with the movement’s values or interests or were responsive to the circumstances of the time. Although Zionism’s pronouncements on immigration were heavily laden with metaphors of inclusion, Zionists actually spoke with more than one voice in defining their immigration preferences. And when it came to putting principles into practice, Zionists were sometimes made complicit in according deference and respect to ideas intrinsically inimical to the movement’s ethic. Filled with assertions of returning Jews to the place where they rightfully belonged, Zionist proclamations set ambitious aims, but the movement had few means at its disposal to implement them. First and foremost, sovereignty over Palestine resided with Great Britain, and Zionists had to align their requests for immigration permits with British interests and policies. Steeped in a culture of social engineering, Zionism invited the charge of elitism because its discourse was filled with preferences for what was called “good human material”—that is, for people who presumably could withstand the hardships of underdevelopment.1 Ordinary Jews, it was postulated, were likely to turn away from the country when they realized how much pain was involved in building a national home in Palestine. The Zionist penchant for quality over quantity abounded with irony
Mak ing Concessions
77
because Zionists believed that the development of a homeland required the creation of legions of workers even as they showed little respect for the ordinary Yiddish-speaking uneducated Diaspora Jew for whom physical labor was nothing new. Even the dedicated pioneers who were esteemed in Zionist rankings and who tried to meet the heavy demands Palestine placed on their bodies and souls required resources. In this first decade of British rule, the World Zionist Organization suffered from financial shortfalls on a scale that made it impossible to furnish sufficient aid to alleviate the brutal conditions the pioneers often failed to endure.2 Hence, Zionist immigration practitioners across the political spectrum concurred with British officials that preference be extended to those with capital, hoping that the financial resources brought into the country would be invested to widen the economy’s productive capacity.3 Not surprisingly, the actions of Zionist officials often tracked with changes in the country’s volatile economy, but the organization’s power was so diff use that even when Zionist policies were clearly stated, they were not always followed. Serious economic downturns, for example, sometimes convinced mid-level Zionist officials—against all stipulated British regulations or Zionist procedures, and in violation of all structures of authority—to distribute only a portion of the certificates they had received from mandatory officials.4 Without sovereignty and deprived of access to sufficient resources, Zionists deployed discourse as an empowering tool for exercising some measure of infl uence over immigration.5 But because bringing Jews to Palestine both fulfilled the Zionist dream and threatened the Zionist cause, the inherited cultural tropes and values of the Zionist movement proved increasingly untenable in Palestine. They were made untenable by shortages of funds and a pace of development that could not meet the basic needs of residents, let alone those waiting to be rescued from poverty and violence in an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe. Not wanting to abandon the dream or acknowledge its problematic status as a goal, Zionist movement leaders bobbed and weaved behind unchanged public pronouncements that drew a thick verbal veil across quite diverse and ever-evolving actions.6 In 1926, the Zionist Executive distributed one-half of the immigrant certificates allocated by mandatory authorities, although it had publicly advanced a request for a higher quota. In 1927, 500 were held back, triggering complaints from Labor Zionists, many of whom had spent years proving their devotion to the cause and waiting for their certificates.7 Overwhelmed by the economic turmoil that forced so many Jews to leave
Exiled in the Homeland
78
Palestine, Zionist immigration official Frederick Kisch observed that if the labor movement could accommodate additional people on its kibbutzim, it should immediately extend an invitation to the country’s unemployed to join these settlements.8 The dissonance and strains between ideology and policy were held at bay during these years partly because British hegemony removed both final authority and responsibility from the Zionist organization for immigration. Still, forced to deal with immigration as a matter of public policymaking, the World Zionist Organization’s Executive learned quickly of the dangers of trying to turn visions into reality. The strains between dreams and policies may reflect what Israel Kolatt called the development of two Zionisms—one centered on rectifying the Jewish problems in the Diaspora and the other, on meeting the needs of Palestine’s Jewish community.9 Believing that the Balfour Declaration ushered in a Zionist era, Max Nordau called for mass immigration from Europe, a call that must have shocked Arthur Ruppin, who believed Zionism would not realize its goals unless it focused on what was needed in Palestine and not on what could be done to help Jews in the Diaspora. Even many predisposed by Herzl’s vision to expect a mass transfer of Jews once the World Zionist Organization received international approval for its goals changed their minds after investigating the conditions in Palestine in the months after war. “The poverty and disease” Justice Brandeis found in the country “convinced him that the immediate need was to provide for those already there rather than [to bring] . . . new Jews to Palestine.”10 The certainties and priorities that came automatically under the oppression of exile were disrupted by the Zionist encounter with Palestine. As fervently as Zionists longed for the “ingathering of the exiles,” the actual immigration experience produced unexpected consequences and a multilayered divergence of interests. Nothing exposed the harsh realities facing the World Zionist Organization and the difficulties the movement had in keeping its footing secure on immigration more than its lobbying efforts to win the release of Zionists from their growing isolation and ever more precarious position in the Soviet Union. Those wishing to leave the Soviet Union for Palestine confronted a puzzle of confl icting impulses. The scale of devastation visited upon Russia’s Jews during World War I and its revolutionary aftermath transformed many into Zionists and deepened their resolve to live in Palestine. Zionist sentiment spread rapidly, partly because Jews were initially treated as a national minority, and Zionist activities could be legitimately
Mak ing Concessions
79
engaged. But leaving the Soviet Union grew increasingly expensive as the price of exit permits rose with demand, and as Bolshevik rulers realized this exodus could be a money-making operation. But as Ziva Galili explains, Soviet immigration presented as many political as financial problems. Money was not the only pressing need. Emigration from Soviet Russia to Palestine required British help in providing Immigration Certificates and easing immigration regulations to accommodate the rigidities and arbitrariness of Soviet procedures. In addition, the Soviet Zionists repeatedly demanded from the Zionist Executive to secure the posting of aliya emissaries from Palestine in Soviet Russia. Direct negotiations on this issue between the London Executive and the Colonial Office took place in September 1927, in the wake of severance of Britain’s diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.11
The World Zionist Organization was unable to comply with the request to station official representatives in the country. Because fl uctuations in Great Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union had enormous consequences and often forced Zionist officials to limit the number of certificates issued, many Jews in the Soviet Union were caught in a double bind: they had to express loyalty to the Zionist cause in order to qualify for exit permits, which then instantly turned them into targets of repression for displaying less than a full commitment to the presumed communist ideals being entrenched around them.12 Nevertheless, the Zionist Executive viewed the Soviet Union as fertile ground for nurturing prime candidates for building the Jewish homeland. Soviet Zionists seemed to identify with Zionism’s spiritual charge, and ironically, their experiences with the shortages and turmoil characteristic of the coercive Bolshevik regime prepared them, at least psychologically and emotionally, for the difficulties in Palestine.13 But many of the Soviet Zionists in peril could not be rescued, even from imprisonment, if they were deemed too radical and not likely to make their peace in a Palestine with an imperialist order. “For most of the decade . . . the number of certificates allowed by the British fell short of the demand from the Chalutzim waiting in Eastern Europe and from Palestine residents wishing to bring over relatives.”14 From the advent of British rule in Palestine, then, the immigration required for population growth was often viewed by Zionist officials as
Exiled in the Homeland
80
disrupting rather than advancing the process of nation-building. Immigration might eventually produce a Jewish majority in Palestine, but not necessarily a people with a strong sense of national identity or a common purpose reflective of Zionist idealism. Zionist leaders understood that without a carefully controlled method of screening the men and women who settled in the land of Israel, immigration might not create a transformed Jewish society, but would simply replicate the many distinct Diaspora communities in Europe. Although proclaiming a glorious vision for the future, Zionists were painfully aware of their own limitations in the present: final authority over Palestine devolved on Great Britain, financial resources were held by Americans whose loyalty to the Zionist cause fell far short of the Jewish community’s development needs, and most immigrants did not see themselves as pioneers, whereas those who did could rarely manage to give full expression to their lofty goals. Zionist policy stances on immigration into Palestine were often forged under severe internal tensions, and only partly because Zionists had highly varied and sometimes totally opposing ideas about how to produce Jewish sovereignty. Actual positions on immigration were formed less out of ideological dogma than out of what was perceived as national interest. Zionist leaders discovered that they could obtain leverage for their claims by collaborating rather than by opposing mandatory policies. Zionist leaders were active in establishing cooperative relationships with mandatory officials, particularly on immigration policies, even if older cultural assumptions or ideological idioms had to be stretched or reinterpreted to justify an alliance between two interests that were neither identical nor always congruent. All Zionist political parties assumed the Jewish state would be established through the transportation of a globally dispersed population to the land of Israel and the forging of a people into a single national entity. Constructing the nation would depend, then, on immigration as the central political task of Zionist political life. All Zionist political movements and leaders had to confront the task of removing significant populations of Jews from the lands of their birth and molding them into a new national body in a totally unfamiliar land. Immigration sometimes brought bitter opponents together in compromise, and at other times drove allies into polarizing confl ict. The inescapable focus on immigration eventually fractured the Zionist movement.15 A destabilizing issue, immigration also bred an awesome and uncompromising set of rights. The most uncompromising of Zionists—those
Mak ing Concessions
81
most convinced of their nation’s immemorial rights—had to acknowledge that Great Britain had sovereign jurisdiction over Palestine’s immigration policy. But such radicals argued that the more ambitious the immigration goal, the more rapid the progress toward statehood and toward compelling Great Britain to concede to Jews the unconditional and unrestricted right to live in Palestine.16 Moderates struggled to contain what they considered excessive Zionist demands, fearing they would rupture rather than consolidate Great Britain’s support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. A singular political language bound Zionists together but did not unify them. Zionists fought passionately over the fundamentals of their own movement in the context of a people gripped by profound change and lethal threats. When analyzing Zionist immigration policies, it is important to note what was never demanded during these years. Although the goal of generating a Jewish majority in Palestine was taken for granted, the World Zionist Organization never advocated unlimited Jewish immigration. Even while making the idea of ending Jewish exile the premier point of Zionist rhetoric, the Zionist movement’s leadership cooperated with the mandatory administration in trying to balance the flow of people with the circulation of funds. In this chapter, I bring Zionist immigration policies to the center of my inquiry and hope to show how they were formed as cultural and political hybrids subject to many divergent imperatives. As I will argue here, Zionist immigration policies were generated through a complex and contested process of making concessions. The term concession suggests a willingness to accept less than desired goals, and may also imply acknowledging that professed goals might never be fully realized. But it also accurately represents the patchwork of agreements through which such multilevel and lateral policies were constructed. Finally, the word conveys the process of formulating such policies as a constant series of transactions and negotiations among Zionist officials from different departments, between the Zionist Executive and Palestine’s mandatory administrators, and to a lesser extent during this decade, among political movements within and without Europe. These concessions would attempt to reach across four thorny interlocking sets of economic, cultural, and political contradictions. First was the opposition between immigration as incentive for investment in Palestine and as a drain on capital resources. Second was the ideological battle over immigration: could a Jewish homeland be built by a broad-based effort
Exiled in the Homeland
82
of Jews filling Palestine’s available spaces, or only by Jews possessing certain qualities of mind, body, and consciousness? Third was the difference between the homeland as site of national transformation or as refuge for those European Jews more and more engulfed by the gathering of ominous anti-Semitic forces. Of course, Zionists confronted these contradictory imperatives in subtle ways. Just as saving Diaspora Jewry was beyond their measure of control, so was transforming the Jewish people not entirely within their grasp. Still, the polarities indicate how Zionists engaged with the limited options facing them and go a long way to explaining how they constructed their national priorities. Finally, there was the conundrum of opening up Palestine to Jewish immigration while coping with the perils it unleashed. The appeal of a larger Jewish population could not but jeopardize the present and future status of the country’s Arabs, giving license to riots, revolts, and terror attacks against Jewish civilians. T h e B a l f o u r D e c l a r at i o n Like all momentous achievements, the Balfour Declaration quickly became the focus of Zionist controversy soon after it was issued. For instead of bringing instant unity to the Zionist movement or to the Jewish people, the Balfour Declaration sparked disagreements not only about how to construct a national home but also about the meaning and depth of Great Britain’s commitment. For the many Zionists in Eastern Europe still dealing with the grim issues of life and death even after war’s end, the project of a Jewish national home in Palestine governed by Great Britain beckoned them to its shores just as visionary Zionist ideals had taken hold of their imagination. To be sure, the available information on conditions in Palestine depicted a rather dismal reality. But not until these enthusiastic Zionists arrived in Palestine did they understand the actual situation. From the earliest days of British rule, the World Zionist Organization courted participation from mandatory officials to “restrain the impatient drive for immediate mass immigration”17 and to begin to regulate the seemingly spontaneously generated flow of Jews to Palestine. Aware that Great Britain’s public support for a Jewish national home acted as a powerful draw for the hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced by war or caught in the crossfire of civil war or local power struggles, the World Zionist Organization feared that masses of Jews—many already on the move— would deluge Palestine’s shores and magnify the scale of human disaster in an area already devastated by years of warfare and neglect. Instead of
Mak ing Concessions
83
seeking immigrants, Zionist officials pressed the British for concessions “to develop state lands, Dead Sea salts, hydroelectric plants, and other capital investments.”18 The soon-to-be-elected president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, well known in Great Britain for his diplomatic skills and for his successful lobbying efforts on behalf of the Zionist cause, was entrusted by Great Britain’s wartime leaders with the charge of designing a strategy for developing the national home.19 He understood that Great Britain was pinning its hopes on a Jewish homeland not to serve Jewish interests but rather to accommodate the political needs of a new imperial order. For that reason Weizmann cautioned Zionists against making too many demands. Thus, instead of gushing forth with praise, many Zionists criticized Weizmann for achievements that left him too eager to back Great Britain and too timid to press the Zionist case.20 But the unprecedented fl uid postwar international order led some Zionists to portray Great Britain’s policy of support for the national home project as an irrevocable commitment that regardless of original intent cemented colonial forces to Zionist goals.21 In the short run, at least, Weizmann’s moderate approach prevailed: the World Zionist Organization tempered its demands and expected only limited access to the resources of the British Empire. Although Great Britain offered security, world Jewry was expected to raise the investment funds for an economic base broad enough to sustain a Jewish majority in Palestine. “The whole conception of Zionist strategy under Weizmann depended on economic development—on resettling a large enough body of immigrants on sufficiently extended territories for an eventual claim to an independent national status.”22 M i l i ta ry C o n q u e s t a n d G o v e r n m e n t i n P a l e s t i n e The arrival of the British military in Palestine marked opportunity for Zionists, but, conversely, bred chaos into the public life of the country’s Arab residents. The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire produced disunity and instability. Borders had to be drawn, and rulers had to be selected. The British had to negotiate a territorial settlement with France that divided the two imperial spheres of infl uence and to create separate states in a region where there was no obvious geographic or cultural logic to the border. Having been wrenched away from the embrace of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab provinces, as structures of consolidated authority, scarcely functioned. And for Arabs in what became Palestine, there were
Exiled in the Homeland
84
added burdens. In Palestine, the British declared their intention to establish a political authority based on a new purpose in international law—the creation of a Jewish national home folding its own imperial authority and legitimacy into what for Arabs was a deeply controversial structure of history and destiny. The British hoped to use the time between their military conquest of Palestine and the convening of an international peace conference to strengthen their position in Palestine and give substance to their support for a Jewish national home. But from the moment it was stated, Great Britain’s policy in Palestine sowed confusion, particularly over the question of how to define a national home and what steps had to be taken to establish it. The belief in the ease with which the Balfour Declaration could be turned into policy came increasingly into question. Political antagonism to it came from Arabs across all the lands formerly under Ottoman rule. A number of well-placed and knowledgeable colonial officials as well as military officers in the field expressed serious reservations about the idea of supporting a Jewish national home given Palestine’s demographic profile.23 Before Great Britain’s principles could be transformed into actual policies and before opponents could be brought into line, officials and politicians had to be apprised of their meaning. While British officials remained to be convinced that authority could be consolidated in Palestine by supporting a Zionist program, a Zionist consensus had yet to be formed on either the final political order the movement endorsed or the process of reaching it. Conscious of the deep reservations and the reservoir of opposition to Great Britain’s decision to back Zionist objectives, Chaim Weizmann attempted to steer the Zionist policies toward moderate and constructive proposals that would not be construed as radical or viewed as constituting a totally new departure in foreign policy. Notwithstanding considerable pressure from many Zionist activists who wanted to put forward their maximum demands, Weizmann counseled patience and a program that did not look to the British treasury for major long-term financing. To sort out how to engage Zionist ambitions at the policy level, Great Britain appointed a commission to gather information and survey conditions in Palestine and hopefully to provide a blueprint for imperial policies consistent with proffering support for the building of a Jewish national home. This set the stage for the creation of the Zionist Commission, initially led by Chaim Weizmann, but also including representatives of British, French, and Italian Jewry unaffiliated with the World Zionist Organization. From the advent of Great Britain’s conquest of Palestine, the
Mak ing Concessions
85
Zionist Commission was expected to campaign for exclusive British rule over the country and to help translate military facts on the ground into a permanent administrative order. Because France held the former Ottoman Syrian provinces to be part of its rightful postwar sphere of infl uence, it also implicitly projected a claim for shared authority over Palestine or for an international regime as a concession to the counterclaims of Great Britain. Hence, the Zionist Commission was charged with the task of advocating for a British Palestine in order to relieve one European power of the appearance of discarding or overturning earlier diplomatic promissory notes to another. The Commission was also expected to render assurances to Palestine’s Arabs that a Jewish national home would not endanger their future or their security.24 Eventually, the responsibilities of the Commission were stipulated as follows: 1. To help in establishing friendly relations between the Jews on the one hand, and the Arabs and other non-Jewish communities on the other. 2. To form a link between the British authorities and the Jewish people in Palestine. 3. To help with relief work in Palestine and to assist in the repatriation of evacuated persons and refugees, so far as the military situation will allow. 4. To assist in restoring and developing the Jewish colonies, and in reorganizing the Jews in general. 5. To collect information and report upon the possibilities of future Jewish developments in Palestine in light of the declaration of his Majesty’s Government.25
What began as a temporary advisory body quickly became a Zionist fixture serving as custodian of priorities from its Palestine office long after the return of Weizmann and of many of the original members to Europe. British policy-makers hoped the Zionist Commission would “give effect to the policy contained in the Balfour Declaration”26 without undermining imperial interests, the latter safeguarded by the Military Administration’s presumably pursuing a strategy designed to restore normalcy and stability to a region whose map deprived its inhabitants of both. Not surprisingly, the Commission and the Military Government rarely operated in tandem or without friction, while the very appearance of dual governing bodies meant that measures taken to inhibit confl ict often provoked it.
Exiled in the Homeland
86
The operations of the Zionist Commission (1919–1921) at once affirmed the assumptions implicit in Great Britain’s decision to back the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home, exposed its ambiguities, and signaled the lines of future problems. Its activities also demonstrated that Weizmann’s moderate tactics remained fragile along multiple axes. The Commission initially incorporated the work of private Jewish charities and distributed aid to Palestine’s Jews. “During the three and a half years in which it functioned, the commission had at its disposal more than a million pounds sterling . . . a little less than 40 percent of all the Jewish public funds that reached Palestine during that period.”27 Channeling funds to soup kitchens, health clinics, and educational institutions, the Commission helped to restore normalcy to the Jewish community even as chaos and confusion still engulfed Palestine’s Arabs. Its access to significant resources from a number of important international non-Zionist Jewish philanthropies impressed British politicians and justified claims that world Jewry held the Zionist movement in high regard. Zionist observers, within and without Palestine, vehemently disagreed about the adequacy of the Commission’s work. Because most money supported the non-Zionist religious communities in Palestine’s holy cities, the financial support extended was condemned as characteristic of a “wasteful and debilitating philanthropic body” and unworthy of a Zionist organization. Aid to artisans and craftsmen intended to form the groundwork of a productive base in the cities also triggered severe criticism from the Zionist leadership in London as economically unwise and fiscally irresponsible.28 The actions of the Zionist Commission by no means solved the problem of balancing British and Zionist interests in Palestine and in many instances, led to a rather troubled state of relations. For British attempts to introduce a new order into a region uncertain and unclear about its political future were often compromised by the Commission’s commitment to bold assertions of Jewish claims, particularly in the economic and cultural domains. For every project calling for Zionist funds, the Commission demanded preference for Jewish firms. The Commission insisted that Hebrew be recognized as one of Palestine’s official languages—a demand the British eventually conceded—whereas the insistence on a Jewish currency for Palestine was rejected. At the heart of the Commission’s activities was the commitment to making local culture and society in Palestine conform to Zionist principles. But just as aggressive assertions of national identity created friction with Military Government officials, the Commission’s expenditures and its decisions to underwrite a series
Mak ing Concessions
87
of small economic initiatives increasingly violated all Zionist budgetary guidelines, provoking severe stress with the movement’s leadership.29 The British decision in 1920 to replace its Military Government with a civil administration convinced the World Zionist Organization to disband the Zionist Commission in 1921 and charge its own Executive with assisting the British in creating the national home. I m m i g r at i o n P o l i c i e s, Z i o n i s t A c t i o n s That the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish national home in the land of Israel won international legitimacy before it was fully embraced by Jews across the globe as the best hope for their future forced Zionists to juggle a series of dangerous and unanticipated confl icting demands. Given the difficulties of reading too far into the sweep of world history, Zionist leaders fully appreciated that Great Britain’s Balfour policy raised both the expectations and the stakes for the movement’s capacity to develop Palestine and for its ability to show that their cause resonated with the wishes of Jews throughout the world. Matched by the grandeur of their world-historical cause, then, were the difficulties Zionists encountered in their daily efforts to create a viable Jewish community in Palestine worthy of what was widely perceived as Great Britain’s risky imperial venture. With regard to immigration, Great Britain’s Balfour policy initially brought with it more expenses and responsibilities than the World Zionist Organization could handle. Zionist immigration policies could not then be shaped by ideal visions, but rather by short-term calculations. Dovetailing the projects of Empire with Zionism meant that older cultural genres and ideological tropes were extended, if not redefined, to explain and justify policies that sometimes restricted rather than opened Palestine’s gates to Jews who sought entry. In prosperous times, the World Zionist Organization was better—but never entirely—able to keep an equilibrium between values and actions. Rather than simply translating dreams into policies, Zionist leaders recognized that they had to order their blueprints to accord with British policies and interests. And because their position was tenuous, Zionist leaders wanted to design proposals that absolutely avoided displaying any signs of failure, particularly at a time when the movement lacked the means to navigate to certain success. The sequence of events during the first year of Great Britain’s civil administration both set off and demonstrated the challenges Zionist leaders had to confront with regard to the issue of immigration following the
Exiled in the Homeland
88
end of World War I, an awful and divisive conflagration for both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Although the conclusion of hostilities allowed the British to issue what amounted to an invitation to Jews to come and rebuild Palestine, the war, itself, had killed off or impoverished the very European communities possessed of the most highly developed Zionist consciousness and of the will to invest in, rather than simply send charity to, a Jewish national home. Jews in the United States closely aligned with banking, commercial, and manufacturing sectors generally regarded Palestine as an object of philanthropic benevolence and not as an environment hospitable for investment. Wealthy U.S. Jews sought foreign investment opportunities in places yielding the kind of capitalist dynamic nowhere to be found in Palestine.30 While Americans provided financing for an array of modest development projects in Palestine, they neither raised nor supplied sufficient financing for the World Zionist Organization to help all the immigrants who came to Palestine adjust to the country’s hardships. The stream of Jews still flowed west, and because the World Zionist Organization could not cope with those who did arrive on Palestine’s shores, it could not absolutely vindicate Great Britain’s decision to back the Zionist enterprise. Here is Ilan Troen’s summary of postwar Jewish immigration trends, which implies a failure to impose a Zionist writ on the migrations of Jews: “The anticipated infl ux of Jewish pioneers did not occur for a variety of reasons: there were more attractive destinations; the paths of alternative emigration were well-organized; and Palestine was economically unattractive and lacked the physical comforts that could be found elsewhere.”31 For different reasons, both Arabs and Zionists feared Jewish immigration. When the streets were filled with recent arrivals looking for work and for their place in Palestine, Arabs saw the crowds as evidence of Zionist success and of the possibility that an increase in the number of Jews might actually establish a population base adequate for a national home. Zionist leaders, for their part, worried about signs of failure, seeing in the sequence of immigration, unemployment, starvation, and eventually mass exodus an indication that the Jews would never be able to produce a Jewish majority, thereby obliging Great Britain to devise a new formula for ruling Palestine. Mandatory officials not only temporarily halted immigration in the wake of the 1921 riots; they also decided that in the future they would place limits on the numbers of Jews allowed into the country.32 Given Zionism’s
Mak ing Concessions
89
paltry resources and poor expectations, it was scarcely imaginable that the national home could be developed in any but the most gradual of ways. The Zionist Executive urged potential immigrants to hold back, but their instructions were often ignored by subordinates entrusted with actually distributing the immigration certificates in various European cities. The new principle introduced by Great Britain in 1922 stipulating that Jewish immigration would be conditioned by Palestine’s “economic absorptive capacity” suited the World Zionist Organization. For British officials, incorporating the idea of “economic absorptive capacity” into Palestine’s immigration policies was intended to establish a strong connection between Jewish population growth and what they viewed as their most serious domestic problem—Arab opposition to the creation of a Jewish national home. For Zionists, the phrase primarily had a Jewish resonance—whether or not Palestine’s Jewish economy could offer jobs to new immigrants.33 But concessions on professed principles could not be reduced to a simple formula, no matter how elastic the meaning of the phrase. For Zionist officials charged with forming or implementing immigration policies engaged in perpetual compromises: socialists gave preference to the rich over the poor; avowed secularists did not interfere with the immigration of Orthodox Jews, many of whom opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Zionist leaders, claiming to speak on behalf of all Jews and searching for those who would not leave the country in times of economic hardships, failed to notice that Middle Eastern Jews remained despite their impoverishment and the discriminatory practices of many Zionist-sponsored organizations. Instructions from the Zionist Executive to stop handing out certificates because of economic problems in Palestine were often ignored when officials in Europe encountered protests from local Jewish organizations that people waiting for permission to immigrate were straining the resources of local charities.34 Sometimes, even those who demonstrated absolute loyalty to the Zionist model of pioneering through their participation in He-Halutz—the labor movement’s framework for preparing Jews for agricultural work in Palestine—were denied certificates if local officials gave priority to those without support networks in Europe.35 The Zionist position on immigration in the 1920s was hardly unified or consistent, and what was most distinctive about its central point of reference—”economic absorptive capacity”—was that it was not so much a principle as a series of compromises aimed at reconciling a number of opposing demands.
Exiled in the Homeland
90
When the World Zionist Organization agreed to accept responsibility for selecting immigrants within the guidelines fixed in mandatory regulations, it did so after prolonged debate, and sometimes with considerable misgiving. Conscious of the movement’s own political and economic limitations, the Zionist leadership, of necessity, had to acknowledge that while power over immigration did not flow in simple channels, it did run ultimately in one direction. Zionist leaders, consequently, took for granted cooperation with mandatory authorities as a core operating principle on matters of immigration. Operating within a quadrilateral of forces, the World Zionist Organization would sacrifice values and allegiances to the one great aim of doing nothing particularly with regard to immigration to forfeit Great Britain’s support for the national home. Zionist policy stances could not be forged until differences among the movement’s own officials in the treasury department and in the political affairs and immigration offices were resolved. Only after the political, economic, and ideological divides were bridged could the Zionist Executive launch negotiations with mandatory officials. Mandatory and Zionist officials were equally anxious to portray the negotiating process as a shared responsibility, if only to avoid assuming the full burden of caring for immigrants after their arrival.36 The World Zionist Organization had limited resources that could not be easily stretched to provide funds simultaneously for the absorption of immigrants and adequate disbursements for the unemployed. Most of the Zionist budget supported the purchase of land and the newly created collective and cooperative agricultural settlements, even though over 80 percent of Palestine’s Jewish immigrants headed to the country’s cities or to the nearby towns, the latter rapidly developing urban characteristics. Such a skewed allocation revealed the ways in which the multiple budgetary needs pressed against one another and that sustaining a viable demographic base could come only at the expense of creating a territory capable of being transcribed onto a map as an independent country.37 The caution that characterized Zionist proposals on immigration continued with redoubled force through the 1920s because Zionist leaders feared that immigrants might demand more extensive financial aid than the organization could provide or that the movement might be stained by mandatory officials if the wrong kinds of people arrived in Palestine. The Zionist Executive was willing, even anxious, to screen out agitators, particularly like those whose May Day parade was held responsible for triggering the Arab violence that spiraled into a month of riots in 1921.38 In
Mak ing Concessions
91
deference to Great Britain’s antipathy for the Soviet Union, Zionist officials purged many Labor Zionists, viewed as too radical, from their immigration roles, even those in Soviet prison camps whose only hope for freedom was immigrating to Palestine. Here is Ziva Galili’s summary of how the two chief immigration officials from the World Zionist Organization and mandatory administration collaborated to minimize the risks involved in bringing Soviet Jews to Palestine—even those punished and imprisoned for their Zionist activities: Beyond the particulars of their parallel attacks on the immigration regulations of October 1927, Kisch [Zionist immigration official] shared Hyamson’s [mandatory immigration administrator] goal of preventing radical elements from entering Palestine. To be sure, the PZE [Palestine or World Zionist Organization Executive] rejected any British interference in the politics of Zionism. In spring of 1929, it had balked at the broader impediments imposed by the Commandant of Police, requiring the Jewish Agency to vouch for the immigrants’ political reliability. But it was determined to dispel British fears, and for that reason Kisch agreed after further discussions with the Chief Secretary that the PZE would make every effort to ascertain the party affiliation of those nominated for immigration from Soviet Russia, as long as it did not have to take full responsibility for their political reliability.39
For Palestine’s Jewish community, the World Zionist Organization functioned as a prism separating the immigrants into a broad spectrum of categories. Historical demography suggests that the World Zionist Organization, above all, tried to balance numbers against resources as much as against employment prospects. The admission of people “possessing a certain amount of wealth, varying between a minimum of PL500 and PL1,000 (PL250 for skilled artisans) and/or assured a secure income stream of PL60 annually” was not restricted before 1939.40 Severely limited by the resources at its disposal and the flow of investment funds to Palestine, the World Zionist Organization may have structured a mechanism of immigrant selection that seemed to reflect what its officials said they held sacred and gave preference to those prepared to engage in physical labor on the land, but the private memos and discussions told a different story that stressed issuing permits to those who could turn to relatives or friends in the country if they could not sweat out sustenance from their own labor.41 The Zionist national creed did nothing to diminish the handy ambigui-
Exiled in the Homeland
92
ties embodied in its stipulated principles, allowing Zionists to cite them as justifications for quite diverse policy proposals. The more official policies offered privileges to those with capital, the more labor organizations raised the counterclaims of workers. But this clash of tongues over immigration priorities had little impact on Zionist programs during these years. Twice during each year, Zionist officials presented requests to the British mandatory administration for so-called labor certificates. The numbers resulted from a calculation of job openings during the previous six months minus the number of unemployed in the same period, with an addition of 15 percent for women expected to serve as household workers.42 Requests from Zionist immigration officials were based upon close inspection of almost every aspect of the Jewish economy in Palestine. The reports surveyed the employment situation in Palestine’s cities, homing in on the prospects for job creation in the private as well as in the public sector. In covering municipalities and other publicly supported enterprises, the statistics reflected past patterns of preference for one group over another. (Generally Arabs had a 6:4 ratio over Jews in this sector.)43 Mandatory officials clearly took the analyses presented by Zionist officials seriously, as this memorandum written by Albert Hyamson, head of Palestine’s Immigration Department, suggests: Gentlemen, I have the honour to refer to your letters, S/182/29 of the 22nd of March last and S/224/29 of the 24th April, on the subject of the Labour Immigration Schedule for the current half year and to state that His Excellency the High Commissioner, who has had the matter under his consideration has approved the following schedule for the six monthly period April–September 1929: (i) 1500 men between the ages of 18 and 35. (ii) 600 women between the ages of 18 and 35. (iii) 300 skilled men above the age of 18. The men may be accompanied by their wives and unmarried children under the age of 18 if any. The women are not entitled to bring dependents with them. The 1500 men will include 900 Zionist refugees from Russia within the ages mentioned and 600 members of the working class who have entered Palestine either as travelers or otherwise apply during the half year under
Mak ing Concessions
93
consideration for permission to remain permanently in the country and whose maintenance is guaranteed by you for a period of one year. The 600 women will include similarly (a) Zionist refugees and (b) persons discovered to be during the Scheduled period, in Palestine without permission and in addition (c) the relatives, including fiancées, but excluding wives, of members of the working and lower middle classes who may desire to settle in Palestine and who are nominated by you. Of the 1500 certificates in respect of men under the age of 35 a thousand will be placed at your disposal immediately and I shall be glad to learn at your convenience the centres to which they will be distributed. It is anticipated that it will be possible to allot to you further certificates later in the half year. For the immigration certificates at the disposal of women, individual nominations should be made, [and] the name and address in Palestine of a relative or friend who will be responsible for the prospective immigrant’s maintenance and will be able to provide her with a home if necessary [should] be given. 400 certificates in the class will be placed at your disposal for the present. It has been decided that the 300 certificates for skilled men shall be issued from this office as occasion arises. I shall, however, be prepared to consider representations from you as regards requirements in this respect from employers of skilled labor.44
As the memorandum indicates, official “labor schedule” requests, informed by the data provided by Zionist officials, paid a good deal of attention to gender and provided a veritable history of the progress for women in Palestine and their continued subordination. Fewer women than men came to Palestine in the 1920s.45 Many were expected to work in domestic service, although according to these same inquiries, female immigrants viewed agricultural labor more favorably than their male counterparts.46 Women had to struggle against the gender-based stereotypes to find work: their dreams seemed to collide with popular perceptions of their capacities. They had a better chance of realizing their dreams if they found entrance into a training program.47 Zionist immigration officials acknowledged that female graduates of these various programs were more successful in securing employment and in negotiating their way through the obstacles and difficulties in Palestine. Albert Hyamson’s memorandum also shows that the Zionist immigration story cannot be fully narrated through the statistics, important
Exiled in the Homeland
94
as they were in marking the movement’s progress toward establishing a Jewish majority in Palestine. Hyamson’s letter attests to the existence of an “illegal” immigration: considerable numbers of Jews who wished to make Palestine their home managed to enter the country—perhaps as tourists—without certificates.48 Moreover, the several officially sanctioned immigrant sponsors listed in the memorandum certainly provided loopholes for vitiating what was intended as a rigidly designed quota system sensitive to the economic imperatives that both mandatory and Zionist officials sought to apply. Thus the illusion of a unified Zionist consensus on immigration may have been matched by the fiction that mandatory officials fully controlled the process. A cash-strapped Zionist organization unavoidably displayed relentless concern with the expenses involved in bringing immigrants under the Labor Schedule to Palestine. Many laborers had no usable skills, and training took time and cost money. Instructors had to be hired and paid salaries. Tools had to be purchased to enable immigrant laborers to work. Zionist institutions had to pay the fixed costs of room and board for a stipulated period. Funds often had to be found for subsidizing the costs of transporting laborers from one work site to another. The building of barracks and adequate sanitary facilities sometimes forced the Zionist Executive to extend loans rather than allocations to the few organizations in Palestine trying to help new immigrants find employment.49 Finally, the price of the partly subsidized steamship tickets took enough of a toll on the Zionist budget allocation for immigration officials in Palestine to bombard commercial shipping companies with letters bargaining for lower fares.50 Necessarily obsessed with statistics—the number of immigrants and emigrants, the numbers possessing capital, the numbers requiring maintenance and training before becoming employable—Zionist immigration officials were pushed powerfully in two directions at once: to overstate the number of certificates requested from the mandatory authorities and to understate the number available for distribution. Of course, it was almost impossible to engage in a permanent inquiry into these numbers without raising questions that might prove embarrassing, if not damaging to the Zionist cause, about the reasons why some immigrants stayed and some left, particularly during times of turmoil and severe economic distress. Some of those inspired by Zionist ideals quickly became disillusioned by their experiences in Palestine and driven by circumstances into a kind of apostasy. Even as they moved up to the land of Israel as committed Zionists, they were plunged downward by unemployment and hunger
Mak ing Concessions
95
into despair and rage. Their number was too high to dismiss, and many were too vocal to ignore. In the good times, there was a kind of balance between those who found fulfillment in the Jewish homeland and those unable to adjust. About 15–17 percent of the immigrants left the country in the good years, a dropout rate similar to those of other countries attracting citizens of other lands. But in times when Zionist institutions teetered near bankruptcy, the rates skyrocketed: 67 percent in 1926 and 309 percent in 1927.51 Many of the emigrants felt abandoned and alone; some accused Zionist agencies of tricking them with the aura of national promise. They not only felt trapped in the country; many were stuck, caught without official papers or victims of the barriers created to control borders drawn, in some cases, in the aftermath of the Great War. Apart from the almost unbearable financial burdens associated with leaving the country, including the ever rising cost of tickets, there were also many complex bureaucratic hurdles that made it difficult for many in Palestine to find a better place to live and work. Some countries would not grant visas to holders of Russian passports, fearing the entry of communists. Others simply would not grant even transit permits to citizens of the Ottoman Empire.52 Willing to confide their sufferings and anger to the public at large, some disillusioned Zionists appealed to the mandatory government and even to Arab leaders—unsuccessfully, of course—for financial aid, charging that “the Zionists are a minority not only amongst Arabs but even amongst Jews.”53 A few resorted to launching attacks against Zionist officials, while some spent their time greeting new immigrants with the following warnings: “Why did you come? We haven’t got anything to eat and neither will you have anything to eat.”54 For a long time the judgments rendered about emigrants were tempered by a broad-based capacity to identify with the suffering of those whose idealism was depleted by an environment that enfeebled both body and soul.55 But given the questions over whether or not Great Britain’s backing of a Jewish national home was a mistake, any developments that did not measure up to mandatory standards of success provoked Zionists not to find explanations for the emigration but rather to deflect this dismal sign away from their project in Palestine. Eventually those who left Palestine began to be assailed with vehement terms of abuse as insufficiently Zionist and as putting personal interests above national needs.56 An utterly uncompromising vocabulary of social disdain surged forth, eliminating the words that might have evinced sympathy for those who could not abide the loneliness or for those who feared the long bouts of hunger.
Exiled in the Homeland
96
The metaphors and words with which the charges were pitched, so redolent of Labor Zionist rhetoric, gave the workers’ movement great purchase over the norms and values entering the Zionist discourse on immigration. Paradoxically, although Labor Zionism did much to highlight the so-called moral inferiority of emigrants, it also erected the institution—the Histadrut—most devoted to helping new immigrants find jobs and integrate into what was for most an unfamiliar environment.57 Through its attention to the needs of immigrants, the Histadrut expanded its membership, and Labor Zionism not only recruited new conscripts but also created a virtual social contract, exchanging aid for loyalty and votes.58 The social contract presented by the Histadrut in the 1920s foreshadowed trends that gathered momentum in the next decade, when political party affiliation became one of the main currencies securing immigration certificates to Palestine.59 By calibrating emigration on a scale of Zionist values, Labor Zionists produced an echo not only of the Zionist impulse for social engineering but also of its diagnosis of Jewish life. Marginalized and presumably alienated in the countries of their birth, Jews were expected, according to this analysis, to be socially and spiritually strengthened, not weakened, by their return to build their homeland in the place where they belonged. Fearing that leaving Palestine would become a metaphor for the unease many Jews actually experienced in Palestine, Labor Zionists instead preferred to interpret emigration as a shirking of responsibility. A true reckoning with the process and costs of absorbing Jews into the national home would have overpowered the Zionist organization’s financial capacity and threatened Zionist claims even as it was beyond the grasp of Zionist semantics. To say that Jews needed help adjusting to Palestine’s Jewish community was, to Zionists, laden with incoherence. To admit that serious attention had to be given to the integration of Jewish immigrants into the evolving homeland threatened to fray Zionism’s contrast between home and exile as definitive of the Jewish condition. Zionists shared a common recognition that while Jews in Palestine confronted hardships, they would instantly fit into the country’s community because they would no longer be treated as strangers, as they presumably had been in the Gentile world they left behind. Zionist ideologies bequeathed to Jewish officials in Palestine a precise language urging Jews to leave the towns and villages where they were born and participate in the arduous and dangerous mission of building a national home. But for many reasons, Zionist officials could not tran-
Mak ing Concessions
97
scribe their ideologies into policies. In public, immigration proposals put forward by the Zionist Executive reflected the values long embraced by the movement. But the Zionist dream that could only be fulfilled in the future had to be balanced by sensitivity to circumstances in the present and by the growing realization that the immigration process could not be completely controlled. Persistent economic upheavals produced a set of troubled Zionist discussions on immigration. Of all workers, it was the unskilled and new immigrants who lost out most frequently during economic downturns and suffered massively during periods of prolonged depression. Many were actually encouraged to leave the country, even if their departure meant returning to Jewish communities in Europe already caught in the crossfire between assertive anti-Semitic populism and severe economic dislocations.60 Publicly, Zionists made sure never to utter the word “expulsion,” for to do so would be an admission of failure both in their reading of Jewish history and in their projections of a glorious nationalist future that the Jewish people were expected to embrace with enthusiasm. The relatively high rates of emigration during the first decade of British rule raised questions about the short- and long-term prospects of the Zionist project and about the depth of Jewish support for it. Professing belief in the right of all Jews to live in Palestine did not stop Zionist officials from accepting the idea of immigration quotas based on the “economic absorptive capacity” and from trying to limit the numbers of those who entered without resources and without families to care for them. Zionist officials even encouraged the departure of those too ill to work and of those who might be forever dependent on community resources for sustenance and medical services. Those with chronic physical and mental illnesses were offered funds to return to Europe whether or not they had families or friends to care for them there. Zionist officials knew very well the lines they could not cross in public, but their actions in private sometimes deprived the weak and vulnerable of a support system they desperately needed.61 Officials did not form their views on immigration reflexively based on their political party affiliations. Everyone subscribed to the belief that immigration would be the central agent for developing the Jewish national home, but differed over its ideal class or gender makeup more than over its political party profile during the early years of the Mandate. Labor Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff insisted that those Jews inculcated with the pioneering spirit through such movements as He-Halutz be given priority,62 but his comrade Yosef Sprinzak considered marriage status the cru-
Exiled in the Homeland
98
cial marker and indicator of future successful absorption. Taking stock of the needs of Palestine’s Jewish community, Sprinzak initially argued for offering “unmarrieds” preference. They could be easily moved around the country, presumably in line with the job market, and carried through the hard times of unemployment for less money than a family would require. But the high rate of emigration punctured Sprinzak’s assumptions about young single workers, and he soon argued that families should be offered certificates before those not married.63 His new view derived from the belief that families would reduce loneliness, strike deep roots in Palestine, and be reluctant to leave the country even during times of distress. Two serious economic depressions—in 1923 and from 1925 to 1928— pushed Zionist officials into private discussions about expelling Jews from Palestine. The discussions preceded rumors that mandatory authorities were pondering whether or not to alleviate unemployment by returning Jews to Europe, but certainly gathered more force when officials heard of this possibility. Fearing a total loss of authority over Palestine’s Jewish community, the Zionist Executive believed it could not relinquish its responsibilities for developing the national home, even when assuming these burdens meant formulating policies hostile to the Zionist ethic. Immigration had brought the World Zionist Organization to the centers of power in Palestine and was viewed even in these years of severe crisis primarily through the prism of power. The large numbers of unemployed roaming the streets in search of food, shelter, and work persuaded officials across the political spectrum— even advocates of mass immigration—to accept strict limits and a system of preferences. Although its moral authority was framed around the notion that Jews had a historic right to create a homeland, the Zionist movement secretly discussed expelling Jews from Palestine with surprisingly few tensions generated. Leaders may have differed over which groups to expel— the unemployed, as representatives of middle class political parties suggested, or the petty bourgeoisie, as Labor Zionists insisted—but no leader or official registered principled opposition to the idea of expulsion as an evil worthy of condemnation. One might have expected such an explosive issue to have triggered serious confl ict, but Zionists had clearly decided that they had to choose among a series of bad alternatives in order to check damage to Palestine’s Jewish community and to the authority of Zionist institutions.64 Between 1919 and 1929 more than 100,000 Jews crossed Europe or parts of the Mediterranean to come to Palestine.65 Most settled in cities. In years
Mak ing Concessions
99
of economic distress in Europe and increasing outbursts of anti-Semitism, demand for immigration certificates increased. Economic downturns in Palestine or eruptions of Arab nationalist violence typically convinced prospective immigrants to delay their departure or, if already in the country, to leave. Bracketed by violence in 1920 and 1929, the first decade of British rule was by no means a period of stable economic and political relations for Palestine’s Jews. But those who survived the disruptions and upheavals at the beginning of the 1920s enjoyed a much improved system of transportation at its end and were able to take advantage of the emergence of new markets in land and produce. Despite its volatility and incremental nature, economic change had tremendous consequences for the Jewish community. But the major impetus for this economic development came not from pioneers instilled with the desire to turn themselves into agricultural laborers—relatively few immigrants found permanent employment as tillers of the soil—but rather from the Jews driven out of Europe by the rising tide of anti-Semitism, most of whom transported their smallbusiness skills to turn Palestine’s towns into cities.66 Population growth and economic progress came to Palestine’s Jewish community in ways that eluded Zionist predictions, and the groups driving both trends were extended no credit for their contributions in Zionism’s public discourse. More important, these trends had no discernible impact on how Zionist officials thought about immigration or about the people who might be the best prospects for continuing the development of the Jewish national home. But two unanticipated events did profoundly reshape British and Zionist views of Jewish immigration and helped solidify a new vocabulary reflective of the rapidly changing and increasingly difficult circumstances. The first event was the outbreak of violence in 1929. It left bloody and painful scars on both Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and convinced Zionist officials that what they were experiencing was now more threatening than past riots and more likely to dislocate their relationship with Great Britain. The policy proposals fashioned by Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield in 1930 only confirmed their worst fears and expectations.67 More important, Zionist leaders now believed that the establishment of a national home would be subjected to the tyranny of a new shortened timetable that would preclude the possibility of completing the Zionist project.68 At stake, according to Zionists, was nothing less than the fate of the Jewish national home.
