History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  A few Zionists had foreseen that to use Palestine to settle ‘the Jewish problem’ might, in turn, create ‘the Arab problem’. Ahad Ha’Am, who had visited Erez Israel, had written an article ‘The Truth from Palestine’, in 1891, six years before Herzl launched his movement. He issued a warning. It was a great mistake, he said, for Zionists to dismiss the Arabs as stupid savages who did not realize what was happening. In fact,

  the Arab, like all semites, possesses a sharp intelligence and great cunning…. [The Arabs] see through our activity in the country and its purpose but they keep silent, since for the time being they do not fear any danger for their future. When however the life of our people in Palestine develops to the point when the indigenous people feel threatened, they will not easily give way any longer. How careful must we be in dealing with an alien people in whose midst we want to settle! How essential it is to practise kindness and esteem towards them!…If ever the Arab judges the action of his rivals to be oppression or the robbing of his rights, then even if he is silent and waits for his time, the rage will stay alive in his heart.28

  This warning was largely ignored. The scale of the settlement pushed up the price of land, and Jewish settlers and agencies found the Arabs hard bargainers: ‘every dunam of land needed for our colonization work [had] to be bought in the open market’, complained Weizmann, ‘at fantastic prices which rose ever higher as our work developed. Every improvement we made raised the value of the remaining land in that particular area, and the Arab landowners lost no time in cashing in. We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold.’29 Hence the Jews tended to see the Arabs as grasping proprietors—or, indeed, as simple labourers. They eased their consciences by the thought that in this, and many other ways, the Arabs were benefiting from Zionism. But as a rule they ignored them, as merely part of the human scenery. Ahad Ha’Am noted as late as 1920: ‘Since the beginning of the Palestinian colonization we have always considered the Arab people as non-existent.’

  Arab nationalism at last became dynamic during the war, when Arab troops fought on both sides and were bid for by both sides. The Allies, for their part, issued during the war a lot of post-dated cheques to countless nationalities whose support they needed. When the peace came some of the cheques bounced and the Arabs, in particular, found they had been handed a stumer. Instead of the great Arab state, they got French protectorates in Syria and Lebanon, and British protectorates in Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. In the dealing and fighting that marked the ‘peace’, the only Arab clan to emerge triumphant were the Saudis in Arabia. The Emir Feisal, head of the Hashemites, whom Britain had backed, had to be content with Transjordan. He was well disposed towards Jewish settlement, believing it would raise Arab living standards. ‘We Arabs,’ he wrote to Felix Frankfurter, 3 March 1919, ‘especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement…. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.’30

  But Feisal overestimated both the numbers and the courage of Arab moderates prepared to work with the Jews. The British had in fact been warned during the war that if the rumours of the Jewish home proved true, they must expect trouble: ‘Politically’, wrote one of Sykes’ best Arab informants, ‘a Jewish state in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.’31 The British establishment in charge, Allenby, General Bols, the Chief of Staff, and Sir Ronald Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem, knew this very well and tried to play down the national home idea. The Balfour Declaration, ran the order, ‘is to be treated as extremely confidential and is on no account for any kind of publication’. At one stage they even proposed that Feisal should be made King of Palestine.32 But the fact that the British authorities tried hard to calm the Arabs-and so were promptly accused of anti-Semitism by some of the Jews—made no difference. The post-war return of Jewish refugees from Egypt to Palestine, and the arrival of more, fleeing pogroms by the White Russians in the Ukraine, marked the point at which the Arabs, in Ha’Am’s words, began to feel threatened. Early in March 1920 there was a series of Arab attacks on Jewish settlements in the Galilee, during one of which Trumpeldor was killed; and they were followed by Arab riots in Jerusalem. Jabotinsky, bringing his self-defence force into action for the first time, was arrested, together with other members of the Haganah, tried by a military court and given fifteen years’ hard labour. Arab rioters were convicted and imprisoned too, among them Haji Amin al-Husaini, who fled the country and was sentenced to ten years in absentia.

  In the uproar that followed the riots, Lloyd George made a fatal error. Seeking to appease the Jews, who claimed that British troops had done little to protect Jewish lives and property, he sent out Samuel as high commissioner. The Jews rejoiced, claimed victory, and the moment Samuel arrived overwhelmed him with complaints and demands. Weizmann was furious. ‘Mr Samuel will be utterly disgusted,’ he wrote to Dr Edu at the Zionist office in Palestine, ‘and will turn his back on the Jewish community, just as the others did, and our best chance will have gone.’33 In fact that was not the real problem. Samuel did not mind Jewish importuning. What he minded was Arab accusations of unfairness because he was a Jew. Samuel always tried to have things both ways. He wanted to be a Jew without joining any Zionist organization. Now he wanted to promote a Jewish national home without offending the Arabs. The thing could not be done. It was inherent in the entire Zionist concept that the Palestine Arabs could not expect full rights within the main area of Jewish settlement. But the Balfour Declaration specifically safeguarded the civil and religious rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ and Samuel took this to mean that the Arabs must have equal rights and opportunities. Indeed, he regarded this phrase as the axiom of his mission. ‘The Zionism that is practical’, he wrote, ‘is the Zionism that fulfils this essential condition.’34 Samuel believed he could square this particular circle. Not believing in Yahweh, his Bible was Lord Morley’s disastrous book, On Compromise.

