New Perspectives on Israeli History

The Early Years of the State

Laurence J Silberstein, Laurence J. Silberstein

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN:
  9780814779293
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814771082
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In this volume a distinguished group of international scholars draws from history, folklore, political anthropology, historiography, and cultural criticism to reexamine critical issues surrounding the birth of Israel. The authors explore such issues as the transition form yishuv to state, early state policy toward the Arab minority, the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, the conflict over myths and symbols in the early state, early attitude toward Holocaust victims and survivors, Arab historiography of the 1948 war, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the shaping of Israeli foreign policy.
The contributors to the book include: Myron J. Aronoff (Rutgers University), Uri Bialer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Neil Caplan (Vanier College, Montreal), Benny Morris(Hebrew Univeristy of Jerusalem), Don Peretz (State University of New York, Binghamton), Dina Porat (Tel Aviv University), Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis University), Elie Rekhess (Tel Aviv University), Avraham Sela(Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Anton Shammas(University of Michigan), Laurence J. Silberstein (Lehigh University), Kennethy STein (Emory University), Yael Zerubavel(University of Pennsylvania), and Ronald W. Zweig (Tel Aviv University).

II. THE TRANSITION TO STATEHOOD: JEWS AND ARABS IN CONFLICT

CHAPTER 2 The Transition from Yishuv to State: Social and Ideological Changes

JEHUDA REINHARZ

The new State of Israel, born to independence on 14 May 1948, arose upon the foundation of a society that was itself young and incomplete. In the first years of its existence, Israel absorbed a mass of immigrants equal in number to its original population but sharply different in many significant social, economic, and cultural traits. What does it mean, then, if, under these circumstances, one speaks of the social structure of the new Jewish state?

Obviously, an analysis of the structure of a society implies a description of its stable elements, but only the future can really tell us how far and in what respects Israel today exhibits the elements of stability characteristic of older, better established societies. Thus, a description of Israel’s social structure is necessarily a venture in prediction. The best approach may be to analyze Israel’s most significant unsolved social problems—those, that is, whose solution is likely to have the most significant historic effect.

In this respect Israel is similar to other states that have emerged in our time. History and social structure are inseparably joined in such states, as they are in all revolutionary—or, as we now call them, rapidly developing—situations. The contemporary social problems of the new “underdeveloped” nations are clearly rooted in their past history, while the shape of their historic future is being decided by the very policies through which they attempt to solve these contemporary social problems. Thus, the extreme poverty and wretched conditions of India’s “untouchables” are closely connected with the religious tradition of Hinduism; and, on the other hand, whether India will become a united, stable, and powerful modern nation greatly depends on its raising the level of literacy, the degree of social acceptance, and the economic productivity of the pariahs and other depressed groups.¹

These relationships are usually well understood by those responsible for determining the policies of new or rejuvenated nations. Even half a century ago, the Young Turks under Kemal Pasha Atatürk held the veiling of women and other Moslem traditions to be responsible for the cultural stagnation and social debility of the Ottoman regime. Consequently, they made “Westernization” a paramount aim of nationalist policy. Thus, measures intended to abolish social ills were also intended to accomplish historic—or even more precisely, political—aims.²

The same observations apply to Israel. The Jewish state is one of those modern societies that seeks to make itself more easily understood by proclaiming its fundamental purposes (not only political, but also social, economic, and cultural) as elaborately articulated principles. Israel is both a state and a social structure, conceived before its birth as a means of solving a specific social problem—the modern Jewish Problem—in all its ramifications. Moreover, since its establishment, Israel has continued to regard the solution of the Jewish Problem as a fundamental purpose. Consequently, the institutions and values of Israel, both the state and the society, have been and continue to be structured by the goal of solving the Jewish Problem. This, at least, is an ideological demand that Israel accepts. History alone will decide how far reality will conform to the ideal.

