Israel

A History

Anita Shapira

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611683530
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Written by one of Israel's most notable scholars, this volume provides a breathtaking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century to the present day. Organized chronologically, the volume explores the emergence of Zionism in Europe against the backdrop of relations among Jews, Arabs, and Turks, and the earliest pioneer settlements in Palestine under Ottoman rule. Weaving together political, social, and cultural developments in Palestine under the British mandate, Shapira creates a tapestry through which to understand the challenges of Israeli nation building, including mass immigration, shifting cultural norms, the politics of war and world diplomacy, and the creation of democratic institutions and a civil society. References to contemporary diaries, memoirs, and literature bring a human dimension to this narrative history of Israel from its declaration of independence in 1948 through successive decades of waging war, negotiating peace, and building a modern state with a vibrant society and culture. Based on archival sources and the most up-to-date scholarly research, this authoritative history is a must-read for anyone with a passionate interest in Israel. Israel: A History will be the gold standard in the field for years to come.

PART I

1881–1918

ZIONISM

IDEOLOGY & PRAXIS

1THE EMERGENCE OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT

“At Basel I founded the Jewish state,” wrote Theodor Herzl in his diary after the First Zionist Congress in 1897. “If I said this out loud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”¹ In fact, fifty-one years intervened between that first congress and the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. What began as an evanescent movement whose most ardent supporters never believed that the objective of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine would be achieved in their lifetime became a real national movement that shaped a society and nation and built a state.

The Zionist movement was born amid stormy controversy that attends it to this day, although the focus of contention varies. What was Zionism, anyway? A renaissance movement directed toward reshaping the Jews, Jewish society, Jewish culture? A colonization movement aiming to establish a Jewish territorial entity that would grant the Jews what other peoples had: a homeland where they could find refuge? A spiritual or political movement? Could Zionism resolve the question of Jewish identity in an era of rising secularization and acculturation, with religion no longer able to save the Jews from atomization? Could it relieve the Jewish existential anxiety that had been on the rise since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when a racism-oriented antisemitism emerged that for the first time in history refused Jews the option of conversion as an escape from the Jewish fate? These questions, which attended the internal Zionist disputes from the beginning and were posed by the movement’s own adherents, bore fateful implications for Zionism’s character and development, its strengths and weaknesses.

At the same time, another controversy raged around the Zionist movement, fomented by its adversaries, who held up a mirror that revealed Zionism’s every weakness, each ideological and practical flaw. In 1881 Dr. Yehuda Leib Pinsker published a pamphlet titled Auto-Emancipation. Writing in the wake of the wave of pogroms that engulfed the Jews in the Tsarist Empire’s Pale of Settlement (known as Suffot Banegev, Storms in Southern Russia), Pinsker analyzed antisemitism in depth and concluded by calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland: a place where Jews, no longer a minority among the gentiles, would live not as guests, but as masters. The possession of a territory where Jews were masters of their own destiny would radically change the twisted relations that had existed for generations between Jews and the peoples they had lived among.

This modest pamphlet, published in German and later translated into Hebrew and other languages, sparked a public debate. The opponents of Pinsker’s idea had a range of objections. Was the idea workable? If so, how much time would be needed to establish this independent or autonomous Jewish entity? We can assume that it will take several centuries, asserted Adolph Landau, editor of the Jewish Russian-language newspaper Voskhod. But in the meantime the world is marching forward, and it would make far more sense to devote our efforts to establishing a liberal and enlightened society in Europe that will accept the Jews as members with equal rights, instead of wasting those efforts on some remote corner of the Middle East or elsewhere, where no one can guarantee their long-term safety and grant them the peace and tranquility they seek. In contrast with the notion of isolating Jews from European society, Landau propounded the ideal of enlightenment and modernism, an optimistic picture of an ever-improving world. Jewish salvation would be part of this general progressive movement, he contended, and temporary reversals of the march of progress should not overshadow the great, decisive shift that was occurring.²

Though this debate was protean, the fundamental question it raised did not change from the earliest days of the Zionist idea: would Jewish salvation come about as a result of a universal realignment—through either the triumph of liberalism and democracy or the victory of the communist revolution that would redeem the world—or would it require a specific Jewish initiative, separate from the great global one? One element of the debate involved questioning the feasibility of the Zionist enterprise, since the Ottoman regime opposed the immigration of Jews and their settlement in Palestine. Palestine was not an empty country; some half a million Arabs lived there. What would the Zionists do with them? Force them out, or allow them to remain? Would they be declared aliens in their own homeland? And if the Zionists did not discriminate between them and the new immigrants, who could guarantee that in time the Jews would not become a minority in their own country and find themselves once again in the situation they had sought to escape?

