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Palestine and Israel
A Challenge to Justice
By John Quigley Duke University Press
Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9745-8
CHAPTER 1
Zionist Settlement in Palestine: The British Connection
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... to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.—Holy Bible, Exodus 3:8
A movement formed in the late nineteenth century among Jews in Europe to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, a land that during the first millenium B.C. had been the site of a Hebrew kingdom. The movement took its name—Zionism—from Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and its purpose was to escape discrimination in Europe. Mass killings of Jews had erupted from time to time going back to the eleventh century during the time of the Crusades when Jews had been forcibly converted to Christianity. In the fourteenth century Jews were held responsible for the Black Death, and large numbers were executed. Jews were frequently expelled from their places of residence, and in many places they were forced to reside in designated sectors.
The French Revolution improved the situation of Jews in Western Europe, but not in Eastern Europe. Most Eastern European Jews lived in Russia or Poland, which was ruled by Russia at the time, and in Russia Jews were by law restricted to residence in a so-called pale, as well as limited in the professions they could pursue. After several decades in which these restrictions were relaxed, in 1881 reactionary Alexander III became tsar and the situation of Jews worsened. Alexander III excluded Jews from the legal profession and from the right to vote in local government assemblies. He reduced the area of the pale and forbade Jews to settle in rural areas, even within the pale. By law he forbade Jews to take Christian given names. Ultimately, serious mob attacks against Jews (pogroms) occurred in Russia and Poland in the late nineteenth century and, as a result of Alexander Ill's policies, Jews left Russia in large numbers. Most went to the United States, but some went to Palestine.
In 1897 Zionism emerged as a European-wide political movement with the first World Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzerland, where Theodor Herzl, an editor of the influential Viennese paper, Neue Freie Piesse, had emerged as a leader. Herzl's 1896 pamphlet Dei Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) had called for a Jewish state in Palestine, and its publication in Vienna made a great impact. Not surprisingly, Zionism had its strongest following in Russia, but even there it was only one of several nationalist currents in Jewry. Despite the difficult circumstances of life, most Jews remained in Eastern Europe and of those leaving most still preferred the United States.
In Palestine, an Arab-populated country under the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, Zionist immigrants set up agricultural settlements on purchased land. "From the very beginning," wrote Ariel Hecht, an Israeli analyst of land tenure in Palestine, "it was clear to the leaders of the Zionist movement that the acquisition of land was a sine qua non towards the realisation of their dream." Land was not acquired in a random fashion. The effort, wrote Israeli General Yigal Allon, was "to establish a chain of villages on one continuous area of Jewish land." The Arabs, soon realizing that the immigrant's aim was to establish a Jewish state, began to oppose Zionism. As early as 1891 Zionist leader, Ahad Ha'am, wrote that the Arabs "understand very well what we are doing and what we are aiming at."
In 1901 the World Zionist Organization formed a company, the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund), to buy land for Jewish settlers. According to its charter, the Fund would buy land in "Palestine, Syria, and other parts of Turkey in Asia and the Peninsula of Sinai." The aim of the Fund was "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people." Fund director, Abraham Granovsky, called "land redemption" the "most vital operation in establishing Jewish Palestine."
The Fund's land could not be sold to anyone and could be leased only to a Jew, an "unincorporated body of Jews," or a Jewish company that promoted Jewish settlement. A lessee was forbidden to sublease. Herzl considered land acquisition under a tenure system that kept it in Jewish hands as the key to establishing Zionism in Palestine. "Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us," he wrote, "selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back." The Fund thus kept land as a kind of trustee for a future state.
The Fund purchased large tracts owned by absentee landowners. Most of this land was tilled by farmers whose families had held it for generations with possessory rights recognized by customary law. Regrettably for many of these families, in the late nineteenth century Turkey had instituted a land registration system that led to wealthy absentees gaining legal title to land, often by questionable means. After this occurred, the family farmers continued in possession—as tenants—and considered themselves to retain their customary right to the land, although that was no longer legally the case.
At the turn of the century the better farmland in Palestine was being cultivated. In 1882 a British traveler, Laurence Oliphant, reported that the Plain of Esdraelon in northern Palestine, an area in which the Fund purchased land, was "a huge green lake of waving wheat." This meant that the Fund could not acquire land without displacing Arab farmers. A delegate to a 1905 Zionist congress, Yitzhak Epstein, warned: "Can it be that the dispossessed will keep silent and calmly accept what is being done to them? Will they not ultimately arise to regain, with physical force, that which they were deprived of through the power of gold? Will they not seek justice from the strangers that placed themselves over their land?"
An element of the Zionist concept of "land redemption" was that the land should be worked by Jews. This meant that Arabs should not be hired as farm laborers. While this policy was not uniformly implemented, it gained adherence. In 1913 Ha'am objected to it. "I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people ... if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve power?"
But Herzl viewed the taking of land and expulsion of Arabs as complementary aspects of Zionism. It would be necessary, he thought, to get the Arabs out of Palestine. "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Some Zionist leaders advocated moving Palestine Arabs to neighboring countries by force if necessary. Moshe Menuhin, a student at the Herzlia Gymnasium in Palestine during the early twentieth century, recalled years later that "it was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must become ours, 'goyim rein' (free of Gentiles)."
