The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  The earlier day when Arab nationalist and Zionist could work together, as they did in the first honeymoon period after the war, came to an end for two reasons. One was Britain’s failure to fulfil the promises made the Arabs on the basis of which their leaders accepted Zionism for Palestine. The other was the Jewish demand, first by implication and then explicitly, for a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish State slogan has made political cooperation between Jew and Arab impossible, and left the Jewish homeland completely dependent on British support. The British, feeling that the Jews had to support the Empire under any circumstances, have more and more made their concessions to the Arabs. These concessions have been at the expense of the Yishuv, of French interests, and of the minorities in the Middle East generally. It is because the Jews understand this and feel deeply the needs of their homeless brethren in Europe that they have launched the present civil-disobedience campaign. They scent an attempt to liquidate the Yishuv, and they scent another cruel Evian farce beneath Bevin’s fine talk of finding a world solution for the Jewish problem. And I must confess that after being in London, and with all due respect for the good intentions of British Labor, I agree with Palestinian Jewry.

  I came away with a great liking and respect for the English people but a great distrust of their officials. I understand the average Englishman’s resentment over American interference, and I favor not only American sharing of responsibility but an international solution for the Middle East. British fears of an Arab uprising largely reflect a hobgoblin of their own making; the great powers can impose any solution they choose. I think the equitable solution would be a bi-national state for Palestine and international trusteeship until population parity has been reached between Jews and Arabs. I think the powers must recognize the Arab aspiration for some kind of league or federation and put bi-national Palestine into it, and I think they must then provide some form of international guaranty for the Christian Lebanon, the Jewish community in Palestine, and other minorities in the East, but a guaranty free from the taint of “capitulations” in Egypt, a system of protection much abused both by the imperialist powers and the minorities themselves. A settlement of this kind depends, of course, on whether London and Washington are sincerely concerned with stability in the Middle East or merely with appeasing the Arabs in preparation for a new war against the Soviet Union. I do not speak from surmise when I report that from Ernest Bevin down, the British Foreign Office and the Colonial Office seem to be suffering from an obsession on this score, and the Jews are its principle victims.

  A bi-national settlement would provide enough immigration certificates over, say, the next five or ten years—about 650,000—to take care of all Jews who must be given a refuge in Palestine. It would establish a Jewish community strong enough to hold its own in the Arab world. It would end Palestinian Arab fears of a Jewish state. It would genuinely fulfil Britain’s obligations to both peoples, and it would lay the basis for a stable and developing order in the Middle East, in which British and world interests in communications and oil could be adequately safeguarded without infringing Arab independence. In that context, if the Jews give one-tenth the devotion to Arab relations that they have given to the land, they can build a secure homeland for themselves among their Semitic brethren. This way, I am deeply convinced, lies the only lasting and equitable solution for Palestine and the Middle East.

  The Racist Challenge in Israel

  By 1964, the fledgling state of Israel had grown and developed enormously, with a thriving economy and a strong security apparatus. In this travel dispatch, Stone reports the signs of progress—and warns of the seeds of future conflicts in the continuing animosity between Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Israel.

  . . .

  June 1, 1964

  TO SEE ISRAEL AGAIN after eight years is to be struck at every turn by the triumphant evidence of progress. The flood of new immigrants, which has more than tripled its population since the achievement of independence eighteen years ago, is reflected in a continuous building boom. The dismal acres of shanty towns (ma’abarôth) hastily erected for new immigrants were still distressingly visible in 1956. Today they have given way (except for a hard-core of 3,000 which still clings to the old hovels) before whole new neighborhoods—and cities—of towering apartment houses. The roads have widened, the traffic jams grown worse. The country throbs with expansive vitality. Israel has become an affluent society. Even in the once Spartan kibbutzim, the outhouse and the cold outside shower have been replaced by private lavatories and running hot water, provided by individual solar heaters. Everywhere there are flowers. Even in Tel Aviv the whole new northern extension of that rather grubby city has become downright pretty with tree-lined boulevards and flower gardens. Not all the changes are to the taste of those who loved the old Palestine. The Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv has become as oversumptuous as its counterparts in Miami. The Desert Inn outside Beer Sheva, no longer a sleepy Bedouin town, might be in luxurious Palm Springs, except for the mezuzoth beside every door and the Arab-with-camel on duty at the entrance. The dolce vita has arrived, as the old-timers complain, complete with juvenile delinquents and call girls.