Exiled in the Homeland
100
Alongside the increasingly vocal and effective Arab opposition to Great Britain’s policy endorsing a Jewish national home came another development in the form of a lethal anti-Semitism, reaching a crescendo with Hitler’s rise to power. The expansion of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Europe further intensified Zionist anxieties about time and about the movement’s international bearings and produced new potentially troublesome confl icts over immigration. The impulse for social engineering seemed about to be overwhelmed by the need to save Jewish lives. Under pressure from the onslaught of anti-Semitism, Jews in Europe increased their demand for permission to reside in Palestine, and when denied, often found their way into the country illegally.69 Zionist leaders could have embraced a policy of unlimited immigration touching the deepest emotions of Jews in desperate need of a refuge. But such a policy stance would have pushed the mandatory authorities well beyond what they would accept and put at risk a relationship that had worked relatively well for a decade. The movement might have been stripped of all its infl uence over immigration. Not wishing to set aside their power for a principle that was unlikely to be implemented, Zionists could also imagine that even if the principle of a mass transfer of Jews to the country became policy, it might very well backfire and unleash as much civil strife within communities as across them.70 Immigration provided the World Zionist Organization with access to the corridors of power in Palestine. In the second decade of British rule, it was perfectly rational for Zionists to believe that the cornerstone of their power was unraveling. It was also reasonable to assume that an increasingly precarious cooperative relationship between the World Zionist Organization and Great Britain could be entirely undone by a direct confrontation over immigration. But heavy reliance on Great Britain did not prevent Zionist leaders in these first years of the Mandate’s second decade from searching for new linguistic resources for thinking about immigration. In these years, Zionists began to see in the movement of Jews across the European continent a powerful engine of international mobilization, but only under the right circumstances.71 Zionist immigration officials could not yet advance the idea of unlimited Jewish immigration with the same fl uency as they spoke about balancing numbers against resources. Economic absorptive capacity had been a linguistic ritual for so many years that it could not be easily set aside as principle or as phrase. It was, after all, of critical importance in the Zionist configuration of power. Controlling the flow of immigrants with a
Mak ing Concessions
101
grid of economic categories and criteria lost its relevance only as a savage scale of slaughter prepared its assaults. A movement once energized by the prospect of bringing Jews to Palestine to rebuild their historic land now felt the pull of other dire needs. A language steeped in a vocabulary of rights began to be heard, effectively repudiating the old talk rooted in occupational categories. C o n c lu d i n g R e m a r k s Troubled to the point of heartbreak by their own political impotence, Zionist officials made one last concession to Great Britain on the matter of immigration after the White Paper of 1939 was issued which placed limits on Jewish population growth. Juxtaposed against the virulence of their speeches condemning the new harsh regulations was a general compliance in order to avoid descending into a confrontation the Zionist movement would surely lose. With violence having only recently reached a fever pitch in Palestine and a war looming in Europe, the World Zionist Organization could not afford to precipitate a crisis that would turn mandatory officials more decisively against the now expanding national home. World War II halted the erosion of the older vocabulary even as it produced the pressures which ultimately, when hostilities ended, fueled the newly crafted Zionist language on immigration. Following the defeat of the murderous Nazi regime and the disclosure of the scale of its genocidal violence, Zionist leaders believed that the time was ripe to claim their national rights, beginning their struggle for statehood by encouraging Jewish survivors in Europe to make their way to Palestine with or without permission. But the prelude for what became known later as the inalienable right of Jews to return to their homeland was set in motion well before the wartime efforts to extinguish Jewish life in Europe.
four
Mi
The heroic efforts to transform the Jewish people grew out of the ashes of the First World War, with many young Zionist activists projecting their utopian visions as unquestioned articles of Zionist faith. Even as they denounced as moribund and doomed to extinction the religion of their parents, Zionists could not imagine their collective future without an imperative set of strictures shaping belief and behavior. Anita Shapira saw that Labor Zionism became a potent movement partly because it substituted extraordinary ideological claims for once revered transcendent religious principles. “[T]he Palestinian labor movement was . . . first and foremost a great fraternity of believers—people whose lives were directed by an all-consuming faith.”1 Jewish teenage boys and girls in Europe caught in the tumultuous forces of war and nationalist uprisings turned their consciousness of being trapped between a repetitive past of repression and a future where hatred of Jews was deeply embedded into a certainty that a strict adherence to the enlightened principles of justice and equality would produce a utopian Jewish homeland. In World War I, Jews discovered that they inhabited one of the most strategically pivotal regions in Europe. Jewish towns and villages became battlefields for armies marching to engage their enemies, but slaughtering Jews on their way because the latter’s ethnicity and religion marked them as suitable subjects for hatred. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by czarist troops; half a million were exiled from their homes, whereas another 100,000 were massacred by anti-Bolshevik forces in the Ukraine during the civil war in Russia between 1917 and 1921.2 A vulnerable people, many of whose towns and villages were erased from Europe’s new geography and who appeared withered and dying, found spiritual hope, according to Anita Shapira, in
Mishnah Impossible
103
[t]wo events of crucial significance . . . the Balfour Declaration and the October Revolution in Russia. These events gave rise to messianic expectations among Jewish youth in Russia. . . . There was a feeling in the air that the Jewish people were now going to be compensated for their sufferings and that the dark days of war were about to give birth to the light of national redemption.3
In the aftermath of the carnage, the postwar international context embracing the principle of minority rights and intended as protection for Jews against discrimination actually reinforced the idea of the Jew as outsider and threat. And although the First World War may have functioned in many ways to foster international recognition of Jews as a national minority, it also touched off the problems of development that typically stoked the fires of Jew-hatred—low standard of living, limited investment, and rapid population increase.4 This, then, was Zionism’s great moment. The fact that hitherto virtually unknown nationalities had risen to dizzying heights of statehood, undreamed of before the war, produced both precedents for the Zionist argument and conditions ripe for attracting large numbers of Jews to Palestine’s shores. In the immediate postwar atmosphere and in the wake of the great triumph of the national principle, everything seemed possible. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the anchoring of Great Britain’s Mandate in Palestine in support of a Jewish national home saved the Zionist cause and transformed what had been the improbability of Jewish independence into a distinct possibility. A British commitment to support in Palestine the establishment of a Jewish national home and an Eastern Europe in which Jewish national consciousness and anti-Semitism were both strengthened caused hundreds of thousands of Jews to see a connection between their aspirations and the need for a Jewish state.5 But some number of Zionists, driven by necessity to seek a political solution to the problems encountered in an age of nationalism and dictatorship, generated ambitions not simply for a state and society like all other nations but also for redemption, the hope that a Jewish state and society would provide a new kind of social order without hierarchy, without exploitation, and with justice and equality for all. The images so indelibly inscribed in the conventional histories of Israel’s founding tend to confirm the notion that a Jewish nation was remade and a new collective identity formed. In a land with no natural resources
Exiled in the Homeland
104
claimed by a movement possessing too little capital for the tasks it undertook, Israel seems to have been established by a collective act of will. The country’s founders pushed this notion to the extreme by presenting the agricultural collectives—never encompassing more than a tiny percentage of Palestine’s Jewish population—as emblematic of the Jewish national home and of a community presumably forged by faith in a set of shared Zionist commandments: to live in freedom, to work the land, and to revitalize the Hebrew language. Zionists would remake their world with their own hands in accordance with their own moral convictions. Barely able to feed their bodies, these young men and women expected to be sustained by the purity of their vision. Expectations this extreme, one might say, must be doomed from the start. This chapter will explore attempts to reshape the character and society undertaken in Palestine by Labor Zionist visionaries, with special but not exclusive attention given to Hashomer Hatzair as one of the first selfanointed movements that not only imagined a Zionist utopia but also tried to build it. The more Hashomer Hatzair members became mired in the poverty and turmoil of the First World War, the more they were convinced of their own power to remake themselves and turn Jewish society in Palestine into a model of justice for the world. Can this be because their wartime experience, with all its terrors, somehow not only suggested to them the techniques needed to determine their own fates but also imparted to them the energy with which to translate their theories into practice? Highlighting Hashomer Hatzair idealists requires some justification because they were, in many ways, exceptional. But although they projected what appeared to be an uncompromising idealism that often ignited furious derision, they also moved well within the orbit of mainstream Zionism in believing in the possibility of historic transformation and in the power of human beings to make themselves felt in fixing its trajectory and in giving it meaning and substance.6 Although other Zionist utopian programs enlisted militant action, they, too, were prompted by the same internal convictions that set Hashomer Hatzair on its course of action and inspired such rapturous admiration. In the dominant culture of Palestine’s Jewish community, Hashomer Hatzair idealists came to personify the Zionist vision in its purest form, a standard against which the achievements of the Jewish homeland came to be measured. Other groups as well caught the imagination of Palestine’s Jewish community because they, too, projected an image of self-sacrifice, an allure springing from the affirmation of their
Mishnah Impossible
105
idealism despite the dangers. Anita Shapira provides this account of why the hard-core leaders of the Gedud ha-Avodah (Labor Battalion) stirred such admiration. “The Gedud operated for seven years, never enrolled more than 10% of Palestine’s workers but loomed large in the imagination. It was considered a national tragedy when a segment returned to the USSR and explained their decision to leave as a failure to fulfill their vision.”7 For visionaries, such as those affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair (and to a lesser extent, with the Gedud ha-Avodah), Zionism had to reach beyond the goals of merely defending or strengthening the Jewish nation; it had to embrace the notion of recasting it into a fundamentally new form. Reconfiguring the Zionist imaginary landscape, visionaries—most of whom affiliated with one or another of the Labor Zionist movements— presented breathtakingly ambitious programs and saw the process of implementing them as the central task of their lives. The term visionary also requires clarification. Visionaries were not necessarily conscious of being more remarkable than the larger group of pioneers of which they were a part. In this chapter, I do not adopt the word so widely used in Zionist historiography—pioneer—because although all pioneers subscribed to one or another Labor Zionist vision, they did not necessarily devote their lives to implementing it in the same literal fashion as the people I will discuss in this chapter. To be sure, pioneers were at the center of Labor Zionist moral and political discourse about place, society, and national identity well into the era of statehood. But the first thing one notes about the years between 1919 and 1924, when supposedly 14,000 pioneers8 entered Palestine, is that there was often great disparity between the situation of pioneers and the ideals they espoused. Not all pioneers remained in Palestine, and many did not engage in manual labor for very long. Many fled to the cities for, as one kibbutz leader put it, “culture and privacy.”9 For many pioneers, communal life turned out to be a form of suffocation. Among pioneers there were differences between those for whom principles pressed powerfully on conscience and life and those for whom they did not. When ideals clashed with economic and political conditions, visionaries showed heightened loyalty to the former, whereas most pioneers accommodated the latter. Nation-building projects as ambitious as those embraced by the visionaries discussed in this chapter arose out of the deluge of a European war that generated both massive social disruptions and intensive and heated debates over the nature and condition of the Jewish people. The war caused
Exiled in the Homeland
106
suffering, but it also triggered an intellectual dynamic that radically revised how Jews understood themselves and how they imagined their future. Although the war did not produce a single definition of Jewish identity or a consensus on the direction of future cultural development, it did seem to “threaten the physical and cultural existence of the Jewish people and turn once vibrant societies into graveyards.”10 The focused brutalities of war convinced these young Zionists to subject all inherited ways of thinking about society to moral judgment. A war that seemed endless had to be a step toward creating social arrangements that would change not only how humans thought about themselves but also how they interacted with one another. The turmoil and violence that triggered the breakdown of institutions and values spurred on Jewish youth, once well placed in the middle class, to raise deep philosophical questions about how people ought to live. Wartime chaos also gave them the ability to see their lives partly in universal terms and imagine that the Jewish homeland would serve as a model of harmony, bestowing benefits on the entire world. In this chapter, I will trace how redeeming land and person acquired almost talismanic power for such visionaries in the early years of the British Mandate and how it became the focus of their unprecedented aspirations. I will describe what happened to these visionaries when their efforts collapsed. If we are to fathom how such utopian visions could become unquestioned articles of faith, we have to examine how the brutality of a war that engulfed so many Jews also convinced many of them to see the Jewish national home as a place of freedom where they could build a society founded on the principles they were developing for a new social order. The War The effects of the First World War in Poland, Russia, and, in particular, in regions of the Ukraine and Galicia, disrupted the lives of all Jews, who were often perceived as the enemy by all sides. Caught in a war they could not stop, Jews were also ritually sacrificed by nationalist forces in popular uprisings they could neither join nor combat. Some young men and women maturing during these years found in Zionism both the psychological and economic support systems necessary to withstand the dangers of war as well as the assaults on their claims to a European cultural heritage. Small groups of teenagers, many now thrown out of their schools and on to the streets to sustain their household needs, organized Zionist
Mishnah Impossible
107
cells to study Hebrew, to provide aid to one another, and above all, to analyze what they perceived as the decline of Europe into chaos and nihilism. Of the early years of Hashomer Hatzair in Europe, David Horowitz, in his memoirs, estimated that about 100 boys and girls belonged to the Vienna branch, which was divided into cells of seven to fifteen members, sometimes along gender lines.11 There were larger Hashomer Hatzair branches throughout Poland and the Ukraine.12 The shock of the war drove many from the villages and small towns, which quickly became battlefields conquered and lost by imperial armies, into the shelter of cities like Vienna, where they joined the refugees walking the streets in search of food and shelter. Jews always had a sense of their own distinctiveness, albeit believing it to be diminishing with the onset of modernity; now they had a mounting consciousness that, against all expectations, their vulnerabilities might be increasing. “[T]he young people who came to Eretz Yisrael . . . were mainly aged from 18–22, forged by the experiences of the war years in Russia, which had separated them from their families, uprooted them from their homes, and interrupted their studies.”13 In the midst of a war in lands where the inhabitants could not insulate themselves from the turmoil and bloodshed that lasted far longer than anticipated, Jews banded together hoping to bring lost humanistic values back to life. Some groups took their name—Hashomer Hatzair— from the young guardsmen defending Jewish agricultural communities in Palestine—the Shomer organization—hoping to nourish in themselves the qualities possessed by Palestine’s self-proclaimed first generation of Jewish soldiers: physical strength, courage, idealism, altruism, and a spirit of adventure. Believing that revitalizing the Jewish people could be a medium for spreading justice throughout the world, Hashomer Hatzair called on its members to commit to the following principles: to live in the land of Israel where Jewish national history was launched, to engage in physical labor, and to communicate only in Hebrew.14 An emphasis on both the land and personal courage appealed to the spirit of youth, while the exigencies of war gathered together an impressive array of talents. Proving his mettle in Vienna during his years as a refugee, David Horowitz attracted attention as an enterprising and intellectually gifted young man. He later wrote of the extraordinary people giving his Hashomer Hatzair youth movement what he called “its most exacting vision.” Some, like Shalom Spiegel, grew up to be famous professors; others became known for their political leadership in European communist parties. Still others, like Sam Spiegel, the Hollywood producer
Exiled in the Homeland
108
of The African Queen and Lawrence of Arabia, were drawn to the arts. David Horowitz, once a Marxist, later a noted economist, eventually became the first director of Israel’s national bank.15 The war inverted traditional family relationships, with children often better able than their parents to find work and negotiate the disorderly street life of refugee-filled cities. Teenagers bumped into one another on the streets where they hawked newspapers or sold goods, and many discovered they shared the same interests. Some found themselves in the company of aspiring poets and writers able to take their learning and inspirations from their descriptions of future possibilities. Hashomer Hatzair activities compensated for the educational deprivations of teenagers expelled from their schools and for their commonly felt profound sense of loss and alienation. The flow of refugees generated the expectation that a shared politics and vision depended as much on culture as on geography. Children filled in the economic gaps left by parents killed by war or caught, in one way or another, by its rampages and unable to cope with its chaos. With families impoverished and dysfunctional, children seemed to become, as if by some uncanny swing of the historical pendulum, ever more powerful and ever more certain of their capacity for changing the course of Jewish history. Youth symbolized a refusal to identify with conventions and suggested an unlimited capacity for rebellion against constricting traditional customs. Defining Hashomer Hatzair’s radical agenda as much against mainstream Zionist goals as against conventional bourgeois morality, David Horowitz wrote that, “for youth, the accession to power can only be through confrontation.”16 Freeing the young from the disciplines of religion, Labor Zionism was also a catalyst for a morality that could transgress the ethical imperatives acknowledged over centuries. In Avigdor Me ͗ iri’s poem “Two Letters,” a member of Gedud ha-Avodah expresses both his determination to remain in the land of Israel despite the hardships of unemployment and starvation and his unwillingness to succumb to the appeals of his sick mother in Europe to return home to care for her. Redeeming the land and the Jewish people, Me ͗ iri implies, takes precedence over discharging parental duties.17 The violence and disorder in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War intruding into the villages and towns where Jews lived and forcing large numbers to take to the roads tested the power of both family and state. The war compelled many young Jews not only to reassess the nature of their national belonging but also to rethink how to build a
Mishnah Impossible
109
solid wall of sentiment. The war detached young men and women from family and traditions. Many chose to mold their ties around their peers who had already successfully adjusted to new and difficult circumstances.18 Neither their parents’ example nor that of their community could guide them through the upheavals they encountered. Their mothers and fathers were immured in the past. The attachment to friends weakened traditional loyalties, but it held out the promise of creating new ideas and a fresh political will. The occasionally wistful memories of David Horowitz suggest that many in the Vienna cells were drawn to the movement primarily for its intensely intellectual atmosphere.19 Pooling resources to obtain food, these teenagers quickly connected to one another through discussions of history, politics, and literature, thereby transforming their conceptions of their shared past and their understanding of their future options. Other testimonies are imprinted with allusions to the emotional bonds among members seeking consolation for their loss of faith and confidence in the possibility of restoring vitality to Jewish life even after the guns were silenced. At a time when factories and massive buildings were changing the landscapes of all cities, these teenagers, following the German youth movement model, infused nature with a national cultural and moral mission.20 Enjoyment of nature soon led to an intense interest in human interactions and in the elements required for the establishment of a just society. The budding visionaries found in nature a simplicity and harmony lacking in their own societies, a place for adventure and the release of enormous energy, and also a metaphor for the organic community they dreamed of creating. Indeed, the step from nature to justice was a logical one in the circumstances of war and was made indispensable by the experiences these teenagers brought to their reading of the works of Marx and Freud, the foremost investigators of history and of thoughts and feelings.21 Jews suffered the full measure of persecution with the defeat of Europe’s multicultural empires and the rise of small nation-states. The Balfour Declaration seemed to make sense out of what was happening in an increasingly senseless Europe by beckoning Jews all over Europe to make their way to Palestine. The menace of violence in the aftermath of war kept the land of Israel a point of reference for Jews hoping to build a society that would reflect values of universal significance in a place where they expected to feel totally at home. During the first years of British rule in Palestine, Jaffa’s port and Tel Aviv’s streets were teeming with young men and women who embraced
Exiled in the Homeland
110
their arrival as “homecoming,” convinced they would be able to redeem both body and soul from a history bathed in bloodshed, degradation, and deep feelings of inferiority. At first, their passions came fully alive. They sang and walked from the port of Jaffa to Tel Aviv “as if in a dream.” At that exhilarating moment, one visionary wrote, “I felt as if I should stand to say Kaddish since after all that has happened, I feel as if I am starting anew.”22 These visionaries expected their lives to pivot around the moment their feet touched the ground in Palestine when they believed, at least during those moments, that they had been reborn. But a tension soon emerged between their extraordinary transcendental ideological beliefs and their inability to live up to them. Thus soon after wandering across the land they designated as home, many of these idealists were shocked not simply by what they saw and heard but also by how much of what they encountered seemed alien. Seeking social and political purity, they had to decipher and negotiate a bewildering territory sounding with a Babel of voices and interests. For all their intentions and desires to identify with the land, these idealists were assaulted by a harsh climate, underdevelopment, unfamiliar sounds, smells, and food, and a physical labor that they experienced as intolerable rather than as liberating.23 It was one thing to declaim on the distortions of the Jewish character in the Diaspora. It was quite another thing to do something about it. In the early years of British rule in Palestine, in an underdeveloped country with limited capital resources, the task came to seem steadily more daunting as Palestine proved initially a site of more danger than opportunity. Young Zionist visionaries arrived armed with dreams of being able to turn the land of Israel into a paradise where physical labor would bring happiness, prosperity, and justice to all. But Labor Zionism’s promises seemed illusory amid the hardships many found difficult to endure and the inevitable feelings of displacement too powerful to acknowledge without casting doubt on the authorizing power of their ideological vision. Labor Zionism’s vision thus sometimes filled an emotional void for Jews suffering from displacement and feelings of alienation. This vision— with its songs, poems, and dances—enveloped them with its comforting idealistic message of justice and its soothing narrative of ultimate success in the face of what seemed at best an uncertain future. Many could not concede that coming to the land of Israel uprooted them; an idealistic vision could thus help some feel more at ease in Zion. The young people making their way to Palestine in these early years ignored warnings from the Zionist movement that such a journey was
Mishnah Impossible
111
dangerous, that they could not enter Constantinople legally, and that there were few jobs available in a country still so heavily damaged by war. When the Eretz Israel Committee in Odessa in 1919 sent a telegram to the Zionist Commission in Palestine notifying it that the British Consul intended to issue 180 visas to refugees from Palestine to return to their country, it received this reply: “Shortage of apartments, enormous shortage of work and no opportunities likely to open up in near future. Don’t force refugees to return but they have to be able to take care of themselves.”24 Despite the hardships, young men and women came, mostly high school graduates, including some trained for agricultural work through the he-Halutz movement.25 Most believed the land of Israel would be the antidote to their despair and their passage to redemption. Many came from parts of Russia fragmented by revolutionary battles; others left Poland and parts of Galicia, where borders were fl uid, national identities were unclear, and chaos allowed travelers to pass across yet unformed countries without official documents.26 During these first postwar months, Zionist migrations were disproportionately male and for the most part, an adventure of the young.27 Moving across Eastern Europe—often without passports and sometimes in violation of military service obligations—scores of young men and women heading for Palestine were compelled to turn to the Jewish communities along the way for food and shelter. The disorders of war helped these Zionists pull up stakes, but their journeys were raked with dangers and tragedies. Many were stopped by hunger and illness; some were beaten by robbers, and some died in the thick of the heavy fighting of civil war. Their spirit of adventure could not help but succumb sometimes to loneliness and disease or sometimes simply to the perils of places with none of the familiar comforts of home. Many headed for Trieste, where they hoped to earn money for their passage to Palestine. It took months of travel to reach Palestine.28 What was expected to be a source of personal growth often ended up generating immense suffering. The irony of having to fall back on traditional Jewish communal organizations and philanthropic customs might not have been acknowledged by these idealists but could not have been entirely ignored. For them, the journey generated a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment. Consider this description of one journey of five young Labor Zionists, showing just how determined they had to be to make it to their destination. The first boatload of five immigrants from [the] he-Halutz movement was helped by Josef Trumpeldor to secure passage on a small Turkish boat
Exiled in the Homeland
112
with five Turkish sailors. After three days on the water, amidst terrible storms—they thought they would sink—they anchored on the coast and walked for three days with no food or water to Constantinople. They found the area with Sephardi families—met up with Trumpeldor and twenty others who had been transported to the city with help of Sephardi families. Trumpeldor found work for them while they waited for others. Finally about 200 gathered [male and female]. They heard that the situation in Palestine was very difficult—there was no work. They had to wait another two months before they could leave for Palestine.29
The conviction that they could change the destiny of the Jewish people carried these visionaries through the uncertainties and trials of their migration. They imagined physical labor on the land as the crucial mechanism of personal fulfillment and national emancipation. Despite their certainties, however, their propensity to see the land of Israel as the place for constructing the new Jewish identity opened up the possibility of failure and of having to find ways to live with unanticipated consequences, particularly for individuals who lacked the funds to feed themselves, let alone to purchase land and build new communities. Coming to Palestine without capital, family ties, and employment could be the beginning of a series of migrations from one temporary job to another. Public works projects often hired for only short periods, with construction jobs typically interrupted by disruptions in funding. The difficulties of searching for work in a country with few jobs available and no public postings to inform people where they might find employment accentuated the loneliness and feelings of estrangement. Palestine’s economy generated severe problems for immigrants, bringing some to the brink of starvation. Political affiliations and personal contacts were vital to those most vulnerable, who barely earned enough money for food and shelter. Some contacts led to displays of unusual solidarity, where communes accepted so many workers that all had too little to eat.30 For visionaries, their traumatic encounter with the grim realities in Palestine made philanthropic aid through Zionist and even non-Zionist organizations more important while it created a sense of urgency for new foundational truths. At a time when they had little power and no independent resources—and when their lives were hardly marked by feelings of fulfillment and success—visionaries considered it more important than ever to produce a narrative, not as compensation for their political or economic weaknesses or failures but rather as a means of defining and
Mishnah Impossible
113
bringing to life a new national identity. Many found meaning even in the failed experiments by framing books, plays, poems, songs, and even a new cultural form—the collectively written diary—around their utopian ideas and values.31 Many of the activists came expecting to live and work amid networks forged in Europe and strengthened on their journeys to Palestine. Networks replaced families, often providing access to jobs, resources, and sustained social interactions. But they differed from families because letting go of the creed often severed people from relationships that had served as economic and emotional supports. The disputes converting Hashomer Hatzair comrades Meir Yaari and David Horowitz into rivals in the early 1920s were not only kept alive throughout their long careers—and periodically revived in memoirs and essays—but were also advanced with the same fervor and belief as if the issues dividing them were still relevant.32 Not surprisingly, the publication of Kehilliyatenu (Our Community), a collective diary of Hashomer Hatzair’s first experience in communal living (at Beitaniyya), also stirred controversy. Although he had written many of the diary entries, Meir Yaari himself urged that it not be published, particularly because Hashomer Hatzair had, in his words, evolved considerably since the troubled days of Beitaniyya, and was “now making common cause with mainstream Labor Zionism . . . [with] agricultural work and not Eros . . . [as] the foundation of community and society.”33 Acutely sensitive to the volume’s frankly revolutionary sensuality, Yaari never stopped trying to suppress or censor novels and narratives based on the diary of his first very intense months in the land of Israel.
Beitaniyya The Hashomer Hatzair members arriving in Palestine in 1919 and 1920 brought with them a potent blend of ideas focused on rescuing the Jewish national home from what they perceived as the deformations introduced by the mainstream bourgeois Zionist institutions. But without resources and confronting an impoverished land devastated by war, these young people had to forgo their principle of complete autonomy for subsistence and accepted the employment offered them by the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, a non-Zionist philanthropy founded by the Baron de Rothschild and devoted to raising the standard of living of Jews in the land of Israel. Although preparing the ground for the planting of trees represented a departure from the group’s ambition to engage in agricul-
Exiled in the Homeland
114
tural labor, the subventions they received for this work helped preserve the friendship networks formed in Europe. Scores of young men and a few women came together to fulfill their dream of engaging in physical labor and journeyed to what was then a remote part of Palestine—the Jezreel Valley—in anticipation of uniting with the land as a means of personal growth and the beginning of social change. Taking their earlier youth movement experiences in Europe as a template for the creation of a new community and ultimately the evolution of a new kind of human being, Hashomer Hatzair immigrants—particularly the group at Beitaniyya—viewed the backbreaking labor in the Jezreel Valley as a prologue to embarking on their ambitious visions of social transformation. The Beitaniyya community lasted for six months. Although the members of Beitaniyya considered themselves activists rather than intellectuals or writers, they soon decided to record their experiences in a text—Kehilliyatenu—as evidence for the possibility of creating a new social order in which communal interests were presumably but a graceful mimicry of individual thoughts and feelings. One of the several collective diaries churned out by the people involved in these early communal projects, Kehilliyatenu symbolized the subordination if not the assimilation of the individual to the larger collective. In form, the collective reflections in these texts, as noted literary authority Aviva Ufaz has brilliantly observed, are not all raw expressions of individual feelings: some have been edited; some censored; some rehearse mundane events and schedules; and some try to express the congruence between the individual and the collective by describing the public areas of the camp shared by all the workers.34 Some comments are the distilled musings of philosophical minds, whereas others read as if they are reports rather than meditative observations. And as Aviva Ufaz has shown, these raw expressions of individual feelings simply do not yield to any synthesis derived from Marxian or Freudian dialectics.35 Instead of showing how one or another utopian vision was enacted at Beitaniyya or elsewhere, the texts describe how disillusionment and disaster can result when theories are put into practice. Kehilliyatenu—trenchant and truthful—is full of testimonial imperatives fostered by the very burdens these activists assumed in trying to get things in their community exactly right. We have moments of incredible exhilaration that can turn quickly to despair in Eretz Israel. We are a community of people with common edu-
Mishnah Impossible
115
cational ties and a shared past. Sometimes our weaknesses stand out—our inability to withstand the difficulties that destroy our bodies. We cry out hysterically in the middle of the night out of despair. We have no faith in the power of the individual to find a way out of the despair and so we are frightened.36
At the center of Hashomer Hatzair’s core principles was the belief that genuine community was possible only for a small population. Meditating on what it would take for Zionism to succeed, Meir Yaari, who evolved into the dominant infl uence at Beitaniyya, a settlement where there were supposed to be no leaders, stated that first it had to capture “the soul.”37 Embedded in this comment is a contempt for the typical Jew who possesses ordinary desires. Indeed, Hashomer Hatzair never held out hope that its Zionist vision would appeal to more than a small number of select individuals who could, nonetheless, serve as agents of redemption for the Jewish people. The long tables set out for meals in other large roadbuilding units organized by the Gedud ha-Avodah pointed away from rather than toward building community, according to Meir Yaari, who cited the dining area accommodating the small numbers at Beitaniyya as imparting solidarity.38 Ostensibly operating with the efficiencies coming from the division of labor, the Gedud’s large communes were actually attacked by Yaari as breeding grounds for alienation and social fragmentation. Public works have an ephemeral character; they render life mechanical[,] pressing hundreds of people together who have nothing in common except the employment office and rows of tents without style or distinction. These mass concentrations have a ploughed characteristic with people who are strangers to one another eating together at long tables, singing in a false way, crying out with the bitterness of [the] European proletariat. This kind of work will truly be punishment. . . . Everyone here is uprooted.39
Intimacy was both the means to a redeemed historical order for the Jewish people and the mark of its success. At Beitaniyya, all daily activities were supposedly assimilated into a strenuous passage to rejuvenation. Food, for example, was presented as a form of spiritual nourishment, a kind of atonement for an alienated past as well as a means of elevation toward a harmonious future. Hovering over the diners was a print of da
Exiled in the Homeland
116
Vinci’s Last Supper with the figure of Jesus taken as a symbolic representation of the meal’s religious value and the group’s capacity to transgress Jewish tradition and convention. The radically new Middle Eastern cuisine in Palestine was interpreted as part of the process of disconnecting Hashomer Hatzair adherents from their families, their homes, and the folkways to which they were unconsciously attached. One way of enduring the tasteless, monotonous meals was to be convinced that they could help reshape life.40 What made Beitaniyya particularly unique was its focus on Eros as the basis for deriving full satisfaction from arduous physical labor. But although the visionaries attributed to Eros an extraordinary capacity to repair cleavages between people, they were never able to deploy that power without generating social tensions. Many of Kehilliyatenu’s authors plead for learning how to love all people and to overcome their feelings of animosity for some of their comrades.41 Moreover, when demands from the Palestine Colonization Association to lower costs convinced the Beitaniyya’s unofficial leaders that the community had to comply, the process of identifying the people asked to leave the commune—the so-called “grand selection”—reflected the privileged position of the Vienna cell and showed some members how swiftly the moral imperatives of the movement could be discarded in the midst of the difficulties of day-to-day life. Clinging to an idiom of unity and equality, the strongest personalities— leaders of the movement in Europe—remained at Beitaniyya, whereas the vulnerable were expelled.42 Writing years later, Meir Yaari registered no consciousness of how this action became an experience of rupture which no ritual or vocabulary could repair.43 Beitaniyya’s leaders thought of themselves as performing noble actions even when they were really engaged in vindictive acting-out and favoritism. Hashomer Hatzair’s attraction to Eros as a force that could help people escape their parochialisms and prejudices often reduced their lived experiences to dichotomous stereotypes with moral implications, pitting those deemed committed and possessed of a fortitude with emancipatory potential against those unable to contribute to the national mission because of depleted energy or misguided priorities.44 Jews in Palestine were assailed for their inability to subscribe to and carry out the Zionist visionary projects and not for their failure to assimilate or adjust. Immigrants were blamed for not finding meaning in serving the nation with their labor. That backbreaking physical labor did not produce a sense of fulfillment or feelings of intimacy with the land triggered profound feelings of mel-
Mishnah Impossible
117
ancholy. The belief that labor would release rather than sap energy generated a deep sense of personal self-doubt when emotions did not match expectations. Although conventional Labor Zionist pieties discouraged expressing disappointment with work—the very activity ideology associated with personal and collective liberation—the dissipation of the glamour of physical labor was too quick and complete to be hidden. One entry in Kehilliyatenu stated that work “was choking.”45 Another remarked, “The days are full of gloom, fog everywhere. . . . And man stands but there is no God around him. What will he do then with an empty heart and a soul without purpose confronting sickness, storms, and work—all of it boring. The clock ticks and with a cruelty, it counts every second.”46 Although some visionaries did find satisfaction—even exhilaration— in the pain and monotony of the tasks before them, many, all across the Labor Zionist spectrum, found no pleasure in manual labor. Rahel ZisleLef kowvich put it this way: “It seems to me that it’s wrong for a person to become a draft animal.”47 In their first months and years in Palestine, it was difficult for even the truest believers in the Labor Zionist vision to see their backbreaking work as building the foundation of a new just society. In their desperation, these visionaries turned to their cultural resources to help them withstand their impoverishment and disappointments. To give substance to the claim that true unity with nature would yield harmonious social relations, pseudo–marriage ceremonies were performed to bind men to the land and presumably infuse them with an intense sense of their mission. In one such ceremony, the bridegroom pronounced the following words: “The land of Nuris. This is not the ordinary name of a bride . . . [but] as husband I give myself to the bosom of my new bride and thus will we all be given to the belly of this holy earth.”48 Although many found the rituals exhilarating, others remembered them as moments of ambiguous joy, and still others dismissed them as nothing special. And when ritual did not dissolve despair, some members began proposing that suffering, itself, would bring redemption, recalling the Jesus narrative as the appropriate paradigm. But what were imagined as restorative and transformative models by some were experienced as sinister by others. As the glamour of physical labor dissipated, so too did the fantasies of engendering a new kind of Jew through erotic relations among men and newly invented rituals to bind men to nature.49 The diaries contain a literature of despair and disillusionment, calling attention to the heavy burdens assumed by these self-proclaimed Zionist visionaries. Theories that seemed incontrovertible in Europe were sud-
Exiled in the Homeland
118
denly totally inadequate for explaining the classes, confl icts, and ruptures these young men and women encountered. Their ideologies promoting physical labor as a noble enterprise ended up crushing individuals who could not abide its strictures, or who felt a grief that could not be absolved and even contemplated or committed suicide. Despair and disappointment cast long shadows over the lives of Palestine’s Jewish community, but particularly over the visionaries, who arrived certain that their Zionism would deliver fulfillment and success but who discovered that they could barely eke out subsistence. Despair ran well ahead of their capacity to explain it. What appeared as overdetermined expectations in retrospect seemed to contemporaries as hanging in the balance. Their nationalist fervors were nourished by a belief that Zionism could restore life to the Jewish people and ensure that the horrifying deaths and destruction gripping Diaspora Jews would become a thing of the past. A newly developed Zionist ideology helped resolve the ways Jews saw, felt, and responded to their suffering in Palestine. Labor Zionists recognized that hunger approaching starvation could destroy health and morale and denude the Zionist argument about the benefits of sovereignty of its substance. Still, they insisted that while death and pain outside of Palestine were killing the Jewish people, suffering in Palestine restored national life.50 Commitment to the true pioneer life continued to exercise a powerful hold upon Palestine’s Jewish community because it presumably gave visionaries a strong sense of the differences between those who could look forward to a future and those who could look only backward to what was deemed a dishonorable past offering neither hope nor security. Thus the people who charted their arc of loneliness and disappointment in Kehilliyatenu could be only marginally conscious of the real sources of their emotional suffering. Judging by the diary’s comments, many of these young Zionists, sent off to the Jezreel Valley, found themselves experiencing intense loneliness. The encampments were isolated from one another and from the Jewish centers in Palestine. Hashomer Hatzair’s denunciations of other Labor Zionist organizations as insufficiently radical51 accentuated the isolation of its members, as did the view of the general Jewish public in Palestine that Beitaniyya was less like a commune devoted to work than a cult organized around a theology of love.52 Was the Beitaniyya community nourished by work or by love? Initially, Meir Yaari seemed to assert that solidarity could only be built through love and particularly through male relationships.53 Yaari confided to one associate that genuine community “derived from erotic attach-
Mishnah Impossible
119
ments and not from need or from spiritual values.”54 Speaking of Eros, one diary entry defined it as “giving individuals the capacity to redeem the world, to return it to its source of beauty and brighten it with exalted harmony.”55 Expressions of homoerotic passions were fairly common at Beitaniyya but they did not necessarily shape the sexual relations of the commune’s members. Meir Yaari himself married his childhood sweetheart in an Orthodox religious ceremony even as he continued to extol the virtues of male bonding.56 As far as we can tell, Beitaniyya was a sexually repressed community.57 Although Yaari clearly conceived of sex as a symbol of larger forces, he did not seem to appreciate how much psychic weight a discourse saturated with sexual references placed on a group of young adults. Despite claims of the unifying effects of Eros, it actually ripped across the community, tearing apart friendships, generating lifelong animosities, and precipitating at least one suicide. “We understand man as suffocating in a framework of individualism and as reduced and hardened by a mechanical civilization. Men must seek relations of brotherhood that combine body and soul into new unities [of men] with nature and all creation.”58 There were very few women at Beitaniyya and even fewer women’s voices published in the diaries. Although Hashomer Hatzair men proclaimed an ideology embracing men and women as equals, many diary entries conjure up the idea of women as a source of sexual tension and of communal divisions without even considering the possibility that rifts were not accidental but rather essential consequences of the utopian project. Nor did women experience the Hashomer Hatzair communities in the same way as their male comrades. Women were mostly mentioned as an afterthought; when they were acknowledged at all, it was generally for their capacity to produce children.59 Paradoxically, an egalitarian rhetoric was also imprinted with a traditional view of the options available to women. The dreams of the girls who had filled in the economic gaps left by a disintegrating family structure during the terrible years of carnage in Europe had to be deflated as comrades urged them into domesticity and traditional family responsibilities. Indeed, the disjuncture between proclaiming the equality of women as a core principle and establishing a model community where only men could produce moral perfection troubled as many in the Hashomer Hatzair movement as in the mainstream Labor Zionist organizations in Palestine. For Hashomer Hatzair’s focus on Eros evoked certain troubling hints of principled opposition to the idea of family and marriage which catalyzed
Exiled in the Homeland
120
significant opposition from the dominant Labor Zionist organizations. Although women were imagined by a few as possessing a sinister power destructive of true unity, they were more typically associated with restorative and generative functions.60 And as the Beitaniyya community selfdestructed, the hostility to it from other Labor Zionist groups in Palestine and from Hashomer Hatzair’s other communes forced the movement’s unofficial leaders, including its most prominent advocate of the virtues of male comradeship, Meir Yaari, to qualify their dreams of dismantling the family and to deploy a language more readily compatible with Palestine’s Labor Zionist social consensus.61 The commune would save not destroy the family. Many women were attracted to Labor Zionism because of its presumed principled commitment to gender equality. All across the several Labor Zionist movements there were women who discharged the same tasks as men in the pioneering communities. The very idea of physical labor resonated with as much meaning for female as for male visionaries. Small numbers of these women—such as the Bat-Sheba collective comprising seven young women—did find ways to work around the constraints. But most found their ambitions still circumscribed by patriarchal norms. “Of 3000 laborers who worked in road construction during 1922–1923, only 400 were women,” noted Deborah Bernstein, and half worked in the camp kitchens.62 Some of the Gedud labor brigades helped women expand beyond their domestic horizons and gave them a new scale of expression, as Anita Shapira explains. At Migdal, liberty was unrestrained. The girls of the Gedud demanded equal rights and obligations, expressed among other things in their determination to work side by side with their male comrades on the roads. They suffered extreme hardship and deprivation, and this was compensated for by the joyous group spirit expressed in the stirring songs left behind them.63
But even in movements endorsing radical social change, women had to fight against gender-based stereotypes that generally kept them confined to domestic roles. To gain access to what was deemed productive labor out in the fields, women had to surmount higher hurdles than men, overcome more rigidly defined biases, and ultimately pay a higher personal and psychic price for their achievements. Here is one description of the struggle:
Mishnah Impossible
121
It was with the utmost difficulty that I, a woman, could persuade [them] to take me along. There were all sorts of objections. The work was too much for a girl. It wasn’t nice for a Jewish girl to be working on the open road. There was even one haver [comrade] who believed that it would be a national crime! But another girl and I stuck it out for the first week and, in spite of renewed objections, stayed on. At the end of the first month, there was a whole group of women at work on the road.64
During the first years of the 1920s, road construction initiated by the British mandate government provided jobs and for Labor Zionists the chance to establish communal settlements. Even when their work gave the lie to the dismissive estimates of their capacities, it reinforced the perception that changes for women could not occur without negatively affecting men. Faced with resistance to their acceptance by male groups, and indignant at being accused of causing financial deficits, women formed their own work communes and even competed with men for job contracts. In the mid-1920s there were two women’s construction groups, several floor tiling communes, as well as tobacco and laundry collectives. The women’s organization established half a dozen training farms modeled on the Kinneret experiment. Women also formed havurot—small collectives based on a combination of vegetable gardening and outside employment.65
Tehiya Liverson had a fine feeling for Labor Zionism’s difficulties in establishing a policy regarding women that did not contradict its egalitarian ideology. She wrote about the difficulties of gaining entrance at the grassroots level to the Construction Workers’ Union. Some said the work was too strenuous for women. Others argued that if women were admitted to the building trade communes, which contracted for work as a group, the output would decrease and the pay with it. The Bat Sheva collective . . . revolutionized road work. All of them are working at breaking gravel and all of them are so good that they have set a record.66
But the idea of women engaged in arduous manual labor ran against most of the cultural preconceptions of even their male comrades. When
Exiled in the Homeland
122
women were allowed to become a part of the road construction encampments, they were most often designated as cooks and thus isolated from their friends or left without any work at all. In searching for jobs, women ran up against stiff opposition from the Employment Office of the workers’ parties and later from the Histadrut.67 Women clearly expected radical movements to support social change and open up to them a broad spectrum of opportunities. For that reason, many men and women thrashed endlessly in a thicket of rationalizations about their bounded world, where they found bias instead of deliverance. Sometimes only a single passage in a memoir conveys the intensity of the emotion aroused by the biases women confronted. As Ada Maimon Fishman writes, “Following the old traditions which determined what constituted women’s work, traditions the woman pioneer . . . had fought against, the kitchen was seen as the only possibility for new women immigrants.”68 Even among visionaries, women found their lives circumscribed by the persisting authority of men infused by custom with enormous power and infl uence. Still, revolutionary ideals excited high expectations that allowed some women to find ways to overcome the barriers. As Anita Shapira has noted, women affiliated with Gedud did somewhat better than in many of the other Labor Zionist movements.69 And some women insisted despite the general trends, as G. M. Berg demonstrates in his study of the essays written by applicants for admission to the Agricultural College for Women at Nahalal, that Labor Zionist projects offered them a genuine chance to come into their own, whether in the field or in work suited to the feminine body. Here is one excerpt from a typical essay. “We have had enough of the people of the book. Muscles are what we need! In building the Land, the woman takes on a major role, and in various work places we can find the active woman in all of the most difficult branches of work.”70 But the idealism and confidence expressed by most of these applicants also disclosed more complex ambiguities than may have initially seemed apparent. In every production of new life in the Land of Israel . . . there has been awakened within the woman an internal desire to liberate herself from the home and to participate in activities and all kinds of productive work, but because of a lack of knowledge and prior training, she is compelled to continue in the way set out for her in advance by doing housework. And the value of this work declines until it means nothing to her. The woman, after being in a labor collective for a year or more, finds herself useless and inefficient and then leaves the group and goes some place for train-
Mishnah Impossible
123
ing. Sometimes she becomes depressed and leaves agriculture entirely and heads for the city. This is not the case for young women who have received training before entering a labor collective. They feel a sense of belonging to the collective, and they fulfill a role like any [other] member, becoming really useful to the group.71
The repeated narrative of the “pioneer” serving the nation through physical labor on the land set a distinctly masculine model for the society. More often than not, women were expected to assume whatever domestic tasks were necessary to sustain the worker and the regimen of manual labor. Having wrested their freedom by leaving home at a young age, women were typically thrown into a number of regimes of patriarchal cultures when they arrived in Palestine. The immigration quota system limited the number of single women. Many men believed that women caused “deficits” in the collectives. Women clearly operated in a strikingly different environment from that of men, as their remembered intimacies—heavily suppressed—show. Even those who achieved prominence in the women’s workers movement had misgivings. ”Superfl uous”—this is how Rachel Katznelson [Shazar] and Yael Gordon, writing in their diaries, described their presence in Eretz Israel. Both were strong, active women who were perennially in the shadow of men: Katznelson in that of her husband, Zalman Shazar; Gordon in that of her father, A. D. Gordon (she was his secretary, never married, and withdrew from public life after his death).72
Most Labor Zionists considered individual interests an obstacle to the creation of a harmonious community, but only Hashomer Hatzair developed a unique technique—the Siha (discussion)—to reshape individual character and energize passions for the new social order.73 Called by David Horowitz Hashomer Hatzair’s Guide for the Perplexed, the Siha, according to Horowitz, discharged many functions, but ultimately it operated as a mechanism of oppression, coercing people to relax all of the inhibitions that kept thoughts and passions private.74 What had been discussion in Europe was turned in Palestine into the Vidui or public confession. This kind of intimate discourse alienated those, like Horowitz, who preferred the more restrained and intellectual discussions of the Vienna cells. Troubled by what the Siha had become, Horowitz wrote about what it had been in Vienna.
