Israel

A History

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780795337406
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Jüdische Geschichte

"The most comprehensive account of Israeli history yet published" (Efraim Karsh, The Sunday Telegraph ). Fleeing persecution in Europe, thousands of Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine after World War II. Renowned historian Martin Gilbert crafts a riveting account of Israel's turbulent history, from the birth of the Zionist movement under Theodor Herzl to the unexpected declaration of its statehood in 1948, and through the many wars, conflicts, treaties, negotiations, and events that have shaped its past six decades—including the Six Day War, the Intifada, Suez, and the Yom Kippur War. Drawing on a wealth of first-hand source materials, eyewitness accounts, and his own personal and intimate knowledge of the country, Gilbert weaves a complex narrative that's both gripping and informative, and probes both the ideals and realities of modern statehood. "Martin Gilbert has left us in his debt, not only for a superlative history of Israel, but also for a restatement of the classic vision of Zion, in which a Middle East without guns is not a bedtime story but an imperative long overdue. This is the vision for which Yitzhak Rabin gave his life. This book is tribute to his memory." —Jonathan Sacks, The Times (London)

CHAPTER ONE

Ideals of statehood

Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70, the Jews, who were dispersed all over the Roman Empire, had prayed for a return to Zion. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was—and remains—the hope expressed at the end of every Passover meal commemorating the ancient exodus from Egypt. For two millennia the dream of such a return seemed a fantasy. Everywhere Jews learned to adapt to the nations within whose borders they lived. Frequent expulsion to other lands made a new adaptation necessary, and this was done. But Zion, which had been under Muslim rule almost without interruption since the seventh century, and under the rule of the Ottoman Turks since the early sixteenth century, was possible only for a few.

The perils of the journey could be severe. Of 1,500 Jews who travelled from Poland, Hungary and Moravia to Palestine in 1700, as many as 500 died on the way. But the imperative to return physically from exile never entirely died. In 1777 more than 300 Hasidic Jewish families, upholders of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, made the journey from Poland to Palestine. In 1812 some 400 followers of the Vilna Gaon—one of the enlightened Jewish sages of his generation—made the journey from Lithuania.

By the middle of the nineteenth century about 10,000 Jews lived in Palestine. More than 8,000 of them lived in Jerusalem. A few hundred lived in the holy city of Safed, in the north, where several Jewish sages were buried, in the mountain village of Peki’in (which had a tradition of continuous Jewish settlement since Roman times) and in nearby Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. In the coastal town of Acre lived 140 Jews, mostly pedlars and artisans, but many without any means of support. There were several hundred Jews in Jaffa.

Most of the Jews in Palestine were immigrants from Poland and Lithuania. Many of them survived on charity, sending regular begging letters back to their original communities in Europe, and even dispatching special emissaries to raise funds. But the attraction of Palestine was growing. In 1862 a German Jew, Moses Hess, an advocate of the Jewish return to Palestine, wrote in his book Rome and Jerusalem of how his Jewish ‘nationality’ was connected ‘inseparably’ with the Holy Land and the Eternal City. Hess added, ‘Without a soil a man sinks to the status of a parasite, feeding on others.’

Eight years later in 1870 a French educator, Charles Netter, with the approval of the Turkish authorities, founded an agricultural school at Mikveh Israel (Hope of Israel). The name was taken from a description of God in the book of Jeremiah. Located a few miles inland from Jaffa, Mikveh Israel was a settlement to which Jews living in countries where they experienced various educational disabilities and restrictions—initially Persia, Roumania and Serbia—could come to live and study.

It was in 1876 that the British Christian writer George Eliot (a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans) completed her novel Daniel Deronda. It was to make its impact on many Jews, among them two Russian Jews, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and I. L. Peretz, both of whom were to exert considerable influence, through their own writings, on Jewish national aspirations. One passage in the novel was often quoted:

Revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding.

In 1878 a number of Jews from Jerusalem decided to establish a Jewish village in the Palestinian countryside. Their first effort was to buy some land near Jericho, but the Sultan refused to allow ownership to be transferred to Jews. They did manage to buy land from a Greek landowner in the coastal plain, and named their village Petah Tikvah (Gateway of Hope), but malaria, disappointing harvests, and quarrels among them led to failure. By 1882, when they abandoned the village, there were only ten houses and sixty-six inhabitants.