  The other big change since the spring of 1956 is in the sense of security. Then infiltrating fedayeen from Egyptian training centers in the Gaza strip and Sinai were shooting up settlements at night and making travel after dark hazardous. The Sinai campaign later that year may have been a humiliating setback for England and France, but for Israel it put a stop to these terrorist raids, smashed Czech and Soviet arms dumps across the Egyptian border and established a UN force at the narrow straits where Elath’s access to the Red Sea had been shut off by Nasser. This much was accomplished, whatever the wisdom of the retaliatory spiral which led up to the Sinai campaign, and its cost in the alienation of Afro-Asian sympathy from Israel.* Today one can travel everywhere with assurance. Unusually heavy rains had turned the country greener and lovelier than we had ever seen it in seven previous trips. Our visit was a succession of unforgettable scenes: Haifa’s gleaming harbor from the top of Mt. Carmel, the wide lawns of Mishmar Ha-Emek, the rich green vistas of the once malarial Valley of Israel, the holy places of Nazareth, Tiberius and Safad, lunch on the eastern shores of Lake Galilee at Ein Gev within the shadow of the Syrian border, the mauve hills at twilight which look down on the fertile collectives in that narrow “finger” of Israel which stretches northward between Lebanon and Syria. Later we saw Ashdod, Israel’s biggest seaport rising on the dunes where the Philistines once dwelt, and Kiryat Dan, a new complex of factories and farms to the north of Beer Sheva. We saw old friends in kibbutzim like Shoval and Hatzor nearby which were once lonely military outposts and are now thriving centers of rural industry as well as agriculture. Since 1959 the industrial byproducts of the collective settlements equal or surpass their agricultural output. The climax was our climb up those venerable hills to Jerusalem. There one can still step backward in time, and savor ways of life centuries apart. A fashionable crowd takes tea on the veranda of the King David overlooking the walls of the Old City and a few blocks away little boys in ear curls and suspenders rock back and forth over their pious schoolbooks in the back-alley yeshivahs of Mea Shearim, keeping alive a medieval universe of orthodox Jewry.

  Beneath the prosperous and picturesque surface there are problems grave enough to threaten Israel’s future. But for those who have seen the crises of its earlier years it is impossible not to be optimistic. I first saw Palestine November 2, 1945, the day the Haganah began the war against the British by blowing up the watch towers from which they laid in wait for illegal immigrant ships; it seemed hopeless for so small a force to challenge so great an empire. In the spring of 1946 I traveled from Poland to Palestine through the British blockade with illegal immigrants on one of these Jewish Mayflowers. In 1947 I saw the British impose martial law on Tel Aviv in an effort to wipe out the terrorist campaign against them. In 1948 I was a witness to the joint attack of the Arab States on what was then an ill-prepared ti
ny community of 650,000 Jews.* In 1949 and 1950 I saw the lack of food and the letdown in morale which followed the war and the onset of the Arab blockade. To have seen such odds overcome makes it hard to take too pessimistically the problems of the dynamic, confident and expanding Israel of today.

  They are nonetheless serious. The first is fiscal: Israel is living beyond its means. Its rate of economic growth is topped only by Japan’s and few countries can match its steep rate of increase in exports. But in 1963 its adverse surplus of imports over exports was still $420 million and in the first quarter of 1964 its trade deficit rose to three times that in the first quarter of 1963. Capital imports have been running ahead of the trade deficit so that the government’s cash reserves have been growing. But of total capital imports in 1963 of $500 million, $162 million was in German reparations and restitution payments which will now decline sharply. Israel will soon have to meet the challenge of austerity and better distribution of income. Its affluent society, like America’s, has little-seen but wide fringes of poverty. An ostentatious luxury by the rich does not make this more bearable. And there, as in America, the problem of poverty is intensified by color and “race.” Israel has a double “Negro” problem. The darker Jews from the Orient and North Africa, as well as the Arab minority, suffer from prejudice.

  The usual Jewish attitude toward the Arabs is one of contemptuous superiority. Our driver northward was a Jew who had fled from the Nazi advance into Hungary but that did not save him from racist habits. When I suggested that we give a boy a lift, he refused, saying the boy was an Arab. When I asked what was the difference, he said Arabs smelled bad. I said that is what anti-Semites said of us Jews in the outside world but this made no impression. His attitude, it is painful to report, is typical. Israel is a country not only of full employment but of labor shortages. Thousands of Arabs do the menial tasks of Tel Aviv. They find it as hard to obtain decent lodgings as Negroes do in America and for the same reasons; many “pass” as Jews to circumvent prejudice. In Haifa I visited the only secondary school attended by both Jews and Arabs but even there the classes turned out to be separate. The State of Israel has done much in a material way for the Arabs but the sense of humiliation outweighs any improvement. The spectacle fills one with despair. For if Jews, after all their experience of suffering, prove no better once in the majority than the rest of mankind, what hope for a world as torn apart as ours is by tribalism and hate?

  More progress is being made in dealing with Israel’s other integration problem—that of the Jews from the Orient and Africa. For these—unlike the Arabs—are people Israel wants. That does not save them from being looked down upon. Half the people of Israel are now from countries where Yiddish is unknown. In Israel, for the first time, the tender language of East European ghettoes has become an upper class tongue. The Ashkenazi, the Yiddish-speaking Jews, hold the commanding positions in the community. The Sephardi, or Oriental Jews, speaking Arabic, French or the Old Castilian of the Spain from which they were driven five centuries ago, are the hewers of wood and drawers of water. They make up half the population but their children are only 15 per cent of those in secondary schools and only 5 per cent of those in the university. Their cultural level is lower. They cannot afford to send their children to the higher schools. Discrimination has given them solidarity. “Communal” tickets have begun to appear in local elections, pitting Sephardi against Ashkenazi. The right wing parties are making demagogic appeals to the Oriental Jews. On the other side one Yiddish speaking meshuganah has just published a book to prove that the Yiddish-speaking from the West are the only true Jews! The government is trying its best to give preferences to the Orientals where equally qualified. It fears lest Israel run into a situation like that of Belgium where after 150 years the conflict between Walloon and Fleming divides the nation. Fortunately the common language of Hebrew, and the melting pot of school and Army, are available to ease Israel’s divisions. Education is seen as the key to amalgamation but education costs money and here we come to Israel’s other big headache, that of defense.

