My final post on the courses of my first spring in college are on Professor Bartal's class on the emergence of the State of Israel. These aren't particularly organized by significance, just maybe by new thoughts I'm having now.
As I read the notes on the period from 1904-1949, I am most struck for some reason by how much struggle and violence there was even in the realm of ideas, and how little idealism he talked about. And I guess by how many things collided at once at various times, to the detriment of any possibility for collaboration and coexistence on a big level between Jews and Arabs.
The pogroms of the Kishinev era sparked the Second Aliyah, which included mostly religious people and people who ended up in cities, but also brought the young people who would become the socialist elite of the Yishuv and then Israel. The dominant socialism of that group had room for a notion of justice and shared struggle with Arabs. But that very same time was the Young Turks' revolution, which catalyzed a sense of pan-Arab identity and nationalism in opposition to the Ottoman rulers. In quick time, the socialist-Zionists came to see their broader social ideals as having no field to play on, so the movement moved more in its own nationalist direction. There was obviously still an idealistic, universalist part of the socialist Zionist movement, but in the course's telling it become not that relevant fairly early on.
Professor Bartal noted some fascinating political dynamics within the Yishuv, made more fascinating both in 1986 and now by reading his notes alongside Professor Hall's. Political life was a given for perhaps a majority of Jewish immigrants; it was so much a part of communal and intellectual life in Eastern Europe for Jews, in a way different from that of the typical European peasant or worker. Even though the majority of the Yishuv were city dwellers, they came to support the Labor Zionists leadership and organizations. Even though a lot of immigration such as in the Third Aliyah was organized via the Labor social organizations, who both selected for and taught their own ideology, there was an acceptance of ideological diversity within Zionist institutions. Partly this was because even the Labor camp was divided into strong subgroups, and was essentially its own coalition, partly said Bartal that the social basis and nationalist beliefs of most Labor Zionists and Revisionists were not dramatically different. When Ben Gurion emerged as the leader, there were elements of his program that drew on or at least were well-aligned with the desire for a state with a substantial territory and the development of a military capacity to make sure that happened.
I see one puzzle within my notes, which is that the city dwellers were the majority of the Yishuv, were politically engaged, were many of them pragmatic vis-a-vis Arabs because they lived in cities many of which were mixed at least through the '20s — and yet there was no classic or very large political expression of bourgeois, middle-class, or classical liberal politics. Once the violence increased between Arabs and Jews, city dwellers were drawn toward either Ben Gurion's or Jabotinsky's versions of a strong response. Mandate Palestine seems to defy most theories of political development; it followed its own path, particularly within the Jewish community.
I said in an earlier post I would return to the question of the language of "colonization." All I find in my notes for the part of the course after World War I are a couple pieces that don't all fit together. All of these things seem present but I can't tell in what degree most of them, or which accounts the most for anything that happened: a patronizing attitude toward Arabs, that the presence of Jews would lift them and benefit them; an idealism among some Jews, especially the most anti-traditional and anti-European, that Arabs were to be admired and imitated even as a kind of pure, original type of Eretz Yisrael Jew; a pragmatic desire not to provoke Arabs by creating new settlements in primarily Arab areas; a desire to cultivate "Hebrew labor" that won out over solidarity with Arab workers; a growing sense in the '40s that expanding the Jewish presence to areas with Arab villages was a strategic necessity; a majority Zionist shift toward seeing Arab violence and the British tilt toward the Arabs as the major factor in Arab-Jewish relations; the fact that the British invested in supporting all manner of Jewish political and economic institutions and development and very little in doing the same for the Arabs.
I found it interesting how Bartal accounted for the merger within Labor Zionism that created Mapai, the party that would be the dominant one in the Yishuv and eventually the Labor Party in Israel (dominant though never the majority). He explained that it came from a merger between two parties that continued some of the classic early Zionist trends. Hapo'el Hatzair was based in A.D. Gordon's philosophy of working the land and developing a new Jewish character through the connection to the land. Achdut Ha'avodah, itself a successor to part of Poalei Tziyon (this is starting to sound like the amphitheater scene in Life of Brian) was grounded in the synthesis of socialism and nationalism of Ber Borochov. Bartal said that each of these two earlier parties had to make a fundamental concession — Achdut Ha'avodah that the conditions for a socialist vision were not present to any significant degree, and Ha'poel Hatzair that a higher degree of political organization was necessary. This combination of political organization and ideological adaptability would be the hallmark of Ben Gurion all the way through, and already had been for him throughout the period after World War I, so I learned here and especially later in some reading about him a few years ago.
I was intrigued by the impact of World War I and then the Russian Revolution on the dynamics of the Zionist movement and the Jewish population of Palestine. Zionism even though the teens had been substantially driven by its leaders in Russia; suddenly all that activity was illegal and being squelched. The reality of the war in Ottoman lands was such that Old Yishuv, mostly religious, suffered at home while many immigrants of the Second Aliyah were deported or menaced as foreigners. The balance of leadership and power shifted toward the newer leaders, even beyond what the relative population of religious vs. new socialist immigrants might have suggested. The Zionist leadership had to adapt to the fall of the Ottomans', the emergence of the British, the anticipation of American influence and the role of the relatively new large population of American Jews — all within the course of a decade or two.
Bartal said that Arab nationalism in Palestine, as something distinct from pan-Arab nationalism, emerged in the late 20s directly in response to the durability of Zionist settlement and the support of the British for the policies of the Balfour Declaration. He said most of the press of the emerging Arab nationalism was about the Jews, rather than internal; and about the sense that the British were behind it all even while Arabs sensed that the British police supported them. Bartal said what I think I have said lately, that it was really only the first decade of the mandate where Britain actively and fairly completely supported Zionist activities. Even so, the decisions of the '30s to restrict Jewish immigration and even to support an Arab state were seen by the Arabs not as a change of heart but as a response to their pressure, and in any case the development of Jewish institutions of governance and society and economic activity continued, so the British remained a mistrusted if not hated party for the Arabs. There was no serious movement of coexistence probably on either side pretty soon after the 1929 revolt.
This leaves me with a question that I will be asking at our upcoming talk with Professor Derek Penslar at our shul, which is why anyone thought the UN partition plan stood a chance when it was proposed or approved.
In my notes prepping for the final, I see Bartal's memorable N map of Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, in areas with fewer Arabs and a notation that until the '40s Jewish policy was to steer clear of Arab areas and conflict to a great degree when it came to building communities. There is also his statement that Jewish history since the 1700s is all about the response to Emancipation, and Zionism is best seen as one of the many responses, which include denominational forms of Judaism and other movements — and that Zionism despite its radical program of removing Jews from Europe was not a rejection of modernity but its own embrace of it.
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