Also founded in 1878, by religious Jews from Safed who wanted to earn their own livelihood, and not be dependent on charity, was the village of Rosh Pinah. Lacking funds and experience, and frequently harassed by the Arabs from nearby villages, they gave up after two years, but Roumanian Jews, driven from Roumania by persecution and poverty, renewed the settlement in 1882, and obtained sufficient aid from the French Jewish philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild to survive. Growing tobacco and planting mulberry trees for silkworms were two of their enterprises. Like so many of the Jewish settlements that were to be founded in Palestine, the name of Rosh Pinah was taken from a biblical phrase, in this case the ‘head stone’ from Psalm 118: ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing. It has become marvellous in our eyes.’

In Russia, following an upsurge of violent attacks against Jews—the pogroms—two movements were founded urging the emigration of Jews to Palestine to work as farmers on the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) in order to ‘redeem’ it. One of the movements was known as the Bilu, from the Hebrew initials in the biblical phrase Beth Jacob Lechu Venelcha: ‘O House of Jacob, come and let us go!’ The young men and women of the Bilu, being secular and socialist in outlook, omitted the concluding words of the phrase: ‘in the light of the Lord’.

The second Russian-born movement was Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Zion). It held its small founding conference in 1884, at Kattowitz, in German Upper Silesia, just across the border from Russian Poland. Its president, Odessa-born Judah Leib Pinsker (who had served as a physician in the Crimean War thirty years earlier, and been honoured by the Tsar) urged upon the thirty-six delegates present the importance of the ‘return to the soil’ of Palestine. But although both the Bilu and Hovevei Zion advocated emigration to Palestine and the building up of farms and villages there, the mass of disaffected Russian Jews went to the United States, others to Britain, Western Europe and South Africa, in search of greater social equality and the chance of less poverty-stricken lives.

Only a small percentage of Russian Jewish emigrants (never more than 2 per cent) went each year to Palestine. But even this small percentage meant that 25,000 Jews reached Palestine between 1882 and 1903. Known as the First Aliyah, from the Hebrew word for ascent, in Palestine many of them lived by tilling the soil and by recourse to the financial support of the Rothschild family, which had for several years encouraged the work of Jews on the land and in the vineyards which the Rothschilds owned. Some of the Bilu pioneers worked as hired labourers at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school. One of them was Vladimir Dubnow, who took the Hebrew name Ze’ev (Wolf). On 21 September 1882 he wrote to his brother Simon—later a distinguished historian who believed that the greatest contribution of the Jews would be in the Diaspora, and who was murdered by the Nazis when in his eighties:

Do you really think that my sole motivation in coming here is to better myself, with the implication that if all goes well I will have achieved this aim and that if it does not then I ought to be pitied? No. My ultimate aim, like that of many others, is greater, broader, incomprehensible but not unattainable. The final goal is eventually to gain control of Palestine and to restore to the Jewish people the political independence of which it has been deprived for two thousand years.

Don’t laugh; this is no illusion. The means for realizing this goal is at hand: the founding of settlements in the country based on agriculture and crafts, the establishment and gradual expansion of all sorts of factories, in brief—to make an effort so that all the land, all the industry, will be in Jewish hands.

In addition, it is necessary to instruct young people and the future generation in the use of firearms (in free, wild Turkey anything can be done), and then—here I too am plunging into conjecture—then the glorious day will dawn of which Isaiah prophesied in his burning and poetic utterances. The Jews will proclaim in a loud voice and (if necessary) with arms in their hands that they are the masters of their ancient homeland. It doesn’t matter whether that glorious day comes in another fifty years or more. Fifty years are but a moment for such an enterprise. Agree, my friend, that this is a sublime and magnificent idea.