  Hence as the Jews quickly discovered, he came not to appease but to lecture. Even before he arrived as high commissioner, he defined ‘the Arab problem’ as the ‘main consideration’. He criticized the Zionists for not having recognized ‘the force and value of the Arab nationalist movement’, which was ‘very real and no bluff’. If anyone had to be appeased, it was the Arabs: ‘The only alternative is a policy of coercion which is wrong in principle and likely to prove unsuccessful in practice.’ The Jews must make ‘considerable sacrifices’. ‘Unless there is very careful steering,’ he wrote to Weizmann, 10 August 1921, ‘it is upon the Arab rock that the Zionist ship may be wrecked.’ He told the Palestine Jewish leaders: ‘You yourselves are inviting a massacre which will come as long as you disregard the Arabs. You pass over them in silence…. You have done nothing to come to an understanding. You know only how to protest against the government…. Zionism has not yet done a thing to obtain the consent of the inhabitants, and without this consent immigration will not be possible.’35

  In a way this was very good advice. The difficulty for the Zionists was that, in the troubled days of the early 1920s, they were finding it very difficult to sustain the effort of settlement at all and had little energy and resources for gestures towards the Arabs. In any case, while giving them such advice Samuel’s other actions ruled out the possibility of taking it. He believed in equivalence, in being even-handed. He did not grasp that, just as there was no place for equivalence as between a Jew and an anti-Semite, so you could not be even-handed between Jewish settlers and those Arabs who did not want them there at all. His first act was to amnesty the 1920 rioters. The object was to release Jabotinsky. But equivalence meant a pardon for the Arab extremists who had started the riots in the first place.

  Then Samuel, in turn, made a fatal mistake. One difficulty the British experienced in dealing with the Arabs was that they had no official leader, King Feisal’s writ running no further than the Jordan. So they invented the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In March 1921 its existing holder, he
ad of an important local family, died. His younger brother was the notorious rioter Haji Amin al-Husaini, now pardoned and back on the political scene. The procedure for creating a new mufti was for a local electoral college of pious Arab Moslems to choose three candidates and for government to confirm one of them. Haji Amin, then in his mid-twenties, was qualified neither by age nor by learning for the post. He had been passionately anti-British ever since the Balfour Declaration. He had a violent, lifelong hatred for Jews. In addition to his ten-year sentence he was down on the police files as a dangerous agitator. The electoral college was mainly moderate and, not surprisingly, Haji Amin came bottom of the poll, getting only eight votes. A moderate and learned man, Sheikh Hisam al-Din, was chosen and Samuel was glad to confirm him. Then the al Husaini family and the nationalist extreme wing—those who had led the 1920 riots—began a vicious campaign of denigration. They plastered Jerusalem with posters attacking the electoral college: ‘The accursed tratiors, whom you all know, have combined with the Jews to have one of their party appointed mufti.’36

  Unfortunately the British staff contained a former architect and assistant to Sir Ronald Storrs called Ernest T. Richmond, who acted as adviser to the high commissioner on Moslem affairs. He was a passionate anti-Zionist, whom the chief secretary, Sir Gilbert Claydon, termed ‘the counterpart of the Zionist organization’. ‘He is a declared enemy of the Zionist policy and almost as frankly declared an enemy of the Jewish policy of HM Government,’ ran a Colonial Office secret minute; ‘government…would gain very greatly by excluding from its secretariat so very partisan a figure as Mr Richmond.’37 It was Richmond who persuaded the moderate sheikh to stand down and then convinced Samuel that, in the light of the agitation, it would be a friendly gesture towards the Arabs to let Haji Amin become Grand Mufti. Samuel saw the young man on 11 April 1921 and accepted ‘assurances that the influence of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquillity’. Three weeks later there were riots in Jaffa and elsewhere in which forty-three Jews were murdered.38

  This appointment to what was regarded as a minor post in an unimportant British protectorate turned into one of the most tragic and decisive errors of the century. It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haji Amin became Grand Mufti. Samuel compounded his initial misjudgment by promoting the formation of a Supreme Moslem Council, which the mufti and his associates promptly captured and turned into a tyrannical instrument of terror. Still worse, he encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to make contact with their neighbours and promote pan-Arabism. Hence the mufti was able to infect the pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism. He was a soft-spoken killer and organizer of killers. The great majority of his victims were fellow Arabs. His prime purpose was to silence moderation in Arab Palestine, and he succeeded completely. He became Britain’s outstanding opponent in the Middle East, and in due course he made common cause with the Nazis and strongly supported Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. But the principal victims of his unbalanced personality were the ordinary people of Arab Palestine. As the historian Elie Kedourie has well observed, ‘It was the Husainis who directed the political strategy of the Palestinians until 1947 and they led them to utter ruin.’39

  The sombre achievement of the Grand Mufti was to open a chasm between the Jewish and Arab leadership which has never since been bridged. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, a year before he acquired his authority, the British mandate and the Balfour Declaration had been officially confirmed as part of the Versailles settlement, and the Arab and Jewish delegations shared a table together at the Royal Hotel to celebrate the event. By February 1939, when the Tripartite Conference met in London to try to resolve Arab-Jewish differences, the Arabs refused to sit with the Jews under any circumstances.40 This was the mufti’s doing, and in the long run it was the failure to negotiate directly with the Jews, forcing them into unilateral action, which lost the Arabs Palestine.