Before the rise of Israel, the Zionist movement proclaimed, in addition to the goal of political sovereignty, the following nationalist objectives: to develop Hebrew as a spoken language and as the foundation of a Jewish national consensus; to transfer to Palestine all Jews who could not or did not wish to live in Diaspora countries; to establish a Jewish community in Palestine free from the peculiar social, economic, and cultural problems that beset the Jews’ status as a minority people scattered throughout the world; to carry out the transformations in the Jewish social and economic distribution; and to create the appropriate social institutions and foster the cultural changes that were necessary for attaining the above ends.

The State of Israel has committed itself to elaborately articulated ideological principles no less clearly and comprehensively than did the Zionist movement before it. With the establishment of the state in 1948, the ideal of national independence was institutionalized in its ultimate form, that of political sovereignty. By that date, the Jewish community in Palestine had already developed institutions aimed at realizing the above-mentioned nationalist aims. Hebrew as a spoken language was widely enough disseminated to become the national tongue of the new state. Social and economic institutions had been developed, an occupational distribution achieved, and cultural values established consistent with the ideal of a self-sustaining, balanced community controlling its own destiny in the same way as other free peoples do. However, following 1948, by extending its welcome to all Jews who could not or would not remain in their old homes, Israel received a mass immigration that, for the most part, lacked the specific national attributes already developed in the settled population. As a consequence of this immigration policy, Israel’s tasks henceforth included the following: enabling the newcomers to master the language and share in the other elements of social consensus existing in the settled community; and enabling them to participate in the social institutions and cultural life of the settled community. In addition, Israel confronted the task of transforming the social and occupational distribution of the new immigrants so that they would, like the settled population, become self-supporting and at the same time help the state to become economically self-sustaining.

From this survey it is evident, however, that in certain respects, Israel differs sharply from the other new states to which I have compared it. The problem to be solved by acquiring sovereignty in Israel and establishing a free Jewish society there was not the problem of an autochthonous community whose pattern of living had emerged through centuries of adjustment to its own locale. It was, instead, the problem of a people living in exile. The first stage, therefore, was to return the people to a homeland to which they were intimately attached, not only in their dreams but in the minute details of their diverse ways of life.

In the very act of migration, the returning Zionists implicitly committed themselves (as did other emigrants to other overseas lands) to renounce habits that might not be suited to the new country. At the same time, their adjustment to modern requirements in the new country, too, was relatively unencumbered by the handicaps of a rigid local tradition. Thus, the establishment of new patterns of living, rationally suited for adjustment to the social, cultural, and economic, as well as political, requirements of a modern nation in Palestine, was far easier for Israel than it was for the native Asian and African communities that have acquired independence in our time. A more suitable comparison would be those new nations of the Western Hemisphere that were colonized by immigrants from Europe.

Another major difference between Israel and the new Asian and African states (and here, too, the situation may properly be compared with other modern societies built up by colonization) is closely related to the first. Israeli society, as it stood in 1948, represented (in conception, at least, and to a considerable degree in fact) a successful solution of the social problems with which the Zionist movement is concerned. While the mass influx of new immigrants after 1948 undoubtedly produced severe new social problems, I would contend that Israel had already succeeded in developing the social institutions, or at any rate the values and principles, which, appropriately applied, could solve the new problems. If this is a fully satisfactory description of Israel’s present situation, Israel from the 1950s on would more closely resemble the United States during the mass immigration of 1880—1920 than countries like contemporary India or Egypt. Its major task, then, would appear to be merely social (how to absorb a “formless” mass of newcomers into an already established social milieu) rather than historic (how to devise new institutions or convert traditional social forms into a suitable environment for “modern” living).

Israel’s differences from other “underdeveloped” countries in this respect must indeed be recognized from the outset. But it is equally essential to recognize how different in magnitude and in kind was Israel’s task of integrating immigrants from that which confronted rapidly developing, nineteenth-century America. If there is a proper comparison to be made, it would more nearly be with the impact of immigration in colonial America³ or later, just behind the moving Western frontier.