Exiled in the Homeland
124
[The Siha] . . . was a combination of instruction through discussions, negotiations, and confession. The subjects of the Siha included Zionist history, important Jewish leaders, principles of the ancient Jewish books, songs, problems of life, religion, love, friendship or any subject linked to anyone’s feelings or thoughts. The head of the group typically selected the topic, but any member could also introduce a subject for discussion. The group was formed on friendship and mutual trust. The Siha was full of symbolism and poetry and sometimes accompanied by athletic activities. The talks mixed games with learning about life, an escape to nature with exercise and hikes to discussions of philosophy all the while stressing the unique experience of youth.75
When the Siha evolved into Vidui (confession) at Beitaniyya, it was also transformed into a discipline intended to cleanse members of their sins and act as solace for individual failures. The particular sins disclosed presumably gave individuals a clear picture of their failures, marking instances when words, actions, or feelings did not conform to the movement’s utopian expectations. Unity and harmony were Hashomer Hatzair’s most enduring goals, but they were always threatened by special friendships, individual jealousies, despair, and longing for the familiarity of European culture (preferring Beethoven and Chopin to the music of the jackals or surrendering to the urge to stage theatrical performances) and for the warmth of family life.76 Rather than providing instruction for the whole group, confessions came more and more to resemble trials where the confessors themselves filed the charges and testified to the impossibility of full divestiture from attachments to Diaspora life.77 Searching for words to express the inexpressible, one person pleaded, “I am turning [to you] with these impoverished words from the depths of my heart and with a grieving soul. I want to tell you about everything that is oppressing me that gives me no peace.”78 Meir Yaari insisted on a relentless scrutiny of communal life where individuals would not be hesitant to render harsh judgments of their own conduct or of the behavior of others. One member observed that what he did not find at Beitaniyya was “compassion” or “consolation.”79 People who admitted lapsing into Yiddish, for example, could be expelled from a community dedicated to reviving Hebrew, though at the time the spoken language was still awkward and unsuited for describing feelings and many contemporary issues. Hashomer Hatzair activists believed Hebrew to be more than a marker of identity or of claims to the land; they held it to be a resource for national restoration.
Mishnah Impossible
125
Language mobilized the impulses for revolutionary change and also disciplined them. These visionaries deemed Yiddish the ultimate expression of Jewish degradation and often draped the mantle of leadership of their organizations on the shoulders of those skilled in Hebrew. Hebrew weighed heavily on the minds of these visionaries because transforming a language once reserved for sacred texts into a tongue used by the common people for daily needs symbolized the transformation of what had been understood as a religious community into a nation. Because knowledge of Hebrew was typically acquired in religious institutions—synagogues, Yeshivot—the lexicon developed was filled with religious phrases given new meanings and applications. Many of the speeches of such labor movement leaders as Meir Yaari, Berl Katznelson, and Yitzhak Tabenkin were packed with “kabbalistic and messianic terminology.”80 And the poetry of Avraham Shlonsky made this point repeatedly. A committed Labor Zionist, Shlonsky could not secure the thrill of physical labor through any of the texts of Marx or of his followers. He could only convey the meaning of reconstructing the Jewish people by drawing on the religious idioms that occupied his mind almost from birth. In one of his famous passages in the poem “Toil,” Shlonsky uses the prayer shawl and phylacteries as metaphors to describe the emotions of the pioneer building the roads: Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colors, and at dawn lead me to [my] toil. My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the roads paved by hand, stream down like phylactery straps. Here the lovely city says the morning prayer to its Creator. And among the creators is your son Abraham, a road-building bard of Israel.81
A great deal of authority was vested in establishing a national language in Palestine. For visionaries, the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language both embodied the renewal of national life and served as a means of reconstructing it. In Rachel Katznelson’s words, “The revolution, the revolt of our generation against itself—we found it in Hebrew literature . . . [for] a language gives, but it also imposes duties.”82 At a time when the Labor Zionists had little power and few resources, they mapped a linguistic culture intended not only to silence Yiddish but also to suppress any remnants of Diaspora consciousness and infl uence. When visionaries confronted the task of radically changing the Jewish people, they deconstructed these goals into a linguistic dichotomy. Although
Exiled in the Homeland
126
many of the networks and friendships were forged in Yiddish, Hebrew served as the language and sign of the newly born nation, and Yiddish, the language spoken by the European Jewish masses, was the presumed barrier to reconstituting Jewish identity. Writing about the arduous labors of agricultural workers predisposed the imagination to thoughts of social progress and presented a grand narrative of unity, commitment, and consensus. Repetition of themes in a common language newly revived symbolized the national rebirth and transformation, particularly when there was little evidence of either on the land and few signs of prosperity. The revival of Hebrew was intended as a way of ordering the experience of immigrants, shaping their outlook on the world, and rationalizing their place and identity in the developing community. But the vision of Hebrew as the national language of the homeland could not help but denote a new, deeply painful rupture for individuals now alienated from the words that could give full expression to their experiences. Their limited vocabulary in a Hebrew reborn meant that the losses immigrants felt could neither be acknowledged nor mourned. Here is one rare description of what was lost in translation. “It cannot be appreciated how much it costs a man to go from speaking one language to another and especially to a language that is not yet a spoken language. How much breaking of the will it takes. And how many torments of the soul that wants to speak and has something to say—and is mute and stammering.”83 Even the person central to the revival of Hebrew literature in Palestine, Berl Katznelson, had enormous difficulties learning to speak the language. In the first days, I had a hard time with Hebrew. I had never spoken Hebrew in my life. As a matter of fact, I saw Hebrew speech as something unnatural, so much so that [in Byelorussia] I had a teacher, a man who was very dear to me—and I caused him great grief. He spoke to me in Hebrew and I spoke to him in Yiddish because I thought Hebrew was not a spoken language. When I came to Eretz-Israel, I couldn’t make a natural sentence in Hebrew, and I didn’t want to talk a foreign language. I decided I wouldn’t utter a foreign word. And for ten days, I didn’t speak at all; when I was forced to answer—I would reply with some Biblical verse close to the issue.84
The connection between the revival of Hebrew and the difficulties of translating Labor Zionist visions into reality in Palestine is clear. Reviving
Mishnah Impossible
127
Hebrew was believed to be able to reshape national memory and Jewish history while instilling an awareness of a people characterized by the capacity to change and supersede the narrow canons of ritual and religious law defining the identity in the past. The more Hebrew became the common language the more the Jewish people seemed to be taking on a new form. For these visionaries, the resurrected language would invent the new man (Adam) and the new land (adamah).85 The laborers lived in poverty and alienation, the physical mastery of work was a Herculean task. They had no property, no land, and no houses. They were not welcome by the Turkish authorities, the Arabs, the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, or the Jewish farmers of the First Aliya. Their existence in Eretz-Israel was justified only by their total ideological commitment that filled the entire lives of those stubborn youngsters. The commitment was built on a series of binary oppositions: freedom versus exile, Eretz-Israel versus Diaspora, Hebrew versus Yiddish, Sephardi versus Ashkenazi accent, life in nature versus the imaginary ghetto walls of the shtetl, physical labor versus a life of idleness and commerce, the young generation versus Jewry of the past, realization of a program versus empty Zionist speeches, and—above all—personal self-realization versus passive suffering in history.86
Particularly in the context of minimal progress socially and economically during these first years, the status of Hebrew signified and incarnated the implicit conviction for national transformation. Once Hebrew was valued for the access it offered to sacred texts. Now, the language was a marker of belonging to the Jewish nation and its homeland. They abhorred the old social order. The place of institutions was taken by the [soul] talks, which were a quasi ritual of confession and prayer that gave expression to their anxiety-ridden world. These talks revealed an enormous thirst for a life of togetherness, an exhilaration with the new way of life, and unarticulated longings for the idyllic world of the youth movement, which became both unsettled and more mature as a result of the encounter with the realities of life in Palestine. Indeed, the depths of these talks, and the tension that filled them, had consequences for the group’s social organization . . . they wanted to prove that their group did not require an organizational structure but sought a deepening of human connection through group encounters. One needs no institutions, only
Exiled in the Homeland
128
dialogue. . . . But along with the dream, there was also a great deal of disorientation, inexperience, longings for the parental home, and a sense of embarrassment that facilitated the rise of strong leadership. Thus, the person who could articulate their feelings, who had the power to chart a clear direction, gained authority.87
Song and dance were another means deployed by visionaries to forge strong attachments to community and reinforce the notion that individual desires had to be fused with collective needs and principles. Ironically and almost incomprehensibly, people who were determined to reject the religious culture of the Diaspora experienced as elevating the kind of singing and dancing introduced by those with family ties to European Hasidism. The Gedud, an organization that embraced the critical insights drawn from the works of Marx, also blended its radical hopes into song and dance, projecting movement and sound as symbols of the unfettered freedom it endorsed, of the capacity to transcend limits, and as a counterbalance to the severe regimentation of physical labor. Ironically, just as work acquired the status of religious worship, so did the orgy-like evening rituals follow older models of prayer. At the camp at Migdal, a way of life evolved which came to be considered typical of the Gedud: an exuberant, uninhibited joie de vivre which found an outlet in wild, night-long, dancing. The joyful atmosphere which prevailed at the camp was a far cry from the sober reserve which reigned at the nearby Second Aliya kvutzah [founded before World War I] of Kinneret.88
The self-proclaimed architects of radical national transformation insisted on the vitality of their programs even when their tangible goals eluded them. British rule in Palestine offered the opportunity to create a new kind of nationhood, according to Zionist visionaries, but a unity of purpose and an absolute consensus on priorities and policies could not be mobilized. But an organic national identity could be formed in speech or in song. The cultural activities once dismissed as inferior to physical labor and as a badge of Jewish servility in the Diaspora were elevated to national achievements by Zionist visionaries. These visionaries sensed the power of putting their views into verse and song and considered themselves as speaking for the nation through these cultural outlets. The allure of their vision kept nostalgia for the world of their parents deeply buried, except on Jewish holidays, when the pull of memory could not be ignored. Ironically, the most radical communities—those modeled
Mishnah Impossible
129
most closely in accordance with egalitarian and utopian ideals—evoked the strongest laments for lost religious customs and traditions. “There is no spiritual life here,” lamented one member of Kibbutz Degania, “even by comparison to the most primitive people.”89 Nostalgic memories of celebrating holidays in their homes in Europe did not renew links to religion or belief in God, but they did induce confl icting passions that could not be resolved or accommodated. Having felt what he described as “an incredible emptiness on Shabbat and on holidays,” one kibbutz member secretly attended Rosh Hashanah services in a synagogue at a nearby town and felt “equally estranged.”90 Hemmed in by ideologies that demanded a rejection of Diaspora religion and culture as a prerequisite to emancipation, Labor Zionist radicals found their faith in social change confounded by their own feelings of loss. Not wanting to replicate the very structures of Diaspora authority or traditions of exploitation challenged through their immigration, these Zionists wanted to build a new spiritual realm based on the creativity they anticipated from engaging in physical labor and working the land. The essence of their socialist egalitarian thought led them to reject the legitimacy of rabbinic authority and the religious principles supporting it, but that very rejection threatened their own sense of authenticity. Visionaries tried to bring their ideas of an organic harmonious community to life through performance, but although they intended to inspire attachments to the new homeland through song and dance, those cultural productions could not help but remind immigrants of what they had left behind and what they had lost. The visionaries posed a number of questions: “If we make work (the mundane, the everyday) holy, how do we make holidays holy?”91 Many wondered if holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur could be celebrated without professing belief in God.92 Others asked whether those who asserted the power of humans to transform a people needed religion.93 Finally, visionaries feared that preserving Jewish religious traditions raised the specter of providing access to the national home for the way of life of the Diaspora. How could new rituals that strike a chord with the people be invented without locking people into old forms of worship? An experiment at Ein Harod with ritualized dances was deemed similar to idol worship, and the new folkways were initially denounced as entirely inauthentic.94 Although rejecting rabbinic authority and religious law, most Labor Zionists, radical or not, followed Jewish practice at birth and, albeit to a lesser extent, at death. Male infants were circumcised eight days after birth, and burial practices generally, although not completely, conformed to
Exiled in the Homeland
130
Jewish tradition. Practice departed most dramatically from tradition with regard to suicides. Because Zionist visionaries were constantly engaged in taking the measure of their own and their comrades’ commitments to the cause, a relatively large number of young men and women, who by their own last testimony felt the strain of trying to live up to the standards of the creed, killed themselves. Perhaps because so many of their living comrades sensed the resonance of the suicides’ despair, their graves were not dug in accordance with religious law at the remote edge of the cemetery, but rather inside its perimeters.95 Perhaps because the suicides also triggered profound feelings of survivors’ guilt when the anticipated sense of revolution and liberation darkened into self-destructive disenchantment, those who took their own lives were not to be banished from the enterprise that was, on some level, responsible for causing their deaths. Although the poems and songs of Labor Zionism mapped out a set of new relations among people and between people and place, they also served as reminders of the vast disjuncture between the real and imagined nation, indicating that the power to cast off and take on identities was not infinitely open. Anita Shapira both captures these dilemmas and summarizes them by examining the confl icting statements of Yitzhak Tabenkin, Labor Zionist and leader of the kibbutz movement. Tabenkin’s approach to the way the Diaspora was represented in their education was full of inner contradictions. On the one hand, he charged that “there is insufficient knowledge of the Diaspora” and wanted the kibbutz child to know the tune of Kol Nidre as well as that of Hatikvah since Jews had been singing the former for 1,200 years. In the same breath, however, he spoke of presenting Jewish history through “Zionist-socialist eyes, eyes that see the Diaspora as a curse, as a disaster, that see our place in the Diaspora as a catastrophe, as a degeneration.”96
Their experience of social change at Beitaniyya and elsewhere forced many to abandon the utopian projects, but not to acknowledge losing faith in their restorative power. Anger, sudden departures, expulsions, and suicide shocked the members of these communities not so much into reexamining their ambitions as into altering their actions. Some shifted their political affiliations. Others, defeated by the hardships of work and loneliness, retreated to urban life in Tel Aviv or in Europe. Finally, some chose to reconstitute their communities, surviving as agricultural organizations with a diminished capacity for radical social change.
Mishnah Impossible
131
Labor Zionist visionaries settled in Palestine with a budget of expectations as improbable as they were affecting: to live by an egalitarian ethic, to create a new kind of Jew, standing erect, doing his or her own work with his or her own hands. For some of these visionaries, this great yearning for social and moral transfiguration yielded—at least in the short run—only disappointment, and jeopardized the economic and political goals truly attainable. A faith calling for self-transformation was at once noble but also destructive when enacted. Some concluded that the idea of remaking souls was, itself, deeply flawed and represented a set of impossible hopes that had to be revised to fit the circumstances and the constraints. The difficulties of living with radical social change led many visionaries not so much to qualify their utopian visions as to turn them into metaphors rather than blueprints. And because the ideas themselves were powerful, they left their imprint on Palestine’s Jewish culture. There is a great irony in Labor Zionism’s cultural dominance. The Labor Zionist visionaries discussed in this chapter defined their struggles for justice and equality as part of a battle to build a national home in the land of Israel with their own hands. They posited that only the concrete act of manual labor could produce genuine liberation for a people whose identity could no longer be sustained by traditional religious beliefs and practices. Although Jewish displacements always fragmented families and communities, their unity was once preserved by a textual tradition that disciplined and unified their communities. But in a modern world, carved into sovereign states and national languages, Jews were increasingly divested of their common holy language and unmediated access to their sacred texts, leaving them with little protection for their cultural unity. Tradition suddenly meant passivity, lack of singularity, unnaturalness, unproductiveness, excessive spirituality. Most important, tradition signified a false faith in the shared world of meanings established and transmitted by words. The ardent faith in the power of language was conceived— especially by Palestinian Zionists—as partly responsible for what they saw as the hopeless predicament of Jews in modernity. Words of prayer and learning prevented no pogroms, assured no political rights, and answered no economic wants. . . . This plight of homelessness led Zionists, and especially the founders of this [labor] movement in Palestine, to ground their identities by relying principally on the visible world of space and its transformation through human action, through collective building.97
Exiled in the Homeland
132
But if the experience of austerity and dependence in the national home’s first years confirmed the failure of the visionaries to bring liberation through physical labor, it nevertheless inspired a poetics of place that ignored the present and instilled absolute optimism about the inevitability of future success. It is perhaps not surprising that in a world full of such intense difficulties and ruptures, Palestine’s Jews clung to more traditions than many—particularly the advocates of radical social change—were willing to acknowledge. Culture was strengthened as the momentum for social change weakened, and it would be Zionist history’s compensation for not totally remaking the Jewish people.
five
No Kaddi
Dreams up against Reality In his essay “Despite all,” Yosef Chaim Brenner wrote that Jewish life in the land of Israel “possessed little to attract people,” and further, that the holy land “was settled by people from places where it is possible to do something better.” There is the force of insight in Brenner’s candor about the hardships of life in the land of Israel. Brenner surmised that it was difficult to be the first to settle an area where none had come before, but that such obstacles would not suffocate the determination of Zionists to cling to their tiny farms despite having no expectation for high profits or for earnings ever to catch up to expenses, “since the income produced on the farms is low, and the price of food is high.”1 Brenner saw needs in Palestine running way ahead of the capacity of people or economy to meet them. Although Brenner’s essay called upon Jews to make Palestine their home, it also evinced pessimism about the country’s possibilities. Still, Brenner concluded that sweating through the hardships of the reworking of Palestine’s primitive environment was a better option for Jews than staying in the lands of their birth, where lives and culture could be shattered each time the wrong blend of nationalism and populism was deployed.2 Powerfully prefiguring the dilemmas that would confront Zionists coming to live in the land of Israel, Brenner’s essay also falls back on the notion he once so eagerly sought to dismiss that passionate conviction could serve as a mobilizing force for Zionist success. The glaring irony of Brenner’s argument—warning Zionists against gripping their illusions too tightly, but ultimately urging them to build a homeland despite the difficulties— is perhaps in part a measure of the author’s own internal contradictory
Exiled in the Homeland
134
impulses and in part an indication of the historically bred insecurities constantly plaguing the Zionist enterprise. Great Britain’s support for the development of a national home in Palestine made possible the creation of a new Jewish society and created the opportunity for Labor Zionists to translate their ideals into reality and into defining the new Jew in this yet to be established community. Fixed on inspiring goals and armed with a full lexicon of values and desires, Labor Zionists proved willing and able to channel their considerable energy into a single organization—the Histadrut—that assumed responsibility for representing the interests of labor and for convincing newly arrived workers that it could supply the impetus for shaping a new economy and society based on widely shared Labor Zionist convictions. But although these convictions generated a momentum for radical change, pressing economic needs produced an urgency for actions that were, at the very least, inconsistent with, if not actually hostile to, what were proclaimed as the Histadrut’s—and by extension, Labor Zionism’s—most precious core values. As Labor Zionism gathered political ambitions, it lost its feverish sense of radicalism. Thus Labor Zionist leaders had to confront a series of anomalies, among them the need to make the immigrants who expected but could not lift the land and people to their vision of an egalitarian community see how their forms of thought and action, however divergent, still had meaning. The immigrants I will examine in this chapter presented themselves as the standard bearers of Labor Zionism—its true pioneers. They consolidated their power and identity—through an all-embracing labor union, the Histadrut, or through the latter’s primary constituent political parties, Ahdut ha-Avodah and Hapoel Hatzair, or its affiliated movements, Gedud ha-Avodah and the Women’s Workers’ Association. More important, and more quickly than the visionaries described in Chapter 4, these immigrants tamed their vision into an accommodation with the non-socialist forces dominating the World Zionist Organization and controlling the distribution of its funds. Examining the lives of mainstream Labor Zionists, most of whom lived in Palestine’s cities, I explore how these activists responded to the market forces confronting them and fashioned behaviors to advance their cause while coping with the failure to turn their transformational creed into practice. Like the visionaries described in the previous chapter, these Labor Zionists also proved themselves by trying to fulfill what they believed to be their national mission born amid the chaos in postwar Eastern Europe
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
135
and the dreadful massacres of its civil wars and pogroms.3 Unwilling to be shut down by a devastation more destructive of people and countries than could have been imagined by those who initiated it, these young Labor Zionists felt themselves impelled by a spiritual charge as they marched across borders and sailed through stormy seas to reach the land of Israel. Suppressing any of the dark, emotional feelings that might complicate fraternity and solidarity or disparage their faith in a radically transformed Jewish future, these young men and women imagined themselves the saviors of their people, the pioneers who would prove that reaching the land of Israel would end not only a nation’s exile but also its suffering. To understand the many ways Labor Zionists dealt with the gap between expectation and achievement, however, we need to note first that there were important differences between those who tried to plant their visions in Palestine’s soil and those who pursued their romantic quest in its towns and cities. Each context produced its own unique set of problems and thus yielded rather different kinds of compromised policies and linguistic conventions for Labor Zionism. Like so many, Haifa’s Histadrut leader, Berl Reftor, crossed through more danger zones than he could count on his journey to Palestine, although he had access to family resources that could have made his trip much easier.4 Sustained by a set of ideals that seemed plausible in Europe, Reftor and his friends—eight males and five females—worked their way around violence and the suspicions of police and populations in the homes they left behind. Arriving at Kishinev with no clothes or luggage—“we left home with the clothes on our backs”—Reftor worked in a match factory until he and all his friends received permission to leave for Palestine.5 Many young immigrants arrived on Palestine’s shores possessing only a belief that agricultural labor would bring personal and national creativity of the purest kind. Their despair could erupt, however, in their very first moments in the country at one of Palestine’s ports, particularly if certificates were not in order, a quarantine was imposed, or weather conditions kept the ship from unloading the passengers in steerage.6 Shortages of capital forced most who arrived in the country with the great expectation of working the land to remain in whichever place was first to offer them food, shelter, and above all, the prospect of employment in a highly unstable and underdeveloped economy. Desperately poor, often helpless when sick, many workers were wracked with guilt for giving in to their fears rather than transcending them with the vision that had carried them through their typically long and dangerous journey to Palestine.
Exiled in the Homeland
136
That most settled in cities and not on the land, where it was believed they could redeem both themselves and the Jewish people, had to evoke feelings of disappointment if not of failure. Labor Zionist discourse reinforced the primacy of agricultural work and the inevitable sense of failure felt by those not settling the land. In 1925, Abba Houshi wrote to his Hashomer Hatzair comrades in Galicia. The Levantine city that is beginning to rule over the Yishuv is being formed externally and internally. The City is draining us of all our strength. One must say openly that the Halutzim now arriving disappoint. . . . They prefer the city to the countryside. They disembark from ships and remain. In the city, life is easer, more comfortable; wages are higher and there are more enjoyments such as cinema, opera. . . . The city seduces.7
Consciousness of community for these immigrants, often acquired in the thickly populated towns or cities of Eastern Europe and nurtured through a vibrant associational life, had to be strained by the encounter with Palestine’s relatively small Jewish population. The demographic relationship of immigrants to their former population base and to the significantly larger stream of Jews moving West could only instill a feeling of enormous uncertainty in the future of the Jewish national home. Also, the demographic relationship of the immigrants to the much larger and ever increasing Arab population could not help but raise questions about Zionism’s long-term prospects. Although Zionist officials possessed relatively precise data on the demographic imbalance, they could not speak openly or directly about it without damaging their own cause, but it triggered a palpable sense of foreboding and weakened the gravitational pull of their vision. That a large reserve of cheaper Arab workers subjected an already perilously volatile economy to additional pressures meant that those who had a job could never feel secure from losing it.8 For immigrants, the upheavals of their first encounters in Palestine only grew more intense as the frenzied search for work began. The country the Jewish workers entered was still organized tenuously and in late-nineteenth-century modes of production and economic relations. There were no industrial cities in Palestine, but the workshops, like the few factories, filled the lungs of workers with poison.9 Caught between competition with Arabs, typically more skilled and lower paid, and long-standing stereotypes of Jews as unable to adjust
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
137
to the discipline of modern wage-labor, Jewish workers in Palestine had to recast their strategies if they were to meet their basic needs. Their focus on workplace concerns—e.g., salary, hours, work conditions, and benefits—made them undesirable as workers.10 It did not escape the notice of Histadrut leaders that capitalism represented not so much a dominant as a marginal force in Palestine, and that confronting it might burden the economy with a load it could ill afford to carry. Commenting on a strike in 1925, Histadrut official David Cohen wrote, Without doubt the strike brought benefits. The local union representatives learned about the legal issues that affect work and restrict strikes. The worker will not play around with the idea of a strike without thinking seriously. The attempt to create a committee to arbitrate confl icts is also without doubt a positive step, but only a step. When the Histadrut was accused of not achieving all of the workers’ demands, that is correct, and it is difficult to stand as the accused; to be the target of complaints. Perhaps the workers would have done better had we not asked them to end the strike; if our nerves were stronger, and we weren’t afraid that the factory would cease to operate. I was very afraid of that. The idea that we would close or ruin a factory that employs 300 workers gives no comfort. Who knows how to guess. Today we know, clearly, that it is a bad idea to tighten the rope too much because of the possibility of losing all jobs.11
Trapped by highly unfavorable market forces, Jewish workers found themselves caught in the crossfire between economic circumstances and social and moral beliefs. They had few material resources at their disposal. If they had been activists in Europe or had come to Palestine with others, they may have had contacts that might help them find work. Initial experiences in a land that was supposed to be home but seemed so alien often strengthened these bonds. But the obstacles Jewish workers encountered came from many sources—including mandatory policies that favored capital at the expense of labor, or government jobs at the national and local levels open only to Arabs. Because these were forces too strong for many individuals to withstand, a cultural and moral fault line appeared between those participating in the transformative processes presumed to be at work and those who ostensibly denied themselves its liberating power. Because too few resources were made available to Labor Zionists to realize their objective and because Labor Zionists did not want to acknowledge abandonment of what they perceived as their vital mission, they developed
Exiled in the Homeland
138
strategies and linguistic conventions to manage the contradictions in a community that would not yield to the moral patterns they were trying to impose on it. David Ben-Gurion gave this message its tersest and most comprehensive formulation in proclaiming what sounded like a slogan—”from class to nation”—but what turned out to be a paradox. Ben-Gurion hoped to instill in Zionists the belief that the working class could be the springboard for creating a new kind of community.12 Of course, a working class had to be formed and then consolidated into a powerful national force. BenGurion’s rhetoric projected the idea of a working class as the vanguard of nation-building but did not lay out a clear strategy for how this should be done. Class would be the site nurturing and propelling the power to build the nation. But in asserting a linkage, the slogan blunted the differences: if class built and upheld the nation, it could not be separated from it. Class counterbalanced nation, but the two were also intermeshed. To understand the implications of this interdependence, it is necessary to consider how the meaning of one shaped the meaning of the other, for fashioning immigrants into workers and mobilizing them into an effective and powerful movement entailed overcoming a convergence of daunting economic circumstances and hedging on principles thought central to Labor Zionism’s romantic dream. Given the economic forces arrayed against the interests of Jewish urban workers, the capacity of Labor Zionists to forge a strong community could not be predicted. The evolution of a workers’ community was a phenomenon contested by many. And the ironies of a workers’ identity that was supposed to derive from a shared communal experience were compounded by the overwhelming importance of a foreign power—Great Britain—in structuring the economy in Palestine. M a n dat o ry P o l i c i e s British colonialism played a dual role in shaping the immigrant experience. On the one hand, strategic calculations encouraged public work on roads and on railway and telegraph lines, drawing large numbers of the unskilled into backbreaking work under the most wretched of conditions. Everything big that got built could be attributed to British security considerations. On the other hand, the costs of World War I, a war fought over more years and more territory than ever anticipated, took their toll on Great Britain’s economy and generated the expectation that the Jewish national home would pay its own way.13 The work of clearing land
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
139
for paving roads saved many young immigrants from starvation in the early 1920s, but the completion of four of these roads in 1922 left hundreds wandering from countryside to city in search of shelter and food. Because the infrastructure planned for Palestine—additional railway lines and a deep port facility in Haifa as well as an airfield—was expensive, it was not initially a serious and urgent mandatory imperative: projects were often delayed or implemented slowly and spread over many years.14 British strategic interests may have generated opportunities for economic development, but they did not necessarily match the needs and expectations of a growing Jewish population. Capitalizing on the British mandatory decision to build roads to secure the country, the Histadrut established an employment agency to find and place the workers in those public projects. Heavy reliance on these public works, however, plunged the Jewish economy into depression in late 1922–1923 as one after another of the roads was paved. By the end of 1923, about one-quarter of Histadrut members in Haifa were without work where economic downturns hit first and hit hardest.15 The reduction of public expenditures spiraled through the private sector as well: fewer houses were constructed, shrinking the jobs available for skilled artisans. Massive unemployment had a negative effect on salaries, further weakening the Histadrut’s campaign against employers who hired cheaper Arab workers. And unskilled workers—typically newly arrived immigrants— were always the first to be fired in economic downturns. Jewish organized labor never ceased from pressing the British authorities to increase the supply of jobs for Jews, arguing for British fulfillment of its earlier commitments to Zionist national home building. Furthermore, it persisted in demanding the legislation of laws protecting workers’ employment rights. However, it also supported its own national enclosure and the confinement of its labor market and workplace struggles in the Jewish sector, where it could have some sense of achievement. After all Jewish immigration to Palestine and economic absorption in Palestine depended on British practices.16
The political struggle for Palestine also had its economic repercussions for Jews: sometimes locked out of public service in municipalities dominated by Arab nationalists, when employed in the public sector, they were enjoined by law from demanding better conditions.
Exiled in the Homeland
140
. . . The legal aspects of employment relations, and strikes in particular . . . were exemplified by the British reliance on the Ottoman opposition to workers’ organizations in the public sector (railways in particular), and on the Ottoman Strike Law which prohibited strikes in the Governmental sector. More specifically the law prevented workers’ associations in the public sector and allowed the Government to intervene in disputes which affected public utility services.17
When workers did engage in labor disputes and strikes against private entrepreneurs, they were often arrested for menacing the social peace or inflaming the political order. The arrest by mandatory police of the strikers in 1923 at a Zionist-funded flour factory, and later at a Jewish-owned printing workshop, sowed panic among workers conscious of a “large ready reserve of cheaper and more acquiescent labour”18 and of the possibility that they could be forcibly deported from the country. But the brutality of conditions in the factories convinced some workers to overcome their fears and press their demands with a missionary zeal in a series of strikes erupting later in the decade. Sometimes those caught up in the worst of exploitative conditions found the courage to overcome the fears gripping the workers and fight for humane treatment. The owners of the Nur [Light] match factory always preferred unorganized women workers. . . . But a strike broke out in February, 1927. The strikers made the following demands: improvement of sanitary conditions; hiring of a Jewish doctor; payment for sick days; a fifty percent increase in wages for workers now earning from five to ten piastres a day; an increase of twenty-five percent to those getting ten to twenty piastres a day; not allowing children to engage in dangerous work. There were sixty Jewish and forty Arab strikers. The strike lasted four months and twelve days. The employer called the police to break up the picket line surrounding the factory aimed at preventing strike-breakers from entering. Police beat men and women and hauled them to jail where they were again beaten, put into irons and in jail where they began to sing a workers’ song.19
Inhibited by a powerful colonial administration that favored capital over labor, viewed workers’ benefits as an unnecessary expense, and considered strikes a prelude to nationalist uprisings, workers nevertheless grasped the need for good relations with a government that would infl uence Zionism’s destiny.
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
141
Conditions for Workers: The Odds Young workers who came to Palestine at the end of World War I expected to engender developments that would change their lives and the course of Jewish history. Instead, they found themselves struggling to keep their ideals alive in the land where jobs, when found, were usually physically grueling, ill-paying, and almost never steady. Wages were far from generous when the cost of living was factored in. “Food in workers’ kitchens or in Arab restaurants cost between ten and fifteen piastres per day. Workers barely earned twenty piastres per day. They had special trouble paying for food during periods of price increases, particularly in 1920–1921 and in 1925.”20 Salaries were reduced during economic downturns, and rarely was compensation offered to workers injured on the job. The search for work defined the flow of most immigrants’ first years in Palestine, as this passage from Devorah Avrahamit’s diary emphasizes even while it glosses over the ambivalence she feels toward the aid extended to her by the Histadrut. My first welcome to Erez Israel was a long affair; it lasted no less than three months, for that was the time that it took me to find my first job. At last I was able to get into the kitchen of the workers’ club of Jaffa (Tel Aviv did not exist yet) as a cook. In the yard of the club there was a sort of ruin which could by courtesy be called a room. Because I had children to look after, I was accorded the privilege of making our home in that ruin.21
Most faced long periods of unemployment and had to rely on friends, family, or various labor-sponsored soup kitchens for food. The fortunate ones lived in tents or shacks erected by the Histadrut, whereas unlucky ones resorted to sleeping in caves. But many of these pioneers bathed their memories of those first months in the country in nostalgia. A group of construction workers lived in tents on the slope of a hill with an empty lot at the bottom, in what was then the center of Tel Aviv [near Balfour Street of today]. My girlfriend and I also put up our tent on the hill, near the sleeping shacks and the sick fund hut. The sand there came up to our knees and on a summer day it was burning hot. There were water faucets outside. Anyone who did not have a room to live in put up a tent. It was very simple, and “the municipality” didn’t bother them.22
Exiled in the Homeland
142
More than providing shelter, the Histadrut delivered sociability, as Bat Rachel goes on to note. The dormitory was on a sandhill . . . behind the hill was a large tent camp where new immigrants lived. There were two shacks on the hill that served as dormitories, one for women and one for men. The men’s dormitory was run by Zvi Luvianiker from the Second Aliyah, and I [Bat Rachel] ran the women’s dormitory. Thirteen women lived in it. The cost for one night was three grush. In Tel Aviv rents were very high, even for those days, and women workers who were training for occupations like tiling and construction did not have the means to rent a room for themselves. The women received a place to sleep with clean linens, and they could even cook something for themselves.23
Aiming to bring all workers into its organizational orbit, but initially lacking the means to do so, the Histadrut encouraged impoverished workers to draw on any aid available, even from synagogues or anti-Zionist religious councils. Ironically, despite its radical claims, the Histadrut led its members back to a reliance on traditional organizations and values. Too little investment generated a desperate plea to Jewish philanthropies for aid,24 a call that was, at the very least, inconsistent with the Labor Zionist principles that defined charity as a form of servility rendering its recipients docile in relation to the injustices besetting them. Conditions of work were dreadful, but the drain on the immigrant who did not find work was even worse. The squalid misery of most factories and workshops did not meet even minimal sanitary standards. People of all ages—sometimes even children—worked twelve-hour shifts, with most clinging desperately to these jobs and rejecting the language of militancy or moral indignation. Although some employers developed warm and close relations with their workers and cooperated with them in hiring Jewish workers, many did not. Many others treated workers with cruelty and disrespect even hitting some to insure the proper behavior and discipline. At the Shemen factory, there was iron-like discipline . . . with a bell sounding the start of the work day, a custom that aroused anger from the workers. At Shemen, the administration did not accommodate workers’ demands for compensation in case of work related accidents and did not contribute to the workers’ health fund. The workers’ day lasted eight hours including Friday.
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
143
The work in the largest station in the Port was filled with dangers and no compensation was extended to families in case of catastrophic accident to a member working there. Bakery owners did not contribute to the workers’ health fund and forced workers to work for extra hours without compensation.25
Without work and wages, laborers might easily starve. Many who faced starvation were forced to leave the country. Work in the sweatshops and the pollutants spewing from small factories weakened bodies and often turned what was expected to be an activity of self-development and source of power for the nation into a nightmare and the cause of an early death. No less an authority than Itzhak Ben-Zvi observed that the Histadrut achieved nothing during its first five years.26 No wonder that many Labor Zionists experienced their own immigration to Palestine not as an enhancement of their power to shape their world—as their ideology predicted—but rather as a loss of control over their lives. It is notably difficult to recapture the degree of uncertainty, fears, and hopes of this period, but a review of the labor conditions in Haifa in the 1920s provides material for a fuller understanding of the misery besetting Jewish workers. Haifa, astride the Mediterranean and gateway to the Fertile Crescent’s hinterland, became the strategic center of British authority and set the tempo of national and international growth for both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. At the end of World War I, Jews made up 9 percent of the city’s population; by 1931, they made up one-third of the city. They increased their presence in Haifa by 105 percent between 1922 and 1931. Jewish capitalist development began with the founding of the Shemen Oil factory during Ottoman rule, expanding with the establishment of Nesher Cement and a substation of the Palestine Electric Corporation, and with the proliferation of flour mills and small workshops.27 There were a few signs of progress measured in terms of the conventional criteria of economic growth, but statistics tell only part of the story and obscure its most crucial elements. Most businessmen operated with small amounts of capital. When growth did occur, although it was typically rapid and marked by sudden reversals, the fact that personal ventures could survive the economic downturns transformed rather modest entities into crucial agents of change. Despite the success of some businesses, too few jobs were created to employ the immigrants streaming into the country more quickly than the investments. Not only was the industrial base small and fragile, most
Exiled in the Homeland
144
workshops and factories stood far from the center of a town with almost no paved roads linking surrounding areas to one another or to areas where new immigrants lived. Most immigrant camps were scattered, and those who had jobs had a long trek at the beginning and end of the workday. Still, many were willing to put themselves through the cruelest forms of exploitation. Without skills, many were shunted to brute labor. Taking stock of his first job in a stone quarry many years later, Berl Reftor emphasized his own quite extraordinary capacity to endure the bodily assaults of hard labor. We went out to work at 5 in the morning. It took one hour and a quarter or an hour and a half to reach the quarry. We passed an Arab market in the lower city. Nothing else was there. We went to one Arab-owned store and bought two pitot [pieces of bread], a bit of salty cheese and a glass of goat milk and two apples. That is all we ate all day long. Before evening, we went to an Armenian café where we ate lunch and dinner together.28
How long people worked and how much time they spent walking to and from their jobs made life very hard. Being forced to work long hours instilled emotional ties among laborers whose suffering defined a new kind of community and kinship. But although physical labor may have heralded national redemption, it afforded no immunity to disease. Illness was omnipresent in the lives of these immigrants as they accustomed themselves simultaneously to a new climate, new foods, water, and barracks-like living quarters. Adjustment to the new society frequently and simply depended on physical strength and stamina. Haifa’s profile as a burgeoning trading center and strategic stronghold drew Jews and Arabs to it in expectation of finding jobs in the best of times, but particularly in the worst of times. Often, their arrival simply added to the density of the local economic burdens, ultimately deepening the mood of visible despair. Unemployment could be set off, as it was in 1922, by the erosion of public investment, with the effects quickly rippling through the private sector, cutting the demand for workers and reducing the standard of living. David DeVries portrays the onset of the 1923 depression this way. The driving force of the economy was construction, and when that diminished unemployment increased. Haifa felt its effects almost immediately. In January, 1923, the government postponed building an airfield
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
145
in the city, stopped laying telephone lines in Beit Shean, shrinking public works in the entire north of the country and reducing the number of workers. With Zionist roads on top of the Carmel completed, near the Shemen factory, there was less need for private housing. Fewer private houses were started and less work was available for carpenters and other skilled workers. With fewer jobs available, employers reduced salaries and tended to replace Jewish with Arab labor. The first to feel unemployment were the unskilled laborers.29
In 1926, Abba Houshi wrote to his wife of the hunger and terrible suffering that he encountered every day among the urban unemployed, and how little he could do to alleviate their pain.30 Women: The Odds Worsen Labor Zionism promoted a philosophy of liberation for women, and for many Jewish girls in Europe, the allure of these movements sprang from the promise and excitement of finding work, returning to the land, and engaging in physical labor. But it was much easier to pronounce a goal of equality than to enact it, as these comments by Menahem Elkind—one of Gedud ha-Avodah’s leaders and a proclaimed Marxist—suggest. In 1926, Elkind demanded the destruction of the bourgeois experience and of the economic and psychological foundations of capitalist culture, the abrogation of the economic basis of the family, the release of the woman from childcare and from serving her husband, the introduction of the woman into productive work, the destruction of the family as the basic unit of society, the emancipation of the woman, a lessening of the place of the family and its limitation in erotic domains.31
Ten years later, Yitzhak Tabenkin, theoretician of another Labor Zionist group, had to repeat that call, indicating that little had been changed for women. We must renew the family in such a way that the woman is not educated solely for family life, in which the content of her life is to be a “man’s wife.” When that alone is the content of a woman’s education or her social position, she is not independent. Being a “man’s wife” means that
Exiled in the Homeland
146
the measure of this person’s, this woman’s life is not her independence, rather it is her dependence.32
Male and female Labor Zionists, partners in Europe in the struggle for an egalitarian workers’ society, often grew apart in Palestine. In Erez Israel there came a parting of the ways. Over there, in the Russian exile, haverim [male comrades] and haverot [female comrades] had been equal comrades in the movement. We worked together, suffered together in the prisons and in the remote countries to which we were expelled: the moment the first pioneer certificates reached us, admitting us into Erez Israel, we were divided into two classes: haverim and haverot. The very first instructions we got from Erez Israel hinted at this inequality, and when we landed we were actually separated into two groups. In the one group were those who were “building the country”; in the other were those who would take care, in everyday matters, of “the builders of the country.”33
Many women joined Labor Zionist organizations believing that equality in opportunity was a shared goal, but they discovered that as workers coalesced into an organized force in Palestine, they tended to pay insufficient attention to the particular problems besetting women, and not only to favor the interests of males over females but also to adopt the conventional traditional outlook on gender. Women recognized that Histadrut policies and actions worked against their demands for equal access to jobs and their hopes of becoming full participants in the workers’ society. I have been in the country for a week. I came from the Volga Guard. In the Diaspora, there was no social problem. We worked at every task like men. We came here . . . we took on public works. They gave us a construction job on the condition that the women would not take part. We were shocked. How could it be? Here? In our own land? We were utterly confused. We spoke with the contractor. They agreed to give work to two or three women, no more. The problem exists here. The problem of the position of the woman worker. It exists, and we have already come up against it. However, they [the women in Palestine] don’t see it . . . they are short-sighted and don’t want to see it. Root of the problem is the disparity between the aspirations of women and the conceptions of men.34
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
147
The Women’s Workers’ Association was founded in 1920. Many of its members were eager to prove that women were as prepared as men for the rigors of manual labor. But the men who dominated Labor Zionism’s various organizations, including the Histadrut, saw little connection between the ideals they professed and the discriminatory behaviors they practiced. Women were divided in their views about whether class consciousness trumped gender interests—the calls by some for policy changes were generally countered by others expressing support for current policies. Because women were split into several competing political parties, they had trouble forging a common agenda or even a consensus on priorities. Access to resources controlled by the Histadrut depended on displaying loyalty to the organization. All attempts by Histadrut members to achieve autonomy generally foundered on charges of conducting an insurgency. For these reasons, the Women’s Workers’ Association submitted to Histadrut discipline in order to strengthen the general interests of workers and to gain access to its resources, however limited the disbursements. Unemployment was particularly acute for women, and many found their chances for employment circumscribed by persisting gender stereotypes or by simple discrimination. Not only did immigration have different meanings for men and women in Palestine, their adjustment experiences were also dramatically different, a point understood very well by Deborah Bernstein when she writes: Despite the mobility of some of the women workers, most of them lived in the city and had to find work on their own. Working conditions for women workers were extremely poor, and unemployment was high. In 1922 a report on some 200 pioneer women in the city found that a few dozen were working in workers’ kitchens and another twenty in construction. Several dozens were employed in cigarette factories, doing work that was injurious to their health for very low wages, and many others were employed in private homes as domestic servants.35
Even the prosperity that the increase in immigration beginning in 1924—the so-called Fourth Aliyah—pumped into the economy did not reach women. The Fourth Aliyah did not improve the situation for women. At the height of prosperity, in the summer of 1925, Miriam Shliemovitz, an activist of the Ahdut Ha-Avodah Party, reported that “about 80 percent, or even
Exiled in the Homeland
148
more, of the women workers in Palestine are concentrated in the city . . . Most of the urban women workers are unemployed right now. At a time when there is almost no problem of unemployment in the Histadrut, it oppresses the women worker without mercy.”36
Labor Zionism put forward a claim of moral advancement for both men and women, but scarce resources and periodic financial crises took out whatever wind was left of Histadrut idealism. Histadrut leaders could describe their actions as socially progressive, but many of its female members had trouble imagining a bright future given the conditions they faced in the workplace. Women workers were denied the right to speak during working hours and were either fined or fired if they dared to do so. Consequently, female workers were penalized financially beyond their initially more meager wages [more meager than those of men]. One particular case, that of a woman worker who was struck by her employer was brought to a Jewish court and received public exposure. . . . The employer was found guilty and fined the then relatively large sum of one Palestinian lira, but the woman employee was fired! Another case, in a different workshop, involved a foreman who brutally attacked one of the women workers. He pulled her hair, threatening to “break her head and back” simply because she stood up to look at the clock. Demanding that women carry heavy loads and turning back the clock in order to lengthen women’s working hours were other forms of intentional harassment.37
Women also found themselves marginalized by the Histadrut’s political structure and procedures. Several conditions made women’s advancement in the Histadrut difficult to realize. Chief among them was the way the Labour Movement elected, or rather nominated, its representatives. Its leadership assigned the organization’s highest and even lowest-level key positions to “preferred” members. This occurred in both the trade unions and in most divisions of the Histadrut. . . . This process of patronage enabled the leadership of the Histadrut to define its “chosen ones.” Usually these were its most reliable and compliant members, and they were mostly, but not exclusively, men.38
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
149
With relatively limited employment opportunities and an economy periodically depleted of resources, the Histadrut found ways to confine women to low-paying positions or to jobs considered acceptable for females in the most patriarchal of societies. When a haver [comrade] chooses a trade, he enters into a permanent relationship with his professional union. But the woman feels within herself—and others are there to remind her—that she is only a guest, a temporary member, in the trade organization. And when she marries, she has not even the right to the professional status of “houseworker”—no, not though she meets completely the statutory demand of the Histadrut which says that those are entitled to membership who live solely by their own physical or mental labor, without employing someone else. No, she is admitted into the Histadrut as “that haver’s wife.”39
However liberating the Labor Zionist ideology with regard to the economy and society, it did not provide a discourse for changing the responsibilities traditionally imposed on women. And who of us has not seen “the worker’s wife” working in other people’s houses or doing other people’s laundry, while her children run around neglected, or cared for by her out-of-work husband? Who has not seen those unhappy women who, without any help from the Histadrut, carry the full burden of their little children and of a chronically sick husband?40
Marriage seemed to dilute a woman’s status in the Histadrut as well as her class and gender consciousness, according to this observation. “We found here hardly any bond or relationship between the unmarried working girl, who feels that she is a full-fledged member of the Histadrut, and the working woman who is married.”41 Occasionally, a text reveals the anger and mordant outlook when female Labor Zionists realized that the rifts between men and women were essential consequences of the Histadrut’s gender-based discrimination. Here is one example. “To be a daughter of the Jewish people means to be faithful far away among strangers and to be a stranger at home among one’s own.”42
Exiled in the Homeland
150
T h e H i s ta d ru t R e ac h i n g f o r P o w e r Conditions in Palestine imposed upon the worker the most radical of demands and the most conventional set of duties, binding together those who took up the burden of meeting them. The Histadrut asked Jewish laborers to adhere to a series of measures: from a reduction of pay demands to a relinquishing of claims for better working conditions. Promoting the principle that the behavior of labor was a matter of national concern, Histadrut officials urged workers to comply with directives to change jobs or move to different towns or cities, even if those orders disrupted their personal lives. These top-down efforts with their discomfiting threatening tones demanded conformity to a strict set of rules and a quiet acceptance of the consequences, even when workers were forced into more oppressive circumstances, as evidenced by the lowering of salaries, particularly in the manufacture, construction, and stevedoring sectors of the economy.43 Nothing seemed more striking in these first years than the accommodation of Labor Zionism to the imperatives of Jewish nation-building. Commenting on the Histadrut’s first five years, Ben-Zvi wrote that if workers had only economic considerations in mind they would have left.44 Workers remained, he surmised, despite the hardships. But Ben-Zvi’s account was no simple accumulation of the data of failure and suffering. Given the depressions and the grueling conditions that drove many to the brink of starvation and significant numbers back to Europe, that Jewish labor continued to increase its numbers and enlarge Histadrut membership gave proof of its devotion to the Zionist cause. Still, the Histadrut stirred both loyalty and disaffection, particularly when its vaunted principles were compromised and the demands it put before employers were lowered in order to help stabilize fledgling enterprises. A whole set of assumptions emerged in the chaotic first years of British rule about who could exercise authority for the labor movement. The labor leader had to be someone who bent his behavior to the needs of the Histadrut and who was perceived to be a builder: the latter sometimes requiring physical strength and always demanding rhetorical talents. As Berl Reftor’s career suggests, his knowledge of Yiddish and Russian enabled him to communicate with new immigrants, and his mastery of Hebrew signaled his absolute loyalty to the cultural model propagated by the Histadrut and the correspondence of his way of thinking to theirs. Not all workers could prove their loyalty to the Histadrut leadership so quickly and so thoroughly.