  The amount spent on defense is a secret but some notion of its magnitude may be gathered from a veiled figure in the budget. This shows that about a third goes for an item called “Security, special budget and reserve.” This has been rising. It was less than $300 million or 28.3 per cent of the 1963/64 budget and close to $400 million or 30.9 per cent of the 1964/65 budget. The next largest item was education, but this is less than 8 per cent of the budget. Were the arms race in the Middle East to end, Israel could afford to make secondary education free, too, as elementary education is now. Nothing could do more to develop her human resources and end the rankling inferiority of Oriental Jew and Arab. Another way to measure the impact of the arms race is to notice that “security, special budget and reserve” amounts to more than German reparations, UJA, private gifts and donations of food surpluses put together. If Israel enjoyed real peace, she would no longer be dependent on the bread of charity.

  However one looks at it, peace is Israel’s overriding problem. It’s hard for a poor country to keep up with the Joneses in armament. “In the war for independence,” said one of those tireless old-timers who make Israel the dynamic community that it is, “a Spitfire was hot stuff. We could buy one secondhand for £2,000. Now the Mystère costs us $750,000; the Mirage, $1,000,000; the super-Mirage, $1,250,000. But planes and tanks are given to Egypt by the Russians for very little. They gave Nasser fifteen submarines and a flotilla of Komars, swift mosquito boats armed with missiles which can shoot from thirty kilometers offshore. Now we’re afraid Egypt may get enriched uranium from Moscow, too.” Between Russian aid and German scientists there is a real fear that Egypt may some day be the instrument for a second go at Hitler’s “final solution.” Khrushchev’s visit stirred deep anxiety.

  “The Government of Israel regrets,” Prime Minister Eshkol told the Knesset pointedly May 20, “that in spite of the Egyptian ruler’s aggressive declarations against Israel he receives political support and supplies of arms from sources that generally advocate peace and coexistence.” It is tragic that Israel could not have joined its neighbor in rejoicing over so fruitful and historic an achievement as the Aswan Dam. And it was mischief-making demagogy for Khrushchev to join the Arab States in stigmatizing as an imperialist plot the beginnings of the Jordan water scheme which could benefit the whole area. It does no more than put to use millions of precious gallons otherwise wasted in the Dead Sea.

  To inflame the Arab-Israeli quarrel is to risk no small conflagration. Eshkol’s statement on the eve of his visit to the United States reiterated previous denials that atomic development in Israel was designed for other than peaceful purposes. But doubts persist. There are circles in Israel which see nuclear arms as a necessity for survival. They fear that neo-Nazi German scientists are using Egypt as a proving ground for “unconventional” weapons. The arms race between Egypt and Israel can become the next hot spot in the proliferation of nuclear arms. A committee of distinguished scholars and scientists in Israel have began to agitate for a denuclearized Arab-Israeli area but there is no echo from Egypt, where a police state represses free opinion. Behind the quarrel which is dividing Israel’s ruling party, the Mapai—the quarrel between Ben-Gurion and Eshkol over the irrepressible Lavon affair—is a struggle between younger military men who put their faith in force and an Old Guard which wishes to steer a course of moderation away from the apocalyptic adventurism of Ben-Gurion. The Suez affair showed that B.G. and the military were able to carry on secretly behind the back of civilian government. They might do so again. Now is the time to prevent Egypt and Israel from wasting their substance and endangering the world in the blind alley of a nuclear arms race.

  * * *

  *See Michael Bar-Zohar’s Suez: Ultra Secret, newly published in Paris, and Simha Flapan’s critical article on it in the May issue of The New Outlook, a Middle East monthly devoted to Arab-Jewish reconciliation.

  *In Underground to Palestine (19
46) I told the story of the illegal trip and in This Is Israel (1948) the story of how Israel won its war of independence.

  Holy War

  In the Six-Day War of June, 1967, Israel dealt a dramatic blow to Arab dreams of destroying the country by routing Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies and tripling their own territory through the seizure of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. In the wake of this Israeli victory, Stone calls for “a reexamination of Zionist ideology” in search of a lasting modus vivendi for Jews and Arabs in Palestine—while sardonically acknowledging the seeming hopelessness of the conflict: “If God as some say now is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.”

  . . .

  August 3, 1967

  STRIPPED OF PROPAGANDA AND SENTIMENT, the Palestine problem is, simply, the struggle of two different peoples for the same strip of land. For the Jews, the establishment of Israel was a Return, with all the mystical significance the capital R implies. For the Arabs it was another invasion. This has led to three wars between them in twenty years. Each has been a victory for the Jews. With each victory the size of Israel has grown. So has the number of Arab homeless.