  All the same, there was an inherent conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs which pointed not to a unitary state, in which both races had rights, but to partition in some form. If this fact had been recognized from the start, the chances of a rational solution would have been much greater. Unfortunately, the mandate was born in the Versailles ear, a time when it was widely assumed that universal ideals and the ties of human brotherhood could overcome the more ancient and primitive sources of discord. Why could not the Arabs and Jews develop harmoniously together, under the benign eye of Britain and the ultimate supervision of the League of Nations? But Arabs and Jews were not on a level of equivalence. The Arabs already constituted several states; soon there would be many. The Jews had none. It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule.

  This was implicit in the Balfour Declaration, as explained to the meeting of the Imperial Cabinet by Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, on 22 June 1921. Arthur Meighen, the Canadian Prime Minister, asked him: ‘How do you define our responsibilities in relation to Palestine under Mr Balfour’s pledge?’ Churchill: ‘To do our best to make an honest effort to give the Jews a chance to make a national home for themselves.’ Meighen: ‘And to give them control of the government?’ Churchill: ‘If in the course of many years they become a majority in the country, they naturally would take it over.’ Meighen: ‘Pro rata with the Arab?’ Churchill: ‘Pro rata with the Arab. We made an equal pledge that we would not turn the Arab off his land or invade his political and social rights.’41

  That being so, the whole future of Palestine turned on the issue of Jewish immigration. It was another axiom of Zionism that all Jews should be free to return to the national home. The British government initially accepted this, or rather took it for granted. In all the early discussions over Palestine as a national home, the assumption was that not enough Jews would wish to go there, rather than too many. As Lloyd George put it, ‘The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing.’42

  Nevertheless, immigration soon became the issue. It was the point on which Arab resistance increasingly concentrated. Nor was this surprising, since the Jews resisted the British desire to develop representative institutions as long as they were in a minority. As Jabotinsky put it, ‘We are afraid, and we don’t want to have a normal constitution here, since the Palestine situation is not normal. The majority of its “electors” have not yet returned to the country.’43 As it happened, this vulnerable argument was not put to the test, since the Arabs, for their own reasons, decided (August 1922) not to co-operate with British policy either. But they knew from the start that Jewish immigration was the key to ultimate Jewish political power and their agitation was designed to stop it. Samuel fell for this tactic. One of his gestures towards the Arabs, when he took up his post, had been to allow the reappearance of Falastin, an extremist Arab journal closed down by the Turks in 1914 for ‘incitement to race hatred’. This, the appointment of the Grand Mufti and similar acts led directly to the pogrom of May 1921, which was incited by the fear of Jews ‘taking over’. Samuel’s response to the riots was to suspend Jewish immigration completely for a time. Three boatloads of Jews fleeing from massacres in Poland and the Ukraine were sent back to Istanbul. Samuel insisted that, as he put it, the ‘impossibility of mass immigration’ must be ‘definitely recognized’. He told David Edu that he would not have ‘a second Ireland’ and that ‘Zionist policy could not be driven through’.44 This led to many bitter Jewish reactions. Edu called Samuel ‘Judas’. Ruppin said he had become ‘a traitor to the Jewish cause in their eyes’. ‘The Jewish national h
ome of the war promises’, Weizmann complained to Churchill in July 1921, ‘has now been transformed into an Arab national home.’45

  This was hyperbole. The Jewish national home grew only slowly in the 1920s but British restrictions on immigration were not the main inhibiting factor. After the difficulties of his first year, Samuel emerged as a successful administrator. His successor, Lord Plumer (1925-8), was even better. Modern services were created, law and order imposed and Palestine, for the first time in many centuries, began to enjoy a modest prosperity. Yet the Jews failed to take advantage of this background to create the rapid build-up of the Yishuv which the 1917 Declaration had made possible. Why?

  One reason was that the Jewish leaders were divided among themselves on both objects and methods. Weizmann was a patient man, who had always believed that the creation of the Zionist state would take a long time, and that the more solidly the infrastructure and foundations were built, the more likely it would be to survive and flourish. He was content to work within Britain’s lengthy time-span. What he wanted to see emerge in Palestine, in the first place, were social, cultural, educational and economic institutions which were excellent in themselves and would endure. As he put it, ‘Nahalal, Deganiah, the University, the Rutenberg electrical works, the Dead Sea concession, meant much more to me politically than all the promises of great governments and great political parties.’46