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
151
Most of the workers [in a Tel Aviv factory during the early 1920s] were immigrants from Russia who did not know Hebrew, and one heard mainly Russian. When more workers came, the numbers of those who knew Hebrew rose slightly, yet the situation did not change much. Out of habit and exhaustion from work, no attention was paid to speaking Hebrew. When the workers became more numerous, they tended to overcome habit, and the number of Hebrew speakers increased. Even those who did not know the language did not treat it as foreign, and some of them tried to overcome the difficulty.45
Berl Reftor’s arrival in Haifa marked the beginning of his passion for the Histadrut—people who knew Rector used to say that the Histadrut was his Rebbe.46 And his capacity not only to pour energy and spirit into working for the organization but also to be able to describe his work and his views in Hebrew as well as in the vernaculars of the time and place gave him personal status and provided currency for the Histadrut in its drive for power over the labor market. It is easy to dwell on the economic conditions in Palestine that allowed the Histadrut to amass power. But this would obscure one of the primary sources of its vast authority—the ability of its leaders to convince workers that the organization was the vehicle of genuine social change. Here is one compelling testimony, ironically from a woman who would later acknowledge some of the organization’s failures. “Here in our midst a new organization is being formed—and it came into being at the same time as the Legion. It is the Histadrut. That organization will fight for labor, for our language, and for our land—for labor which educates, for the language which unites, and for the Galilee of the future [but the speech was delivered in Yiddish].”47 Despite the appeal of its expansive and liberating vision, the Histadrut could not provide jobs for all its members, campaign for the rapid improvement of sanitary standards too costly for the start-up enterprises to bear, or protect all its members from becoming a kind of factory fodder tied to the drudgery of work without adequate or fair compensation. Demands for a shortened workday often backfired by convincing entrepreneurs that Jewish labor was simply too expensive to employ. With little capital and an unfavorable labor market, Jewish labor movement leaders knew their position was precarious—its constituents always threatened by their own needs versus their values, the volatility of the economy, and their rela-
Exiled in the Homeland
152
tionship with Great Britain, whose colonial masters were unsympathetic to the needs of Jewish labor. As a convergence of developments brought enough bad times to dampen the ebullient spirit of Labor Zionism’s youthful immigrants and plunge even the most enthusiastic of them into a downward spiral of starvation and despair, Histadrut leaders acquired the confidence to mediate between the demands of impoverished laborers and the interests of business helping the latter to build a firm foundation while trying to aid the former by widening their access to jobs. The Histadrut recognized that it could not afford to alienate Jewish capitalists nor could it totally transform market forces operating against labors’ interest.48
It is difficult to fit the Histadrut membership into the stock category of class. Although Histadrut actions did not move the community of workers toward egalitarianism, they did improve conditions and benefits for members, even during the first decade of British rule. But the incremental progress that raised the general standard of living, reduced the numbers working more than forty-eight hours a week, and brought greater stability to the labor economy also fueled new forms of differentiation and tensions. Skilled workers often earned more than the unskilled, and they fought vigorously to retain the disparity. When they were not guaranteed higher wages, they sometimes left the labor union. Self-organized groups of workers became small-scale contractors and offered employers savings on labor costs. In the construction sector and in carpentry, such contracting groups preferred to buy cheap materials and tools from Arabs, thus aggravating the competition with Jewish suppliers and other groups of Jewish workers who wished to specialize in these artisanal ventures, blurring the distinction between worker and employer.49
Seniority proved divisive as well because it could be ignored when the organization insisted that finding employment for new immigrants was indeed a priority. There was bitterness toward people who had job security: in Haifa, they were called “the people who lived on top of the hill.” The organization of a workers’ community forged a powerful link between economic and political leaders in Palestine, fomenting bitter disputes and fissures over the distribution of power within the Histadrut.
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
153
Abba Houshi, who helped turn Haifa into the mainstay of labor’s political power, never found a comfort level with the movement’s internal tensions, attributing them to the weaknesses carried by immigrants to the land of Israel from the Diaspora. Houshi constantly focused on tensions among workers rather than on the opposition between workers and capitalists while stressing the difficulties posed by British policies. He saw the threats to workers as emanating mostly from lack of ideological commitments and the bad infl uence of the Galut [Diaspora]. Immigrant workers too often preferred to be unorganized. Histadrut leaders tended to be suspicious of urban workers as insufficiently committed—too greedy and individualistic. Houshi also viewed artisans, clerks, and teachers as aspiring to the middle class. Palestine’s periodic depressions only accentuated tensions and confl icts among workers: they seemed insufficiently committed to continue [support of] immigration; they developed confl icts between skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed. Even the kibbutzim around Haifa seemed to withdraw into themselves. Houshi saw his main challenge as maintaining Histadrut discipline over workers. Houshi had to curb the militancy of some unions in order to secure jobs, and he worked hard to promote continued immigration, the conquest of labor, and to infl uence the British to open up more jobs for Jews.50
Carried on with varying degrees of intensity were battles between Histadrut leaders and members over policies as well as over how policies would be formulated. The intertwining of labor and political elites sparked ambitions at the local level for more rapid salary raises and more generous benefits, and triggered controversy over the dispersion of authority. Confl icts within the Histadrut became superheated and public, particularly over strike actions or over whether to back policies that allowed immigrants to stream into the country and glut the labor market. The Histadrut regulations were often violated: many workers attempted to evade paying membership dues, challenged the attempts of the Councils’ Labor Exchanges to control allocation of employment, and opposed Histadrut attempts at regulating relations with employers and containing unrest in the Yishuv economy. Organizational protest was also reflected in workers turning to an “external” authority [the British police or Yishuv institutions], and in their almost total refusal to fulfill institutional regulations
Exiled in the Homeland
154
and accept their entailed sanctions. Leftist opposition to the policies of the dominant political elite on the Councils turned these into political arenas where ideological domination and political authority were challenged.51
Jewish employers, trying to protect their newly minted and fragile enterprises, claimed they could not pay workers what they were worth or construct working conditions worthy of their employees without going bankrupt or without being undersold by competitors who cut costs by hiring Arabs or immigrants straight off the boat who would work for lower wages and tolerate humiliating and abject conditions. What might have set off a broad confrontation between capital and labor was checked by Histadrut actions that often blamed workers for inflaming passions and for putting forward unreasonable demands. Workers were told that the power to create a new national identity would come only from those capable of disciplined work and of shaping their behavior to serve collective not personal goals. The story of Haifa’s dockworkers shows how the Histadrut’s philosophy gained momentum and gave the organization power and eventually a strong base of support in the city. Labor conditions in the ports infl icted immense suffering on the workers. Employed by contractors at low salaries, workers had to adjust to draconian standards of physical endurance that few could meet. The long hours and the heavy loads threatened the health of all workers, and accidents—not covered by any insurance or benefit programs funded by employers—could permanently disable them. Arab contractors, with long-established ties to the authorities dispensing the contracts, worked to restrict Jewish access and keep the dock work free of competition. Histadrut activists in Haifa decided to find Jewish workers who would stop at nothing to gain a foothold in this pivotal business. Initially, the Jewish laborers worked for longer hours, for less money, and with greater speed and efficiency.52 For the most part, these workers did not invoke the values of militancy or of moral indignation; their overall stance displayed a remarkably stoic endurance. But just this kind of tale of suffering could stir the ire of local activists who saw their fight to protect the prerogatives of skilled workers, raise their wages, and improve working conditions as the very basis for building a viable economy in Palestine and a new Jewish national identity. Ideology and self-interest could supply the impetus for a trade union activism that could be quite militant. Pressure for an egalitarian society, ironically, forced Histadrut leaders to defend an economic system—capi-
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
155
talist—that their values deemed indefensible. As appealing as its rhetoric was in its vision of a harmonious society of workers, an egalitarian ethos did not shape Histadrut financial strategies. Encouraging entrepreneurs not so much to maximize profits as to secure the expansion of wealth, Histadrut officials recognized that because land purchases and the setting up of a sound economy took considerable assets, progressive policies for workers would be deferred. Because Histadrut leaders appropriated to themselves the role of speaking for the workers as a whole, they often opposed initiatives coming from local labor representatives. Of course, not all local labor councils forged the same relationship with the national leadership. The demographic balance favoring Arabs in Haifa mattered just as much as the reverse in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in erecting walls of distrust between local and national officials. In Haifa, local labor activists managed to acquire more autonomy than in the other cities, and also a more troubled relationship with national leaders. Nevertheless, generally speaking, seen from the bottom of the Histadrut hierarchy, even in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, national stances seemed too soft on employers and too harsh on workers. But demands made by local labor councils often grated on the sensibilities of national Histadrut leaders and were associated with a zealotry perceived as threatening to the entire Zionist enterprise. Building a new nation required not only a vision, according to the leaders; it also demanded an extraordinary resilience and loyalty to its framework of ordered relationships.53 The Labor Zionist movement, so deeply saturated in socialist rhetoric, so intensely committed to the idea that workers were the true Zionist heroes, managed to compromise its values and still retain its status as the legitimate representative of labor interests. Labor leaders explained their opposition to strike actions aimed at changing conditions that had turned work into a travesty by charging those holding discordant views with refusing to defer to the dictates of the national leaders, with breaking ranks, with antagonizing the mandatory government, and finally, with alienating Jewish capitalists whose investments were needed to lay the foundation of a modern economy that could offer young workers their jobs. Just as the Histadrut combated nonunionized labor, it also attacked the ideologues and visionaries who presumably put class above nation, often labeling them enemies, expelling them from the organization, and isolating them from the aid and comfort of community.54 The Histadrut organized Jewish labor into a united force, extending benefits to the faithful and imposing severe sanctions on the disloyal.
Exiled in the Homeland
156
Calls for inclusive class solidarity inevitably turned into an embrace of unity across rather substantial national boundaries. Although there were some enterprises where Jews and Arabs worked side by side and received equal pay for equal work—there was, for instance, the National Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, established in 1919—most Jewish workers came to see their Arab counterparts as rivals.55 Labor disputes created incentives for alliances across the ethnic divide, but nationalist competition trumped most joint actions. The Histadrut operated as if the secret of Zionism’s success would be determined by Jewish workers alone. “[B]y [the] mid-1920s almost 70 percent of Jewish workers were members of the Histadrut. The exclusion of Arab workers from Histadrut and the general weakness of union organization among Arabs hampered joint action.”56 The task of nation-building offered Histadrut leaders the rhetorical opportunity to generate solidarity even when their tangible goals eluded them. But rhetoric alone could not produce sufficient ordering mechanisms for workers’ behavior. In bad times, members whose salaries were lowered refused to pay dues. When the salaries of dockworkers were reduced from twenty Egyptian grush to fifteen per day, many refused to contribute to the Histadrut sick fund.57 Skilled workers sometimes preferred to form their own cooperatives and search for jobs on their own. When skilled workers sought to find work on their own and bypass Histadrut rules, they faced dire consequences for their actions. Workers forming their own cooperatives might find jobs during prosperous times but have no access to aid during economic downturns. Even skilled workers who had little trouble finding jobs needed Histadrut connections to locate housing or to secure infrastructural improvements to their residences. Despite the socialist hoopla celebrating equality, the symbolism of the puritan Halutz hardly captured the social structural essence of Palestine’s Jewish labor force dominated by clerks and teachers, which according to commentators made the goal of economic independence a near impossibility. Public funds were poured into building workers’ apartments and used to dampen inflationary pressures. Many scarce resources were channeled into housing and other lifestyle supports.58 A wholesale embrace of Histadrut discipline could mean long periods of unemployment or partial employment when strikes were announced. Finding work for new immigrants in the good times often meant sending people to various settlements around the country despite the preferences of the new arrivals. In the bad times, the Histadrut tried to encourage
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
157
workers to share jobs and salaries with the unemployed. Although requests were ignored by many, they did raise pay for over 40,000 workdays during the 1923 depression and helped many manual and office workers overcome all the social barriers that normally kept them apart and even antagonistic.59 But Histadrut officials had a hard time showing workers how much they had in common, particularly during periods when economic resources were severely depleted. The 1922–1923 downturn accentuated competition among Jewish workers. Workers’ economic individualism began to threaten newly created Labor Councils and their attempts to enforce a collectivist strategy of market and social control. This was exemplified in the fact that in seeking job security and fearing that they would be unable to ensure the livelihood of their families, many workers opted for abstention from disputes with Jewish employers over the employment of Arabs or the improvement of working conditions.60
Labor activities throughout the decade demonstrated that the Histadrut continued to augment its power and forge new and immense loyalties, even in Haifa, where circumstances made local leaders less responsive to national directives. Of the 158 strikes and lockouts in Palestine during 1922–26, 38 took place in Haifa [24.1 percent,] 32 of which were part of a distinctive strike wave which beset the town in 1923–25. For a small town with a population growing from 24,600 in 1922 to 35,000 in 1926, such a degree of labour unrest was quite distinctive, and signified deep employment tensions. However, almost all strikes were in [the] Jewish sector. Jews constituted about a third of [the] population in 1926 and a labour force of some 15,000.61
But although increasing numbers of workers followed Histadrut directives, they did not do so simply as a result of a growing consensus on the organization’s tactics and strategies. As appealing as Histadrut rhetoric was in giving voice to laborers, it also demanded conformity to a strict set of rules that often exposed the vulnerable to a form of ideological ostracism. Those who did not conform could be economically and culturally disenfranchised through a variety of Histadrut disciplinary mechanisms aimed at controlling workers’ behavior. The same national goals that moved
Exiled in the Homeland
158
Histadrut leaders to open labor exchanges as employment agencies also convinced them to assert the exclusive right to classify jobs. The Histadrut thus had the authority to open up opportunities for particular positions to a broad spectrum of people or alternatively close them down to reduce competition. Tribunals emerged as a kind of quasi-judicial instrument—run by union officials and not by judges—to define the new rules organizing the labor culture and to mete out punishment to workers who ignored directives or evaded what were deemed their national duties. Violators were treated as if they had committed unspeakable crimes. In David DeVries’s words, the tribunals functioned as “moral entrepreneurs defining the norms of communal deviance.”62 Here is his summary of their operations: “In 1922, tribunals began to operate and dealt with 62 cases. During 1924–26, 1,143. When strikes increased cases decreased. The reverse was also true. . . . When unemployment soared, strikes declined and tribunals increased radically.”63 Working out the terms of a just society and of nationhood became a self-imposed but contested task among the self-proclaimed pioneers coming to Palestine during this formative period of the Mandate. In Europe, they had been united with nothing but abstract ideologies. Pioneers molded national and socialist sentiments around their own experiences, and most put a premium on self-discipline and obedience to Histadrut directives. A dense network of workers thus passed together through the thresholds of love and labor, supposedly refashioning self and society. Workers may have initially described themselves in different ways: class, community, movement. But many who initially thought of themselves as belonging to a class gradually came to define themselves as part of the Histadrut system that ordered their lives and gave them its meaning. Reluctant to break with their values, workers replaced them with loyalty to a sovereign-like framework—the Histadrut. For many workers, the Histadrut symbolized both their vision of the new society and the means to realizing it. Ya ͗ acov Davidon arrived in Haifa, a port town in the north of Palestine on the 2nd of November, 1921. He had come by train from Jaffa, and made his way through the narrow streets of the Arab suq, heading toward the wooden huts that his friends, of the builders’ collective, had constructed on the lower slopes of Mount Carmel. The streets were almost empty and the few people about seemed frightened. He was soon to learn that
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
159
the Arabs had staged a demonstration that day, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The police had dispersed it and badly wounded two of the demonstrators. Riots had broken out, and many Jews had been hurt. Davidon continued determinedly on his way . . . [finally reaching] Herzl Street, the main thoroughfare of the new Hebrew neighborhood of Hadar Hacarmel. He was joyfully greeted by Jewish workers who were on guard duty. He was safe—once again in an all-Jewish environment. The following morning, he set out, together with members of the collective, for one of the many construction sites in the neighborhood. It would soon be the heart of the new Jewish community of Haifa. His life, over the next few years, evolved within this newly established community: He dwelt, with friends, in the camp of tents that the Haifa Labor Council (HLC) constructed for the hundreds of new immigrant workers. He usually ate in the HLC workers’ kitchen, where meals were cheap, and then crossed the street to join other Jewish workers at the Lebanon Café. He enjoyed improvised theater where the immigrants staged Hebrew plays.64
M at e r i a l a n d I d e o l o g i c a l R e s o u r c e s Labor Zionist immigrants coming to Palestine with nothing to sell but their labor power were possessed of a belief that physical labor could liberate both the land and them. This belief instilled in Labor Zionism’s leadership in the Histadrut the conviction that the sacrifices and immense suffering of workers would move the national struggle forward. The Histadrut that idealized the Jewish working class asked for their stoical endurance for the sake of building the new nation. Because movement activists believed that self-development depended on transforming the whole physical and social world they inhabited, even stoic endurance represented, however, a radical rupture with the ideals that drove them to come and settle the land. That had to exact its personal costs. As compensation, Histadrut leaders used their moral and ideological resources to give work meaning, to drench it in song and poetry and generate slogans with beauty and excitement no matter the actual misery of workers’ lives and labor. National conferences resembled youth festivals where people sang, danced, and spent the night arguing and sleeping under the stars as if they were on a nature hike. Freewheeling discussions opened new channels of confl ict and danger, public and private, between people and movements, but Histadrut members were acutely aware that “freedom of thought was joined with unity of action.”65
Exiled in the Homeland
160
The new immigrants put up their tents on the sands and empty lots of Allenby and Balfour streets. They organized into groups of construction gangs and went out to build Tel Aviv. In the evenings they left the tents and filled the “settled” streets of Tel Aviv. They congregated in groups and held heated arguments about how the world would be redeemed and how the country would be built and by which party. And after the arguments, they broke into song and dance. The residents of Tel Aviv complained that the singing and dancing youngsters were disturbing their sleep, and Dizengoff [the mayor of Tel Aviv] asked them to be quiet. But the young people would gather to eat and argue at Hannah Meisel’s workers’ kitchen on Nachlat Benjamin Street, at Spector’s, who also opened a restaurant on Nachlat Benjamin Street, or in the kitchen of the Ahdut Ha-Avodah Party. Each party had its own kitchen, its own employment office and its own activists. When they were in a good mood, they went out into the street to dance. It is hard to believe the young people went out and danced wild horas for no apparent reason. But that is how it was. Perhaps it was because they were happy that they were building the country and happy to be the first, and perhaps it was because they were alone and wanted to overcome longings for the homes they had left behind.66
Histadrut leaders echoed Ben-Gurion’s ringing phrase—from class to nation—in making the actions of labor the signature of what they proclaimed to be Palestine’s new Jewish community, predisposing the imagination to look ahead and not back for the criteria of achievement. The humble efforts of manual labor were expected to change the landscape and the community, and workers began to pour their own individual stories into one large narrative of striving and success. Many of the Labor Zionist immigrants who wrote memoirs filled them with laconic notations on the prosaic details of their work routines and union activities.67 Men and women developed a vocabulary crafted around their roles in creating the new Labor Zionist culture, their lives often depicted as a set of experiences shared with the larger community rather than as an individual drama. For instance, Yokheved Bat Rachel, who followed labor activist Abraham Tarshish from one assignment to another, tells us more about their Labor Zionist missions than about her feelings for the man with whom she spent her life.68 When political alliances or movements fragmented, echoes of the dis-
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
161
agreements coursed through marriages and friendships, redirecting feelings and sometimes turning family members against one another.69 In relating these developments, people seemed more comfortable describing their deepest passions about politics than their feelings about loved ones lost.70 The Yishuv was portrayed as a model of self-sacrifice, altruism, courage, and solidarity. Feelings once attached to family were redeployed to friends and comrades. Few of the writings offer detailed accounts of personal feelings untouched by labor movement considerations. Couples even seemed to have arranged marriages as much for political purposes as out of passion or love. He is a fellow from the third wave of immigration, a pioneer and even leader of a group of pioneers, what we call an activist. She—a girl from the same wave, a member of the same group—a pioneer. Both of them would like to live in an agricultural settlement. They work on the roads, by the hour. They go from road to road [to work] and return to the city. Here they live in a tent, with two beds of the type common in those days—black, low, army issue. The chairs—two empty kerosene boxes and an empty kerosene tin, turned upside down. The table is made of crate slats and sways like a drunk. The tablecloth which covers it is a newspaper and the tea in the cups always waves and spills, wetting the paper. The couple lie down on the sand by their tent in the light of the moon. He tells her what he did all day during meetings, and she talks about this, that, and the other. One of the idylls of Palestine! Both write letters to their parents telling them that they are well, that they are getting along fine—they have their own apartment, their own furniture, and life of work and a partnership in building the country.71
Histadrut officials relied on large and small, formal and informal cultural gatherings to mobilize new members, provide companionship for those already affiliated, and intensify identification with the organization. Public celebrations of holidays were also designed to structure emotional patterns for Labor Zionists. There were parades on Purim and on May Day, indicating that the domain of the Jewish calendar would no longer be patrolled solely by rabbis.72 Because the death of young immigrants occurred more frequently than anticipated, funerals were granted an importance that transcended the loss. The death of a comrade was marked by public gatherings, with
Exiled in the Homeland
162
Histadrut officials attempting to provoke new emotions and to link the loss to an imperative to redouble the dedication to the organization’s mission rather than to provide consolation. Young workers who died quickly became heroes as their surviving friends were told to keep their memories alive through hard work. Labor Zionist rhetoric invented a vocabulary that measured class interests on a scale of spiritual, national regeneration, rendering class confl ict a highly contentious if not problematic tactic and value and giving coherence and justification to the Histadrut strategy aimed at moderating workers’ demands.73 In a community deeming emigration from the land of Israel tantamount to betrayal and a violation of a sacred duty, immigrants who could not adjust to the rigors and hardships of life in Palestine sometimes committed suicide—more women than men and among the women, more who were unmarried.74 The rupture that a suicide represented for the community may have triggered profound feelings of guilt among survivors, but they were rarely expressed, as the following eulogy suggests. In the Labor Anthology Baavodah [At Labor], the last words are those of Shoshanah who took her life a few days before the book appeared. And she ended with: “Happy is he who dies in victory; happier is he who lives in victory.” After the event, we, the survivors, looked on each other with different eyes. Reading the last works of Shoshanah, our lives gained new affirmation.75
The pioneering activities of Labor Zionists became the muse for many poets. To young immigrant workers, the poetry readings offered by Yitzhak Lamdan and Avraham Shlonsky served as rituals of belonging and harmony after the long hours of backbreaking labor when workers could not help but feel alienated and exploited. Of course, many workers were too crushed by the drudgery of more than ten hours of labor every day to participate in these cultural activities. But large numbers did attend, reinforcing Labor Zionist rhetoric and supposedly giving the misery experienced by workers genuine meaning. Literary figures developed the language for talking about Labor Zionism. Out of their discourse a recognizable Zionist type took form, albeit confined to a substantial minority of the men and women living in Palestine, but radiating power well beyond its numbers. This image of unity depended upon and legitimized the Zionist enterprise in Palestine as the labor of men and women coming together to
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
163
define and rejuvenate the nation, blurring or obliterating the distinctions between classes. Through relatively easy access to print through Histadrut-sponsored newspapers and publishers, Labor Zionists succeeded in planting their narrative deep into public consciousness. But this powerful narrative offered little room for alternative views of how to become part of the nationbuilding project, and it showed no awareness of how many laborers it left culturally ostracized. Many poor workers, for example, particularly those living in Jerusalem from Bukhara and Yemen, could not find themselves in the dominant Labor Zionist heroic story. They did not consider Labor Zionism’s radical aims to transform family and religious traditions legitimate. Nor did they find its cultural events appealing. The Histadrut offered some young immigrants the rhetorical opportunity to treat their work and life in Palestine as agents of social transformation. But this radical call did not provide every worker in Palestine with the sentiments, symbols, or goals for identifying with the community. Looking at the youth organizations set up by the Labor Zionist movement in Palestine illustrates how the configuration of the new Jewish culture impinged upon the structuring of identity and community. Workers’ youth groups affiliated with the Histadrut occasionally pressed issues such as child labor and the general mistreatment of children in workshops. Surveying the youth movements during the British Mandate, Israel Kolatt observes, “The youth workers organized by Histadrut in the 1920s led some of the first strikes in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Tiberius.” But although they were, in his words, “interested in improving working conditions,” they also devoted a great deal of time to “seminars and hikes.”76 Believing themselves to be another conduit for social change, most Histadrut youth leaders promoted the egalitarian Labor Zionist vision and its promise of radical transformation. Activities were built around building solidarity and devotion to the Histadrut, presumably to prepare these young men and women to set the course for the nation. These activities fashioned the primary context for their education and, more important, the identity formation of a new generation. They were expected to make more of a difference for the young participants than for their families. Of course, for boys and girls who did not want their identities transformed or who did not want to be the instrument of radical social change, these movements were problematic. Growing up in rigidly patriarchal homes, children such as these found both Labor Zionist discourse and activities disorienting. These young Jews preferred to affiliate with the
Exiled in the Homeland
164
Revisionist Betar youth movement when they were drawn into any movement at all. Betar offered no critique of hierarchy: indeed its discourse was replete with praise for the idea of charismatic and strong leadership. The group possessed a clear structure of authority within and formed no agenda for the radical reform of traditional authority structures such as the family or religious life. Although boys and girls in Histadrut-affiliated groups achieved distinction by renouncing the values of their Diasporaborn ancestors, in Betar they operated under the superintending authority of their leader and were presumed to be able to reach adulthood without having to reject the world of their parents. C o n c lu s i o n The economic and cultural strains of immigration generated insecurity as well as uncertainty about whether or not Jews had a national future in Palestine. The difficulties of finding and retaining work forced many to leave the country and discouraged those left behind. The desire to transform Jewish life, buoyed by the conviction that it was actually possible to do so, ran aground on the economic realities of Palestine. Very few pioneers actually found agricultural work, and those who did often found themselves dispirited instead of fulfilled by the disciplinary demands of the labor. Although Labor Zionism viewed the city as suspect, it also became a symbol of excitement. If the city was indeed a site of bourgeois culture, it was also the place where crowds gathered, where store shelves overflowed, and where the writers whose stories and poems celebrated working the land actually lived. The temptations of the city also drew Labor Zionists into the kind of occupational structure their ideologies condemned—jobs as clerks and as small-business owners. But there were few agonized reflections on the occupational trends in Labor Zionist discourse. Histadrut leaders did not drive themselves wild denouncing members who no longer maintained the purity of their identity as workers. Instead, these developments provided Labor Zionists with the opportunity to expand the range of their vocabulary and recast their judgment of jobs they once disparaged. For example, the term worker, now encompassing clerks employed by the Histadrut, was so widely used that it eventually lost its distinctiveness and its explanatory power.77 Instead of reshaping Jewish society, Labor Zionism restructured the vernacular culture by redefining the occupational categories deployed to
No K addish for Exile, No Path to Redemption
165
describe society. Anyone employed by the Histadrut or even affiliated with its political parties was automatically deemed a worker. Perhaps Labor Zionists lacked the capacity to instill in people’s minds unshakeable devotion to a revolutionary impulse to transform society. But they did possess the power to change the vocabulary deployed to describe the daily activities of the growing numbers of bureaucrats associated, in one way or another, with Labor Zionism’s institutions. The bureaucrat could achieve an intense militancy at the behest of Histadrut leaders, but was required to remain docile in relation to the radical creed that presumably once gripped his imagination. By periodically affirming its ideals, the Histadrut fortified its membership even as the organization’s policies and actions confl icted with its proclaimed utopian values. A soaring rhetoric seemed to restore the Histadrut to its original integrity and to its convictions in Zionism’s unlimited possibilities and in immigration as the primal source of energy for the development of the national home. Convinced by their experiences in Palestine, Histadrut leaders opted for a change in the relationships of power, rather than for the pursuit of the principles initially inspiring their Labor Zionist convictions, that would produce a radical disruption in the inherited attitudes and practices carried from Europe. In Palestine, the Diaspora would be negated in word but not in deed. That this disjuncture touched off all sorts of difficulties and controversies is well known; that it also implanted a deeply felt anguish may have been understood, but it certainly was never acknowledged.
six
Un
Menahem Sheinkin: I do not want to rehearse what is conventionally accepted: that without land and without workers we will not establish our place in the land of Israel. But I will try to shed light on the character of the land purchases and methods of expanding the numbers of workers. Although these two principles almost always appear in word and deed, they have not really occupied similar importance in our actual activities. . . . We have not yet figured out how we are going to fulfill these two objectives.1
Settling and working the land framed the Zionist project with an idealistic vision but not with a program for creating the conditions for statehood. Although the establishment of a Jewish national home through land purchases and the creation of a working class was an objective accepted in general terms and a consistent theme in Zionist discourse, it also proved a divisive and troubling issue as a basis for setting priorities and as a method for translating goals into policies. Intended to project a unity of aims, the call to settle and work the land also exposed Zionism’s fault lines and cultural contradictions.2 It is important to remember that the lines of opposition were drawn in a time of turbulence for Jews within and without Palestine during the first decade of British rule. But although the war ravaged Jewish population centers in Europe, it also brought instability, hunger, and the dislocation of combat to Palestine as well. Ten thousand Jews were expelled from their homes in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in March 1917, with many (elderly, poor,
Unsung Heroes
167
and young) sent to the Galilee, where disease and primitive living conditions killed a large number. Almost every resident of these prewar centers of Jewish life had a personal encounter with death, burying at least one relative before returning home. The Zionist enterprise itself was on the verge of collapse.3 Often women, abandoned by husbands all too eager to escape the burdens of caring for their poor families, paid the highest price for the years of turmoil that tore apart families. Without religiously sanctioned divorce writs, these abandoned women could not remarry, their lives locked up inside the domestic roles they occupied. The many appeals to rabbis and various official Jewish organizations, including the Zionist Commission, contain powerful narratives of neglect and desperation. The fate of many of these women quickly became an important concern for the Zionist Commission as it sought to alleviate the wartime suffering of Palestine’s Jewish community. Many husbands left their wives to go to America or to Austria after the war. Sometimes even if wives were not left behind in Palestine, they returned claiming their husbands were forced to work on Shabbat. The many appeals to the National Desertion Bureau in the United States and to the Zionist Commission led to intervention by Rabbi Abraham Kook. The Zionist Commission searched on behalf of “deserted women” everywhere: Egypt, Russia, Germany, Roumania, South Africa, Paraguay, Argentina, England, and in America. Even when found some had already remarried, many sent no money to care for families in Palestine, although some did promise to return.4
When women did find work in factories, their wages—even within the workers’ communities—fell well below those of men and could not cover minimal household expenses. Subject to an array of discriminatory practices, they were often the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Typically compelled into domestic service, women worked long hours for low salaries and unless they found caring employers, they faced an unsettling loss of control over their own lives.5 Although the war laid the groundwork for fulfilling Zionism’s political ambitions, Great Britain’s endorsement of a Jewish national home in Palestine also unleashed a series of challenges. Never had political success looked so precarious. To fulfill the expectations that resulted from Great Britain’s support, the World Zionist Organization had to mobilize vast amounts of money for economic investment and attract large numbers
Exiled in the Homeland
168
of Jews to Palestine’s shores. The passage to Palestine of about 100,000 Jews between 1919 and 1929 both expanded and overwhelmed the country’s productive capacity.6 Initially, a major impetus for growth was demographic, but mounting numbers of people searching for work quickly outstripped the available supply of jobs and had the effect of pushing artisans and small shop owners into the same distress as unskilled workers. Almost everyone who came to Palestine during these years struggled to make ends meet. The volatile economy brought short-term material benefits, but they were hardly distributed equally. Economic downturns triggered widespread unemployment, often hitting hardest at the newest arrivals, who found themselves facing a very different situation from those who came even a few months earlier. Calculations and sentiments always pointed in different directions. This view was neatly encapsulated by Menahem Sheinkin, whose Zionism started in the Hovevei Ziyyon organization and who embraced the permissive path that movement laid out for economic and national development.7 It should come as no surprise, then, that Sheinkin focused his critical attention on Labor Zionism, because its beliefs quickly grew to the proportion of sacred propositions for national development. Sheinkin was one of the first people to illuminate the problems of trying to turn visions into blueprints and to spell out, in a very public way, the costs of committing resources to ideals that could not be fulfilled. Labor Zionism’s failures to subject its assumptions to rigorous analysis, and by contrast, its simultaneous success in projecting its principles as ideas widely shared by Palestine’s Jews, generated expensive mistakes and self-defeating policies, according to Sheinkin. Even the pattern of public land purchases had wasted more money and scarce resources than the modes adopted by private developers. The scale of incompetence given the World Zionist Organization’s severe budgetary constraints multiplied every policy error. The land purchased by the World Zionist Organization is in the worst areas, often next to areas that would be better for the health of farmers or for more robust planting. Private enterprise is doing a better job in raising funds for land purchase than are official Zionist organizations. If land purchases expanded to the hills in the Galilee and near Jerusalem, then less money would be needed for such purposes and the market for land even near the coast would cool off.8
Unsung Heroes
169
For Sheinkin, Labor Zionism encouraged too limited a perspective on how to build a viable Jewish community in Palestine, and not incidentally how to expand the country’s Jewish working class. Labor Zionists were taken to task for looking so far into the distance that they entirely missed what existed on the horizon. Menahem Sheinkin believed that [the] pioneer movement would be sporadic, serendipitous, and insecure as long as it included young intelligentsia and did not embrace masses of ordinary people. Artisans, he argued, were a steadier lot and a more reliable source of immigration. The artisan stays and so does his progeny. But since artisans are afforded no protection from the national organizations, Zionism and the land of Israel may lose them. If Diaspora Jews knew more about the absorption process in the land, more could come even from the United States. . . . Artisans do not want to burden the World Zionist Organization, and they do not need as much support as do halutzim [pioneers].9
Labor Zionism may have struck a chord vital to the sensibilities of Palestine’s Jews in their identification with renewal and progress. But Labor Zionism’s visionary brilliance was both problematic and perilous, most notably because its view of a distant future eluded its capacity to see the fact that a Jewish working class did not need to be created: it already existed. The emergent Jewish working class was composed primarily of handicraft workers. According to figures supplied by the Jewish Colonisation Association (estimations considered too low in all categories), in 1898 there were about 400,000 Jewish wage workers in the Pale of Settlement. Of these, over 240,000 were handicraft workers, over 100,000 were day labourers and agricultural workers, and only about 45,000 were factory workers.10
Jewish workers offered what Menahem Sheinkin described as “a steadier lot and a more reliable source of immigrants.” But, adding this cautionary note, he emphasized that these workers were not “an adventurous group.”11 They would come to the land of Israel primarily in search of a better life. From these Jews, there would be no mass clamor for social change; they would come to Palestine desperate to work even in the degrading and humiliating conditions of the newly founded factories.
Exiled in the Homeland
170
Although they normally remained below the threshold of public attention, Helvig Gellner gives us a rare but vivid collective portrait of women from this socioeconomic sector that confirms Sheinkin’s argument. Most of these young women [unemployed in the city] are not pioneers in the real sense of the word—that is, Zionists who want to help build Palestine. Most of the young women looking for work are new immigrants who came with their families. The parents are usually unemployed and the women have to help support the family. These women refuse to accept work in private homes and would not agree to leave the city. The only kind of work they want is factory work, but lately factories have been firing women workers rather than hiring them.12
For Labor Zionists, the idea that the Jewish national home might become a business entrepôt for the region and a bastion of liberal capitalism was tantamount to depriving it of its symbolic capacity to create something entirely new and possessed of great humanist value. By contrast, the majority of Jewish immigrants simply wanted recognition from Labor Zionism for the work they actually undertook and support from Zionist institutions for their contribution to Palestine’s economic development, even though these men and women did not speak in the ideological tones demanded by Zionism’s radical transformers. But Labor Zionist leaders typically made clear their distaste for the Jewish masses. Instead they cultivated a young intelligentsia that was, according to Sheinkin, “sporadic, serendipitous, and insecure,” and drenched their rhetoric in ethical imperatives directed to constructing a new Jew without acknowledging the painful undertows of this process for the old one.13 Although Labor Zionism’s radical aims in trying to introduce a new phase in the political evolution of Jews as well as of humanity were taken for granted, they did not produce a wholesale reconstruction of Palestine’s Jewish society or even of the movement’s most loyal followers and committed adherents. Sheinkin ridiculed Labor Zionist leaders for their pretensions in proclaiming to be speaking on behalf of a working class that actually consisted of clerks or intellectuals. Consider, he wrote, the job trajectory of the so-called pioneers who appeared to be the first to lack the courage and will to live up to their ideals. [Pioneers] who aspired to be workers became instead doctors and professionals because they were from the beginning members of the intelli-
Unsung Heroes
171
gentsia. . . . The pioneering movement called on Jewish youth to sacrifice itself on [the] altar of [the] nation. The youthful pioneers are filled with intelligentsia, and they are not a sufficient basis for building a national home. The young are good and important for propaganda but not for building a firm foundation for a country. People who came to the land of Israel to improve their lives—to prevent the assimilation of their families in the Diaspora were peasants, merchants, artisans, teachers. Pioneers have vision but do not understand what to do with it. Most of them withdraw as the real house of Jacob arises and establishes the basis for building the homeland. . . . Youth become enthusiastic about a project but often give up because of hardships.14
Challenges to Labor Zionism were joined around their vision and almost always avoided questions raised about the soundness of their policy proposals. Viewed more closely, however, and as Sheinkin implied, Labor Zionist principles exacerbated rather than lowered tensions among workers and between workers and capitalists, and actually retarded economic progress in Palestine. Sheinkin also observed that the radical vision of social change put forward by Labor Zionism never won universal assent in Palestine’s Jewish community. Sheinkin believed that Labor Zionist fervor was nourished by the dangerous illusion that physical labor could transform both land and people, for which, as he said repeatedly, there was little evidence the eyes could take in. Labor Zionists should have realized that radical social change required more resources than were at their disposal, and depended on consent from the ordinary people who were slated to be molded anew. In fact, as I spelled out in the previous chapter, Labor Zionist institutions often forged policies that violated their own sacred principles. Reborn through necessity, most Labor Zionists in Palestine actually found their voice for change filtered through the Histadrut hierarchy and significantly altered by its institutional interests even while affirming their visionary principles. Sheinkin considered the uneasy coexistence between Labor Zionist policies and principles to have a negative impact on most of Palestine’s Jews torn between fading adherence to the latter and an unsure allegiance willed to the former. I have already explained how Histadrut actions deliberately minimized the differences between the interests of labor and capital, whereas the organization’s rhetoric created the impression that Labor Zionism had indeed crystallized into a new collective identity for the Jewish people in Palestine. This new identity was presumably less the unfolding and spread-
Exiled in the Homeland
172
ing of characteristics born in one country and replanted in another than a conscious process of economic, political, and cultural transformation. Most Histadrut affiliates are intelligentsia not real workers. How many of Hapoel Hatzair are now clerks or engaged in other bourgeois occupations? It is fair to ask how many years and how much is one supposed to sacrifice for [the] nation. Certainly, it makes no sense to sacrifice talents. The pioneering movement will not be sufficiently steady so long as it is comprised only of youth and intelligentsia and not the nation’s masses. Or another way of putting it—pioneering will become a steady force when it includes the masses who want a safe homeland.15
Zionism was conceived in Eastern Europe where misery, subordination, and bloodshed crystallized into an imagined national home fulfilling individual and collective expectations for freedom, equality, and justice. For many, the viability of a national home and identity would be marked off by their distance from Zionism’s birthplace. Although Zionists frequently asserted that the new Jewish society in the land of Israel was being fashioned in accordance with their visions and not by deploying the customs and habits acquired in the countries of their birth, their presentation of Zionist principles as totally antithetical to life in the Diaspora was more a slogan than a description of an ideal translated into reality. Sheinkin never tired of pointing out that in Europe, negating the Diaspora helped Zionists see a way out of the troubles that seemed to leave Jews feeling helpless. Rejecting the Diaspora was an important empowering device for Jews in Europe, instilling in them the belief that they could control their own futures and giving them hope about what they might be able to achieve with political power. But in Palestine, the continued emphasis on eliminating traces of Diaspora culture generated not a capacity for action but rather a process of loss. In Europe, alienation was a badge of honor, but roots could not be lowered securely in Jewish soil unless immigrants understood their migration as having liberated them from alienation as well as from the non-Jewish world. Bombarded by a variety of historical changes, the Zionists discussed in this chapter tried to shape their lives in the new country by embracing and not rejecting their cultural and social traditions. Although escaping some of the same wartime turmoil as the Labor Zionists discussed in earlier chapters, these Zionists also struggled with the tumultuous forces connected with the transition from a traditional to a modern industrialized
Unsung Heroes
173
and market economy. For this group, the currents of change swirled in many directions. Threatened by industrialization, on the one hand, and a market inundated with craftsmen, on the other, artisans held their own in Eastern Europe by relying upon family and communal institutions. In traditional Jewish society artisans were considered a socially inferior group. Although there was a whole system of stratification within the Jewish crafts, with printers, engravers, silversmiths, and others occupying the top, and tailors and cobblers occupying the bottom of the scale, nevertheless as a group they were considered the inferiors in status of merchants and traders. . . . It was assumed that skill training absorbed some of the savings of individuals and even some of the community funds earmarked for preparing Jews for gainful employment in craft and industry.16
Jaffa had long drawn Jewish artisans to its shores, and their arrival coincided with an expansion of the city’s boundaries and the establishment of new neighborhoods. Artisans preferred to settle in familiar neighborhoods, and so followed family members or fellow townsmen who had come to Jaffa and Tel Aviv before the outbreak of war. Family and communal institutions were as vital to sustaining life and lives in Palestine as they had been in Eastern Europe. Linked by kin or village, immigrants arriving after the war were quickly made aware that they had no more control over their destinies in the land of Israel than they had in Europe. The wartime expulsions from Jaffa and Tel Aviv were a constant historical referent for residents of these cities and towns. Recalling the experiences of pogroms in Russia, many immigrants were convinced of the similarities rather than the differences between Diaspora home and national homeland. Like many people who had seen their world collapse, these men and women always entertained the possibility that it might collapse again. Fear of their own vulnerabilities being ever present, artisans cultivated the same kind of associational life they had developed in Europe with a primary concern for their own corporate security. Zionist visionaries, of course, would not acknowledge that the European Jewish culture in which they were raised and nurtured was the source or inspiration for the rehabilitation of Jewish life in Palestine.17 Although many Zionists came to see their lives as free of the tyranny of Diaspora norms and values, their vision may have been clouded, particularly since immigrating to the land of Israel—though asserted as home by Zionists—actually tore people from the nourishment of the traditions, families, and geographies they knew since birth. Some
Exiled in the Homeland
174
Zionists might wish to forget their past, but it is difficult to imagine they could erase its impact. Caught in a shower of intense and unfamiliar pressures in what appeared entirely unfamiliar circumstances in Palestine, many Zionists clung to the cultural and social traditions they carried to Palestine from the lands of their births and only slowly structured their national sentiments around them. These traditions were to be reworked to fit the new circumstances, but they were not to be abandoned as a matter of principle or as part of defining a new national identity. Neither bound by the rigid pietism of Orthodoxy nor drawn to the imprisonment of any of the socialist ideologies, many Zionists built synagogues because these institutions eased their traumatic encounter with a new country and also helped them stake their own claim to the new homeland. Labor Zionists kept filling whatever channels of expression there were with the notion that Judaism’s traditional culture and institutions would wither away in the modern world as they were said to have evaporated in the newly made orbit of work and life in the national home. But many immigrants coming to Palestine considered the proposed radical changes put forward by Labor Zionist ideology as only compounding their initial disorientation. No wonder, then, that in the newly paved streets connecting city centers to newly built houses, there was still visible infl uence of traditional Jewish mores and organizations. By the end of the 1920s, Tel Aviv, for example, had fifty-five synagogues.18 Still, according to Labor Zionists, neither the example of their parents nor that of their Diaspora communities could guide Palestine’s Jews in their nation-building project. Immigrants unwilling to become agents of change in what was anticipated as a grand transformation of people and society were doomed, in Labor Zionism’s words, to replicate the world, and not insignificantly the mistakes of those Jews stuck in a past at the very time and in the very place where they could construct a new kind of Jewish future. Sheinkin argued that this kind of absolute faith in radical social change sealed the Zionist imagination against a critical review of its achievements and bestowed upon the movement’s leaders a totally unreal conception of conditions in the country. Of the tens of thousands of immigrants in the past two years, about 5000 were young pioneers and members of the intelligentsia. The remainder are people with families who paid their own way—not peddlers but people who just want to earn an honorable living. When a person works for
Unsung Heroes
175
a salary for farmers and is satisfied with a wage, why not call this a form of pioneering? When artisans come with families and are happy they have provided sufficient food and shelter and have survived the difficulties of adjusting to new conditions, why isn’t this a form of pioneering? Why not award [the] title of pioneer to those simple Jews who haul on wagons or on their backs or learn new crafts in construction and earn a living for themselves and families with the labor of their hands? If masses in the Diaspora knew they could find work and sustenance in the land of Israel, the masses would come.19
The gap between how people structured their lives in Palestine and the ideals they were said to have embraced could neither be ignored nor bridged by ideological indoctrination, no matter how intense, reasoned Sheinkin. Radical social change might come to a few people, but at a price most Jews in Palestine who had to endure the disorientation that came with it seemed unwilling to pay. Labor Zionism may have used its impressive communication network to propagate its values, but its characterization of the national home failed to account for the way in which most Jews in Palestine ordered their lives. In fact, as Sheinkin observed, more than a common set of ideological principles joined together the immigrants arriving in Palestine during the first decade of British rule because, despite the widespread agreement on settling and working the land, most Zionists actually streamed into the country’s large towns and cities. “According to the statistics 80% of the immigrants went to the cities; some to Haifa and Jerusalem, but most to Tel-Aviv. Although the first two were mixed Arab and Jewish cities, the latter became an unmixed Jewish urban center, built by the immigrants themselves, and which within two years had a population of over 40,000.”20 So much that immigrants saw around them was newly built that it was possible to think of the national home as having been planted by a collective act of will and as having been founded on a common vision of what the Jewish nation could become. But this was a flawed perception as the overall social and economic patterns reveal that the same desires pulling Jews away from the countryside also drew them away from a radically new occupational structure. Palestine, Sheinkin postulated, should become a place where Jews can feel instantly at home. Zionist leaders, particularly those in the labor movement, should convey a message of respect and not of revulsion for the nation’s poorest working members.