Sixty-five and a half years were to pass before a Jewish State was established. At the time that Ze’ev Dubnow wrote his letter, there were scarcely 20,000 Jews in Palestine—one quarter of one per cent of world Jewry, and only one Jewish village. Dubnow himself was unable to settle in Palestine and returned to Russia after a few years, dying there more than forty years later. But slowly, with enormous difficulties, and yet with an incredible tenacity of purpose, the Jewish presence and Jewish enterprise in Palestine grew. In 1882 the town of Zichron Yaakov (‘Memory of Jacob’) was founded by Jewish immigrants from Roumania. It was financed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who named it after his father. That same year, 1882, a Gibraltar-born Jew, Hayyim Amzalak, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1830—at the age of six—and was later British vice-consul for Jaffa, bought the land on which the first all-Jewish village in Palestine, Petah Tikvah, had been built four years earlier. He gave it to Bilu pioneers from Russia who were willing to try to make it work. As a British subject, Amzalak could buy land; Russian-born Jews were not allowed to do so.

Petah Tikvah was not only cursed by malaria, it suffered frequent attacks from the neighbouring Arab villages. But the pioneers persevered, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild—‘The Baron’, as he was known—gave them the money needed to clear the malaria swamps which had defeated the first villagers.

Hayyim Amzalak also helped to finance the establishment of Rishon le-Zion (First to Zion), the first village to be built by settlers from outside Palestine—both Rosh Pinah and Petah Tikvah had been founded by local Jews from Safed and Jerusalem. Rishon le-Zion’s settlers were ten pioneers from Russia. When funds began to run short and the water in the shallow wells had failed, an emissary from Rishon le-Zion travelled to Paris, where he persuaded Edmond de Rothschild to provide sufficient funds to dig a deep well. The Baron also sent out experts in agriculture and wine-growing. The Carmel Oriental wine cellars, which he established, produce commercially successful wine to this day. The first Hebrew-language kindergarten and elementary school in Palestine were opened in Rishon le-Zion within a few years of its foundation. Once more it was the Bible which had provided the inspiration for the village’s name, the phrase in the Book of Isaiah: ‘The first shall say to Zion…’

In honour of the founding of the town, a Roumanian-Jewish poet, Naphtali Herz Imber, wrote a poem, Hatikvah (The Hope), which was to become the Zionist hymn, and later the State of Israel’s national anthem. Imber read the poem to the farmers of Rishon le-Zion, one of whom, Samuel Cohen, who had emigrated from Moldavia four years earlier, set it to music. The poem read:

As long as deep in the heart

The soul of a Jew yearns,

And towards the East

An eye looks to Zion

Our hope is not yet lost

The age-old hope,

To return to the land of our fathers

To the city where David dwelt.

Within a few years, the second verse was changed to the version now in use:

Our hope is not yet lost

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free people in our land

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

In 1883 a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Reuben Lehrer, built a house in an Arab village, Wadi Hanin, in the coastal plain. Several other Jews, among them a fellow immigrant from Russia, Avraham Yalofsky, soon joined him. Until the War of Independence in 1948, Jews and Arabs lived peacefully side by side in the village. Lehrer called it Nes Ziona (Banner towards Zion). He and his friends planted citrus groves and engaged in bee-keeping. But an omen of the dangers that lay ahead for Jewish settlement in Palestine came only five years after the start of Jewish life in the village, when, in a nearby wadi, a group of Arabs—not from the village—ambushed Yalofsky and killed him.

Despite the hazards of life imposed by nature, and by man, each year saw some new effort at Jewish settlement. In 1884 a Russian-born Jew, Yehiel Michael Pines, the representative in Palestine of the newly established Moses Montefiore Testimonial Fund (a Russian-based charitable fund, chaired by Judah Leib Pinsker, whose purpose was to support Jewish agricultural work in Palestine) bought, through the fund, the land needed for the Bilu pioneers to found another village, Gederah. The principal produce of their fields was to be grapes and grain.

Agriculture was also the chosen pursuit of the Lovers of Zion pioneers. Through it they believed they could ‘redeem’ the land and restore the Jews as a people. When a Russian-Jewish professor, Hermann Schapira, himself one of the founders of Lovers of Zion, proposed establishing a Jewish university in Jerusalem, he was challenged by Menachem Ussishkin, one of the young leaders of the movement, who declared that nobody but a visionary could think of a university in Palestine at that time: ‘First and foremost we desire to create a farmer class in the Land of Israel, whose sons would not be “huge heads on chicken’s feet” but ordinary people tilling the soil.’