The relative scale of immigration to Israel was so great that the “established” institutions had to adjust to the immigrants no less than the immigrants to the institutions. In addition, the change from a community living under a Mandate government to an independent Jewish state, with all the other political, social, economic, and cultural upheavals that attended it, undoubtedly loosened the underpinnings of die old institutions. It could be said, therefore, that Israel’s social institutions and values were and are more in flux than fixed.

In sum, the study of Israel’s pressing domestic problems today can and should be more than a study of merely social issues. The questions that demand solution, if we may put the issue in technical terms, arise from something more than a merely frictional maladjustment, and the solutions require something more than the restored equilibrium of a stable, “boundary-maintaining” social structure. Moreover, the solutions of Israel’s social problems are likely to have historic significance. They may, in fact, determine the forms in which as yet incompletely defined current Israeli social institutions and values eventually become fixed and stable.

Any social structure, to the extent that it is at all involved in historic processes, is tentative, provisional, and continually challenged by alternatives. In a situation as fluid as that of Israel, such alternatives assert themselves with special force. In a rapidly developing country that absorbs large numbers of immigrants, newcomers are not confronted by a monolithic code of values. Instead, they find a range of nuanced alternatives that are recognized as legitimate by the settled community. In rapidly developing countries, the newcomers do not enter into direct social relationships with all or even a representative sample of the settled population. Instead, they enter into complex relationships of reciprocal acceptance and rejection with selected elements among the old settlers, according to the newcomers’ particular social functions.

Where the relative weight of the immigrant population is as large as it is in Israel, the support that the newcomers lend to alternative values which may lie latent among the older settlers could well force the revision of the political, economic, cultural, and social patterns. So large an immigration relative to the settled population could also result in new institutions which do not even exist as latent, deviant trends among the older settlers. Moreover, the right of Jewish immigrants to determine the patterns of Israel’s future existence is firmly grounded in Zionist principles.

Israel exists, according to its own proclamation, in order to solve the problem of the Jewish people’s homelessness and lack of independence.⁴ Israel’s purpose, therefore, is to provide a rational solution for the problem of Jews in exile by allowing the Jews of the dispersion to return to the homeland and become masters of their own national destiny. This surely means that the new immigrants are no less entitled to advocate their own patterns of living as appropriate for Israeli society as a whole, or for part of it, than were their predecessors who established Israel’s original social institutions.

I

In all the new states that have emerged in our day, the conversion from dependency to sovereignty has produced new, complex social problems and raised issues of historic significance. In Israel, as in many other countries, the colonial administration did not hand over to the new state functioning institutions or trained officials fully able to cope with the responsibilities of sovereignty. On this count alone, the transfer of authority in Israel could not have been smooth. It came as an abrupt shock that had to be met by improvised expedients with many attendant difficulties. In the ensuing years, the adjustment to a new governmental structure placed a severe strain on many of the institutions of the yishuv (the Hebrew community in Palestine) which had been built up in the absence of a Jewish state. Here, too, difficulties arose similar to those of other new states.

From the very beginning, however, the Jewish state was confronted not only by these common readjustments to independence, taxing enough in all cases, but by quite unusual special difficulties. Israel’s independence was won in rebellion and war; and the conditions under which Israel had to plan its future after the hostilities subsided were radically different from all that had existed under the Mandate. Such conditions differed from anything for which the Zionists had planned or even deemed likely.

In some ways, however, Israel was much better equipped for sovereignty as a result of its legacy from the Mandate period than were other ex-colonial areas. Even though the Mandate administration was unable to create a legislative council or an advisory council which would have enabled the population to gain experience in government at the highest level, a fair number of Jews were employed in the higher ranks of various government departments. Also, additional personnel with general administrative experience could be drawn from the many welfare and development agencies with which the yishuv was so well supplied. The Jewish Agency, the Histadrut (trade union federation), and the minor party organizations conducted social, economic, cultural, and political activities in many ways parallel to those of a state. There were, nevertheless, many important ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• I. Frameworks and Perspectives
• II. The Transition to Statehood: Jews and Arabs in Conflict
• III. Myths, Symbols, Values: The Struggle for National Identity
• IV. Conflicts Within and Conflicts Without: Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
• Notes
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Index