Exiled in the Homeland
176
By fighting for unrealistic ideals, Sheinkin charged, the labor movement was cordoning off the national home from substantial growth and unlimited possibilities. “Building cities is one key to creating a demographic Jewish majority in Palestine. There is an urgent need to build a port city to receive immigrants near Rishon and south of Haifa. That would ease the process of immigration—a Jewish port to welcome new immigrants run by Jewish officials because first impressions are crucial.”21 In Palestine, during this first decade of British rule, development patterns in the Jewish national home followed Sheinkin’s predictions. Tel Aviv was both at the vortex of this intense activity and its clearest symbol. In these years, Tel Aviv turned from a Jaffa suburb into a vibrant city with a population of 50,000 by 192922 and was even more special in its cultural and economic density. Many of the poets and writers who stirred the hearts and souls of Palestinian Jews with their romantic verse and stories of rural life sat in Tel Aviv’s cafes, where art and literature flourished. The Jewish population in Haifa and Jerusalem increased, as did the number of Arabs living in both cities. Larger populations stimulated economic growth and job creation. The steep population increase augmented the demand for housing and advancing the building industry to the main sector for investment and employment. The wages paid building workers in Tel-Aviv alone, during the years 1924–1925, averaged one-half million pounds each year. This sum was equivalent to the total (including settlement, health and educational services, land purchases, etc.) annual budget of the Zionist Histadruth (Organization). In 1925 the number of those employed in building and auxiliary branches reached 60% of the wage earners; in 1926, with the beginning of the recession, 35% of the wage earners were still employed in building. Building wages were in general higher than those in all other branches, and during certain periods as much as twice as high.23
The flow of people to cities heralded the beginning of a political economy dependent on construction as the main branch for absorption in the years 1924–1925. Most investments, even from those with relatively modest amounts of capital, were channeled into real estate ventures because renting rooms and apartments produced reasonably good returns.24 Tel Aviv’s Jewish population soon outstripped that of Palestine’s other cities, with most residents calling themselves merchants, artisans, and/or professionals.
Unsung Heroes
177
According to the 1925 Tel-Aviv Census on business units, 1627 in number, 42.5% of them were trade units, 14.7% were “professional” units (chemist shops, dental clinics, private teachers etc.) or agencies, 35.4% were workshops and service units (hotels, restaurants etc.), 7.4% industrial units. Using 1924 as a base, the rate of growth of trade units (stores, kiosks etc.) for 1925 was expressed in the addition of a store for every sixteen new families.25
Much of the wealth of merchants went into urban real estate but derived, in one way or another, from the citrus trade. Citrus cultivation had an enormous impact on Tel Aviv’s economy and incidentally, on its air—the scents of orange and lemon trees saturated the city’s atmosphere—but it had no discernible effect on its public culture. Citrus grove owners were “relegated to the margins of national legitimacy.”26 Although many Zionist leaders, including long-time Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff, hoped that investments in industrial development would sweep up the savings of the wealthy, most ventures were small and required little start-up capital. “Immigrants with only small personal means began petty trading and started up small businesses based essentially on family labor not requiring wage outlays; income was based on fixed neighborhood daily consumption, and on the expectation of increased numbers of purchasers with the growth of immigration.”27 Urbanization triggered an economic development based on a growing demand for consumption. Tel Aviv was not much of an industrial city, according to some of Zionism’s most thoughtful leaders. Craftsmen, merchants, and workshop owners ruled Tel Aviv’s economy—the city contained more retail stores per capita than in the United States28—but they did not lay the foundation for a stable economy in the first decade of British rule.29 The immigrant artisan or holder of small capital, encouraged by the growth in population and local consumption, invested his capital, either independently or in partnership, in a workshop or “plant” in textiles (which was almost entirely confined to workshops), leather processing, carpentry, furniture and building materials (which were half crafts, half manufacturing units); and in the same fashion in “metals” plants, smitheries and foundries (half of which were also small workshops). Apparently the most secure investment among them, and the largest, was in the food branch, although it also was dependent on imports, especially of sugar, flour and vegetable oils.30
Exiled in the Homeland
178
Owners often scraped by with family members as employees relying for their market on a continuous stream of new immigrants. Investors followed conservative strategies, with few turning their brains and hands to making something entirely new. Few enterprises generated rapid increases in productivity, creating an economy that repeatedly experienced wide fl uctuations and rapid swings from boom to bust. In 1924–1925 many workshops were set up, most in carpentry, tailoring, shoe-making; smitheries and foundries, and also food industries (which were generally larger units). In most the owners were the sole workers. Those who began in crafts and small industry operated under the same pressures as those who started in trade. The workshops were based on the capital of one or two families (the partnerships were more than 60% of the number of the workshop-plant licenses granted by the Government in the years 1924–1925). The little private capital at their disposal pressed, in both instances, towards small investment (mainly for raw materials) and for concentration on the final stages of production, and in goods destined for immediate consumption. Crafts and industry operated almost without public or bank credits.31
The people with the most money almost never moved their capital into industrial enterprises. Conditions seemed to favor small shop owners and workshops. “Immigrants who came with small funds found their livelihood in grocery stores, in dairies and milk distribution, kiosks, as sales agents for foreign firms, in small hotels and restaurants (the clients of which were the bachelor workers). Most of these were either family businesses or partnerships.”32 But the fact that individual proprietors ran most workshops did not necessarily liberate them or the relatives they employed from the burdens of manual labor. Many were simultaneously owners of capital and productive workers. Sheinkin’s most distinctive argument was to state boldly that a Jewish working class did not have to be created, for it already existed. To ignore these people, as Labor Zionism did, was to lose touch with the everyday flow of Jewish life in Palestine, as this survey of overall patterns suggests. In a general census of crafts and industry for all Jewish Palestine in 1929, 2,475 establishments (units) were enumerated. Two-thirds, 1,851, were
Unsung Heroes
179
workshops which employed 3,861 persons; and, of the latter 2,297 were owners, partners or relatives not receiving wages; in all, 1,089 were hired workers and apprentices (a high percentage of whom were youths and women). Out of the 617 industrial plants with a personnel of 6,777, 20% of the latter were owners, 5% clerks and 75% wage workers. Half of the plants were in Tel-Aviv, the remainder in Jerusalem and Haifa. 70% of the plants employed fewer than 10 persons, and the number of employed in them reached only 32% of those employed in industry. 63.5% of the plants were privately owned; but they employed only 45% of those employed in industry and their capital was only 30% of that invested in industry. On the other hand, only 28 (4.5%) of the plants were incorporated, but their capital was 26.5% of the total amount invested since the public funding institutions, e.g. Jewish Colonization Association, Keren Hayesod, invested in them as basic industries (power, electricity, cement, salt, phosphates, etc.).33
A rt i s a n s The centrality of physical labor on the land as a medium of personal growth and a means to national redemption shaped the cultural paradigm for Labor Zionists in Palestine even as it severed their mission from the way in which most Jewish inhabitants—including their own adherents— of the country lived. Most Zionists coming to Palestine in the 1920s replicated the material and cultural Jewish immigrant experience denounced and rejected by the Labor Zionist paradigm. The paradigm not only projected a profile but also defined a consensus that simply excluded much of the country. Labor Zionists insisted that they were the only authentic Zionists and had founded the only organizations—political parties affiliated with the Histadrut—whose policies could ensure the eventual establishment of a Jewish state. Through the Histadrut, Labor Zionists galvanized young Jewish immigrants around the idea that only productive labor could generate individual and collective commitments sufficient to create genuine Jewish independence. But although Labor Zionism inspired the most enduring models of self-sacrifice and dedication, it also bred the greatest vulnerabilities, particularly when reality did not comport with dreams and expectations. Labor Zionists arrived with beliefs not in a land of promise but rather in a land with seemingly little to offer except for the opportunity to remake the Jewish people.
Exiled in the Homeland
180
But not every immigrant found a sustaining set of values in Labor Zionist aspirations for radical change or identified with Histadrut policies as a sensible trajectory for economic stability. Many of these immigrants were skilled artisans who considered Histadrut policies an infringement on individual freedom and destructive of the real interests of workers. What separated Histadrut members from this group was not class, as many Labor Zionists claimed, but rather outlook. This was a classic disagreement over how to manage and secure the establishment of a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. For these artisans, the vocational and organizational skills they carried with them from their homes in Europe served their needs as well as advanced national goals. Two groups of workers could be distinguished in Palestine, not so much by occupation or material well-being as by their different visions of the Jewish past and future. With the founding of the Histadrut in 1920 and with only part of the self-defined workers’ community affiliating, these groups entered into confrontation. In Tel Aviv, the presence of workers unaffiliated with the Histadrut—many were artisans—was notable, estimated to be in 1924 one in every thirty-eight residents. Included in this group were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors, all with membership in various vocational associations, reaching 4,000 by the end of 1927. In the depths of the 1927 depression, almost 2,000 of these artisans were unemployed and claimed responsibility for some 8,000 dependents.34 Artisan immigrants produced a groundswell of voluntarism, organizing vocational training courses, cultural activities including theater performances, and the opening of reading rooms where they could educate each other and debate the issues of the day. Artisans also knitted together a series of voluntary associations into a network of philanthropic efforts and economic initiatives that mirrored the activities of the Histadrut. A loan fund, bank, newspapers, library, and cultural centers attracted members proud of their skills and anxious for self-improvement. Committed to Jewish labor and dedicated to reviving the Hebrew language, these associations derived much of their energy from their continued contributions to the economic development of the country.35 The creation of such associations was doubtless due partly to the exigencies of the situation artisans confronted from the beginning of their immigration to Palestine during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. But it also symbolized a conception of Jewish nationhood that both reflected Diaspora experiences and accorded them respect. For these artisans the various calls to reject Diaspora habits and history never grew deep roots,
Unsung Heroes
181
even after the establishment of the Histadrut. Artisans proudly proclaiming what they called their deeply embedded Zionist credentials recalled that the Histadrut projects of the 1920s were hardly innovations because they were simply replicating their own activities from earlier years: “The Organization of Artisans . . . was the first public organization in Palestine. It founded the neighborhoods of Nahalat Binyamin that were later incorporated into Tel Aviv. It organized a community council to replace the old one and founded three of Tel Aviv’s neighborhoods.”36 Before the outbreak of World War I, artisans built a number of institutions serving communal as well as economic interests in Palestine’s towns and cities. There was a labor battalion founded in 1907 to “help artisans deal with [the] financial and moral challenges of settling in Palestine. . . . Between 1904 and 1910, 34 associations [were] founded among Jews in Palestine.” On the eve of World War I, artisans had founded the largest labor organization in Palestine, with 150 members.37 The bakers’ group distributed food to those suffering from hunger, while tailors gave away clothes to the poor. Artisan associations imposed a fee on members to mobilize funds for small loans for start-up enterprises and for the upkeep of synagogues and cultural centers. Without an explicitly drawn ideology, these workers were transformed—perhaps, after coming to Palestine—into nationalists insisting on Hebrew as their spoken language and turning labor into a serious and urgent imperative for Palestine’s Jewish community. Artisans understood that even after the onset of British rule, the Zionist project was as yet an experiment and had not yet proved its capacity for endurance. To no avail, however, did they argue—by offering examples from their own recent history—that their own liberal model of development could put Palestine’s Jewish community on a more stable economic footing than the policies advocated by the labor movement. The limited scope of Palestine’s economy magnified the scale of human disappointments as business failures and unemployment often forced people to leave the country. But artisans had an extraordinary record in sustaining their presence despite the considerable hardships they faced even during World War I. We were the guardians of the land during its hours of crisis—we never moved from this place no matter the danger or difficulty until we were expelled from Jaffa and Tel Aviv with corpses lying all around us and bombardment from all sides. Despite these difficulties, we were among
Exiled in the Homeland
182
the first volunteers for the Jewish Legion. From then until today, we have worked for the good of the country’s artisans, night and day, without salary as is customary in other labor organization bureaucracies here. What we created in this land, we created with our own power by ourselves.38
“Standards” and “experience” were the terms artisans most often used to characterize the reasons for their opposition to Histadrut labor policies. Labor Zionist talk of creating a workers’ nation ironically forced artisans to become defenders of vocational professionalism, declaiming on the presumed chaos and inefficiencies that were visited on the national home when conventional standards and requirements for jobs were suspended. Insisting on formal training and vocational education as prerequisites for certain jobs, artisans believed it essential to fit skill to task as the most efficient way to bring benefits to individual and community. In many instances, this stress on skills meant, as Menahem Sheinkin remarked, that parents still held the keys to the most valuable resource for artisans— training. But Sheinkin’s reasoning contained both material and cultural elements. “[The artisan] does not philosophize about the world and does not deny his Jewishness—it runs in his blood and absorbs his skin and soul. The simple family of the artisan is the natural character of his Jewishness passed on to the next generation.”39 Palestine’s Jewish community was paying the price for the Histadrut’s dysfunctions when patronage networks and partisanship instead of skills and experience were the criteria deployed for hiring workers. Unfortunately, when economic panics hit, the World Zionist Organization responded by shoring up rather than by reforming the same Labor Zionist institutions whose practices exacerbated if not caused the difficulties. Labor Zionist institutions were given more money and power without serious scrutiny of their practices.40 For Labor Zionist leaders, however, Histadrut membership and absolute loyalty to the organization’s directives rather than to any particular set of skills represented exactly the qualities demanded by the homeland. And as Palestine’s economy expanded and then quickly contracted into depression several times in the 1920s, the World Zionist Organization channeled more and more of its funds into Labor Zionist institutions, first simply to stave off their collapse and then to manage and modernize the national home in an effort to show how Jewish life could be enriched both materially and spiritually through the medium of public investment. Because sudden and dramatic economic panics punctuated the lives of
Unsung Heroes
183
so many Jewish immigrants, there was widespread comfort with the idea of a controlled market that promised support during the bad times. That workers not affiliated with the Histadrut received only meager public allocations, and then only when funds were readily available, did not bother a Labor Zionist establishment eager to gain a monopoly over the labor force market and chart the course for economic development. Although artisans were quick to grasp the extent to which the destiny of the homeland would largely be worked out in the offices occupied by Histadrut and Labor Zionist politicians, they found themselves helpless to stop a process so adverse to their interests and to what they believed to be the well-being of Palestine’s Jewish community. Many aspiring artisans failed to rise above poverty even in the good times, and the economic downturns jeopardized not only their economic interests but also their independence. Each downturn narrowed and rigidified the Yishuv’s response to the question of how to structure a national economy. Increasingly dependent on outside philanthropic funds rather than investments, the Yishuv’s market became more regulated as the Histadrut began to shape the pattern of economic development, presumably implementing the Labor Zionist vision even while concealing the problems that might arise from the concentration of communal wealth and power.41 With the Histadrut widening the ambit of its control over the job market and external Zionist funds, artisan associations found their pooled resources increasingly less able to support their unemployed comrades and their families, and their bitterness deepened. “I did not expect to see here what we saw in the first minutes upon first setting foot on the shore. We felt affronted when we disembarked the ship and were surrounded by agents of the parties. . . . We came to Eretz Israel for new lives and here we encounter the same life from which we sought refuge.”42 The champions of an open labor market did, however, find allies among some of the strongest defenders of tradition. Rarely considered in Labor Zionist discourse were the hopelessly poor, typically immigrants from Yemen or Bukhara, whose values and poverty denied them infl uence and attention. They were, in the words of Labor Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff, the Yishuv’s true proletariat.43 Reluctant to join the Histadrut, although most were workers of one sort or another, they also ignored or rejected the organization’s lofty prescriptions for radical social change. Their affiliation with various artisan associations in Jerusalem and in other cities was made in deference to religious norms and customs, showing
Exiled in the Homeland
184
how much cultural ideals infl uenced social and economic life in Palestine.44 The perception that Labor Zionism represented an alternate tradition alienated considerable numbers of Jewish workers. Culture rather than class relations or even political party affiliation seemed to register which group of workers had significant support and resources at their disposal. Perhaps because theirs was the losing side, the ideas and achievements of the artisans have been largely ignored. Because they opposed the Histadrut’s domination of the labor market, which they believed inherently unfair and detrimental to developing a high-quality group of skilled workers, there has been some tendency to characterize the group as representing the interests of capital rather than labor. Indeed, Labor Zionist leaders delegitimized the artisan ethos as reflecting class privilege. Their ownership of workshops further dispossessed artisans of their working-class credentials, not only in the allocation of public funds but also in the distribution of cultural capital. Artisans recognized that their narrative gained no momentum despite their attempts to make known their accomplishments, turn their vocational stories into song, and challenge the propositions for national development implicit in Labor Zionism. Acceptance of Labor Zionism’s values and ideals left artisans vulnerable to a form of cultural ostracism that could not be struck down even when they voted for labor parties in local or countrywide elections. Artisans considered themselves the first genuine Zionist workers despite Labor Zionism’s claims. For many, the very Jewish traditions deemed so problematic by Labor Zionists actually supplied the impetus for a network of activities that enlarged the capacity for constructive action and that filled the men and women neglected by the self-conscious Labor Zionist elite with a sense of their own importance and competence even though many of their tangible goals eluded them. Artisans charged that the Histadrut’s constant refrain in support of Jewish labor was not only false, it was also misleading, because the organization actually cut the ground out from under most laborers by importing goods for its enterprises that were already produced in Palestine in factories owned by Jewish entrepreneurs.45 Histadrut policies were labeled a travesty of Labor Zionism’s values because they often subverted the very objectives the organization supposedly embraced. Because Labor Zionism viewed its followers as a vanguard, these so-called pioneers were imagined to have the iconic power to pull the rest of the community with them. But, in fact, Labor Zionism’s rhetoric did not supply the sentiments, symbols, or policies nec-
Unsung Heroes
185
essary for an inclusive integrative national identity; rather, it produced a set of ominous dichotomies. Although Labor Zionists defined Palestine’s national identity as based on the discipline of productive labor expressed through Histadrut affiliation, they also vaunted their national vision in images that resonated with almost all of Palestine’s Jews: independence, initiative, hard work. The aspirations of Labor Zionists cohered around an imagined set of policies that presumably improved the material environment, reformed a flawed people, and put nation-building in the vanguard of Jewish history. Culture trumped economics. Menahem Sheinkin was perhaps one of the few Zionists capable of improving the position of artisans and workers unaffiliated with the Histadrut, but he died suddenly in a car accident in 1924. His fate found an echo among those who attempted to challenge and oppose the dominance of Labor Zionism. The statistics that measured the increase in Histadrut membership also registered the disappointments of those whose work status denied them the advantages and respectability accorded “pioneers.” Without Histadrut membership, artisans and others preserved their vocational autonomy with little but high hopes for adequate financing for their bank or for securing visas to bring more skilled laborers from the Diaspora to Palestine. Labor Zionists cultivated a moral rectitude that, deliberately or not, saw only their humanistic triumphs and not the often destructive consequences of their activities. As soon as an artisan leaves the ship . . . members of one political party or another confront him. They give him a note granting permission to stay at the party’s hostel and the party’s rolls increase by signing up a new member. After that, he is entirely ignored and abandoned without knowing where to turn for help in adjusting to life in the land of Israel.46
Tel Aviv Tel Aviv acted like a magnet for artisans and for those needing a commercial infrastructure for their stores and workshops. The artisans who benefited from their skills and hard work created a way of life strikingly different from that of their counterparts in the Histadrut, but it comported nicely with the emerging culture of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv became the principal site of bourgeois life in Palestine and also the form of collective life that underwent the most spectacular, dynamic growth, even in these early years of the Mandate. Although Zionists supposedly posited, implicitly or
Exiled in the Homeland
186
explicitly, that only agricultural labor could relieve Jews of the burdens of exile, liberating land and person simultaneously, most of Palestine’s Jewish immigrants lived in cities, with about 40 percent of them in Tel Aviv. By the end of the Mandate’s first decade, Tel Aviv had doubled its population. Tel Aviv, then, was as much a personification of Zionist nation-building as the kibbutz. As icon, the city gave expression to the stirrings of Jews for individual freedom and ambition. The search for a better standard of living and a quality education for their children initially spurred residents of Jaffa to purchase land far from that port city’s densely populated areas and to begin building Tel Aviv’s first houses. But Tel Aviv eventually offered far more than educational opportunities—although by 1930 approximately 13,000 children were enrolled in city schools—and a chance for gracious living. Even before it became a city, officially, Tel Aviv possessed urban characteristics. No wonder, then, that from the earliest days of the British Mandate, it was known as the Yishuv’s first Hebrew city.47 Tel Aviv’s founders. . . . imagined Tel Aviv not as a farming village but as a city that emulated a variety of European models with which they were familiar. For some it was to be a Palestinian Odessa. For others it was to be Vienna on the Mediterranean. All envisioned a European city rising out of the desolate sand dunes on the shores of the Mediterranean.48
Many of Palestine’s Jews, even those devoted to the most radical forms of socialist Zionism, were drawn to Tel Aviv’s intense and vibrant street life as well as to its urban hangouts—cafes, theaters, and stores. There were, according to one respected authority, “at least as many cafes and restaurants per person as in European cities.”49 Almost from its founding, then, Tel Aviv had a visual presence. Although embracing what may be called the primitive geography of the land of Israel, where the landscape could instantly evoke a vision of the country’s biblical origins, Zionists were drawn to Tel Aviv as a place that enriched the possibilities of life in Palestine. Tel Aviv came to symbolize what Jews could do when they lived and worked together. This “first Hebrew city” was, according to Sir Herbert Samuel, Great Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, a “city of wonders. One may compare it with the miraculous cities of the Arabian Nights, which blossom overnight in the desert.”50 Even as popular culture celebrated arduous labor on the land, many of
Unsung Heroes
187
its creators learned and practiced their craft in what quickly became Jewish Palestine’s urban center—Tel Aviv. Although this city started simply as stomping ground and meeting place for artists, it also became the inspiration for works of art. Tel Aviv embraced the idea of the flaneur—the wanderer in the city who watches. In Tel Aviv, the flaneur did not so much reflect on as experience the city. Tel Aviv’s flaneurs were no disinterested observers; they were its residents, who created the city streets not only as a visual presence but also as an extension of their homes, infusing them with the same feelings of safety as shelters for the Jewish people. But Tel Aviv’s built environment was a combination of radically contradictory images. Its streets were a fusion of order and disorder. Newly arrived immigrants saw in Tel Aviv the most successful and wealthiest of Palestine’s Jews as well as its poorest.51 Miriam Hari described Tel Aviv as a city without poverty in 1921, whereas Haim Nachman Bialik saw it “as a city built crookedly without straight streets, without a central garden, without character,” and with a profile similar to “a small shtetl in Poland.”52 For those expecting Tel Aviv to appear exactly as originally planned and as described in advertisements touting its achievements, the city could appear like a disaster. Tel Aviv’s leaders supposed the city’s achievements would not only give visitors a sense of the intense energy of the Jewish homeland, but that they would also infuse these people with a fervent belief in the Zionist project. For that reason, city officials created a tour perfectly attuned to the image of their city becoming the commercial center of the Middle East. The typical route began at city hall, moved on to the municipal hospital, the high school, one of the factories, and the recently installed electrical station, with the final destination the Hotel Palletin, where tourists could enjoy afternoon tea.53 Although many visitors could feel the idealism behind the city’s rapid growth, many seemed uninterested in its successes, obsessed only with its failures. There were too few bathrooms, wrote one visitor; the cost of horse-drawn carriage rides was too high, noted others. Many complained that the air was toxic from gasoline fumes while the streets were filled with rubbish. The modern idealized community of Tel Aviv the founders hoped to create was always in danger of being overcome by the crush of market pressures and the consequences of human indifference. Municipal officials tried to counter both with signs urging Tel Aviv residents to clean their streets, install indoor bathrooms, and display kindness to one another.54 Only to those coming without expectations might the city actu-
Exiled in the Homeland
188
ally appear impressive. To them, the weird juxtapositions that many took as signs of failure appeared as evidence of a thrilling urban modernity. For poet Natan Alterman, Tel Aviv provided the opportunity for Jews to create something totally new and at the same time to consider the record of their past. “The town lines contain spectacles of modern life thrust together with relics of a world unchanged: automobiles and buses negotiate the same roads as camels and donkeys.” Tel Aviv seemed to symbolize not only the future Jewish state but also the meaning of the Zionist project.55 To understand Tel Aviv, it is necessary to acknowledge its divergent trajectories. A place planned originally to offer Jews a European standard of housing and gracious living with planted rows stressing cleanliness and a landscape engineered for beauty, Tel Aviv was to be blessed with a smalltown neighborliness56 propped by a modern economic base. A transportation system would connect Tel Aviv not only with the Jewish neighborhoods in Jaffa but also with the agricultural colonies seeking enlarged markets for their produce.57 Transportation strengthened the scope of Tel Aviv’s economic activity and extended its impact in unexpected ways. Tel Aviv’s roads reached into surrounding villages and helped the city become the primary financial and trade center for citrus exports. Although hundreds of citrus grove owners traveled to Tel Aviv to conduct their business, the expanded trade gave Palestine’s urban culture a new scale of expression that reached well beyond its city limits. Communities began to sprawl out from Tel Aviv distant enough to create their own settlements but close enough to benefit from the city’s services. Ramat Gan was founded in 1922; B ͗ nai Brak in 1924, to be followed by Ramat ha-Sharon, Herzlia, and Ra ͗ anana.58 From its very beginnings, Tel Aviv’s story was as rich in contradictions as in wonders. Determined to modernize rapidly, the city set up electric streetlights and encouraged the use of motor transport even before there were clearly marked streets. At their best, the old and the new coexisted; at their worst, they produced complaints and disappointments. Consider this description of the experience of traveling on one of the city’s bus lines. These buses are ramshackle affairs held together by some mysterious centripetal force unknown to science. . . . They are run by a co-operative group of chauffeurs who all have a shabby, dare-devil look about them. The arrangement is—theoretically—that one bus leaves the standing place as soon as another arrives. But in reality, you hum, tap your foot,
Unsung Heroes
189
or exhibit other symptoms of impatience in vain until two things have come to pass: the chauffeur, who has curled up on the front seat, finished the chapter of “Einleitung in die Psychologie” which engrosses him, and the bus is full. Neither event in itself is a sufficient reason for starting. . . . But if you are really anxious to keep an important appointment or meet a train you can pay for all the unoccupied places in the bus and demand immediate departure. . . . There is, however, an unwritten law to the effect that if any additional passengers are picked up en route their fares are restituted to the buyer-up.59
Soon after Great Britain assumed responsibility for the Palestine Mandate, Tel Aviv “was granted town council status . . . [and] a measure of administrative and judicial autonomy.”60 Expanding geographically and administratively allowed the town residents to set their own course for municipal political development. “Six municipal elections took place during the 1920s and 1930s and despite the presence of a strong workers’ faction, most elections produced coalitions of various liberal and middle class factions whose leader, Meir Dizengoff, served as mayor almost continuously until his death in 1936.”61 Politicians in Tel Aviv argued over the budget and over how far to extend and democratize the eligibility for voting, awakening everyone to the stakes involved in municipal elections. Unable to extend Tel Aviv’s suffrage to all adult residents, the labor movement did succeed in setting a very low tax payment as a requirement for voting.62 Raucous partisanship thus percolated through elections to other domains of public life. Here in Tel Aviv, Jews not only built civil institutions, they also created occasions that gave life to the economy of the Jewish national home and momentum to its art, literature, and music. Many commented on the dynamic feel given by the rapidly growing site. The young and vibrant city was often described as extremely vital, surrounding the Jew with a rare feeling of security, freedom, and informality. Tel Aviv is the only corner in the world where a person from the nation of Israel can walk in complete security. The Jew knows this natural freedom in no other place in the world, including more enlightened places. Even within the most praiseworthy of metropolises in the golah [Diaspora], the Jew cannot acquire his freedom, except at the cost of minimizing the Jewish image.63
Exiled in the Homeland
190
For many immigrants, Tel Aviv was not only the city of their dreams and ideals but also, and more important, the city of their day-to-day life. The economic and cultural center of Palestine’s Zionist community, Tel Aviv promoted commercial activities even as the dominant Labor Zionist rhetoric charged the materialistic spirit with corrupting the nationbuilding project. Advertisements on every major street were designed to encourage consumption, to proclaim that the relatively new city had already acquired European elegance and that prosperity would come by manufacturing more durable goods that could undersell the competition. Signs rarely included pictures of the “pioneer” because his ascetic qualities seemed unlikely to promote consumption.64 By ignoring this icon, however, consumer culture actually raised its status, anointing it with an almost sacred quality that could not be transgressed. Still, almost all of Palestine’s Jews, including those belonging to the Labor Zionist movement, seemed to find signs of luxury, even in its sleazy manifestations, worthwhile to note. Affl uence stood as a symbol of a European modernity that was, perhaps, part of its appeal. . . . Carriages stopped at the entrance [of the casino] . . . [and those who emerged] were not exactly the same type as those in the tents, on the seashore. Or those who paraded arm-in-arm through the streets. Ladies in silk dresses and men in shiny white suits, and wearing ties. The heat of the summer did not bother them. White suits, buttoned down immaculate. Among them were officials of the British Mandate and Arab dignitaries from Jaffa and other places, who came to imbibe a little illegal alcohol at the bar of the San Remo. But there were more than a few Jews, too. The upper class . . . entertains itself on Saturday night.65
But wealth and high fashion could not erase the view of the layers of material impoverishment, particularly during Palestine’s periodic but sudden reversals of good times. Economic downturns ignited enormous suffering and also sowed doubts about the entire Zionist enterprise. Taking the full measure of the distress caused by financial crises made it impossible not to wonder whether nationalist fervor nourished by moral resources alone was sufficient to complete the Zionist mission. The crisis is moving through the streets of the city. Bitterness, despair spread through the camp. The situation in the first Hebrew city that includes one-quarter of the Yishuv’s population challenges faith in our
Unsung Heroes
191
social and economic position. Poverty overwhelms families who are living in shacks like packages of fish, alone, alienated. . . . solitary and barren poor holding like straw against the black despair and darkness in our land that is blessed by sun and light.66
Close to the edge of Tel Aviv, almost touching Jaffa, were the brothels where women from every ethnic and religious group in the country— among them single mothers or immigrants without families, or wives of conscripted soldiers—offered their services to customers who, themselves, reflected the same diverse cross-section of the population. Some women became prostitutes because they could earn more in this trade than in the factories. Prostitution was sometimes the only option for female children of impoverished families or for those who ran away from families exploiting or mistreating them—many from Muslim countries. For yet others, prostitution was part of a spiral of despair triggered by a doomed love affair that engulfed some young innocent girls unprepared for the sexual liberation they encountered in radical socialist communities and who succumbed to profound feelings of shame and to the degradation they believed they deserved.67 But although many people in Tel Aviv remained poor—even impoverished—enough succeeded to attract the attention of Jews in Palestine and, not incidentally, significant numbers outside of the country. Tel Aviv’s boosters presented the city “as a corner of Europe in the Middle East,” contrasting the new town with the old city of Jaffa, whose image was thoroughly “Oriental.” Tel Aviv’s founders and leaders believed the city actually expanded the reach of Western civilization and brought progress to the Middle East. An agora of possibilities, the city held fairs that highlighted modernity—technology, industry, productivity, and of course, Tel Aviv’s rich commercial potential.68 Nevertheless, the very visible gap between rich and poor in Tel Aviv did not intensify class antagonisms within city limits or dampen the ebullient spirit of community. Rothschild Boulevard, as is well known, is a meeting place for people who don’t have a penny in their pocket. Unemployed workers, members of the “middle class,” looking for some kind of class, even less than middle; loafers, gossips, prattlers, the news-thirsty and spreaders-of-lies, those dying of curiosity and just plain old Jews—all these happen upon Rothschild, a few steps away from the flow of the street, like having a “picnic” by the
Exiled in the Homeland
192
banks of a noisy river. Near a tree that was called in the glory days of the place the “tree of knowledge” the words of fools and wise men could be leisurely heard.69
People noted that workers in Tel Aviv seemed bourgeois. They emulated the bourgeoisie even in dress. In this city, class struggle—indeed, some would say, classes themselves—had no meaning. Haim Arlosoroff described the Jewish community’s socioeconomic structure: . . . there are not real classes in Palestine. Classes are fictional and rhetorical devices not measurable by income. A Histadrut member living in workers’ housing lives at a higher standard of living than many in the socalled middle class. Workers, rather than the bourgeoisie, are hegemonic in the land of Israel.70
Even the hardcore disciples of Marx in Gedud ha-Avodah seemed less ideologically strident in Tel Aviv than in other cities. “Haifa’s organized laborers seemed to have a stronger class-consciousness than their Tel Avivian comrades, and although smaller and less urban, Petah Tikvah’s society had a clearer-cut class division, reflected in a bitter class struggle between farmers and laborers.”71 One description of the so-called Gedud ha-Avodah dancing style illustrates the difficulty of resisting Tel Aviv’s thoroughly commodified bourgeois atmosphere. In Tel Yosef, kibbutz dancing was “slow and labored”; in Jerusalem, “wild and fiery.” It was only “half-awake” in Haifa, but in Tel Aviv, “dancing was gay, full of internal satisfaction, and without fiery savagery.” The Gedud sent its comrades who needed rest and relaxation to work in its Tel Aviv branch.72 Although leaders of the labor movement could easily have criticized the city’s culture as bourgeois and as a parable of modern grandeur and decay—women wore lipstick, the city’s men and women seemed to favor ballroom dancing to the hora—they preferred to focus their attention on the city as an incubator for Galut values rather than on its exploitative bourgeois relations of production. In fact, Labor Zionists debunked Tel Aviv’s consumer culture no more often than their bourgeois counterparts leveled criticisms at what they termed the city’s culture of “excess.” Where Tel Aviv residents saw satisfaction and fulfillment, many town leaders, particularly its longtime liberal mayor, Meir Dizengoff, saw danger and risk. “Isn’t it true that we are all living here with too much excess and beyond our means and material conditions?”73 Even when Tel Aviv was
Unsung Heroes
193
experiencing spectacular growth, Moshe Smilansky, no great supporter of agricultural collectives, reminded Tel Aviv residents that although they “were enjoying luxuries . . . pioneers in the Galilee were starving.”74 Commerce and economic vitality put the denizens of Tel Aviv to a kind of test: they were supposed to help build a culture of commerce, but not “buy” fully into it. Torrents of invective came from politicians across the political spectrum against Tel Aviv’s supposed hedonism.75 Despite the warnings issued by politicians espousing strict-minded principles, commerce penetrated almost every facet of Tel Aviv public life. Even Jewish holidays supplied the impetus for enlarging and energizing commerce. The intensity of commercial activity provoked many public discussions of values and behavior, with high potential for blurring the line between politics and religion. Local campaigns to preserve the Sabbath as a day of rest and close down all stores and commerce pleased the city’s religious establishment but created disharmony with business leaders and, judging by their behavior, with most of the residents. Although urging respect for the Sabbath and for Jewish religious traditions, Mayor Dizengoff recognized the potentially divisive impact of religious Orthodoxy on the city’s image and on the lifestyle it supported. Although Tel Aviv’s rabbis sent a steady stream of petitions to the municipal council regarding Sabbath observance—and often received favorable rulings— people more or less voted with their feet on this issue.76 The elaboration of commercial activity forged a powerful link between politics and economics in the city. Religious imperatives, no matter how sacred, could not entirely override business interests. On the contrary, religion and commerce worked interactively to create new forms of Jewish identity and new ways of expressing it. Religious traditions were respected but did not corral most immigrants into a conformist pattern of behavior. In Tel Aviv, on the Sabbath, most stores were closed, but many cafes and restaurants were open. People walking on the beach or boardwalk could buy light refreshments. Celebrating the Sabbath generally included swimming, sports activities, and visiting friends and relatives.77 Tel Aviv’s residents showed an intense familiarity with one another and even assimilated their neighborhoods into their lives. Dizengoff urged residents to observe Shabbat, but would not deny them services that might add to the enjoyment of the day, including shoeshining. Lifestyle almost always trumped ideological purity in matters of public policy.78 The discourse of promise in Tel Aviv gravitated toward its public places, particularly its beach and boardwalk. Climate allowed streets to become extensions of the household unless there was a hamsin (heat wave).79 The
Exiled in the Homeland
194
seashore was the most popular site for Sabbath promenades and everyday strolls. People loved to sunbathe, wear swimsuits daring enough to shock the religious community, and, despite regulations, change into their bathing suits on the shore. People were drawn to dancing in the streets and on the boardwalks, and everyone took a special pride in the sea.80 Often roaming the town very late at night, groups of young people loved to sing Hebrew songs and dance to express their joy and freedom despite disturbing their neighbors.81 Tel Aviv is a street city. People live in the streets, while apartments are nothing but light, transparent, summer dwellings, where everything that happens in them is heard on the street. From within, the street can be seen, and the apartments can be seen from the street. From the street one looks directly into rooms and speaks to those sitting there. There is no boundary between home and street, neither architecturally nor psychologically speaking. A single area, one-dimensional.82
In Tel Aviv, Jews found a public space where they could feel perfectly at ease. They organized parades in the streets on Purim at a time when their families and friends in Europe were menaced in the streets, increasingly squeezed out of work and deprived of any chance to display their talents and energies. Jewish immigrants drawn to Tel Aviv did not want power so much as the freedom to interact with people. Tel Aviv gave them the capacity to nourish such freedom. The emergence of an openly Jewish culture encompassing public spaces was, by all accounts, exhilarating, and Tel Aviv’s residents constantly searched for occasions to put their national identity on display. National poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik supposedly invented the tradition of the oneg Shabbat (literally, enjoyment of the Sabbath) as a way of marking the Sabbath with song and educational activities rather than with religious ritual and prayer. But before Bialik brought his oneg Shabbat to Tel Aviv, the city’s denizens used their streets and cafes as places where old and new customs converged and were redefined. The weekly promenade on Shabbat had the feel of a parade.83 Purim was turned into carnival, with commercial benefits for the city.84 On Passover, there were public seders for unmarried workers, and eventually, some were organized for members of the right-wing movements.85 Everyone was ultimately able to find a ritual meal suited to his or her political beliefs and values. After the meals, people would march into the streets and fill the air with singing and shouts.86 Funeral processions were also public, as
Unsung Heroes
195
was the annual May 1 labor demonstration. New Jewish rituals were born and made on Tel Aviv’s streets. To a young Amos Oz, living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv gave Jews a new scale of personal fulfillment and expression and the opportunity to show what they could do with genuine freedom. Over the hills and far away, the city of Tel Aviv was also an exciting place, from which came the newspapers, rumors of theater, opera, ballet, and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates and indistinct snatches of gossip. There were great sportsmen in Tel Aviv. And there was the sea, full of bronzed Jews who could swim. Who in Jerusalem could swim? Who had ever heard of swimming Jews? These were different genes. . . . There was a special magic in the very name of Tel Aviv. As soon as I heard the word “Tel Aviv,” I conjured up in my mind’s eye a picture of a tough guy in a dark blue T-shirt, bronzed and broad-shouldered, a poet-worker-revolutionary, a man made without fear, the type they called a Hevreman, with a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at home in the world: all day long he worked hard on the land, or with sand and mortar, in the evening he played the violin, at night he danced with girls or sang them soulful songs amid the sand dunes by the light of the full moon, and in the early hours he took a handgun or sten out of its hiding place and stole away into the darkness to guard the houses and fields. . . . It’s not just that the light in Tel Aviv was different from the light in Jerusalem, more than it is today, even the laws of gravity were different. People didn’t walk in Tel Aviv: they leaped and floated . . . In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral or latecomers at a concert.87
Freedom, Oz tells us, sometimes appeared as rudeness in men and bawdiness in women, but still Palestine’s Jews seemed convinced that Tel Aviv had created a remarkable environment where almost everything could be seen and heard. No wonder Tel Aviv was full of immediately dramatic juxtapositions suggesting the scope of differences over identity and the Jewish nationbuilding project. Tel Aviv’s founders developed their city as a celebration of community.88 Money may have been channeled into construction, but energy was directed to celebrating urban Jewish vitality. Intended to reflect the most advanced planning available in the modern world, Tel
Exiled in the Homeland
196
Aviv’s development expressed instead the dynamism and diversity of the immigrant experience and the failure of planners and political leaders to keep everything under control. The Tel Aviv that so grandly mirrored Zionism’s many successes thus also reflected many of its failures. The city’s rapid growth and economic development opened up new channels for confl ict and danger. Private initiatives enlarged Tel Aviv’s development, but also made it more insecure. Those who managed to live through the economic spirals from downturns to depressions, which seemed to erupt often and without warning, were never free from the fear of unemployment even after they found work. During the decade of the 1920s, Zionists described Tel Aviv as the medium and symbol of the infiltration of Diaspora values and lifestyles into the national home. Streets filled with peddlers hawking their wares and stores opened with too little capital investment led many to claim that Tel Aviv weakened rather than strengthened the Zionist mission. But if Tel Aviv inspired no single vision, it did give many people who came to Palestine ideas not only about how to live in what was then a harsh environment and in difficult circumstances but also about how to create the relationships and institutions that would help them feel at home in a place that was still new and too fragile to be taken for granted. Variety always fl irted with chaos, and contrasts were always more common than syntheses. The most fundamental of these contrasts came from the clash between Tel Aviv’s image and its reality. Tel Aviv was supposed to be as clean as a German town, but in fact it was notorious for its filth and squalor; instead of being quiet and pleasant, it was often described as noisy and smelly; contrary to the intention of Tel Aviv’s founders, there were hardly any open spaces, public parks or private gardens. The Zionists considered Hebrew a crucial vehicle for consolidating a new national culture, but many foreign languages were spoken, read, and heard in Tel Aviv’s streets. The presence of animals such as camels and cows diminished the modern look of Tel Aviv, as did thousands of cats and rats.89
Barbara Mann points out that, “as the ‘first Hebrew city,’ Tel Aviv was portrayed by writers, painters, photographers, and city planners as new, clean, and modern—everything the crowded neighborhoods of Jaffa were not—a city sprung from the sands.”90 A few apologetic reports describe
Unsung Heroes
197
Tel Aviv as pretty, whereas most witnesses—even great supporters of “the first Hebrew city”—experienced it as an ugly environment. The second obvious contrast was that Tel Aviv existed in some tension with the Jewish community in other parts of Palestine. This was a place where Labor Zionist pioneers were more talked about than seen, where Yiddish theater drew crowds as well as violent protests, and where European fashions signified progress and not degeneration. Tel Aviv could evoke simultaneously the power of memory and the force of creating something new, or, in Barbara Mann’s words, “the location of homecoming and [of] a radically utopian social space.”91 . . . The epigraph of The Book of Tel Aviv Street Names [1944], a chilling variation on Psalms—Im eshkahekh golah tishkah yemini [If I forget thee, O Diaspora, may my right hand lose its cunning]—demonstrates the importance of a connection to the Diaspora even as the idea of Exile was ostensibly rejected. The book promotes the triumphal narrative of Tel Aviv as “the first Hebrew city” but simultaneously anchors Tel Aviv in the past— in this case, a specifically Jewish, diasporic past. The book, written in the shadow of the war, offers this delineation of what the city could offer its newest citizens, who might have had reservations about its appeal.92
The third and final contrast is a corollary of the second and comes from the contentious matter of language and cultural diversity. Dizengoff called Tel Aviv a Hebrew city and urged immigrants to speak the language. The municipality returned letters sent to it in languages other than Hebrew. Dizengoff gave the distinct impression that he deemed the use of foreign languages in the city illegitimate. “As he stands at the gates of our city, every new immigrant must remember that Tel Aviv is not just a typical oriental city—it is rather a city Hebrew in its culture with only one unifying language, the language of the Bible. And all other languages brought here from other lands must give way to this language.”93 But living in the throes of momentous historical changes, many of Tel Aviv’s Jews relied on the medium of their “old” language—Yiddish—to describe how they experienced what for most was a mushrooming new reality. This did not occur only in the private sphere: there were store signs in languages other than Hebrew, and many of the signs in Hebrew bore obvious mistakes. Tel Aviv was a multilingual city with many books and newspapers published in other languages readily available for purchase.94 Dizengoff was not an extremist on matters of language usage because
Exiled in the Homeland
198
he wanted Hebrew to unify and not divide the city. He knew, also, that the language could be a medium of bringing people together only over time and only by showing patience and sensitivity, and not rushing to confrontation.95 The idea of negating Exile by rejecting the Diaspora was not just Labor Zionism’s obsession. Concerns about the insidious dangers imported into Palestine from the Jewish Diaspora were dragged into public discussions by politicians representing the interests of private capital as well. Tel Aviv was both source and reflection of the many fateful connections and contrasts between the developing national home and their homes left behind in Europe. Although Palestine’s Zionist leaders were more often prepared to proclaim what set them apart from their Diaspora Jewish roots than to concede the many linkages, Tel Aviv created a culture and an architecture that marked out how nourished the city’s population had been in the lands of their birth but also how heavy were the responsibilities imposed by tradition, geography, and family. Perhaps more than any other population in Palestine, Tel Aviv’s knew how difficult it was to see the redemptive vision of the Zionist project as the complete answer to the Jewish problems left behind in other lands.