While the liberal Jews posed questions of feasibility, the Jewish revolutionaries raised moral issues: let us assume, they said, that contrary to probability the Jews succeed in putting down stakes in that impoverished, economically backward country with no natural resources and without the capacity to absorb millions of immigrants. Would it be morally justifiable to transform the Arabs from masters of the land into a minority?³

The anti-Zionist discourse did not embrace only the issue of what was possible and desirable; it also included the religious aspect. Pinsker, and later Herzl, did not suggest Palestine as the only possible location of the proposed Jewish state, but they did mention it. However, from the moment the idea took shape, it was connected in the minds of the Jewish masses to one country alone: the Land of Israel they had prayed for and dreamed of, even if they had not attempted to return and settle there. The idea of return to the motherland was intrinsic to Zionist ideology. Its critics contended that the connection with the Land of Israel was based upon religious myth, and that a secular Jew should not embrace the notions of the sanctity of the land, of “renewing our days as of old,” and other such ideas originating in the Jewish faith. To ultra-Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, the idea of Jews returning to their homeland flew in the face of the fate decreed for them. To them such an act ran counter to the three oaths the Jewish people swore to the Almighty: not to storm the wall, not to rush the End, and not to rebel against the nations of the world, while the Almighty adjured the nations of the world not to destroy the Jewish people.⁴ They saw an attempt to bring about redemption by natural, man-made means as rebelling against divine decrees, as Jews taking their fate into their own hands and not waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Consequently ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently opposed this perilous heresy.

Opposition to Zionism therefore unified many and varied groups: ultra-Orthodox and assimilationists, revolutionaries and capitalists, dreamers and pragmatists. There were those who opposed the idea because they believed that a better solution to “the Jewish problem” could be found within a more universal framework. Other opponents were concerned for their status as citizens with equal rights in the countries where they lived. Still others thought Zionism either too revolutionary or excessively conservative.

THE JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Although the Jews customarily mentioned Jerusalem and their hopes of returning there in their prayers three times a day, they did not tend toward taking any initiative that might change their existential situation, which had lasted for centuries. The vast majority of the Jewish people lived in Europe and accepted the reality of occasional outbreaks of violence, humiliation, and discrimination. What, then, changed in the nineteenth century that led to the emergence of the Zionist idea?

In the second half of the eighteenth century, modernization began to penetrate the Jewish street, as the absolutist kingdoms undermined the old European social order of a corporate society in which each corporation was autonomous and could maintain its traditional life and culture. For hundreds of years the Jews had constituted a corporation within European society and enjoyed autonomy within the kahal (community), a sort of lesser self-rule under which anyone could be ostracized who did not abide by accepted religious laws and the rules of social conduct. In this way the Jews preserved a clearly defined Jewish identity in accordance with halakhic law and traditional social mores. The absolutist states, however, introduced a system of direct rule, invalidating the corporate bodies that mediated between them and their subjects. The authority of the kahal was nullified, and the structure that had preserved traditional Jewish identity—either voluntarily or through coercion—collapsed. New options opened to the Jews.

This process began in Western Europe and slowly penetrated to the east, where beginning in the early nineteenth century, a demographic revolution occurred: the Jewish population increased at a rate several times greater than the general population. In 1800 there were between 1 and 1.2 million Jews in the Russian Empire, and by the end of the century there were some five million. This tremendous natural increase created an acute problem out of what had been a marginal one: the Jews did not speak the local language and did not send their children to their country’s schools. They lived mainly in Poland, Western Ukraine, and Lithuania, made a living from crafts, peddling, and trade, and suffered increasing poverty. Many sought a livelihood in the big cities, but due to increasing modernization and the beginnings of industrialization—in which they were unable to participate—they found themselves doomed there, too, to continued poverty and hopelessness. They were thus considered a noncontributing element of the population.

In 1781 (for the Jews of Bohemia) and 1782 (for those of Austria), Emperor Joseph II of Austria issued a series of Toleranzedikten (Edicts of Tolerance) that opened previously unheard-of possibilities of education and economic advancement to the Jews of the Habsburg Empire. Accordingly, the first buds of a Jewish Enlightenment movement sprouted. Among other things it strove to bring progress and what was termed “productivization” to the Jewish masses, modernizing them and turning them into useful citizens who were part of their local economy and culture. Learning the local language and secular education were the foundation stones of this movement.