The sense of nationality which was emerging among the Jews in Palestine received a boost in 1889, when a Russian-born Jew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and a small number of like-minded friends, including Yehiel Pines, formed a group with the declared object of ‘spreading the Hebrew language and speech among people in all walks of life’. A year later the group elected a committee which set about establishing Hebrew terms for modern words which were in daily use, and creating a uniform system of pronunciation—as every emigrant homeland had a different pronunciation, mostly derived from 2,000 years of evolving liturgical prayer, this was no easy task.

Ben-Yehuda drafted the committee’s statement of purpose: ‘To prepare the Hebrew language for use as a spoken language in all facets of life—in the home, school, public life, business, industry, fine arts, and in the sciences… To preserve the Oriental qualities of the language and its distinctive form, in the pronunciation of the consonants, in word structure and in style, and to add the flexibility necessary to enable it fully to express contemporary human thought.’ This Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew, which Ben-Yehuda favoured, was believed to be closer to the biblical tongue; the Ashkenazi pronunciation, with which he had been brought up in Russia, had changed over time, and by the impact of Yiddish, into something that he regarded as less mellifluous, and less ‘genuine’.

There was a considerable element of excitement and ingenuity in the language committee’s work. Ancient Hebrew roots were given modern forms. Arabic roots were also used. Non-Semitic words which had a Hebrew form were also incorporated. When, in 1890, a group of Lovers of Zion established a small farming settlement in Upper Galilee, on the west bank of the River Jordan, they gave it the Hebrew name Mishmar Ha-Yarden (Guard of the Jordan).

It was not only the Jews from Russia who were striving to introduce Hebrew as a spoken language. Several of the religious communities of Jews from Arab lands did likewise. Among them were several thousand Jews from the Yemen, one of whose leaders, Shalom ben Joseph Alsheikh, who emigrated to Jerusalem in 1891, was a leading educationalist in his community (and from 1908 until his death in 1944, at the age of eighty-five, chief rabbi of the Yemenite community of Jerusalem).

The Jewish population of Jerusalem grew considerably through immigration; Jews had been a majority there since the 1850s, and between 1864 and 1889 their numbers multiplied three-fold, reaching 25,000. There were then 14,000 Arabs in the city.

Among those who moved from Jerusalem to the growing number of Jewish villages and settlements was Abraham Shapira. He had been born in Russia in 1870 and was brought to Palestine by his parents when he was ten. When, in 1890, he moved to Petah Tikvah, he found that Arab farmers were pasturing their flocks on the Jewish fields, damaging the crops. Shapira set up a guardsmen’s group which drove off the intruders and maintained the security of the village, enlisting the help of local Bedouin as well as of young Jewish settlers.

In 1890 another Jewish village was founded in the coastal plain. This was Rehovot (Wide Expanses; taken from the Book of Genesis). The land was bought from a wealthy Christian Arab landowner. The impetus of the founders was to establish a Jewish village that would not be dependent on the financial goodwill—and administrative supervision—of Edmond de Rothschild. After a decade of effort, and frequent attacks from the neighbouring Arab villages in which blows would be struck, property damaged and trees cut down, success came and the village grew, helped by the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Yemen.

Russian Jews, members of the Lovers of Zion who had emigrated from Vilna, Riga and Kovno, founded their own village in 1890. They called it by the Arabic name, Hadera (The Green), after the emerald green colour of the swamp vegetation around them. They could not have chosen a less hospitable site. It was not the local Arabs who tormented them, but the malarial mosquito. More than half of the inhabitants of Hadera died of malaria in the first twenty years of its existence. But with Egyptian drainage workers sent to them by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and the planting of eucalyptus groves, they gradually drained the soil and were able to turn from field and vegetable-garden crops to citrus fruits.

***

The nineteenth century was coming to an end with considerable Jewish activity in Palestine. But among the sophisticated and assimilated Jews in Europe little was known of this. Palestinian Jewry was seen, wrongly, as an exclusively religious community, set in the ways of late medieval Judaism, black-garbed...