Conclusion
Vital Stati
Picture Israel’s founding in 1948. The image of a man or woman in overalls behind a plow is likely to come to mind, conjuring up the notion that Israel was built literally out of the backbreaking labor of its dedicated immigrants. Now turn to Tel Aviv. The very words evoke classic urban scenes of men and women strolling along the seaside while Palestine’s Jewish cultural elite sits and argues in outdoor cafes. On the one hand, signs of self-denial and public service, and on the other, emblems of middle-class leisure and abundance. Even as both pictures seem familiar, they seem isolated from one another. But the political and economic requirements of building a national home made their total isolation impossible, if not undesirable. Measured unfavorably against the image of the agricultural worker in the Zionist narrative, the city dweller reflected the spatial location of the overwhelming majority of the country’s immigrants. Most Jews, including those who claimed the city held no special meaning for their Zionism, crowded into the corners and alleys of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. And although never raised to the status of Palestine’s agricultural lands, these urban sites held the national home’s demographic base, so crucial in convincing Palestine’s rulers in Great Britain that the Zionist project was worthy of support, and essential in demonstrating that Zionism’s national claims had corresponding realities. The discourse that extolled agriculture also imagined the land as the site for transforming the people and their culture. The city, by contrast, came into focus as a place of social and cultural extremes, partly a product of unfettered capitalism and partly a consequence of the presence of immigrants uprooted from the Diaspora but still clinging to its values. The praise bestowed on those working the land reminded those in the cit-
Exiled in the Homeland
200
ies of their failures to cross the principal divide Zionists posited between Diaspora and national home. Stressing the presumed disparities between exile and homeland, the Zionist narrative gave its adherents great expectations of what coming to live in Palestine could mean for the collective life of the Jews. But instead of feeling empowered, immigrants often felt weakened by their move and more aware of the ruptures with their past than of the liberation in their future. Because the strains of immigration could not be captured by any of Zionism’s categories of analysis, they were almost never acknowledged and always exempt from scrutiny. At the level of first principles, Zionism seemed only capable of pursuing the pathway set out by its vision all the way to the end. But although that vision remained constant, the logic underlying its realization grew increasingly complicated after Great Britain drove Ottoman troops out of Palestine and authorized both a geography and a set of political demands that bedeviled Zionists with tensions between the imperatives of nation-building and those of state-making. Even when the omens for both were dire, as in the latter half of the 1920s, when Palestine’s Jewish community was compelled to operate with an economy near collapse, Zionist leaders could not be candid about the situation or publicly give in to despair; instead, they summoned up expressions of certainty and of hope, especially when the circumstances might be read otherwise, if not as catastrophic. Consider the optimism represented by the founding of a Tel Aviv museum in 1929, a year filled with an enormous disparity between the life situation of most of the town’s residents and the achievements on display. The economic dislocations set off in 1925 were still casting a long shadow. The museum was called a conceit by one of Tel Aviv’s most famous residents, writer Natan Alterman, who intimated that a town without much of a past had to borrow heavily from the language of fiction to claim that it could document its “history.” Nevertheless, Zionist leaders never missed an opportunity to proclaim the allegiance of Palestine’s Jews to the homeland they were building. Thus, instead of offering a funeral service for the impoverished, suffering from many years of economic decline, the museum put on display signs of Tel Aviv’s urban creativity and even its prosperity wherever it could be found. For Zionists in their nation-building roles, the future was always more imperative than either the past or the present. But their function as statemakers inevitably drew their concentration to the present and to the possibilities of the moment. The potential confl ict between nation-building
Conclusion
201
and state-making aims was always present in Zionism, but it was made more acute by the principles undergirding the authority of the British Mandate for Palestine—establishing a Jewish national home in the newly defined country. With this unprecedented access to global sponsorship, Zionists expected to be able to reach both their state- and nation-building goals. They quickly learned, however, that the opportunity for national transformation could easily hurt the prospects for founding a state. When the generation struggling for radical change turned its attention to mobilizing resources for economic and political development, it discovered that the tactics and strategies functioning effectively for one purpose could fatally damage the other. Making national identity central to how Jews understood and defined themselves meant, at least theoretically, eradicating not only Judaism’s religious strictures but also an array of associations and practices developed in the Diaspora and associated with exile and powerlessness. But attacking a traditional order that Zionists believed was already fading made no sense in the context of building a state. Nor could Zionism’s political aims be secured by threatening long-established institutions if they could be used to generate financial support for the Jewish national home and rally people to the nationalist cause. Although Zionism’s ambition to transform the nation created the need to proclaim homeland and exile as bipolar opposites, the project of creating a state could not afford to posit so radical a polarization. Without a genuine exchange between Diaspora and national home, there would be too few Jews choosing Palestine if other options were available, and far fewer of Palestine’s Jewish immigrants embracing Zionism’s principles. State-making required consensus and compromise and familiarity with Jewish institutions in Europe; nation-building demanded absolute adherence to a newly designed set of principles and insulation from contamination by Diaspora organizations and values. The devaluation of the Diaspora experience and the unquestioned presumption of exile and home as antinomies are typically invoked as explanations for the triumph of the Zionist cause and the establishment in 1948 of a Jewish state.1 Zionist visions of the Jewish state restored had more to say about national characteristics than about borders. The Zionist narrative followed a strict sequence: land, immigration, fl uency in Hebrew, and liberation. It conferred a metaphorical order on seemingly unrelated or random developments. Writers who represented agriculture as the emblem of Zionism emphasized it not only as part of the Zionist landscape but also as a point of view. By reducing the many motivations
Exiled in the Homeland
202
for immigration to one of dedication to national transformation, Zionist leaders attempted to control the heterogeneity of Palestine’s Jewish population. Zionists imagined that independence would not only liberate Jews from their marginal and subordinate existence, it would also bestow on their community a harmony and moral purpose denied them in the Diaspora. Identifying the processes of nation-building and state-making as distinct, however, does not mean there were no relationships between them, but rather that interdependence was not tantamount to an equivalence where progress in one domain automatically translated into the other. In fact, the two often worked against one another. Zionism’s nation-building project, so thoroughly dismissive of Diaspora culture and loyalties, would have undermined the very political and economic developments that enabled the founding in 1948 of a Jewish state. The opposition posed in Zionist theory between the Diaspora and Palestinian Jewish societies was countered in practice by a variety of sustained contacts that continued well beyond the year of immigration and the fact of residence in the new land. Diaspora Jewry participated in the development of the political life of Jewish Palestine, and continuous Diaspora– national home interactions generated overlapping realms of institutional experience. Sensitive to the fact that Jewish political power was widely dispersed, Palestine’s Zionist political leaders traveled to Europe several times a year to consult with heads of various organizations in major Jewish population centers. Policies were often hammered out during meetings in Europe where priorities with regard to the distribution of immigration certificates were fixed. These activities had an enormous effect on the social structure and economic development of Palestine’s Jewish community. European Zionists shaped the creation of the new Jewish society in other ways as well. The shift in financial aid from the small to the large commune or kibbutz was decided by the World Zionist Organization and not by local activists. The kibbutz itself stabilized as an institution because of its association with a network of Diaspora organizations. Movements such as He-Halutz gave the kibbutz a renewed sense of mission as a core state-building institution, and by recruiting new members, Zionists living in the Diaspora imbued kibbutz leaders with immeasurably greater confidence in the kibbutz’s future. An associational politics was created, with Palestine’s Jewish representatives—the community’s up-and-coming leaders—invited to spend a year
Conclusion
203
or more preparing Diaspora Zionists for life and work in the homeland. The practice of sending such activists to the Diaspora created a realm of intense political interaction for European and Palestinian Zionists. Palestinian teachers often learned political strategies from their European students, many of whom later immigrated and continued to exert a direct impact on the distribution of political power in Palestine’s Jewish community. Leaders of many Zionist political parties understood that the well-being of their institutions and organizations depended on their success in generating and maintaining loyalty in the Diaspora and in the Jewish national home. Their more powerful branches in various countries of Europe sometimes overshadowed even the strongest of Palestine’s political parties. Torn between confl icting needs, these political parties frequently had to respond to demands issued simultaneously from two different continents, or sometimes had to establish priorities between them, and were often beholden to continental trends. Finally, with all of the hoopla about economic independence and a productive Jewish economy, the national home relied on external financial aid and channeled large amounts of money into subsidies to control inflation and raise the standard of living. Capital accumulated in the lands of the Diaspora poured into real estate, outstripping investments directed to industrial developments. In 1927 Haim Arlosoroff warned against “dependency on Zionist philanthropy,” which created what he called “an artificially high standard of living in Palestine.” “The Yishuv,” he wrote, “had to learn to live within its means.” During the 1920s private investment in the Jewish national home exceeded that of public Zionist funds flowing into the country. Even some of the Third Aliyah immigrants, refugees fleeing from Bolshevism, had capital. For them Palestine represented an opportunity for private investment and individual affl uence. Public funds were poured into building workers’ apartments and used to dampen inflationary pressures. Many scarce resources were directed into housing and other lifestyle supports.2 It is important to remember that the move from old world to new homeland contained an irony no immigrant anticipated. Although Zionists in Europe could take the idea of Jewish nationhood as a given, they were forced to see it as a problem in the homeland. To believe they had come home, immigrants had to negate the evidence of their senses because of their demographic relationship to the local population of Arabs as well as to the significantly larger stream of Jews that continued to move West until blocked either by U.S. law or by Soviet edict. The shortages of capital
Exiled in the Homeland
204
and natural resources that constrained economic development and added to the burdens of meeting individual and household needs could not help but raise further questions about Zionism’s long-term prospects. Rebellions and riots reminded Palestine’s Jews that their claims were contested and that their political objectives would be vigorously opposed. The outbreak of war in 1939 confirmed Zionist views of the insecurities of life in the Diaspora, but it also deepened the sense of weakness among Palestine’s Jews as relatives and a reservoir of potential immigrants were transported to death camps and not to the land of Israel. A comprehensive analysis of the experience of immigration must surely begin, then, with the following observations. Jewish national consciousness flowed as much from numbers as from territory. The Zionist colonization of Palestine during the period of British rule was shaped by population size even though the demographic issue was seldom fully and publicly addressed. The very global development that marked the dramatic recognition of Zionism as a legitimate national movement created a framework of rule encouraging both Jewish immigration and land settlement as the central means of developing a Jewish national home. Palestine’s Jewish residents could not help but ponder population growth as the mandatory regime itself insisted that the number of Jewish immigrants (without capital) be fixed in accordance with the country’s estimated economic absorptive capacity. Serving as subtext in discussions of the adequacy of natural resources and economic institutions, demography became a covert consideration in imagining geographic boundaries and in naturalizing the principles of a security doctrine. Demographic concerns also impinged upon the openness of Palestine’s Jews to cultural difference and to the idea of a truly heterogeneous society. The colonization of Palestine brought men and women of diverse backgrounds together in the most unfamiliar of circumstances, forcing them to confront the dissonance between Zionist theory and practice while generating a series of unexpected ruptures. Jews who lived outside of Palestine embraced Zionism and its vision of a national home as an abstract idea and goal. In Palestine, Jewish immigrants experienced the national home as an assortment of institutions shaping their lives. In Europe, Zionists could imagine the future Jewish society; in Palestine, their daily activities formed it. The differences were profound. Not able to define the population statistically for state-building purposes, Zionist leaders relied more and more on material and cultural markers that came to personify the national home as giving voice to the stirrings of
Conclusion
205
the young for a just and productive Hebrew society. The Zionist emphasis on building new cities, creating new social formations, and producing a modern culture resonated with young Jews and perpetuated an image of the Zionist project as forever young. The Zionist call for Jews to become workers, revive their ancient language, and take risks with their resources turned those who answered it into believers in themselves as agents of change. Oriented to a future where the young were under no obligation to re-create the world of their fathers, the Zionist vision added a distinctly youthful characteristic to Palestine’s Jewish culture that lasted even after it began to age. The Jewish consciousness of national belonging, then, was forged in a crucible of insecurities. Many Zionist immigrants were young, separated from their families and birthplaces for the first time. They felt a loneliness in Palestine they did not know how to confront.3 How could they explain feeling alienated in the very land supposed to fulfill the redemptive Zionist vision they held sacred? Loneliness and insecurity caused Zionists to doubt themselves and to suspect that they could not measure up to the demands their vision imposed on them. Some number of young idealists killed themselves rather than relinquish their grip of a Zionist dream that had once given them such hope and infused their lives with such meaning.4 Literary critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi describes this kind of alienation as a mark of Jewish distinctiveness. “[T]here is a specific poetics of exile,” she writes, “that emerges in modern Jewish culture not only from the experience of mass displacement but from the struggle with an inherited construction of homecoming that was essentially ahistorical.”5 Ezrahi suggests that a classical Jewish literary tradition born in exile, no matter the political transformations and achievements, could not provide the conceptual resources for a clear and comprehensible description of home. For Palestine’s Jews, the rituals of normalcy in Europe included danger and poverty. But whatever the trouble or distress, Jews could find comfort in family and friends and the familiarity of their towns and villages. Although strained by the economic and political changes of modernity, traditional structures still provided the cultural ballast for most Jews in Europe. Imagine, then, the encounter of idealistic Zionists with a Jewish homeland that offered no more safety or economic opportunity than the countries of their birth but that denounced, abandoned, eclipsed, or erased their familiar ground of language and culture. Though claiming Palestine as native ground, immigrants had to struggle not to feel themselves strangers.
Exiled in the Homeland
206
But Zionist discourse told a different story and told it over and over again. Why? The story may have reflected the deeply rooted insecurities about the present by asserting that Jews were controlling their existence in Palestine when they were not. The story may also have derived from wellplaced fears for the future by joining the imperatives of social change to the forces underlying national destiny. For many Zionists, their narrative possessed an imaginative and moral power. It promised an end to centuriesold Jew-hatred and a dismissal of intolerable constraints. It spoke for previously unspoken rights to independence and recently forged claims to statehood. It offered a new future for Jews if they released energies of commitment and presented a vision of possibilities that few Jews could conceive, let alone achieve on their own. Thus, Exiled in the Homeland suggests that there is, in fact, a single answer to the elaborately interconnected questions that have shadowed my discussion of Palestine’s Jewish immigrants: to what extent did Zionism’s idealistic vision motivate Jews to make Palestine their home, and to what extent did it continue to inspire their behavior and belief after their arrival? How long did Zionist idealists subsist on their dreams of later glory, and how did they reconcile their ideological principles with the demands of their daily experiences? Zionist discourse suggests that if idealists recognized that the community they were creating would never match the purity of their dreams, they were not prepared to acknowledge the differences, and certainly not to label them as failures. This study also indicates that there was a complicated relationship between the realm of reality for immigrants—conditions, situations, options—and the constructions bestowed upon it. Zionist leaders interpreted the reality lived by immigrants partly to present to mandatory authorities their accounting of the benefits of Great Britain’s policy of support for the Jewish national home and partly to advance a narrative of initiative and self-sacrifice that presumably differentiated Palestine’s Jews from those streaming to other places. The essential and original Zionist claim was not that Jewish nation-building was unique but rather that Jews possessed a different way of being a nation. Zionists projected a community of purpose rather than a claim to a particular well-defined geography. Possessed of a national mission to gather together Jews in the land of Israel, Zionists believed Jews could be remade as well through labor and physical contact with the soil. Thus if 1948 marked a clear victory for Zionist political development, its implications for Zionist nation-building were much less clear, though
Conclusion
207
the issue was deliberately not engaged. The conviction that transforming the nation amounted to no more than simply purging it of its Diaspora values foundered on the more immediate and prosaic tasks of establishing a state. No nation could remake itself solely as it pleased; nor could the Jewish state have been created without intense interactions with the Diaspora culture its founders claimed to reject.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Note<
Introduction 1. Gur Alroey, “Roslan,” Cathedra 107 (April 2003): 73. 2. Two important books on Israeli revisionist history are Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar, Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, London, 2003, and Derek J. Penslar, Israel in History, London, 2007. 3. A 1983 study of the geographic history of the Jezreel Valley ignited a stream of protests by arguing that only 10 percent of the area was the fetid swampland described in the Zionist canon. With one scholarly thrust, a highly technical analysis cast doubt on the assertion that the familiar rolling fields of wheat and barley along Israel’s northern landscape had been wrested through backbreaking labor out of a malaria-infested, heretofore uninhabitable soil. The implication that agricultural productivity came at a lower human cost once Zionist pioneers understood what crops to grow and how to grow them seemed to jeopardize if not repudiate the Zionist story of renewing the land and nation while scaling back the achievements of the men and women once revered for their dedication to the Jewish struggle for a state. See Shmuel Shamai and Yoram Bar-Gal, “The Swamps of the Jezreel Valley: A Struggle Over the Myth,” Sociologia Internationalis 25 (1987): 193–206. 4. David Vital, The Origins of Zionism, Oxford, 1975; Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Hanover and London, 1995; Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York, 1981; Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, Cambridge, 1969. 5. One telling illustration of the kind of commitment Zionism demanded: Wedding announcements in Hebrew newspapers during the period of British rule typically included a record of the donations by guests to the Jewish National Fund or to one of the other Zionist institutions operating in Palestine. They sometimes noted the absence of donations as well. 6. Yael Zerubavel, “Revisiting the Pioneer Past: Continuity and Change in Hebrew Settlement Narratives,” Hebrew Studies 41 (2000): 209–224. On page 211, Zerubavel writes, “The pioneer period thus marked the new nation’s emergence as a major phenomenon that transformed Jewish history. The common references to Zionist
Notes to Pages 5–12
210
settlers as ‘pioneers’ [halutzim], ‘founders’ [meyassedim] and the ‘first generation’ [dor harishonim] reflected and reinforced their role as opening a new historical era.” 7. Some of the new research is summarized and presented in Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society, New York, 1998. On Arabs, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge, 1989. See also Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The SocioTerritorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, Berkeley, 1983. On women see Devorah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society, New York, 1987, and her edited volume Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, Albany, 1992. On non-Zionists in Palestine, see especially Yosef Salmon, Religion and Zionism: First Encounters, Jerusalem, 2002. See also Shapira and Penslar, Israeli Historical Revisionism. 8. Nachum T. Gross, Not By Spirit Alone: Studies in the Economic History of Modern Palestine and Israel, Jerusalem, 1999 (in Hebrew). 9. Arieh Bruce Saposnik, “Exorcising the ‘Angel of National Death’—National and Individual Death (and Rebirth) in Zionist Palestine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95(3) (Summer 2005): 562. 10. Meir Chazan, “The Murder of Moshe Barsky: Transformations in Ethos, Pathos and Myth,” Israel Affairs 12(2) (April 2006): 284–306; see also Ruth Malkinson, Shimshon Rubin, and Eliezer Witztum (eds.), Ovdan ve-Shchol ba-Hevra ha-Yisraelit, Jerusalem, 1993. 11. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “The Grapes of Roth: ‘Diasporism’ Between Portnoy and Shylock,” in Literary Strategies: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, vol. CXII, New York, 1996: 150. 12. Anat Helman, Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv, Haifa, 2007, 71. 13. I occasionally touch on events beyond the circumscribed period I take as my focus, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3, because they help make sense of earlier trends and developments. 14. My coverage is highly asymmetric because I concentrate heavily on European rather than on Middle Eastern Jews. I am following the record of experiences that I could trace through the available sources. 15. Not all Jews immigrating to Palestine during these years were Zionists. Many Jews came to live in the land of Israel in order to fulfill religious commandments, and some number of those were actively opposed to Zionism and to its political agenda. 16. Braha Habas and Eliezer Shohat (eds.), The Second Aliyah, Tel Aviv, 1947 (in Hebrew); Moshe Smilansky, Perakim be-Toldot ha-Yishuv, vol. 3, Tel Aviv, 1943 (in Hebrew). 17. Eyal Kaf kafi, “Changes in Ideology during Two Generations of a Zionist Youth Movement,” Journal of Israeli History (Autumn 1996): 283–300. Mordecai Naor (ed.), Youth Movements, Jerusalem, 1989 (in Hebrew). 18. Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement: A History, vol. I, Oxford, 1992, 92. 19. “During the first ten years of [Great Britain’s] civil rule, approximately 100,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine (99,808 according to official records) as opposed to 25,000 departures. In real terms, the Jewish population thus increased by 75,000 and more than doubled in the course of the decade. In 1925 alone, when the Jewish population totaled 95,000, the number of new immigrants reached 34,386. The ratio of immi-
Notes to Pages 14–25
211
grants that year—361 per 1,000 Jewish residents—was the highest ratio ever recorded, from 1919 until today” (Gideon Biger, An Empire in the Holy Land, New York, 1995, 224). 20. Baruch Ben-Avram and Henry Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, Jerusalem, 1995, 65ff (in Hebrew). 21. Near, Kibbutz Movement, 74. 22. Aviva Halamish has published outstanding studies of immigration to Palestine during the period of the British Mandate. A useful volume on the subject—with an article by Halamish—is Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky (eds.), Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948, Beersheva, 2001. See especially 179–216. Two other important studies are Dan Giladi, Jewish Palestine During the Fourth Aliyah Period (1924–1929): Economic and Social Aspects, Tel Aviv, 1973, and Yigal Drori, Between Right and Left: The Central Circles in Eretz Israel (1920–1929), Tel Aviv, 1990 (in Hebrew). 23. Halpern and Reinharz provide a good overview of this perspective in Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. 24. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton, 2004. 25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., New York, 2006.
Chapter One 1. Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, Cambridge, 1969, ch. 4. 2. Margalit Shilo, “Mass Immigration or Selective Immigration? The Zionist Policy (1882–1914),” in Ingathering of Exiles: Aliyah to the Land of Israel, Myth and Reality, ed. Dvora Hacohen, Jerusalem, 1998, 107–131 (in Hebrew). 3. Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855, Philadelphia, 1983; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, Cambridge, 1981; Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss, Chicago, 1986; David Vital, The Origins of Zionism, Oxford, 1975; Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society, New York, 1998, ch. 1. See also Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York, 1981, especially 73–87; Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before The First World War, New York, 1993; Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle, Berkeley, 2001; Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia, New York, 1989; Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Hanover, 1995; Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, New York, 1972. 4. David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, Oxford, 1987, 312–326. 5. Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, Masada, 1935, 22. 6. Ibid., 23. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Ibid., 12–13. 9. Alan Dowty, The Jewish State a Century Later, Berkeley, 1998, 29. 10. Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 32. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid., 12–13.
Notes to Pages 25–41
212
13. Ibid., 8. 14. David Vital, “The Zionist as Thinker: Ahad Ha ͗ am and Hibbat Zion,” in At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha’am, ed. Jacques Kornberg, Albany, 1983, 94. 15. Steven Beller, Herzl, New York, 1991, 78ff. 16. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, New York, 1935, 41–42. 17. Ibid., 42. 18. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, New York, 1988. 19. Herzl, Jewish State, 75. 20. Derek Jonathan Penslar, “Herzl, Zionism and the Origins of Jewish Social Policy,” in Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich, Jerusalem, 1999, 215. 21. Herzl, Jewish State, 75. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington, 1991, 52. 26. Ibid., 1. 27. Dan Miron, “Mi-Yotzrim u-Vanim le-Vnei beli Bayit” (From Creators and Builders to Homeless), Igara 2 (1985–1986): 70–135. 28. Benjamin Harshav, Language in a Time of Revolution, Berkeley, 1993. 29. Arieh Bruce Saposnik, “‘ . . . Will Issue Forth from Zion’? The Emergence of a Jewish National Culture in Palestine and the Dynamics of Yishuv-Diaspora Relations,” Jewish Social Studies 10(1) (Fall 2003): 151–184. 30. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha ͗ am and the Origins of Zionism, Berkeley, 1993, 70; see also Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism, 112–124; Leon Simon, Ahad Ha-Am Asher Ginsburg: A Biography, London, 1960. 31. Ahad Ha ͗ am, “Lo Zeh ha-Derech” (This Is Not the Way), in Kol Kitvei Ahad Ha ͗ am (Writings of Ahad Ha ͗ am), Tel Aviv, 1947, 13. 32. Alan Dowty, “Much Ado About Little: Ahad Ha ͗ am’s ‘Truth From Eretz Yisrael,’” Israel Studies 5(2) (Fall 2000): 161. 33. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet. 34. Dowty, “Much Ado about Little,” 170–171. 35. Harshav, Language in a Time of Revolution, 59. 36. Dowty, “Much Ado about Little,” 162. 37. Ibid., 168. 38. Ibid., 163. 39. Harshav, Language in a Time of Revolution, 228. 40. Ibid., 108. 41. Ibid., 193. 42. Ibid., 200. 43. Chaim Rabin, Ikre toldot ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit (Principles in the Development of the Hebrew Language), Jerusalem, 1972–1974, 55. 44. Saposnik, “‘ . . . Will Issue Forth From Zion’?” 155.
Notes to Pages 42–53
213
45. Haim Arlosoroff, Nation, Society, and State: Selected Essays, ed. Asher Maniv, Tel Aviv, 1984, 41 (in Hebrew). 46. Cited in Shlomo Avineri, Arlosoroff, London, 1989, 48–49. 47. Ibid. See also Arlosoroff, Nation, Society, and State, 42ff. 48. Quoted in Miriam Getter, Chaim Arlosoroff: A Political Biography, Tel Aviv, 1977, 148 (in Hebrew). 49. Quoted in Avineri, Arlosoroff, 53. 50. Ibid., 47. 51. Quoted in Getter, Chaim Arlosoroff, 116. 52. Esther Stein-Ashkenazy, Betar in Eretz-Israel, 1925–1947, Jerusalem, 1997 (in Hebrew). 53. Moshe Smilansky, Perakim be-Toldot ha-Yishuv, vol. 2, Tel Aviv, 1959, 38. 54. Quoted in Nahum Karlinsky, Citrus Blossoms: Jewish Entrepreneurship in Palestine, 1890–1939, Jerusalem, 2000, 45 (in Hebrew). 55. Smilansky, Perakim, vol. 3, 22. 56. Ibid., vol. 2, 82. 57. Ibid., 43. 58. Ibid., 69. 59. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton and Oxford, 2004, describes the transformations in wonderfully vivid language. 60. Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, Ithaca and London, 2005. See Chapter 3. Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity, Philadelphia, 2006, 73–74.
C h a p t e r T wo 1. John Darwin, “An Undeclared Empire: The British in the Middle East, 1918–1939,” in The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of William Roger Louis, ed. Robert D. King and Robin W. Kilson, London, 1999, 161. 2. Ibid., 163. 3. David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, New York, 1988, 255. 4. John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays, ed. Anil Seal, Cambridge, 1982, 87. 5. Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932, New York, 1992. See also Susan Pedersen, “From National Crisis to ‘National Crisis’: British Politics, 1914–1931,” Journal of British Studies 33(3) ( July 1994): 322–335. 6. Keith Jeffrey, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–1922, Manchester, 1984, 4, 11. 7. Dane Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 1880–1945, London and New York, 2002, 48. 8. Ibid., 46. 9. Susan Pedersen, “Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain During the Great War,” American Historical Review 95(4) (1990): 1000. 10. Pedersen, “From National Crisis to ‘National Crisis,’” 332.
Notes to Pages 54–59
214
11. Jeffrey, British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 96. 12. Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 51. 13. Among the many fine historical analyses are J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, New York, 1950; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929, London, 1978; Aaron S. Klieman, Foundations of British Policy in the Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921, Baltimore, 1970; Gideon Biger, Crown Colony or National Home: The Influence of British Rule in Palestine, 1917–1930, Jerusalem, 1983; Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939, Ithaca, 1979; Michael J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate, London, 1978; Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India and the Arabs 1914–1921, Berkeley, 1971; Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, New York, 1988; Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939, Chapel Hill, 1984; Ylana N. Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine 1920–1948, Austin, 1985; Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, Cambridge, 1998; Isa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948, Albany, 1991. 14. Stevenson, The First World War, 255. 15. Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 75. 16. Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931, London, 1967; Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24(3) (September 1996): 345–363. 17. Gabriel Sheffer, “British Colonial Policy-Making towards Palestine (1929–1939),” Middle Eastern Studies 14(3) (October 1978): 308. 18. Gabriel Sheffer, “Intentions and Results of British Policy in Palestine: Passfield’s White Paper,” Middle Eastern Studies 9(1) ( January 1973): 43–60. 19. Evyatar Friesel, “Through a Peculiar Lens: Zionism and Palestine in British Diaries, 1927–31,” Middle Eastern Studies 29(3) ( July 1993): 420. 20. Susan Pedersen, “Introduction: Claims to Belong,” Journal of British Studies 40 (October 2001): 447–453. 21. Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 51. 22. Stevenson, The First World War, 195. 23. John Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–1922, New York, 1981; B. Gokay, A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism, 1918–1923, London and New York, 1997; Max Beloff, Imperial Sunset: Dream of Commonwealth, 1921–1942, London, 1984; David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing and Decolonisation, Manchester, 1992. 24. See J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, vol. II, New Haven, 1979, 306. Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine: “The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.” 25. Parliamentary Papers, Command Paper 3530, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929 (“The Shaw Report”), London, 1930, 8; see also
Notes to Pages 60–68
215
Albert Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, London, 1950, 67; Keren Hayesod, Statistical Abstract of Palestine 1929, Jerusalem, 1930. 26. Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader, New York, 1985, 225. 27. Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism, New York, 1987, 205–232. 28. Henry L. Feingold, The Jewish People in America: A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920–1945, vol. IV, Baltimore, 1992, 166–176. 29. Report on the Disturbances of August 1929, 100. 30. See Immigration Ordinances of 1920, 1925, and 1933. 31. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, 283. 32. Ibid., 55–56. 33. Report on the Disturbances of 1929 quotes an earlier report by Sir John Campbell on pages 103–104. 34. Report on the Disturbances of 1929, 129. 35. Moshe Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel, London, 1978, 158. See Appendix I. 36. Ibid.; see ch. 2. 37. Based on a comparison of the three central immigration ordinances of 1920, 1925, and 1933. 38. See Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy; Evyatar Friesel, “Herbert Samuel’s Reassessment of Zionism in 1921,” Studies in Zionism 5(2) (Autumn 1984): 213–238; and Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life, New York, 1992. 39. Report on the Disturbances of August 1929, 19–20. 40. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, 57–58. 41. Itzhak Avnery, “The Zionist Organization and Illegal Immigration to Eretz Israel from the Beginning of the British Occupation to the Outbreak of World War II” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1979 [in Hebrew]). See also Arthur Ruppin, Three Decades of Palestine, Jerusalem, 1936. 42. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine; Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929, 129. 43. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929, London, 1974, ch. 7. 44. Anita Shapira, Futile Struggle: The Jewish Labor Controversy, 1929–1939, Tel Aviv, 1977 (in Hebrew). 45. Friesel, “Through a Peculiar Lens,” 426. 46. Ibid. 47. Shaw served as head of the commission that investigated and wrote the 1929 Report on the Disturbances. The Report called for another investigation into Jewish land settlement. The second commission produced the following report: Colonial Office, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development by John Hope Simpson, Command Paper 3686, London, 1930. 48. Martin Kolinsky, “The Collapse and Restoration of Public Security,” in Britain and the Middle East in the 1930s, ed. Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky, New York,
Notes to Pages 69–77
216
1992, 147–168; and Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order, and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928–1935, London, 1993. 49. Sheffer, “Intentions and Results of British Policy in Palestine,” 44. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 45. 52. Conclusions drawn from the Shaw and Simpson reports. 53. Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939, vol. 2, London, 1977, 33. 54. Hurewitz, Struggle for Palestine, 22–23. 55. Colonial Office. Report by His Britannic Majesty’s Government to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Years 1925– 1938 Nos. 20, 26, 40, 47, 59, 75, 82, 94, 104, 112, 129, 146, 166. See also P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990, London and New York, 1993. 56. Yosef Gorny, The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948, London, 1983. 57. Esco Foundation for Palestine, Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies, vol. II, New Haven, 1947, 635ff. 58. Bernard Wasserstein, in The British in Palestine, states that “even many of those who strongly disapproved of the pro-Zionist policy would concede that the Balfour Declaration was a binding commitment out of which Britain could not honourably wriggle” (8). 59. Pinhas Ofer, “Creating a Mandatory Administration and the Basic Principles of Development for the Jewish National Home,” in The History of the Jewish Community in Eretz-Israel since 1882: The Period of the British Mandate, ed. Moshe Lissak, Jerusalem, 1994, 223–328 (in Hebrew). 60. Ibid., 313. 61. Sheffer, “British Colonial Policy-Making,” 316. 62. Jeffrey, British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 129.
Chapter Three 1. Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918, Bloomington, 1991, provides the most extensive analysis of the Zionist disposition for social engineering. On the idea of selective immigration, see Aviva Halamish, “Selective Immigration in Zionist Ideology: Praxis and Historiography,” in Idan ha-Tsiyonut (The Age of Zionism) ed. Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris, Jerusalem, 2000, 185–202 (in Hebrew). 2. Nachum T. Gross, Not by Spirit Alone: Studies in the Economic History of Modern Palestine and Israel, Jerusalem, 1999 (in Hebrew). 3. Aviva Halamish, “Immigration and Absorption Policy of the Zionist Organization,” 1931–1939, Unpublished Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1996, 10. 4. Meir Margalit, “Problems in Selecting Immigrants at the Beginning of the Mandate Period—Ideology, Policy, and Implementation,” Yahadut Zemanenu 13 (1998–1999): 250. 5. Ibid., 243ff.
Notes to Pages 77–83
217
6. Moshe Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel, London, 1978, see especially 65–71. 7. Margalit, “Problems in Selecting Immigrants,” 261. 8. Ibid. 9. Israel Kolatt, “Ha-Im ha-Yishuv ba-Eretz Israel Hu Hagshamat ha-Leumiyut haYehudit?” in Jewish Nationalism and Politics: New Perspectives, ed. Jehuda Reinharz, Yosef Salmon, and Gideon Shimoni, Jerusalem, 1996, 225 (in Hebrew). 10. Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism, New York, 1987, 197. 11. Ziva Galili and Boros Morozov, Exiled in Palestine: The Emigration of Zionist Convicts from the Soviet Union, 1924–1934, London and New York, 2006, 52. 12. Ziva Galili, “The Soviet Experience of Zionism,” Journal of Israeli History 24(1) (March 2005): 7–9. 13. Ibid., 4–5. 14. Galili and Mozorov, Exiled in Palestine, 53. 15. The Revisionists left the World Zionist Organization in 1935 and, according to Aviva Halamish, the movement fractured over control of the distribution of immigration certificates. See Aviva Halamish, “The Struggle for ‘Certificates’: Prelude to the Secession of the Revisionists from the World Zionist Organization,” Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 165–81. See also Esther Stein-Ashkenazy, “The Dispute within Revisionist Circles: The Aliyah of Beitar Members, Option or Obligation (1925–1935), in Ingathering of Exiles: Aliyah to the Land of Israel, Myth and Reality, ed. Dvora Hacohen, Jerusalem, 1998, 145–164. The questionnaire that immigrants were required to fill out began to list political party affiliation in the mid-1920s. See Central Zionist Archives, S15/21532. 16. Yaacov Shavit, “Fire and Water: Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement,” Studies in Zionism 4 (Autumn 1981): 219–236. Shavit writes on pages 231–232: “The basic tenet in Jabotinsky’s political outlook was that the means existed for using the legal possibilities provided by the Mandate to create a Jewish majority in Palestine as a pre-condition for the establishment of a state. These possibilities could be realized if the Zionist movement would publicly declare its aims and then activate English public opinion on its behalf.” 17. Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society, New York, 1998, 197. 18. Ibid. 19. Jehuda Reinharz, “The Balfour Declaration in Historical Perspective,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, New York, 1996, 587–616. 20. Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Hanover and London, 1995; Moshe Lissak and Gavriel Cohen (eds.), The History of the Jewish Community in Eretz Israel since 1882, Jerusalem, 1989. 21. Eran Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right, Madison, 2005; Eran Kaplan, “Decadent Pioneers: Land, Space, and Gender in Zionist Revisionist Thought,” Journal of Israeli History 20(1) (Spring 2001): 1–23. 22. Halpern and Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society, 196.
Notes to Pages 84–94
218
23. According to the first census conducted by the mandatory government in 1922, there were 80,000 Jews in Palestine, about 10 percent of the total population. 24. Halpern, A Clash of Heroes, 171ff. 25. Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman, New York, 1993, 223–224. 26. David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, Oxford, 1987, 312–313. 27. Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete, New York, 2000, 69. 28. Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes, 222–266. 29. Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann, 223–224. 30. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, New York, 1992, 270; Ben Halpern, “The Americanization of Zionism 1880–1930,” in Reinharz and Shapira, Essential Papers on Zionism, 318–336; George L. Berlin, “The Brandeis-Weizmann Dispute,” in Reinharz and Shapira, Essential Papers on Zionism, 337–368. 31. S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, New Haven, 2003, 168. 32. Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy, 23. 33. Aviva Halamish, “Immigration according to the Economic Absorptive Capacity: The Guiding Principles, the Implementation, and the Demographic Ramifications of the British and Zionist Immigration Policies in Palestine between the World Wars,” in Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, ed. Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky, Beersheva, 2001, 179–216. 34. Margalit, “Problems in Selecting Immigrants,” 276. 35. Ibid., 278. 36. Hagit Lavsky, “Aliyah ve-Klitah be-Yishuv ha-Yehudi,” in Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, ed. Bareli and Karlinsky, 153–169. Lavsky insists that the Zionists had no absorption policy until the 1930s. 37. Halamish, “Immigration and Absorption Policy,” 57. 38. Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy, 35. 39. Galili and Mozorov, Exiled in Palestine, 62. 40. Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Palestine, New York, 1998, 75. 41. “Ha-Aliyah ve-She’elot Hityashvut ha-Hakla’it ve-ha-Karka,” Central Zionist Archives S25/7452. 42. Halamish, “Immigration according to the Economic Absorptive Capacity,” 169. 43. Halamish, “Immigration and Absorption Policy,” 48. 44. “Memorandum from the Chief Immigration Officer, May 1929,” Central Zionist Archives, S25/2384. 45. “Memorandum from the Jewish Agency to the High Commissioner, March 24, 1930,” Central Zionist Archives, S 25/2389. 46. “Memorandum on the Immigration of Jewish Women: Letter to the Zionist Executive, 14 May 1929,” Central Zionist Archives, S25/291. 47. Itzhak Avnery, “The Zionist Organization and Illegal Immigration to Eretz Israel from the Beginning of the British Occupation to the Outbreak of World War II,” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1979. 48. Meir Margalit, “The Dispute between the Zionist Executive and the National Council Concerning the Treatment of New Immigrants at the Beginning of the
Notes to Pages 94–100
219
Mandatory Period,” Zionism 22 (2000), 159–178. The major elected body representing Palestine’s Jews—the Vaad ha-Leumi—tried to provide shelter and other sorts of aid to new immigrants, but had no authority to raise funds. It negotiated some small loans from the Zionist Executive in London, but it was also trying to establish its own autonomous authority over the immigrants. Viewing the Vaad actions as a threat to its power base, the Zionist Executive withdrew its loans and closed down one of the few efforts helping immigrants adjust to life in Palestine. 49. “Memorandum on the Costs of Immigrant Aid” (n.d.), Central Zionist Archives S25/297. See also “The Problems of the Present Immigration” (n.d.), Central Zionist Archives S81/31. 50. A typical one can be found in file S6/3900 in the Central Zionist Archives. 51. Meir Margalit, “Aspiring Emigrants,” Cathedra 125 (2007): 81 (Hebrew). 52. Ibid., 84–86. 53. “The Problems of the Present Immigration” (n.d.), Central Zionist Archives S81/31. 54. Ibid. 55. Matityahu Mintz, “Work for the Land of Israel and ‘Work in the Present’: A Concept of Unity, a Reality of Contradictions,” in Reinharz and Shapira, Essential Papers on Zionism, 161–170. 56. Halamish, “Immigration and Absorption Policy,” 57. 57. Ibid., 59. 58. Ibid., 57. 59. Halamish, “The Struggle for ‘Certificates,’” 169–170. 60. Margalit, “Problems in Selecting Immigrants,” 268–269. 61. Ibid., 262. 62. Ibid., 254. 63. Ibid., 255. 64. Ibid., 263. 65. A. Gertz (ed.), Statistical Handbook of Palestine 1947, Jerusalem, 1947, 103, quoted in Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity: Palestine under the Mandate, Chicago, 1978, 180–181. 66. Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, 75–78. 67. Pinhas Ofer, Enemy and Rival: The Zionist Movement and the Yishuv between the Arabs and the British, 1929–1948, Tel Aviv, 2001, see especially Chapters 1, 2, and 3. 68. Yoav Gelber, “Difficulties and Changes in the Zionist Attitude to Aliyah,” in Hacohen, ed., Ingathering of Exiles, 249–284. 69. Avnery, “The Zionist Organization and Illegal Immigration to Eretz Israel.” 70. Haim Arlosoroff, Nation, Society, and State: Selected Essays, ed. Asher Maniv, Tel Aviv, 1984, 160–170. In a letter to Chaim Weizmann written in 1932, Arlosoroff expresses his pessimism about the future of the Zionist project and describes his fears for the future of European Jewry, but he sees no alternative but to follow the same moderate and pragmatic policies on immigration because of limited resources. 71. Zeev Tsahor, “Ben Gurion’s Attitude toward the Gola (Diaspora) and Aliyah,” in Ingathering of Exiles, 131–144; Itzhak Avnery, “‘Rebellion by Immigration’: Ben-Gurion’s Scheme for Illegal Immigration,” Cathedra 44 ( June 1987): 126–157 (in Hebrew).