In the 1860s the policies of Tsar Alexander II brought these trends into the Russian Empire as well, and secularization created an entire stratum of Jews who moved, to varying degrees, away from Jewish tradition: some upheld tradition in the home but conducted themselves as non-Jews outside it. (“Be a man abroad and a Jew in your tent,” wrote Yehuda Leib Gordon, a poet of the Enlightenment period.⁵) Others, apart from minimal observance of the Jewish festivals, did not view themselves as Jews, and many converted to Christianity.

Until the early nineteenth century Jews had viewed themselves as a people, albeit a diaspora people without territory and sovereignty. In Jewish consciousness the maxim “all Jews are responsible for each other” meant far more than just religious identity. The Jewish corporation sustained the dual identity of religion and ethnicity, especially since for centuries conversion to Judaism was forbidden in the Christian and Islamic countries. The solidarity that existed among Jewish communities in times of crisis—such as ransom of prisoners or blood libels (as in Damascus in 1840) or attempts at expulsion of Jews (such as that perpetrated by Empress Maria Theresa in Prague in December 1744) against which Jews from various countries stood together⁶—strengthened these communities’ sense of closeness and of sharing a common fate. So long as the traditional identity was not undermined, the question of a disjunction between religion and nationality never arose. But once the winds of secularization began to blow, the religious connection was weakened, and questions arose regarding the character of Jewish identity: What are the Jews? Do they possess just a common religion or also a separate Jewish nationality?

The French Revolution granted the Jews equal rights on condition that they relinquish their collective identity. As Clermont-Tonnerre declared in the French National Assembly: to the Jews as individuals—everything; as a nation—nothing. That was the price the Jews had to pay for equal rights. The Napoleonic Wars broke down the barriers of European conservatism and led to the spread of nationalist consciousness and the emergence of nationalist aspirations throughout the continent. The multinational empires, such as the Habsburg and Russian Empires, found themselves under attack by national movements. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Germany, and Italy, these began as movements of cultural renewal born of a desire to return to the nation’s cultural roots, to nurture the national language, literature, music, and art. Each national culture included a connection with a version of Christianity: Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbian nationalism was linked to streams of Orthodox Christianity, whereas the Polish variety was interwoven with Catholicism.

The appearance of nationalism laid down a dual challenge to the Jews: First, should they become nationalists of the countries where they lived, or should they remain loyal to the great empires? Second, while the peoples of Europe were taking on national identities, the Jews were required to relinquish their collective identity as a prerequisite for obtaining equal rights. The borderlines of the Jewish collective, which until then had been clearly demarcated, became blurred: individual Jews now had to face their personal identity and fate, and to a great extent they could define these as they saw fit. The Jews in the Western countries enthusiastically accepted equal rights, which they saw as the key to acculturating into non-Jewish society. Many did not intend to relinquish their Jewish identity, but simply defined it differently. Thus a paradox was created whereby in an era of increasing secularization, the Jews’ self-definition began to lean heavily on religion: Germans of the Jewish faith, French people of the Jewish faith, and so forth.

This self-definition created for the first time a distinction between Jewish religion and nationality. The Jews believed that emancipation, which opened before them a future of progress, including education, new occupations, and geographic, social, and economic mobility, would lead to redemption from exile, as described by Yechezkel Kaufmann, author of an analysis of Jewish political currents.⁷ The drive to assimilate amounted to a movement with messianic attributes that viewed integration into the countries where Jews lived as the correct road, the redeeming direction, and it constituted the dominant trend in the first half of the nineteenth century.

During the course of that century, emancipation was completed in both Western and Central Europe, but stopped at the border of the Tsarist Empire. As a consequence of the division of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, this empire now ruled over a large Jewish population, and throughout the nineteenth century its rulers tried both to convert the Jews, by means of edicts and pressure, and to reform them, i.e., make them more useful to the state. Attempts to make the Jews more productive included both general education and teaching them the language of the country, and under Alexander II they were given the opportunity to attend high school. Alexander was also more benign regarding Jews who lived outside the Pale of Settlement (the areas annexed by Russia from Poland where Jews were allowed to reside). But following Alexander’s assassination in 1881, the pendulum swung back toward a policy of edicts and restrictions, and Jewish emancipation reached Russia only in 1917, with the February Revolution.

Thus it was not surprising that some Eastern European Jews reacted with suspicion and hostility toward their brethren who raised the banner of Enlightenment, whom they saw as government emissaries seeking to convert them. But once Jewish secular education got under way, there was no stopp...