Notes to Pages 102–107
220
Chapter Four 1. Anita Shapira, “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, Jerusalem, 1998, 254. 2. Yehuda Erez (ed.), Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit (The Third Aliyah Book), Tel Aviv, 1964, 83. 3. Anita Shapira, “Gedud ha-Avodah: A Dream That Failed,” Jerusalem Quarterly 30 (Winter 1984): 62. Lelia Basevitz, who eventually settled at Kibbutz Ein Harod, remembered the Russian Revolution as causing “a great revolution in the hearts of youth. There was a feeling that it would be a terrible sin for a man or woman to devote themselves to their private lives.” See Devorah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society, Westport, 1987, 29. 4. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews,” in The Jews in Poland, ed. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jacjimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, Oxford, 1987, 130–139; Zvi Gitelman (ed.), The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, Pittsburgh, 2003, see especially 3–19; Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Politics in Interwar Poland: An Overview,” in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, Hanover, 1989, 9–19; and Israel Gutman, “Polish Antisemitism between the Wars: An Overview,” in Gutman et al., The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, 97–108. See also Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926, New Haven, 1981, and Ezra Mendelson, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Bloomington, 1983; Aharon Efrat, Derekh Shomrim Be-Hagshama, Givat Haviva, 1991. 5. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, New York, 1985, 112ff; Israel Oppenheim, “Hehalutz in Poland between the Two World Wars,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.), Essential Papers on Zionism, New York, 1996, 238–251. 6. Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Death of a Temporal Revolution,” Political Theory 26(5) (1998): 652–685. 7. Anita Shapira, Ha-Halikhah al-Kaf ha-Ofek (Visions in Confl ict), Tel Aviv, 1987, 157. 8. Based on the most accurate demographic survey according to Baruch Ben-Avram and Henry Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit (1919–1924) (Studies in the Third Aliyah [1919–1924]: Image and Reality), Jerusalem 1995, 19 (in Hebrew). 9. Ibid., 20. 10. Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War,” in European Culture during the Great War, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, Cambridge, 1999, 98. 11. David Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli (My Yesterday), Jerusalem, 1970, 44–45. 12. Issues of ha-Atid (the future) contain essays that describe the activities of Zionist youth groups during World War I and during its turbulent aftermath. They also provide vivid accounts of the journeys to Palestine. Central Zionist Archives Record Numbers 6554 and 6457. There are also accounts in Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit. See also Elkana Margalit, Hashomer Hatzair: From Youth Movement to Revolutionary Marxist Party, 1913–1936, Tel Aviv, 1971, 16ff (in Hebrew); Yedidya Shoham, Diary of Youth: Early Days of Hashomer Hatzair Movement—Levov 1917 to Beit Alfa 1924, Tel Aviv, 1987.
Notes to Pages 107–115
221
13. Shapira, Gedud ha-Avodah, 63. 14. Margalit, Hashomer Hatzair, 16–32. 15. Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli, 48–49, and 79. 16. Ibid., 44–45. As he notes, David Horowitz once wrote, “perhaps we will be the first generation to be perpetually young. . . . giving mankind an opportunity not to be missed.” 17. Shmuel Almog, “The Metaphorical Pioneer versus the Age-Old Diaspora Jew,” in Idan ha-Tsiyonut (The Age of Zionism), ed. Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris, Jerusalem, 2000, 91–108 (in Hebrew). 18. Margalit, Hashomer Hatzair, 25; David Zait, Ha-Otopia ha-Shomerit: ha-Shomer Hatzair be-Folin 1921–1931, Beersheva, 2002, 1–29. 19. Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli, 29–31. Reinhard Bendix recalled that his association with Hashomer Hatzair in Germany in the 1930s gave him great satisfaction precisely because of the warmth with which he was accepted and because of its intense intellectual environment. See Jehuda Reinharz, “Hashomer Hatzair in Germany (II): Under the Shadow of the Swastika, 1933–1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 186. 20. Margalit, Hashomer Hatzair, 44. 21. Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli, 39–40. 22. Shoham, Diary of Youth, 161. 23. Erez, Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 30. 24. Ibid., 83. 25. Ben-Avram and Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 12; Yehoshua Vashchuna, “Shahriya—Fifteen Years,” in Central Zionist Archives, No. 56791, 5–23. 26. Erez, Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 13–17. 27. Ben-Avram and Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 18–19. 28. Erez, Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 82–83. 29. “From Crimea to Constantinople,” in ha-Atid, 6 and 11. 30. Erez, Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 53. 31. Hanan Hever, “Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in Erets Israel,” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 199–225. 32. Margalit, Hashomer Hatzair, 84–85. 33. Ibid., 87 34. Aviva Ufaz, Te’udah ve-Yetsirah (Document and Fiction of the Third Aliyah), Tel Aviv, 1996, 28–29. 35. Ibid., 32. 36. Moki Tsur (ed.), Kehilliyatenu, Jerusalem, 1988, 42. 37. Meir Yaari, “On Some Elements of Hashomer Hatzair,” Tsiyonut 18 (1994): 331–44; David Zait and Yosef Shamir (eds.), Profile of a Leader as a Young Man: Meir Yaari, Chapters of My Life, 1897–1929, Tel Aviv, 1992, 51–53. 38. Ufaz, Te’udah ve-Yetsirah, 42 and 72. See also Elkana Margalit, Kibbutz Society and Politics, Tel Aviv, 1988. 39. Meir Yaari, “We Are in the Land of Israel,” letter written to Hashomer Hatzair activists in Europe. Central Zionist Archives, 59670/1.
Notes to Pages 116–122
222
40. Ufaz, Te’udah, 21; Yeshayahu Be’eri, My Kibbutz Mishmar ha-Emek, Tel Aviv, 1992 (in Hebrew). 41. Moki Tsur, Kehilliyatenu, 55. 42. Ufaz, Te’udah, 48. 43. See David Zait and Yosef Shamir, Profile of a Leader, and Aviva Halamish, “Meir Yaari: A Collective Biography,” in Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel— History, Culture and Society 3 (2003): 69–96. 44. Natan Shaham, Utopia, Sixty Years Later, Tel Aviv, 1984 (in Hebrew). 45. Moki Tsur, Kehilliyatenu, 81. 46. Quoted in Ufaz, Te’udah ve-Yetsirah, 29. 47. Mark A. Raider and Miriam B. Raider-Roth (eds.), The Plough Woman, Hanover, 2002, lxiii. 48. Aviva Ufaz, “The ‘Feminist Issue’ and Feminine Self-Expression in a Pioneering Society: A Re-reading of Kehilliyatenu,” Cathedra 95 (2000): 109. 49. Ibid., 109; and Yael Weiler, “The Fascinating World of ‘Hashomer Hatzair,’” Cathedra 88 (1998): 94. 50. Arieh Bruce Saposnik, “Exorcising the ‘Angel of National Death’—National and Individual Death (and Rebirth) in Zionist Palestine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95(3) (Summer 2005): 557–578. 51. They simultaneously criticized labor political parties and considered affiliating with them because they did not want Hashomer Hatzair to become an ordinary political party. 52. Ufaz, Te’udah, 22; see also Weiler, “The Fascinating World,” 80. 53. Matityahu Mintz, Pangs of Youth: “Hashomer Hatzair” 1911–1921, Jerusalem, 1995, 52–55. 54. David Zait and Yosef Shamir (eds.), Profile of a Leader, 57; and Ufaz, Te’udah, 39. 55. Yaari, “We Are in the Land of Israel,” 56. 56. Halamish, “A Collective Biography,” 80. 57. Ibid., 81. 58. Zait and Shamir, Profile of a Leader, 72–73. 59. Ufaz, “The ‘Feminist Issue,’” 102. 60. Ibid., 107. 61. Margalit, Kibbutz Society and Politics, 119. 62. Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 34. 63. Shapira, “Gedud ha-Avodah,” 66. 64. Raider and Raider-Roth, The Plough Woman, xlv. 65. Devorah S. Bernstein (ed.), Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, Albany, 1992, 193. 66. Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 33. 67. Jocheved Bat-Rachel Tarshish, The Path I Took, Tel Aviv, 1980, 27; Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 31–32. 68. Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 40. 69. Shapira, “Gedud,” 66. See also Margalit, Kibbutz Society and Politics, ch. 4.
Notes to Pages 122–133
223
70. Gerald M. Berg, “Zionist Women of the 1920s: The Voice of Nation-Building,” Journal of Israeli History 25(2) (September 2006): 317. 71. Ibid., 327. 72. Ya’ara Bar-On, “They Were Expendable,” Haaretz (October 10, 2006). A review of Bat-Sheva Margalit-Stern’s Redemption in Chains: The Women Workers’ Movement in Eretz-Israel, 1920–1939, Jerusalem, 2006. 73. Yael Weiler, “The Camaraderie of Hashomer Hatzair,” Cathedra 102 (2001): 63–96. 74. Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli. Yael Weiler, in “The Camaraderie,” points out that people believed they were speaking “the language of the soul” during these sessions. See “The Camaraderie,” especially 78–81. 75. Horowitz, Ha-Etmol Sheli, 46. 76. Aviva Ufaz, “The World of Symbols in Kehilliyatenu,” Cathedra 59 (March 1991): 141. 77. Ufaz, Te’udah, 31 and 73. 78. Ibid., 26. 79. Ibid., 30. 80. Anita Shapira, “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, Jerusalem, 1998, 255. 81. Ibid., 256. 82. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, Stanford, 1993, 186–187. 83. Ibid., 138. 84. Ibid., 138–139. See also Berl Katznelson, “A Report,” Igorot 3, Tel Aviv, 1976, 126–127. 85. Zakim, To Build and Be Built, Philadelphia, 2006, 3 and 113. 86. Ibid., 136. 87. Tamar Katriel, Dialogic Moments from Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture, Detroit, 2004, 35. 88. Shapira, “Gedud,” 66. 89. Moti Ze’ira, Rural Collective Settlement and Jewish Culture in Eretz-Israel during the 1920s, Jerusalem 2002, 60. 90. Ibid., 63. 91. Ibid., 64. 92. Ibid., 88. 93. Ibid., 103. 94. Ibid. 95. Yoram Bar-Gal and Maoz Azaryahu, “Israeli Cemeteries and Jewish Tradition: Two Cases,” in Land and Community: Geography in Jewish Studies, ed. Harold Brodsky, Bethesda, 1997, 108 and 111. 96. Anita Shapira, New Jews, Old Jews, Tel Aviv, 1997, 272 (in Hebrew). 97. Eyal Chowers, “The End of Building: Zionism and the Politics of the Concrete,” Review of Politics 64(4) (September 2002): 599–626.
Chapter Five 1. Yosef Hayyim Brenner, “Af Al-Pi . . . Ken,” in Ha-Adamah 25, in Central Zionist Archives, Record Group 5507716, 1900.
Notes to Pages 133–143
224
2. Yosef Gorny, “Hope Born out of Despair,” Jerusalem Quarterly 26 (Winter 1983): 84–95. 3. Berl Reftor, Without Pause, Tel Aviv, 1973, 15–34 (in Hebrew). 4. Yakov Goren, Berl Reftor: Vision in Everyday Life, Tel Aviv, 1995, ch. 1 (in Hebrew). See also Reftor, Without Pause, 38–43. 5. Goren, Berl Reftor, 26. 6. David DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of “Red Haifa,” Tel Aviv, 1999, 40 (in Hebrew); Reftor, Without Pause, 44. 7. David DeVries, “Abba Houshi in Haifa and the Profile of the Labour Movement in the Urban Context during the 1920s,” Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 226. 8. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, ch. 1. 9. Ibid., 51. 10. Ibid., 150. 11. Quoted in ibid., 152. See also David Cohen, Sheloshah Ben Rabim: Hayim ve-Havayot be-Eretz Yisrael, Jerusalem, 1972. 12. Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Hanover, 1995, 201–205. See also Zeev Tsahor, Ha-Hazon ve-ha-Heshbon: Ben-Gurion ben Ideologiah le-Politikah (Vision and Reckoning: Ben-Gurion between Ideology and Politics), Tel Aviv, 1994; and Israel Kolatt, Fathers and Founders, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1975. 13. J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, New York, 1950; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration, London, 1961; Esco Foundation for Palestine, Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies, 2 volumes, New Haven, 1947. See also annual reports submitted by the Colonial Office to the League of Nations on the administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. 14. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 119, 156ff. 15. David DeVries, “The National Construction of a Workers’ Moral Community: Labor’s Informal Justice in Early Mandate Palestine,” in The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society in Israel, 1917–1967, ed. Ron Harris, Alexander (Sandy) Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski, Burlington, 2002, 44. See also DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 58ff. 16. David DeVries, “Drawing the Repertoire of Collective Action: Labour Zionism and Strikes in 1920s Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) ( July 2002): 102. 17. Ibid., 99. 18. Ibid., 100. 19. Mark A. Raider and Miriam B. Raider-Roth (eds.), The Plough Woman, Hanover, 2002, 94–96. 20. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 55. 21. Devorah Avrahamit, “The Workers’ Club,” in The Plough Woman, ed. Raider and Raider-Roth, Hanover, 2002, 92–93. 22. Devorah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality, New York, 1987, 38. 23. Ibid. 24. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 24. 25. Ibid., 54–55. 26. Getzel Kressel, Shchunat Borochov, Givatayim, 1961.
Notes to Pages 143–155
225
27. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906– 1948, Berkeley, 1996, 85. 28. Goren, Berl Reftor, 54. 29. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 119. 30. DeVries, “Abba Houshi,” 237. 31. Devorah S. Bernstein, “Human Being or Housewife: The Status of Women in the Jewish Working Class Family in Palestine of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, ed. Devorah S. Bernstein, Albany, 1992, 237. 32. Ibid., 237–238. 33. Ziporah Bar Droma, “Wife of Haver,” in Raider and Raider-Roth, Plough Woman, 145. 34. Devorah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society, New York, 1987, 31. 35. Ibid., 46. 36. Ibid., 47. 37. Bat-Sheva Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance: The 1930s Textile Strike in Tel Aviv and the Boundaries of Women’s Self-Reliance,” Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) ( July 2002): 179. 38. Ibid., 176. 39. Bar Droma, “Wife of Haver,” 145–146. 40. Ibid., 145. 41. Ibid. 42. Rivkah (Broizman), “Fighting for Work in Petah Tikvah,” in Raider and RaiderRoth, Plough Woman, 101. 43. David DeVries, “Haifa’s Workers during the Crisis of the Third Aliyah: Tension between the Leadership and Periphery and the Beginning of Bureaucratic Idealism in the Palestine Workers’ Movement,” Tsiyonut 17 (1993): 117–153. 44. Kressel, Shchunat Borochov, 90. 45. Yehuda Erez (ed.), Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit, Tel Aviv, 1964, 33. 46. Goren, Berl Reftor, 18. 47. Rachel Katznelson (Shazar), “A Word to the Legionnaires,” in Raider and RaiderRoth, Plough Woman, 88. 48. DeVries, “Haifa’s Workers during the Crisis,” 125. 49. David DeVries, The Making of Labour Zionism as a Moral Community: Workers’ Tribunals in 1920s Palestine, Working Paper, Golda Meir Institute for Social and Labour Research, Tel Aviv University, 1999, 7. 50. DeVries, “Abba Houshi,” 232. 51. DeVries, Making of Labour Zionism, 8–9. 52. David DeVries, “Nationalism and the Making of Dock Labour in British-Ruled Palestine,” in Dock-Workers International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, ed. Sam Davies, Colin J. Davis, David DeVries, Lex Heerma van Voss, Lidewij Hesselink, and Klaus Weinhauer, Burlington, 2000, 231–249. 53. Reftor, Without Pause, 43–44.
Notes to Pages 155–166
226
54. DeVries, “National Construction of a Workers’ Moral Community,” 47. See also Histadrut, The Comrades’ Courts: A Collection, Tel Aviv, 1936 (in Hebrew). 55. Walter Preuss, The Labour Movement in Israel, Jerusalem, 1965, 65. 56. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 98. 57. Ibid., 55. 58. Baruch Ben-Avram and Henry Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, Jerusalem, 1995, 26–28, 40, and 65. 59. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 54. 60. David DeVries, “Drawing the Repertoire of Collective Action: Labour Zionism and Strikes in 1920s Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) ( July 2002): 97. 61. Ibid. 62. DeVries, “National Construction of a Workers’ Moral Community,” 47. 63. Ibid., 48, 51ff. 64. Devorah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine, Albany, 2000, 1. 65. Baruch Kanari, Doubts about Fulfillment: A Discussion of the Zionist-Socialist Endeavor in the 1920s, Tel Aviv, 2007, 31–37. 66. Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality, 37. 67. Ibid., 44. 68. Ibid., 38. 69. See Devorah Dayan, Be-Osher u-ve-Yagan (In Happiness and in Sorrow), Tel Aviv, 1957; Ada Maimon Fishman, Tenu’at ha-Po’a lot be-Erets-Yisrael 1904–1929, Tel Aviv, 1929. 70. Devorah S. Bernstein and Musia Lipman, “Fragments of Life: From the Diaries of Two Young Women,” in Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, ed. Devorah S. Bernstein, Albany, 1992, 145–164. See also Margalit Shilo, “Prati keTsibori: Eta Yalin ve-Yehudit Harari Kotvot Autobiographia,” Cathedra 118 (2005): 41–66. 71. Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality, 55–56. 72. DeVries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 141. 73. DeVries, “National Construction of a Workers’ Moral Community,” 44–45. 74. Bat-Sheva Margalit-Stern, Redemption in Chains: The Women Workers’ Movement in Eretz-Israel, 1920–1939, Jerusalem, 2006, 109ff (in Hebrew). 75. Rachel Katznelson (Shazar), “On the Last Words of Shoshanah,” in Raider and Raider-Roth, Plough Woman, 181. 76. Israel Kolatt, “Youth Movements: Rebels Avant-Garde or Walking in Ploughed Ground?” in Youth Movements, 1920–1960, ed. Mordecai Naor, Jerusalem, 1989, 12–13. See also Yuval Dror, Tnu’at ha-No’ar (Youth Movements), Haifa, 1979. 77. Ben-Avram and Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, 56–57.
Chapter Six 1. Menahem Sheinkin, Kitvei Menahem Sheinkin (The Writings of Menahem Sheinkin), ed. A. Harmoni, Jerusalem, 1935, 253. 2. Nahum Karlinsky, “Private Cooperative Societies in Jewish Palestine,” Economy and
Notes to Pages 167–177
227
Society in Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948, ed. Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky, Beersheva, 2001, 239–289. Karlinsky points out that there were many privately established cooperatives unaffiliated with the labor movement during these years. They served as a means of raising capital for businesses and of spreading the risk. They also were formed and run not from the top down but rather with the participation of the members who formed them. 3. Gur Alroey, “Exiles in Their Own Land?” Cathedra 120 ( June 2006): 136 (in Hebrew). 4. Correspondence to the Zionist Commission, Central Zionist Archives, Record Group 12/221. 5. Devorah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society, New York, 1987, 42–43. 6. Dan Giladi, Jewish Palestine during the Fourth Aliyah Period (1924–1929): Economic and Social Aspects, Tel Aviv, 1973, 9 (in Hebrew). 7. Sheinkin, Kitvei, Introduction, iii–xvi. 8. Ibid., 254. 9. Yigal Drori, “The Organization of Artisans in Palestine until 1925,” Cathedra 34 ( January 1985): 160 (in Hebrew). 10. Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale, New York, 1989, 24–25. 11. Sheinkin, Kitvei, 292. 12. Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 47. 13. Sheinkin, Kitvei, 268. 14. Ibid., 266–269. 15. Ibid., 286. 16. Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss, Chicago, 1986, 25 and 45. 17. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “The Grapes of Roth: ‘Diasporism’ between Portnoy and Shylock,” in Literary Strategies: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, vol. CXII, New York, 1996, 150. 18. Anat Helman, “Religion and the Public Sphere in Mandatory Tel Aviv,” Cathedra 105 (2002): 89. 19. Sheinkin, Kitvei, 270. 20. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfield, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis: The Process of Jewish Colonization in Palestine during the 1920s,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12 (1972): 46. 21. Sheinkin, Kitvei, 236. 22. S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, New Haven, 2003, 93. 23. Carmi and Rosenfield, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis,” 46. 24. Meir Dizengoff, Pituah ha-Ir Tel Aviv (Developing the City of Tel Aviv), Tel Aviv, 1932. Longtime mayor of Tel Aviv Meir Dizengoff considered this investment flow problematic for steady economic growth. He urged the creation of industry as crucial for economic development both in Tel Aviv and in the Jewish national home. 25. Carmi and Rosenfield, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis,” 47.
Notes to Pages 177–188
228
26. Nahum Karlinsky, California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and Technology in the Citrus Industry of Palestine, Albany, 2005. See especially 2–22. 27. Carmi and Rosenfield, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis,” 47. 28. Anat Helman, Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv, Haifa, 2007, 105 (in Hebrew). 29. See quotes from Dizengoff, Smilansky, and Arlosoroff in Anat Helman, “The Development of Civil Society and Urban Culture in Tel Aviv during the 1920s and 1930s” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2000). 30. Carmi and Rosenfield, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis,” 47. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. Ibid., 48. 33. Ibid. 34. Amir Ben-Porat, Where Are the Bourgeoisie? Jerusalem, 1999, 62–79 (in Hebrew). 35. Gur Alroey, “The Artisans’ Labor Battalion: The Story of a Failed Ethos,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 13, 255–275. 36. Ibid., 267–268. 37. Ibid., 260. 38. Ibid., 268. 39. Ibid., 271. 40. Yigal Drori, in “The Organization of Artisans in Palestine,” speaks of the bitter feelings of artisans regarding the extent to which they had to be totally self-reliant. 41. John Gal, A Burden by Choice? Policy towards the Unemployed in Pre-State Palestine and Israel, 1920–1995, Beersheva, 2002, 49–50 (in Hebrew). 42. Shifra Shvartz, The Workers’ Health Fund in Eretz Israel Kupat Holim, 1911–1937, Rochester, 2002, 83. 43. Helman, Urban Culture, 187. 44. Alroey, “The Artisans’ Labor Battalion,” 270–271; and Karlinsky, California Dreaming, 75–76. 45. Drori, “Organization of Artisans in Palestine,” 145, 156, 159. 46. Ibid., 147. 47. Helman, Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv, 19–20. 48. Troen, Imagining Zion, 91. 49. Ibid., 94. 50. Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City, Syracuse, 2007, 39. 51. Anat Helman, “Cleanliness and Squalor in Inter-War Tel Aviv,” Urban History 31(1) (2004): 72–99. 52. Jacob Shavit and Gideon Biger, History of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, 2001, 27. 53. Helman, Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv, 71. 54. Ibid., 43 and 31. 55. Natan Alterman, Little Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, 1981, 21–22. 56. Nahum Gutman, Ir Ketana ve-Anashim ba-Me’at (Little City and the Few People within It), Jerusalem, 1970. 57. Nahum Karlinsky, Citrus Blossoms: Jewish Entrepreneurship in Palestine, 1890–1939, Jerusalem, 2000, 2–5.
Notes to Pages 188–197
229
58. Shavit and Biger, History of Tel Aviv, 94. See also Getzel Kressel, Em ha-Moshavot Petah Tikvah, Petah Tikvah, 1953, for how Petah Tikvah benefited from Tel Aviv’s growth. 59. Nellie Straus-Mochenson, Our Palestine, Tel Aviv, 1939, 78–79. 60. Naomi Shiloach, “The Civilian Circles in Tel Aviv Municipal Elections,” Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 128. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 129. 63. Meir Dizengoff, Pituah ha-Ir Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, 1932, 3. 64. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 193. 65. Quoted in Devorah Bernstein, Struggle for Equality, 37–40. 66. Shavit and Biger, History of Tel Aviv, 127. 67. Devorah Bernstein, “Tel Aviv Exposed . . . Its City Limits,” Te’oryah u-vikoret (Theory and Criticism) 25 (Autumn 2004): 143–162. 68. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 137. 69. Barbara E. Mann, A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space, Stanford, 2006, 100. 70. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 272. 71. Ibid., 315. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 188. 74. Ibid., 190. 75. Ibid. 76. Helman, “Religion and the Public Sphere,” 105. 77. Ibid., 98. 78. Ibid. 79. Anat Helman, “European Jews in the Levant Heat,” Journal of Israeli History 22(1) (Spring 2003): 71–90. 80. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 122. 81. Ibid. 82. Mann, Place in History, 142–143. 83. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 121. 84. Ibid., 122; Batia Carmiel, in her study Tel Aviv be-Tahposet ve-Kheter Hagigot Purim be-Shanim, 1912–1935, Tel Aviv, 1999, notes that Purim balls became the occasion for marking important issues of the day—political and religious controversies, and sometimes as relief from the crises of the time. 85. Helman, “Religion and the Public Sphere,” 98. 86. Ibid. 87. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Orlando, 2004, 6–7. 88. Aharon Wardi, Ir ha-Pe’a lot, Tel Aviv, 1928. 89. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 69–70. 90. Mann, Place in History, 2–3. 91. Ibid., 21. 92. Ibid., 89.
Notes to Pages 197–205
230
93. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 79. 94. Ibid. See also Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten, Syracuse, 2000, 31–32. Many of the songs of the “pioneers” were in Yiddish, according to Yehuda Erez, editor of Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit. 95. Helman, Development of Civil Society, 89.
C o n c lu s i o n 1. Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society, New York, 1998, 4. 2. Baruch Ben-Avram and Henry Near, Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit, Jerusalem, 1995, 26–27, 40, 65. 3. S. Yizhar’s story of the Jaffa riots of 1921 opens with this passage: “Too many things are happening outside all the time. As though we had to finish it all in a single day. They are already talking about dozens killed, and huge numbers wounded. They are talking a lot together about everything, and all together, but they don’t manage to know the pain of a single man, nor who nor what his name is, nor who at home will wait for him in vain.” See Modern Hebrew Literature 111 (Fall 2006): 7. 4. Gur Alroey, “Halutzim Ovdei-Derech? Sugiot Hitbadut al Seder Yoman Shel haAliyot ha-Shniya ve-ha-Shelishit,” Yahadut Zemanenu 13 (1999): 209–242. 5. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Our Homeland, the Text . . . Our Text, the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Jewish Imagination,” Michigan Quarterly Review 31(4) (1992): 467.
Glo<<ary
Ahdut ha-Avodah: United Labor Party. A socialist-Zionist political party founded in 1919; the largest party within the Labor movement in the 1920s. Aliyah: literally, “ascent” in Hebrew; metaphorically, in the Zionist lexicon, immigrating to the land of Israel. Betar: Youth movement attached to the Revisionist party. Galut: Diaspora. Also golah. Gedud ha-Avodah: The Labor Battalion, founded in 1920. It engaged in collective labor activities across Palestine in both rural and urban areas. Halutz, Halutzim: Pioneer, pioneers. The Zionist term for the immigrants to Palestine who became workers. Hapoel Hatzair: Young Worker. Formed in Palestine in 1905, this Zionist workers’ party rejected Marxist notions of class struggle and believed in the value of small collective communities working the land. Hashomer Hatzair: Originally a youth movement—later a political party—aiming to create a just and egalitarian society in the land of Israel. Haskala: The Jewish Enlightenment, stressing the value of a secular as well as a modern Jewish education. He-Halutz: A Diaspora movement established to prepare young Jews for agricultural labor in Palestine. Histadrut: The General Federation of Jewish Workers in the Land of Israel, comprising unions and a variety of entities devoted to creating job opportunities, training workers, and forging a new Hebrew culture in the Jewish homeland. Jewish Agency: An international body established by the World Zionist Organization in 1929 and charged with the development of the Jewish national home in Palestine. Jewish National Fund: Founded by the World Zionist Organization to purchase land in Palestine as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. Kaddish: A prayer, mostly in Aramaic, recited at the conclusion of parts of one of the three daily Jewish public services and at the end of the service by close relatives of someone who has died. It is commonly known as a prayer for mourners.
Exiled in the Homeland
232
Keren ha-Yesod: Founded in 1920 to raise money for the project of developing the Jewish national home. Kibbutz: A collective agricultural settlement. Kibbutzim: Plural of Kibbutz. Kvutza: A small communal agricultural settlement. Maskil, Maskilim: A proponent or proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskala. Mishnah: The classical text compiled after the destruction of the second Temple in 70 c.e. The teachings helped Jews reinvent their religious life and develop new modes of sustaining identity when Temple sacrifices and rituals were no longer possible. Moshav: An agricultural settlement based on privately owned farms that employ hired labor. Old Yishuv: Zionist term for the non-Zionist, mostly religious Jewish community in Palestine. Po’alei Zion: Workers of Zion. A federation of Zionist socialist parties in the Diaspora, founded in 1906. Its members in Palestine helped found the Ahdut ha-Avodah party in 1919 and the Histadrut in 1920. Solel Boneh: Histadrut’s construction company. Vaad ha-Leumi: National Council. Established as a kind of elected representative assembly for the Jews in Palestine. Yishuv: The shorthand term describing the Zionist Jewish community forming in Palestine.
Bibliography
D o c u m e n t s a n d A r c h i va l M at e r i a l Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. Great Britain, Colonial Office, Reports by His Britannic Majesty’s Government to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Years 1925–1938, Numbers 20, 26, 40, 47, 59, 75, 82, 94, 104, 112, 129, 146, 166. Keren Hayesod, Statistical Abstract of Palestine 1929, Jerusalem, 1930. Parliamentary Papers Command Paper 3530, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929 (“The Shaw Report”), London, 1930. Parliamentary Papers Command Paper 3686, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development (“The Simpson Report”), London, 1930. Parliamentary Papers Command Paper 3692, Palestine: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom (“The Passfield White Paper”), London, October 1930. Record Groups Covering Activities of the Zionist Commission and Other Zionist Agencies Concerning Immigration Record Groups: L2/221; L3/201; S30/2449; S/25/2557; S/3/48; S25/7452; S25/2384; S25/2389; S/25/1291; S25/297; S6/3900; S81/31; S95/2005; 59670/1 Report of the Executive of the Zionist Organisation to the XII Zionist Congress, London, 1921. Several Issues of Shahariya and ha-Atid.
B o o k s a n d A rt i c l e s Almog, Shmuel. “The Metaphorical Pioneer versus the Age-Old Diaspora Jew.” In Idan ha-Tsiyonut (Age of Zionism), edited by Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2000, 91–108. Alroey, Gur. “‘And I Remained Alone in a Vast Land’: Women in the Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe.” Jewish Social Studies 12(3) (Spring/Summer 2006): 39–72. ——. “Exiles in Their Own Land?” Cathedra 120 ( June 2006): 135–160. ——. “Women Pioneers Who Were Not Laborers.” Cathedra 118 (2005): 67–88. ——. Immigrants: Jewish Immigration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2004.
Exiled in the Homeland
234
——. “The Artisans’ Labor Battalion: The Story of a Failed Ethos.” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 13 (2003): 255–275. ——. “Roslan.” Cathedra 107 (April 2003): 63–80. ——. “Halutzim Ovdei-Derech? Sugiot Hitbadut al Seder Yoman Shel ha-Aliyot haShniya ve-ha-Shelishit.” Yahadut Zemanenu 13 (1999): 209–242. Alterman, Natan. Little Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, Israel: ha-Kibbutz he-Meu ͗ had, 1981. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Anderson, David M., and David Killingray, eds. Policing and Decolonisation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992. Arlosoroff, Haim. Nation, Society, and State: Selected Essays, edited by Asher Maniv. Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, 1984. Avineri, Shlomo. Arlosoroff. London: Halbau, 1989. ——. The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Avnery, Itzhak. “‘Rebellion by Immigration’: Ben-Gurion’s Scheme for Illegal Immigration.” Cathedra 44 ( June 1987): 126–157. ——. “The Zionist Organization and Illegal Immigration to Eretz Israel from the Beginning of the British Occupation to the Outbreak of World War II.” Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1979. Azaryahu, Maoz. Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Bareli, Avi, and Nahum Karlinsky, eds. Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, 1918– 1948. Beersheva: Beersheva University Press, 2001. Bar-Gal, Yoram, and Maoz Azaryahu. “Israeli Cemeteries and Jewish Tradition: Two Cases.” In Land and Community: Geography in Jewish Studies, edited by Harold Brodsky, 105–125. Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 1997. Bar-On, Ya ͗ ara. “They Were Expendable.” Haaretz, October 10, 2006. Baskin, Orit. “Hanukkah in the Zionist Discourse according to Sefer ha-Moadim.” Zemanim 16(61) (1997–1998): 38–50. Be ͗ eri, Yeshayahu. My Kibbutz Mishmar ha-Emek. Tel Aviv: Mishmar ha-Emek, 1992. Beller, Steven. Herzl. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. Beloff, Max. Imperial Sunset: Dream of Commonwealth, 1921–1942. London: Knopf, 1984. Ben-Avram, Baruch, and Henry Near. Iyunim ba- ͑ Aliyah ha-Shelishit (1919–1924). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1995. Ben-Porat, Amir. Where Are the Bourgeoisie? Jerusalem: Yehuda Magnes Press, 1999. Bentov, Mordekhai. The Days Tell My Story, edited by Raffel Barkan. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po ͗ alim, 1984. Berg, Gerald M. “Zionist Women of the 1920s: The Voice of Nation-Building.” Journal of Israeli History 25(2) (September 2006): 313–334. Berkowitz, Michael. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Berlin, George L. “The Brandeis-Weizmann Dispute.” In Essential Papers on Zionism, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, 337–368. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Bibliog raphy
235
Bernstein, Devorah. “Tel Aviv Exposed . . . Its City Limits.” Te ͗ oryah u-vikoret 25 (Autumn 2004): 143–162. ——. Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ——. The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society. New York: Praeger, 1987. Bernstein, Devorah, ed. Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Biger, Gideon. An Empire in the Holy Land: Historical Geography of the British Administration in Palestine, 1917–1929. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. ——. Crown Colony or National Home: The Influence of British Rule in Palestine, 1917–1930. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1983. Busch, Briton Cooper. Britain, India and the Arabs 1914–1921. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990. London: Longman, 1993. Carmi, Shulamit, and Henry Rosenfield. “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis: The Process of Jewish Colonization in Palestine during the 1920s.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12 (1972): 4–57. Carmiel, Batia. Tel Aviv be-Tahposet ve-Kheter Hagigot Purim be-Shanim, 1912–1935. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1999. Chaver, Yael. What Must Be Forgotten. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Chazan, Meir. “The Murder of Moshe Barsky: Transformations in Ethos, Pathos and Myth.” Israel Affairs 12(2) (April 2006): 284–306. Chowers, Eyal. “The End of Building: Zionism and the Politics of the Concrete.” Review of Politics 64(4) (September 2002): 599–626. ——. “Time in Zionism: The Life and Death of a Temporal Revolution.” Political Theory 26(5) (1998): 652–685. Cohen, David. Sheloshah Ben Rabim: Hayim ve-Havayot be-Eretz Yisrael. Jerusalem: M. Nyuman, 1972. Cohen, Michael J. Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate. London: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Cohen-Hattab, Kobi, and Yossi Katz. “The Attraction of Palestine: Tourism in the Years 1850–1948.” Journal of Historical Geography 27(2) (2001): 166–177. Darwin, John. “An Undeclared Empire: The British in the Middle East, 1918–1939.” In The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of William Roger Louis, edited by Robert D. King and Robin W. Kilson, 158–175. London: Frank Cass, 1999. ——. Britain, Egypt, and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–1922. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Dayan, Devorah. Be-Osher u-ve-Yagan. Tel Aviv: Massadah, 1957. DeVries, David. “The National Construction of a Workers’ Moral Community: Labor’s Informal Justice System in Early Mandate Palestine.” In The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society in Israel, 1917–1967, edited by Ron Harris, Alexander (Sandy) Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski, 37–74. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. ——. “Drawing the Repertoire of Collective Action: Labour Zionism and Strikes in 1920s Palestine.” Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) ( July 2002): 93–122.
Exiled in the Homeland
236
——. “Abba Houshi in Haifa and the Profile of the Labour Movement in the Urban Context during the 1920s.” Yehadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 225–261. ——. “Nationalism and the Making of Dock Labour in British-Ruled Palestine.” In Dock-Workers International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, edited by Sam Davies, Colin J. Davis, David DeVries, Lex Heerma van Voss, Lidewij Hesselink, and Klaus Weinhauer, 231–249. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. ——. Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of “Red Haifa.” Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1999. ——. The Making of Labour Zionism as a Moral Community: Workers’ Tribunals in 1920s Palestine. Tel Aviv: Golda Meir Institute for Social and Labour Research, 1999. ——. “Haifa’s Workers during the Crisis of the Third Aliyah: Tension between the Leadership and Periphery and the Beginning of Bureaucratic Idealism in the Palestine Workers’ Movement.” Tsiyonut 17 (1993): 117–153. Dizengoff, Meir. Pituah ha-Ir Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv: A. Y. Shtibel, 1932. Dowty, Alan. “Much Ado about Little: Ahad Ha ͗ am’s ‘Truth from Eretz Yisrael.’” Israeli Studies 5(2) (Fall 2000): 154–181. ——. The Jewish State a Century Later. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Dror, Yuval. Tnu ͗ at ha-No ͗ ar. Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1979. Drori, Yigal. Between Right and Left: The Central Circles in Eretz Israel (1920–1929). Tel Aviv: Mif ͗ alim Universitayim, 1990. ——. “The Organization of Artisans in Palestine until 1925.” Cathedra 34 ( January 1985): 145–174. Efrat, Aharon. Derekh Shomrim Be-Hagshama. Givat Haviva, Israel: Sifriyat Po ͗ alim, 1991. Eisenstadt, Shmuel, and Moshe Lissak, eds. Zionism and a Return to History: A Reappraisal. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1999. Erez, Yehuda, ed. Sefer ha-Aliyah ha-Shelishit. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1964. Esco Foundation for Palestine. Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies, vol. II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. “The Grapes of Roth: ‘Diasporism’ between Portnoy and Shylock.” In Literary Strategies: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, vol. CXIII, 148–158. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ——. “Our Homeland, the Text . . . Our Text, the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Jewish Imagination.” Michigan Quarterly Review 31(4) (1992): 463–497. Feingold, Henry L. The Jewish People in America: A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920–1945, vol. IV. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Fishman, Ada Maimon. Tenu ͗ at ha-Po ͗ a lot be-Erets-Yisrael 1904–1929. Tel Aviv: Hapo ͗ el Ha-tza ͗ ir, 1929. Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Friesel, Evyatar. “Through a Peculiar Lens: Zionism and Palestine in British Diaries, 1927–31.” Middle Eastern Studies 29(3) ( July 1993): 419–444. ——. “Herbert Samuel’s Reassessment of Zionism in 1921.” Studies in Zionism 5(2) (Autumn 1984): 213–238. Gal, John. A Burden by Choice? Policy towards the Unemployed in Pre-State Palestine and Israel, 1920–1995. Beersheva: Mercaz le-Moreshet Ben Guriyon, 2002.
Bibliog raphy
237
Galili, Ziva. “The Soviet Experience of Zionism.” Journal of Israeli History 24(1) (March 2005): 1–33. Galili, Ziva, and Boros Morozov. Exiled in Palestine: The Emigration of Zionist Convicts from the Soviet Union, 1924–1934. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Gallagher, John. The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays, edited by Anil Seal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Gat, Rafael. “The Emergence and Politicization of Israeli Labor Youth Movements, 1933–1945.” Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1974. Gelber, Yoav. “Difficulties and Changes in the Zionist Attitude to Aliyah.” In Ingathering of Exiles: Aliyah to the Land of Israel, Myth and Reality, edited by Dvora Hacohen, 249–284. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998. Gertz, A., ed. Statistical Handbook of Palestine 1947. Jerusalem: Jewish Agency, 1947. Getter, Miriam. Chaim Arlosoroff: A Political Biography. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1977. Giladi, Dan. Jewish Palestine during the Fourth Aliyah Period (1924–1929): Economic and Social Aspects. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1973. Gitelman, Zvi. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: YIVO Institute, 1988. Gitelman, Zvi, ed. The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Gokay, Bulent. A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism, 1918–1923. London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997. Goldstein, Yaacov. Ba-Derekh le-Hegemonyah. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1980. Goldstein, Yossi. Ussishkin-Biografiyah. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Yehudah Magnes Press, 1999. Goren, Yakov. Berl Reftor: Vision in Everyday Life. Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, 1995. Gorny, Yosef. The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948. London: Frank Cass, 1983. ——. “Hope Born out of Despair.” Jerusalem Quarterly 26 (Winter 1983): 84–95. Gracier, Iris. “The Valley of Jezreel: Social Ideologies and Settlement Landscape.” Studies in Zionism 11(1) (1990): 1–23. ——. “Red Vienna and Municipal Socialism in Tel Aviv, 1925–1928.” Journal of Historical Geography 15(4) (1989): 385–401. ——. “Social Architecture in Palestine: Conceptions in Working Class Housing, 1920– 1938.” In The Land That Became Palestine, edited by Ruth Kark, 287–307. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. ——. “The JNF Urban Land Policy and Its Infl uence on Urban Development in Palestine during the Mandate.” Karka ( July 1983): 70–86. Gross, Nachum T. Not by Spirit Alone: Studies in the Economic History of Modern Palestine and Israel. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1999. Gutman, Israel. “Polish Antisemitism between the Wars: An Overview.” In The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, edited by Israel Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, 97–108. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989. Gutman, Nahum. Ir Ketana ve-Anashim ba-Me ͗ at, edited by Tanya Reinhart. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1970.
Exiled in the Homeland
238
Ha͗am, Ahad. Kol Kitvei Ahad Ha ͗ am. Tel Aviv: Hotsa ͗ ah ͑ Ivrit, 1947. Habas, Braha, and Eliezer Shohat, eds. The Second Aliyah. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1947. Halamish, Aviva. “Immigration according to the Economic Absorptive Capacity: The Guiding Principles, the Implementation, and the Demographic Ramifications of the British and Zionist Immigration Policies in Palestine between the World Wars.” Kalkalah ve-Hevrah Be-Yemei ha-Mandat 1918–1948, edited by Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky, 179–216. Beersheva: Beersheva University Press, 2003. ——. “Meir Yaari: A Collective Biography.” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Culture and Society 3 (2003): 69–96. ——. “The Struggle for ‘Certificates’: Prelude to the Secession of the Revisionists from the World Zionist Organization.” Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 165–181. ——. “Selective Immigration in Zionist Ideology: Praxis and Historiography.” In Idan ha-Tsiyonut, edited by Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2000, 185–202. ——. “Immigration and Absorption Policy of the Zionist Organization, 1931–1939.” Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1996. Halpern, Ben. “The Americanization of Zionism 1880–1930.” In Essential Papers on Zionism, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, 318–336. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ——. A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ——. The Idea of the Jewish State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Halpern, Ben, and Jehuda Reinharz. Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Harshav, Benjamin. Language in a Time of Revolution. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Helman, Anat. Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv. Haifa: Haifa University Press, 2007. ——. “Civic Involvement and Street-Naming in Inter-War Tel Aviv.” Jewish Culture and History 8(2) (Autumn 2006): 29–52. ——. “Cleanliness and Squalor in Inter-War Tel Aviv.” Urban History 31(1) (2004): 72–99. ——. “European Jews in the Levant Heat.” Journal of Israeli History 22(1) (Spring 2003): 71–90. ——. “Religion and the Public Sphere in Mandatory Tel Aviv.” Cathedra 105 (2002): 85–110. ——. “The Development of Civil Society and Urban Culture in Tel Aviv during the 1920s and 1930s.” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2000. Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State. New York: Scopus, 1935. Hever, Hanan. “Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in Erets Israel.” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 199–225. Histadrut. The Comrades’ Courts: A Collection. Tel Aviv, 1936. Horowitz, Dan, and Moshe Lissak. Origins of the Israeli Polity Palestine under the Mandate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Horowitz, David. Ha-Etmol Sheli. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1970.
Bibliog raphy
239
Hurewitz, J. C. The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. ——. The Struggle for Palestine. New York: Norton, 1950. Hyamson, Albert. Palestine under the Mandate. London: Methuen, 1950. Jeffrey, Keith. The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–1922. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984. Kaf kafi, Eyal. Pinhas Lavon—Anti-Messiah: A Biography. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1998. ——. “Changes in Ideology during Two Generations of a Zionist Youth Movement.” Journal of Israeli History 17(3) (Autumn 1996): 283–300. Kahan, Arcadius. Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, edited by Roger Weiss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Kanari, Baruch. Doubts about Fulfillment: A Discussion of the Zionist-Socialist Endeavor in the 1920s. Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, 2007. ——. Mission and Reality. Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, 1989. Kaplan, Eran. The Jewish Radical Right. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. ——. “Decadent Pioneers: Land, Space, and Gender in Zionist Revisionist Thought.” Journal of Israeli History 20(1) (Spring 2001): 1–23. Karlinsky, Nahum. California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and Technology in the Citrus Industry of Palestine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. ——. “Private Cooperative Societies in Jewish Palestine.” In Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948, edited by Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky. Beersheva: Beersheva University Press, 2001, 239–289. ——. Citrus Blossoms: Jewish Entrepreneurship in Palestine, 1890–1939. Jerusalem: Yehuda Magnes Press, 2000. Katriel, Tamar. Dialogic Moments from Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Katznelson, Berl. “A Report.” Igorot 3 (1976): 126–127. Kennedy, Dane. Britain and Empire, 1880–1945. London: Longman, 2002. ——. “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24(3) (September 1996): 345–363. Keshet, Shula. “The Yamim ve-Leilot Affair: Ideological Censorship.” Tsiyonut 18 (1994): 187–212. Khalaf, Isa. Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Kimmerling, Baruch. Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Klieman, Aaron S. Foundations of British Policy in the Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Kolatt, Israel. “Ha-Im ha-Yishuv ba-Eretz Israel Hu Hagshamat ha-Leumiyut haYehudit?” In Jewish Nationalism and Politics: New Perspectives, edited by Jehuda Reinharz, Yosef Salmon, and Gideon Shimoni. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1996, 225–252. ——. Fathers and Founders. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1975. Kolinsky, Martin. Law, Order, and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928–1935. London, 1993.
Exiled in the Homeland
240
——. “The Collapse and Restoration of Public Security.” In Britain and the Middle East in the 1930s, edited by Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky, 147–168. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Kressel, Getzel. Shchunat Borochov. Givatayim: Shchunat Borochov, 1961. ——. Em ha-Moshavot Petah Tikvah. Petah Tikvah: Petah Tikvah, 1953. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York: Schocken, 1972. Lavie, Shlomo. My Life in Ein Harod. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1947. Lavsky, Hagit. “Aliyah ve-Klitah be-Yishuv ha-Yehudi.” In Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948, edited by Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky. Beersheva: Beersheva University Press, 2001, 153–169. Lederhendler, Eli. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Lesch, Ann Mosely. Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Likhovski, Assaf. Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Lissak, Moshe, and Gavriel Cohen, eds. The History of the Jewish Community in Eretz Israel since 1882. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1989. Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906– 1948. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Malkinson, Ruth, Shimshon Rubin, and Eliezer Witztum, eds. Ovdan ve-Shchol ba-Hevra ha-Yisraelit. Jerusalem: Kanah and Ministry of Defense, 1993. Mann, Barbara E. A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Manor, Dalia. “Imagined Homeland: Landscape Painting in Palestine in the 1920s.” Nations and Nationalism 9(61) (1997–1998): 38–50. Margalit, Elkana. Kibbutz Society and Politics. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1988. ——. Gordonia Youth Movement. Tel Aviv: Golda Meir Institute for Social and Labour Research, 1986. ——. Hashomer Hatzair: From Youth Movement to Revolutionary Marxist Party, 1913–1936. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1971. Margalit, Meir. “Aspiring Emigrants.” Cathedra 125 (2007): 70–98. ——. “The Dispute between the Zionist Executive and the National Council Concerning the Treatment of New Immigrants at the Beginning of the Mandate Period.” Tsiyonut 22 (2000): 159–178. ——. “Problems in Selecting Immigrants at the Beginning of the Mandate Period: Ideology, Policy, and Implementation. Yahadut Zemanenu 13 (1998–1999): 243–280. Margalit-Stern, Bat-Sheva. Redemption in Chains: The Women Workers’ Movement in Eretz-Israel, 1920–1939. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2006. ——. “Rebels of Unimportance: The 1930s Textile Strike in Tel Aviv and the Boundaries of Women’s Self-Reliance.” Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) ( July 2002): 171–194. Mattar, Philip. The Mufti of Jerusalem. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Mendelsohn, Ezra. “Jewish Politics in Interwar Poland: An Overview.” In The Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars, edited by Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn,
Bibliog raphy
241
Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1989. —— “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews.” In The Jews in Poland, edited by Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jacjimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, 130–139. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. ——. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. ——. Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Metzer, Jacob. The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Miller, Ylana N. Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920–1948. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Mintz, Matityahu. “Work for the Land of Israel and ‘Work in the Present’: A Concept of Unity, a Reality of Contradictions.” In Essential Papers on Zionism, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, 161–170. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ——. Pangs of Youth: “Hashomer Hatzair,” 1911–1921. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1995. Miron, Dan. “Mi-Yotzrim u-Vanim le-Vnei beli Bayit.” Igara 2 (1985–1986): 70–135. Mishory, Alec. Lo and Behold: Zionist Icons and Visual Symbols in Israeli Culture. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 2000. Mossek, Moshe. Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel. London: Frank Cass, 1978. Naor, Mordecai, ed. Youth Movements 1920–1960. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1989. Near, Henry. The Kibbutz Movement: A History, vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ofer, Pinhas. Enemy and Rival: The Zionist Movement and the Yishuv between the Arabs and the British, 1929–1948. Tel Aviv: Tcherikover, 2001. ——. “Creating a Mandatory Administration and the Basic Principles of Development for the Jewish National Home.” In The History of the Jewish Community in Eretz-Israel since 1882: The Period of the British Mandate, edited by Moshe Lissak. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994, 223–328. Oppenheim, Israel. “Hehalutz in Poland between the Two World Wars.” In Reinharz and Shapira, Essential Papers on Zionism. Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004. Pedersen, Susan. “Introduction: Claims to Belong.” Journal of British Studies 40 (October 2001): 447–453. ——. “From National Crisis to ‘National Crisis’: British Politics, 1914–1931.” Journal of British Studies 33 ( July 1994): 322–335 ——. “Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War.” American Historical Review 95(4) (1990): 983–1007. Peled, Rina. “The New Man” of the Zionist Revolution: Hashomer Hatza ͗ ir and Its European Roots. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 2002. Peled, Yoav. Class and Ethnicity in the Pale. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Peleg, Yaron. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Exiled in the Homeland
242
Penslar, Derek J. Israel in History. London: Routledge, 2007. ——. Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Pinsker, Leon. Auto-Emancipation. New York: Masada, 1935. Porath, Yehoshua. The Palestinian-Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929– 1939. Vol. 2. London: Frank Cass, 1977. ——. The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929. London: Frank Cass, 1974. Preuss, Walter. The Labour Movement in Israel. Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1965. Rabin, Chaim. Ikre toldot ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit. Jerusalem: Jewish Agency, 1972–1974. Raider, Mark A., and Miriam B. Raider-Roth, eds. The Plough Woman. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002. Reftor, Berl. Without Pause. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1973. Reinharz, Jehuda. “The Balfour Declaration in Historical Perspective.” In Essential Papers on Zionism, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, 587–616. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ——. Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman. New York: Oxford, 1993. ——. “Hashomer Hatzair in Germany (II): Under the Shadow of the Swastika, 1933– 1938.” In Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 173–208. ——. Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Roshwald, Aviel. “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War.” In European Culture during the Great War, edited by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 369–378. Ruppin, Arthur. Three Decades of Palestine. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1936. Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. New York: Knopf, 1992. Salmon, Yosef. Religion and Zionism: First Encounters. Jerusalem: Yehuda Magnes Press, 2002. Saposnik, Arieh Bruce. “Exorcising the ‘Angel of National Death’—National and Individual Death (and Rebirth) in Zionist Palestine.” Jewish Quarterly Review 95(3) (Summer 2005): 557–578. ——. “‘ . . . Will Issue Forth from Zion’? The Emergence of a Jewish National Culture in Palestine and the Dynamics of Yishuv-Diaspora Relations.” Jewish Social Studies 10(1) (Fall 2003): 151–184. Segev, Tom. One Palestine Complete. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Shaham, Natan. Utopia, Sixty Years Later. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po ͗ alim, 1984. Shamai, Shmuel, and Yoram Bar-Gal. “The Swamps of the Jezreel Valley: A Struggle over the Myth.” Sociologia Internationalis 25 (1987): 193–206. Shapira, Anita. “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement.” In Zionism and Religion, edited by Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, 251–272. Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1998. ——. New Jews, Old Jews. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1997.
Bibliog raphy
243
——. Ha-Halikhah al-Kaf ha-Ofek. Tel Aviv: ͑ Am ͑ Oved, 1987. ——. “Gedud ha-Avodah: A Dream That Failed.” Jerusalem Quarterly 30 (Winter 1984): 62–76. ——. Futile Struggle: The Jewish Labor Controversy, 1929–1939. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1977. Shapira, Anita, and Derek J. Penslar. Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right. London: Frank Cass, 2003. Shavit, Yaacov. “Fire and Water: Ze ͗ ev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement.” Studies in Zionism 4 (Autumn 1981): 219–236. Shavit, Jacob, and Gideon Biger. The History of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2001. Sheffer, Gabriel. “British Colonial Policy-Making towards Palestine (1929–1939).” Middle Eastern Studies 14(3) (October 1978): 307–322. ——. “Intentions and Results of British Policy in Palestine: Passfield’s White Paper.” Middle Eastern Studies 9(1) ( January 1973): 43–60. Sheinkin, Menahem. Kitvei Menahem Sheinkin, edited by A. Harmoni. Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1935. Shilo, Margalit. “Prati ke-Tsibori: Eta Yalin ve-Yehudit Harari Kotvot Autobiographia,” Cathedra 118 (2005): 41–66. ——. “Women as Victims of War: The British Conquest (1917) and the Plight of Prostitution in the Holy City.” Nashim (Fall 2003): 72–83. ——. “The Double or Multiple Image of the New Jewish Woman.” Nashim 1 (1998): 73–94. ——. “Mass Immigration or Selective Immigration? The Zionist Policy (1882–1914).” In Ingathering of Exiles: Aliyah to the Land of Israel, Myth and Reality, edited by Dvora Hacohen, 107–131 (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998. Shiloach, Naomi. Vanishing Center: Citizens’ Interest Groups in Eretz Israel during the 1930s. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2003. ——. “The Civilian Circles in Tel Aviv Municipal Elections.” In Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 127–164. Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1995. Shimoni, Gideon, and Robert S. Wistrich, eds. Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999. Shoham, Yedidya. Diary of Youth: Early Days of Hashomer Hatzair Movement—Levov 1917 to Beit Alfa 1924. Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Beit Alfa, 1987. Shvartz, Shifra. The Workers’ Health Fund in Eretz Israel Kupat Holim, 1911–1937. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Simon, Leon. Ahad Ha-Am Asher Ginsburg: A Biography. London: East and West Library, 1960. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Skidelsky, Robert. Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931. London: Macmillan, 1967. Smilansky, Moshe. Perakim be-Toldot ha-Yishuv, vols. 2 and 3. Tel Aviv: Devir, 1943 and 1959.
Exiled in the Homeland
244
Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin de Siecle. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. ——. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983. Stein, Kenneth W. The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Stein, Leonard. The Balfour Declaration. London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1961. Stein-Ashkenazy, Esther. “The Dispute within Revisionist Circles: The Aliyah of Beitar Members, Option or Obligation (1925–1935).” In Ingathering of Exiles, edited by Dvora Hacohen, 145–164. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998. ——. Betar in Eretz-Israel, 1925–1947. Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1997. Stern, Bat-Sheva. “Educating Women in the Women’s Labor Movement in Pre-State Israel: Transition and Tradition.” In Education and History: Cultural and Political Contexts, edited by Rivka Feldhay and Immanuel Etkes, 391–404. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1999. Stevenson, David. The First World War and International Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Stoyanovsky, J. The Mandate for Palestine. London: Longmans, Green, 1928. Straus-Mochenson, Nellie. Our Palestine. Tel Aviv, 1939. N.p. Tarshish, Jocheved Bat-Rachel. The Path I Took. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1980. Thompson, Andrew S. Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, 1880–1932. London: Longman, 2000. Troen, S. Ilan. Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Tsahor, Zeev. “Ben Gurion’s Attitude toward the Gola [Diaspora] and Aliyah.” In Ingathering of Exiles, edited by Dvora Hacohen, 131–144. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998. ——. Ha-Hazon ve-ha-Heshbon: Ben-Gurion ben Ideologiah le-Politikah. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po ͗ alim, 1994. Tsur, Moki, ed. Kehilliyatenu. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1988. Tsur, Moki, Ta ͗ ir Zevulun, and Hanina Porat, eds. The Beginning of the Kibbutz. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1981. Ufaz, Aviva. Sefer ha-Hayyim Yomana Shel Kvutzat Kiryat Anavim. Jerusalem: Yad BenZvi, 2001. ——. “The ‘Feminist Issue’ and Feminine Self-Expression in a Pioneering Society: A Rereading of Kehilliyatenu.” Cathedra 95 (2000): 101–118. ——. Te ͗ udah ve-Yetsirah. Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me ͗ uhad, 1996. ——. “The World of Symbols in Kehilliyatenu.” Cathedra 59 (March 1991): 126–143. Vital, David. Zionism: The Crucial Phase. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. ——. “The Zionist as Thinker: Ahad Ha ͗ am and Hibbat Zion.” In At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha ͗ am, edited by Jacques Kornberg, 87–97. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. ——. The Origins of Zionism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Wardi, Aharon. Ir ha-Pe ͗ a lot. Tel Aviv: Hotsa ͗ at Le-Ma ͗ an ha-Sefer, 1928.
Bibliog raphy
245
Wasserstein, Bernard. Herbert Samuel: A Political Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ——. The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929. London: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Weiler, Yael. “The Camaraderie of Hashomer Hatzair.” Cathedra 102 (2002): 33–64. ——. “The Fascinating World of ‘Hashomer Hatzair,’” Cathedra 88 (1998): 73–94. Weitz, Yechiam, ed. From Vision to Revision: A Hundred Years of Historiography of Zionism. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1997. Williamson, Philip. National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Yaari, Meir. “On Some Elements of Hashomer Hatsair.” Tsiyonut 18 (1994): 331–344. Yaari, Yehuda. When the Candle Was Burning. London: Victor Gollancz, 1947. Yahav, Dan. Komunot be-Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, 1990. Yizhar, S. “Preliminaries.” Modern Hebrew Literature 111 (Fall 2006): 7–14. Yotvat, Shlomo. “London, Washington, and Jerusalem: The Zionist Movement and the Shifting Centers of Power, 1917–1947.” Studies in Jewish Civilization 1 (1991): 102–128. Zait, David. Ha-Otopia ha-Shomerit: ha-Shomer Hatzair be-Folin 1921–1931. Beersheva: haMercaz le-Moreshet Ben Guryon, 2002. Zait, David, and Yosef Shamir, eds. Profile of a Leader as a Young Man: Meir Yaari, Chapters of My Life, 1897–1929. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po ͗ alim, 1992. Zakim, Eric. To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Ze ͗ ira, Moti. Rural Collective Settlement and Jewish Culture in Eretz-Israel during the 1920s. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2002. Zerubavel, Yael. “Revisiting the Pioneer Past: Continuity and Change in Hebrew Settlement Narratives.” Hebrew Studies 41 (2000): 209–224. Zipperstein, Steven J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha ͗ am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Index
Abba Houshi, 136, 145, 153 agricultural collectives. See kibbutz/kibbutzim Agricultural College for Women, 122 agricultural wage-labor, 13 Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 33, 34; economic development and, 46; kvutza and, 11, 128, 232; Labor Zionists, and beliefs in, 17, 166, 184–185; national homeland, and role of, 104, 166; pioneers, and ideals of, 105; pioneers and, 13, 164; transformation of Jewish people, and role of, 103–104; urban centers versus, 105, 136–138, 164, 193, 199–200; women, and role in, 123; work on, 13, 114, 116–117, 162, 199, 209n3; WZO, and role in, 31, 32; Zionist ideology and, 17, 184–185 Ahdut ha-Avodah, 134, 147–149, 160, 231 alienation: anti-Semitism and, 25; in Diaspora, 172, 205; immigrants, and feelings of, 108, 110, 115, 118, 127, 205, 230n3 aliyah/aliyot, 10, 13, 19, 40, 147, 203, 231 Alterman, Natan, 188, 200 Anderson, Benedict, 17 Arabs: agricultural wage-labor and, 13; Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 35; community power of, 75, 88, 89; demographic issue and, 20–21, 82–83, 84, 203–204, 218n23; equality between immigrants and, 156; exile of leaders of, 75; in Haifa, 155, 175, 176; mandate administration, and effects
on, 83–84; mandatory administration, and policies for, 11, 55, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 74; officials’ relationships with, 155; partition plan offered to, 75; Revolt of 1936-1939 by, 73–74, 75; riots of 1921 by, 63–64, 166, 230n3; riots of 1929 by, 63–64, 67–72, 215n47; status of, 156; union organization of, 156; wage-labor force of, 48, 136, 139, 144, 155, 156; Yishuv, and opposition by, 69; Zionist ideology, and effects on, 82, 85, 156; Zionist policies and, 82, 85, 156 Arlosoroff, Haim: on economic development, 42–44; on immigration policies, 219n70; on immigrant qualifications, 97; on Jewish self-identity, 45, 49; on nation-building experience, 41–45, 50; on philanthropic charity, 59; on political Zionism, 44–45; on socioeconomic structure, 192; on Yishuv, 183, 203 artisans: associations, and activities of, 180–181; cultural ostracism and, 184; Eastern European society and, 173; economic development, and limitations for, 156, 183, 185; family structure and, 173; Jaffa, and neighborhoods of, 173; Labor Zionists and, 169, 178, 179–180; nation-building experience and, 169, 178, 179–185; skills and experience for, 182; in Tel Aviv, 180, 185–186; unemployment and, 168, 180, 181–182, 183; workshop and industry statistics and, 178–179;
Exiled in the Homeland Zionist Commission, and support for, 86 authority and power issues. See power and authority issues auto-emancipation, 14, 19, 25–26, 57. See also emancipation Auto-Emancipation (Pinsker), 23 Avrahamit, Devorah, 141 Balfour Declaration, 23, 51 Basel Program, 31 Bat Rachel, Yokheved, 142, 160 Bat-Sheva collective, 120, 121 Beitaniyya, 113–116, 118–120, 124, 130 Ben-Gurion, David, 138, 160 Ben-Zvi, Itzhak, 143, 150 Berg, G. M., 122 Bernstein, Deborah/Devorah, 120, 147 Betar youth movement, 164, 231 Bialik, H. N., 39, 187, 194 Bible, and national homeland, 7, 40 B ͗ nai Brak, 188 bourgeois culture: in Eastern Europe, 25; Labor Zionists and, 98, 113, 145; morality of, 108; in urban centers, 164, 182–193, 185 Brandeis, Louis D., 60, 78 Brenner, Yosef Chaim, 133–134 British Mandate, 9, 10. See also mandatory administration Bukharan immigrants, 163, 183 capitalism: economic development and, 43, 46–48, 49, 60, 137, 143, 171; Fourth Aliyah and, 10; Jews as “Other” and, 25; urban centers and, 199; women and, 145; worker solidarity versus, 16, 153–156, 164–165, 171–172; Zionist ideology and, 5–6, 42–43, 46–48, 49, 152, 155, 171 Chalutzim, 5, 13, 79, 209–210n6, 231 Chancellor, John, 69–70 cities. See urban centers class and class structure: Arlosoroff on, 43; in Gedud ha-Avodah, 192; Hebrew language and, 39, 41; Herzl on, 29–30; in Histadrut, 162–163; Labor Zionists and, 169, 170–171, 178, 179–180, 183, 184; Pinsker on, 24; in Tel Aviv, 190–192;
248
youth organizations and, 163–164; Zionist ideology and, 41–42, 76–77, 79–80, 89, 96, 175–176 class structure issues, Labor Zionists and, 45 Cohen, David, 137 Colonial Office-Foreign Office, 57, 74 construction industry: artisans and, 175; economic development and, 144, 176, 195; funding and, 112; in Haifa, 144, 159; salaries in, 150; self-organizing groups in, 152; in Tel Aviv, 160, 176, 195; wagelabor force and, 14, 141–142; women in, 121 Construction Workers’ Union, 121 craftsmen. See artisans culture, nation-building experience, and role of, 32, 132 culture and social traditions, 8, 129–130, 161, 172–175, 183–184, 205 currency, Jewish, 86 Darwin, John, 51 death: in Diaspora, 7, 82, 118; of immigrants, 143, 161, 167; rituals, 7, 129–130, 161–162, 194 demographic issue, 20–21, 82–83, 84, 203–204, 218n23 depressions of 1920s, 12–13, 47, 98, 139, 144–145, 156–157 “Despite all . . .” (Brenner), 133 destiny, and beliefs of visionaries, 112, 135 DeVries, David, 144–145, 158 Diaspora: alienation in, 172, 205; beliefs about, 8, 13, 19, 129, 165, 202; death in, 7, 82, 118; devaluation of, 172, 201; emancipation, and rejection of, 14, 19, 25–26, 57; exile, and end of, 19, 20, 78, 198; family structure in, 33, 205; kibbutzim, and support from, 202; philanthropic charity from, 8, 59, 60, 75, 77, 167–168, 203; political interactions between Zionist leadership and, 202–203; Tel Aviv life, and culture of, 196, 197, 198; Yishuv, and culture of, 45; Zionist narrative, and beliefs about, 172, 201 discussion (Siha), 123–124, 127–128, 159–160 diseases, and immigrants, 11, 78, 97, 111, 144, 167
Index disillusionment, of immigrants, 94–95, 96, 97 displacement experience: demographic issue, and effects on, 20; in exile, 205; family structure and, 131; Hebrew language and, 126; ideology versus reality of, 16, 48–50, 96–97; in Palestine, 19, 28, 110, 205; Pinsker on, 23–26; Yiddish language and, 125–126; Zionist ideology and, 19–20, 23 Dizengoff, Meir, 8, 177, 189, 192–193, 197– 198, 227n24 economic absorptive capacity, 61, 62, 78, 89, 97, 100 economic development: agricultural collectives and, 46; Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 34–35; Arlosoroff on, 42–44; artisans, and restrictions on, 156, 183, 185; capitalism, and role in, 43, 46–48, 49, 60, 137, 143, 171; construction industry and, 144, 176, 195; in Haifa, 139; industrial enterprises and, 177, 178, 227n24; investments for, 88; Labor Zionists and, 168–169, 171, 182–183; mandatory administration and, 12–13, 42, 56, 61, 65; nation-building experience and, 5, 33–35, 88, 99; philanthropic charity, and effects on, 47–48; political Zionism and, 91–92, 94; smallbusiness skills, and role in, 99; Smilansky on, 46, 47, 48; stability of economy and, 11, 177; in Tel Aviv, 177–178, 190–191, 193, 196; of Yishuv, 47, 48, 153; Zionist Commission, and support for, 86; Zionist narrative and, 5, 14–15, 17, 33–35, 83, 99 economic resources, and immigration policies, 91–92, 94 Elkind, Menahem, 145 emancipation, 14, 19, 25–26, 57 emigration: beliefs about, 11; disillusionment and, 95, 96, 97; from Palestine, 14, 95, 97, 105, 131, 150, 167; of Russian Jews, 3, 23–24, 26, 27, 79; from U.S., 169 Enlightenment, 21–22, 231, 232 Eros, 113, 116, 118–119 exile: idea of, 8–9, 96, 205; self-identity of Jews, and idea of, 96, 205; Zionist nar-
249 rative, and ending, 9, 19, 20, 78, 81, 135, 198, 199–200 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 205 family structure: Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 33, 205; artisans, and role of, 173; in Diaspora, 33, 205; displacement experience and, 131; immigrant qualifications and, 66, 97–98; Labor Zionists, and view of, 11, 16, 119–120; modernity, and altered, 33, 205; parental duties and, 108; political alliances versus, 160–161; shop owners and, 178; youth and, 108, 163, 205 First World War. See World War I Fishman, Ada Maimon, 122 flaneur, 187 Fourth Aliya, 10, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 109, 114 Friesel, Evyatar, 57 Galilee, 40, 151, 167, 168, 193 Galili, Ziva, 79, 91 Galut, 44, 231. See also Diaspora Gedud ha-Avodah (Labor Battalion): class structure issues and, 192; described, 128, 134, 231; emigration from Palestine and, 14, 105; public works projects and, 115; song and dance and, 128; utopian vision and, 14, 105; women’s role in, 120, 122, 145. See also Labor Zionists Gelber, Yoav, 170 Gellner, Helvig, 170 gender-based stereotypes, 93, 119, 120–123, 146–147, 149, 167 Gordon, A. D., 123 Gordon, Yael, 123 Great Britain: demographic issue, and policies of, 20, 84, 218n23; imperial dynamic of, 51–53, 52, 54, 58; international law in Palestine under, 84; Mandate and, 9, 10; national homeland, and commitment of, 6–7, 20, 55, 58, 70, 73–75, 84; Ottoman defeat by, 23, 51–52; World War I, and effects on government of, 53–54 Ha ͗ am, Ahad, 32–39, 44, 50 Haifa: Arab populations in, 155, 175, 176; construction industry in, 144, 159;
Exiled in the Homeland economic development plans for, 139; populations of immigrants in, 175, 176; strikes during 1920s in, 157; technical school in, 40; wage-labor force in, 139, 143, 152, 154, 155, 158–159 Halamish, Aviva, 217n15 he-Halutz, 63, 89, 97, 111, 202, 231. See also pioneers Halutz/Halutzim, 5, 79, 156, 209–210n6, 231. See also pioneers Hapoel Hatzair, 134, 172 Hari, Miriam, 187 Hashomer Hatzair: alienation in, 118; defined, 231; disputes and rivalries in, 113, 124; Eros and, 113, 116, 118–119; Hebrew language use and, 107, 124; historical context for, 107, 108; idealism and, 104, 115; ideology of, 107, 108, 115, 118, 221n16, 222n51; intellectual atmosphere in, 109, 221n19; origin of name, 107; Siha and, 123–124, 127–128; transformation of Jewish people, and role of, 104, 105; women, and role in, 119 Haskala, 21–22, 231, 232 Hebrew language: class structure, and use of, 39, 41; Hashomer Hatzair, and use of, 107, 124; linguistic dichotomy and, 125–126; literature and, 37–38, 125; as national spoken language, 38–39, 40, 50, 86, 125–126, 197; religious idioms and phrases, and use of, 125; Tel Aviv, and use of, 197–198; transformation of Jewish people and, 37–39, 42, 50, 125–127; Yishuv and, 40; Zionist narrative and, 7, 40–41 Herzl, Theodor, 23, 26–32, 30, 50 Herzlia, 188 Hibbat Zion, 26, 32, 168 High Commissioner, 57, 63, 64, 69, 186 Histadrut: Arab wage-labor force, and policy of, 156; capitalism versus worker solidarity and, 16, 153–156, 164–165, 171– 172; class structure issues and, 162–163; cultural traditions, and policies of, 161; death rituals in, 161–162; depressions of 1920s and, 156–157; described, 134, 231; disciplinary mechanisms of, 157–158; discussions and, 159–160; dues for, 153,
250
156; gender-based stereotypes and, 122, 146–147, 149; housing construction and, 156; ideology versus reality and, 142, 143; immigrants, and aid from, 96, 141; infrastructure improvements and, 156; intellectuals, and membership of, 153, 156, 164, 170–172; internal tensions in, 153–154; labor certificates and, 96; Labor Exchanges and, 153, 158; labor leadership and, 150–152; Labor Tribunals and, 158; moral discourse of founders and, 159; philanthropic charity and, 142; power, and authority of, 63, 150–159, 165, 182– 183; public works projects and, 139; rhetoric developed in, 159, 160, 165; sick fund for, 141, 156; Solel Boneh and, 47, 232; transformation of Jewish people, and policies of, 159, 163; wage-laborer force and, 141, 150, 151–152, 154, 155; women, and policies of, 146–149; work, and resources to instill meaning in, 159–164; worker, and use of term in, 164–165; youth organizations and, 159, 163 homoeroticism, 119 Horowitz, David, 107–109, 113, 123–124, 221n16 Hovevei Ziyyon, 26, 32, 168 Hyamson, Albert, 62, 66, 92–93 ideology versus reality in Palestine: displacement experience and, 16, 48–50, 96–97; Histadrut and, 142, 143; Labor Zionists and, 16, 110–111, 114–118, 130–138; pioneers and, 77, 88, 158–159, 193; Sheinkin on, 166, 168–171, 174–176; visionaries, and effects of, 112, 116–118, 130; women, and effects of, 122–123, 162; Zionist narrative and, 3–9, 14–15, 17–18, 200, 206, 209–210nn3,5–6 illegal immigration, 66, 94, 100 illnesses, and immigrants, 11, 78, 97, 111, 144, 167 industrial enterprises, 14, 177, 178, 227n24 infrastructure, in Palestine, 7, 30, 138–140, 156, 188 integration issues, 96 intellectuals and intellectual atmosphere, 109, 153, 156, 164, 170–172, 221n19
Index International Poale Zion, 11 international recognition, and national homeland, 84, 87, 103 Jaffa: artisans in, 173; described, 3, 186, 188, 191, 196; Labor Zionists in, 109, 110, 141; riots of 1921 in, 166, 230n3 Jerusalem, 155, 175, 176 Jewish Agency, 73, 91, 231 Jewish Colonization Association, 113, 116, 179 Jewish National Fund ( JNF), 231 Jewish State (Herzl), 23 Jezreel Valley, 114, 118, 209n3 Kaddish, 110, 231 Karlinsky, Nahum, 226–227n2 Katznelson, Berl, 11, 125, 126 Katznelson, Rachel, 123, 125 Kehilliyatenu (Our Community), 113–118 Keren ha-Yesod, 179, 232 kibbutz/kibbutzim: dancing style in, 192; defined, 232; Diaspora support for, 202; economic absorptive capacity and, 78; religious traditions on, 130; Zionist ideology and, 130, 153, 186 Kisch, Frederick, 78 Kolatt, Israel, 78 kvutza, 11, 12–13, 128, 232 Labor Battalion. See Gedud ha-Avodah: Labor Zionists labor certificates, 62–66, 79, 92–94, 96, 217n15. See also qualifications for immigrants Labor Exchanges, 153, 158 labor force, agricultural wage-, 13. See also wage-labor force Labor Tribunals, 158 Labor Zionists: agricultural collectives, and beliefs of, 17, 136–138, 164, 166, 184–185, 193; artisans and, 169, 178, 179–180; Beitaniyya and, 113–116, 118–120, 124, 130; binary oppositions and, 127; birth rituals and, 129; bourgeois culture and, 98, 113, 145; class structure issues and, 45, 96, 169, 170–171, 178, 179–180, 183, 184; death rituals in, 129–130, 161–162; depressions
251 of 1920s, and institutions of, 47; disillusionment, and beliefs of, 96; economic development and, 168–169, 171, 182–183; family structure, and beliefs of, 11, 16, 119–120; gender-based stereotypes and, 93, 119, 120–123, 146–147, 149, 167; historic context for, 102–106; ideology versus reality and, 16, 110–111, 114–118, 115, 130–138; immigrant qualifications and, 64, 91, 112, 116; Kehilliyatenu community and, 113–118; mandatory administration and, 138–140; narratives of journey to Palestine by, 111–112, 135; national identity, and ideology of, 164, 185; nature, and role in, 109, 119; power and authority of, 63, 116; self-sacrifice and, 104–105, 220n3; shared loyalties to traditions and, 102, 109, 128–132; solidarity displays by members of, 112; song and dance, and view of, 128, 129; transformation of Jewish people, and beliefs of, 16, 39–40, 104, 115–116, 131–132, 169–170, 174; urban centers versus agricultural collectives, and beliefs of, 105, 136–138, 164, 199–200; utopian vision of, 102, 103; women, and role in, 109, 111, 114, 119–123, 145–149; Zionist narrative and, 15. See also Histadrut; visionaries; specific movements and organizations Lamdan, Yitzhak, 162 League of Nations, 58, 70 Liverson, Tehiya, 121 Lovers of Zion, 26 Macdonald, Ramsay, 70, 71–72 Mandate, 9, 10 mandatory administration: Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 under, 73–74, 75; Arabs, and policy principles of, 11, 55, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 74; British domestic political struggles during, 56–57, 70–72; dates for, 9; diplomatic constraints and, 51, 54, 56, 57, 74; economic absorptive capacity under, 61, 62, 78, 89, 97, 100; economic development and, 12–13, 42, 56, 61, 65; illegal immigration during, 66, 94; immigration policy principles of, 16, 55, 59, 60–61, 63–66, 67, 81; immigrant qualifi-
Exiled in the Homeland cations and, 66; infl uences on, 57; Labor Zionists and, 138–140; military training for immigrants under, 75; moderate humane policies under, 58; monetary qualifications for immigrants under, 61–62, 66, 77, 91–92; political unity principle of, 56–58; principles of, 55–56; prosperity and surplus production under, 55–56, 65–66, 73; public works projects and, 138–139; religious entities under, 11; religious official authority under, 11, 12; riots of 1921 under, 63–64, 166, 230n3; riots of 1929 under, 63–64, 67–72, 215n47; stability of region under, 10, 54, 73; static policies during, 67, 69–70, 71–73; strategic objectives of, 54–55; strikes and, 140; White Papers under, 70, 74, 75 Mann, Barbara E., 196–197 marriage ceremonies, between men and nature, 117 marriage status, 97–98, 149, 161 Marx, Karl, 109, 114 Marxism, 43, 145 Maskil/Maskilim, 21–22, 232 May Day celebrations, 63–64, 90, 161, 195 Me ͗ iri, Avigdor, 108 Middle Eastern Jews, 89, 163, 183, 210n14 Mishnah: defined, 232 moral discourse of founders: Histadrut and, 159; immigrant experience versus, 16, 137–138, 142, 154, 190; national homeland and, 98; pioneers and, 105; Zionist ideology and, 6, 27, 104, 106, 109, 116, 119, 148, 185, 206 morality of Jews, 9, 28, 36, 43, 45, 56, 96, 202 moshav, defined, 232 motivations, of immigrants, 9–10, 13, 210n15 national homeland: agricultural collectives, and fulfillment of, 104, 166; Bible and, 7, 40; Britain’s commitment to, 6–7, 20, 55, 58, 70, 73, 74–75, 84; future of, 219n70; immigrants and, 50, 87, 97; international support for, 84, 87, 103; Labor Zionist ideology and, 110–111, 130, 133–134; moral discourse of founders and, 98; Nazism, and effects on, 100; redemp-
252
tion in, 102–104, 106, 108, 109–110, 220n3; riots, and effects on, 99; Tel Aviv, and fulfillment of, 198; urban centers, and fulfillment of, 176, 186; women, and role in, 122; youth, and role in, 205; Zionist ideology, and fulfillment of, 19, 22–23, 26, 81, 84, 101, 200–201, 217n16; Zionist narrative of, 7, 22, 23–26, 30–31 national identity issues, 35–36, 50, 164, 185. See also self-identity of Jews National Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, 156 nation-building experience: Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 32–33, 36–37, 39, 50; Arlosoroff on, 41–45, 50; artisans, and role in, 169, 178, 179–185; culture, and role in, 32, 132; economic development and, 5, 33–35, 88, 99; Herzl on, 50; immigration in context of, 25, 41–48, 50; political Zionism and, 6, 14–15, 17; Smilansky on immigration in context of, 41, 42, 49, 50; state making versus, 199–204 nation-state. See national homeland nature, and role in Labor Zionism, 109, 117, 119 Nazism, 73, 100 non-Zionist Jews, 5, 86, 112, 113, 232 Nordau, Max, 78 Old Yishuv, 5, 86, 112, 113, 232 Ottoman Empire, 12, 23, 31, 51–52 Oz, Amos, 195 Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, 113, 116, 179 Passfield, Lord, 70, 99 Pedersen, Susan, 53 Penslar, Derek J., 28 philanthropic charity: Arlosoroff on, 59; from Diaspora, 8, 59, 60, 75, 77, 167–168, 203; economic development, and effects of, 47–48; Herzl on, 30; Histadrut and, 142; pioneers and, 169; Smilansky on, 47; U.S. and, 60; Weizmann on, 59, 60; WZO, and role in, 59, 60, 75, 77, 167–168; Zionist Commission, and distribution of, 86 Pinsker, Leon, 23–26
Index pioneers: advertisements, and icon of, 190; agricultural collectives and, 13, 111, 164; capitalism, and role of, 47, 99; class structure and, 156; culture and social traditions continued by, 174–175; described, 13, 105, 158, 161; economic development and, 77; Histadrut and, 134–135, 141–142, 184–185; ideals of, 5; ideology versus reality and, 77, 88, 158–159, 193; kibbutzim and, 202; labor certificates for, 79, 89, 97–98; moral discourse of founders and, 105, 158; as muse, 162; philanthropic charity and, 169; qualifications for immigrants, and spirit of, 88, 97–98, 146; self-identity of, 80; Sheinkin on, 169–172, 174–175; Shlonsky on, 125; urban centers and, 136, 197; visionaries versus, 105; women as, 122–123, 147; Zionist narrative and, 3, 4, 209–210nn3,6. See also he-Halutz; Halutz/ Halutzim Po ͗ alei Zion: defined, 232 poetry, 124, 125, 159, 162 political Zionism: Arlosoroff on, 44–45; diversity in, 10–11; economic development and, 91–92, 94; Herzl on, 26–32, 38; immigration policies and, 87, 90–92, 94, 96–97, 100–101; nation-building experience and, 6, 14–15, 17; Zionist Commission and role in, 7, 23, 84–87; Zionist narrative and, 6, 14–15, 17 population statistics: artisan, 180, 185–186; Haifa, and Arab, 155, 175, 176; Haifa, and immigrant, 175, 176; immigration, 12, 98, 168, 210–211n19; Tel Aviv, 175, 176, 180, 185–186; urban, 90, 136, 175 power and authority issues: Arab community power and, 75, 88, 89; Zionist ideology and, 63, 100, 150–159, 165, 182–183, 202, 218–219n48 practical Zionism, 31, 41 private cooperatives, 226–227n2 prostitution, 191 public confession (Vidui), 123–124 public realm restructuring, 40, 41–42, 193–195, 229n84 public works projects: mandatory administration and, 138–139; road construction
253 and, 14, 115, 121, 122, 138, 161; Zionist organizations and, 115. See also construction industry qualifications for immigrants, 64, 66, 91, 97–98, 112, 116. See also labor certificates Ra’anana, 188 Ramat Gan, 188 Ramat ha-Sharon, 188 real estate industry, 176, 177 redemption, in national homeland, 102–104, 106, 108, 109–111, 220n3 Reftor, Berl, 135, 144, 150–151 Reinharz, Jehuda, 60 religious traditions: Ahad Ha ͗ am on, 34; birth rituals and, 129; death rituals and, 7, 129–130, 161–162, 194; holiday observance and, 193; on kibbutzim, 130; modernity, and infl uence of, 33; Sabbath observance and, 193; shared loyalties to, 102, 109, 128–132; spiritual loss and, 128–129; in Tel Aviv, 193, 194–195, 229n84; World War I anti-Semitism and, 102; Zionist ideology and, 7, 11–12, 14, 102, 108 retail industry, 36, 168, 177–178 Revisionists, 5, 45, 164, 217n15, 231 Revolt of 1936–1939, Arab, 66–67 riots: of 1921, 63–64, 166, 230n3; of 1929, 63–64, 67–72, 99, 215n47; immigration, and effects of, 88, 101; national homeland, and effects of, 99 road construction, 14, 115, 121, 122, 138, 161 Roslan (ship), 3, 6 Rothschild, Baron de, 113 Ruppin, Arthur, 78 Russian Jews, 3, 21–24, 26, 27, 78–79, 91 Samuel, Herbert, 57, 63, 64–65 scholarship, on immigrants, 9, 210n14 Second Aliyah, 40 self-identity of Jews, 7, 21, 45, 49, 105–106. See also national identity issues self-sacrifice, and Labor Zionists, 104–105, 220n3 service industries, 14 sex workers, 191
Exiled in the Homeland Shapira, Anita, 102–103, 120, 122, 130 Shavit, Yaakov, 217n16 Shazar, Rachel, 123 Shazar, Zalman, 123 Sheinkin, Menahem: on artisans, 178, 182, 185; on devaluation of Diaspora culture, 172; on ideology versus reality, 166, 168–171, 174–176; on skills and experience, 182 Shlonsky, Avraham, 125, 162 shop owners, small, 36, 168, 178 Siha (discussion), 123–124, 127–128, 159–160 small shop owners, 36, 168, 178 Smilansky, Moshe: on bourgeois culture in Tel Aviv, 193; on economic development, 46, 47, 48; on immigration in context of nation-building experience, 41, 42, 49, 50; on philanthropic charity, 47 socioeconomic structure, 50, 60, 170, 192 Solel Boneh, 47, 232 song and dance, 128, 129, 159, 160, 192 Soviet Union. See Russian Jews Spiegel, Sam, 107–108 Spiegel, Shalom, 107 spiritual center, 36–37, 44 spiritual loss, 128–129, 172 Sprinzak, Yosef, 97–98 state-making goals, 5–6, 18, 200–202 Stevenson, David, 52 strikes, 48, 137, 140, 157, 163 suicides, 118, 119, 130, 162, 205 synagogues, 125, 142, 174, 181 Tabenkin, Yitzhak, 40, 125, 130, 145 Tarshish, Yokheved Bat-Rachel, 142, 160 Tel Aviv: Arabs, and relationships in, 155; artisan population in, 180, 185–186; bourgeois culture in, 182–193; class structure in, 190–192; construction industry in, 160, 176, 195; dancing style in, 192; described, 176; Diaspora culture, and life in, 196, 197, 198; economic development in, 177–178, 190–191, 193, 196; education system in, 186; Hebrew language use in, 197–198; ideology versus reality of, 187–188, 196–197, 200; infrastructure and, 188; modernization of, 188–189; national homeland fulfill-
254
ment and, 186; politics, and government of, 189; population growth in, 175, 176, 186; prostitution in, 191; public realm, and activities in, 193–195, 229n84; religious traditions in, 193, 194–195, 229n84; synagogues in, 174; transportation system in, 188–189; visual presence of, 186; vitality of, 189–190, 195–196 Third Aliya/Third Wave, 10, 13, 203 “Toil” (Shlonsky), 125 transformation of Jewish people: agricultural collectives, and role in, 103–104; Hashomer Hatzair, and role in, 104, 105; Hebrew language, and role in, 37–39, 42, 50, 125–127; Histadrut policies and, 159, 163; Labor Zionist beliefs about, 16, 39–40, 104, 115–116, 131–132, 169–170, 174; Zionist narrative on, 112–113, 201–202, 207 transportation system, in Tel Aviv, 188–189 Troen, S. Ilan, 88 Trumpeldor, Josef, 111–112 “Two Letters” (Me ͗ iri), 108 Ufaz, Aviva, 114 United States: capital investment from, 72, 88; emigration from, 169; immigrant discrimination in, 28; immigration to, 22, 33; National Desertion Bureau in, 167; philanthropic charity from, 59, 60 urban centers: agricultural collectives versus, 105, 136–138, 164, 199–200; bourgeois culture in, 164, 182–193; capitalism and, 199; construction industry, and flow of immigrants to, 176; immigrant homes in, 90, 136; national homeland fulfillment and, 176, 186; pioneers and, 136, 197; population statistics and, 90, 136, 175; wage-labor force in, 136–138; Yishuv versus, 136. See also wage-labor force; specific cities utopian vision, 14, 102, 103, 105 Vaad ha-Leumi, 218–219n48, 232n4 Vidui (public confession), 123–124 visionaries: described, 104–106, 134; destiny, and beliefs of, 112, 135; Eros, and beliefs of, 116; ideology of, 110, 131; ideol-
Index ogy versus reality, and effects on, 112, 116–118, 130; linguistic dichotomy and, 125–126; narrative of, 112–113; nature and, 109; song and dance, and view of, 128, 129; use of term, 105; women as, 120, 122. See also Labor Zionists Vital, David, 26 wage-labor force: agricultural, 13; Arab, 13, 48, 136, 139, 144, 155, 156; conditions for, 141–145, 150, 151–152; construction industry and, 14, 141–142; depressions of 1920s, and effects on, 144–145; in Haifa, 139, 143, 152, 154, 155, 158–159; Histadrut’s policies and, 141, 150, 151–152, 154, 155; public works projects and, 138–139; statistics, 14; strikes by, 48; urban centers and, 136–138; women and, 147 Weizmann, Chaim, 59, 60, 83, 84 Western Europe, discrimination in, 28–29 White Paper (1930), 70 White Paper (1939), 74, 75, 101 women: agricultural collectives, and role of, 123; capitalism and, 145; construction industry, 121; deserted, 167; genderbased stereotypes and, 93, 119, 120–123, 167; ideology versus reality and, 122–123, 162; immigration statistics and, 93; labor certificates for, 92–93; Labor Zionists, and role of, 109, 111, 114, 119–123, 145–149; marriage, and status of, 149; road construction and, 121, 161; suicides and, 162; wage-labor force and, 147, 167, 169; work collectives formed by, 121 Women’s Workers’ Association, 134, 147 work collectives, 14, 121 worker solidarity, versus capitalism, 16, 153–156, 164–165, 171–172 work force. See wage-labor force World War I, 102, 103, 105–113 World War II, 73, 100 World Zionist Organization (WZO): agricultural collectives, and role of, 31, 32;
255 economic resources, and immigration policies of, 91–92, 94; educational projects, and role of, 31–32; illegal immigration and, 66; immigration policy, and infl uence of, 62, 63, 64, 65, 77, 87; philanthropic charity, and role of, 59, 60, 75, 77, 167–168; policy cost analysis, and ideology of, 168–169; power and authority of, 100, 202; private property, and role of, 75; on White Paper of 1930, 70 Yaari, Meir, 113, 115, 116, 118–119, 124, 125 Yemenite immigrants, 163, 183 yesh me-ayin (creating something from nothing), 4 Yiddish language, 38, 125–126, 150, 197 Yishuv: Arab opposition to, 69; Arlosoroff on, 183, 203; described, 161, 232; Diaspora culture and, 45; economic development of, 47, 48, 153; Hebrew language and, 40; institutions, 153–154; urban centers versus, 136 Yizhar, S., 230n3 youth, 108, 205 youth organizations, 159, 163–164, 231. See also Hashomer Hatzair Zerubavel, Yael, 209–210n6 Zionist Commission, 7, 23, 84–87, 167 Zionist ideology: concessions and, 16, 81, 89, 101; contradictory imperatives of, 81–82, 166–177; disillusionment with, 95, 97; expulsion discussions and, 98; immigration policies and, 90–91, 96–97, 100–101, 219n70; implementation of, 14–15, 31, 77–78, 88; social and cultural commitment to, 14–15, 17, 86 Zionist narrative, ideology versus reality and, 3–9, 14–15, 17–18, 200, 206, 209–210nn3,5–6 Zionist Project. See national homeland Zisle-Lefowvich, Rahel, 117
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