In 1909 the World Zionist Organization formed the Palestine Land Development Company, Ltd., which became the main purchasing agency for the Fund. As land purchases increased, so did Arab opposition to them and, consequently, to Zionism itself. At various locations in northern Palestine Arab farmers refused to move from land the Fund purchased from absentee owners, and Turkish authorities, at the Fund's request, evicted them. Arabs formed societies in Jerusalem and Nablus to raise funds to purchase land that might otherwise be sold to Zionists, and Arab newspapers warned of the danger that Zionism posed to Palestine. In Haifa Arabs formed a society in 1910 to lobby Turkey to prohibit land sales to Zionists, and Arabs boycotted goods produced by the settlers. In 1914 Arabs in Tiberias protested when settlers tried to buy the Huleh marshes, which contained mineral deposits. At times dispossessed Arab farmers raided settlements built on their former lands and Zionist settlers formed a militia that it called Hashomer to defend them.
The indigenous Jews of Palestine also reacted negatively to Zionism. They did not see the need for a Jewish state in Palestine and did not want to exacerbate relations with the Arabs. In 1903 a Zionist group in Palestine tried to convene a "Jewish National Assembly," but they got little response from the indigenous Jewish communities, which were in Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias, and Hebron.
Zionism emerged just as European nations were dividing Africa. Taking advantage of the European interest in colonization, Herzl sought the backing of European governments in establishing a Jewish state. To European leaders he argued that Zionism would serve their interests in the Middle East. "For Europe," Herzl said, "we could constitute part of the wall of defense against Asia; we would serve as an outpost of civilization against barbarism." Yet Palestine was only one of several possible sites discussed for settlement. In 1903, at Herzl's request, Britain offered Uganda as a Jewish state. The 1903 Zionist congress voted to send a commission there but let the matter drop. In 1904 Herzl approached King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and asked for Tripoli (north Africa) as a Jewish state. Theking refused. To the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdülhamid II, Herzl argued that Jews would help prevent an Arab uprising against the empire.
Herzl approached Britain because, he said, it was "the first to recognize the need for colonial expansion." According to him, "the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily and quickly understood in England." In 1902 Herzl approached Cecil Rhodes, who had recently colonized the territory of the Shona people as Rhodesia. "You are being invited to help make history," he said in a letter to Rhodes. "It doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews. How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial."
Britain had already shown interest in Palestine. In 1839 Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary had opened a consulate in Jerusalem, instructing it to protect the Jews. Then in 1840 Palmerston proposed to the Ottoman Empire that it encourage settlement of European Jews in Palestine and that Jews be permitted to make complaints against Ottoman officials through the British embassy in Constantinople. While nothing came of this plan, the British consul at Jerusalem carried out Palmerston's directive to assist Jews. When anti-Jewish violence erupted in Damascus in 1840, Britain extended protection to Jews in Palestine.
In encouraging the Jews to look to Britain for aid, Palmerston was following a technique already being used by rival powers. Cultivating a population group was a technique of European intervention in the Middle East in the nineteenth century. France already had client populations in the Levant, and Russia courted the Orthodox population. A protected minority, it was hoped, would be loyal to the protecting power, so Palmerston encouraged Jewish dependence on Britain. This policy, however, was not risk-free. Conflict on protection of minorities precipitated the Crimean War of 1854-56.
The Zionist movement hoped to build on this earlier British interest and on its contemporary needs in the Middle East. After Herzl's death in 1904 Chaim Weizmann assumed the lead. A research chemist, Weizmann did military research for Britain during World War I and gained a position in the British admiralty through Lord Balfour, who was then foreign secretary Like Herzl, Weizmann argued that sponsorship of Zionism could help Britain. "Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence," he wrote to the Manchester Guardian in 1914, "and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal."
As Britain was taking territory from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Weizmann increased his efforts. In 1917 he convinced Balfour to propose to the cabinet a policy statement in support of Zionism. At Balfour's request Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, who headed the Zionist Federation in Britain, drafted the statement. Balfour convinced the cabinet to approve the statement, which Balfour then issued as a letter to Rothschild. The letter said that Britain "viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." The letter became known as the Balfour Declaration. The next month Britain captured Jerusalem.
The cabinet issued the declaration because it thought that Zionism would help Britain. It hoped that Jewish settlement of Palestine under British auspices would strengthen Britain there. Louis Brandeis, the president of the Zionist Federation of America, said that from his contact with British officials during World War I he became convinced that it was "as much to the interest of Great Britain as to our interest" that "Palestine should be developed by Jews." Sir Ronald Storrs, Britain's military governor of Jerusalem and later of Palestine, said that Zionism "blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England 'a little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."
Moreover, the War had demonstrated the importance of oil, and Britain wanted to build a pipeline from Arabian oil fields west to Haifa. Britain's Palestine expert, Sir Mark Sykes, saw in Zionism a vehicle for extending British influence in the Middle East. In 1916 Sykes negotiated with France the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which arranged the postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement gave Britain the right to build a port at Haifa and called for joint Anglo-French control of Palestine. The cabinet feared competition from France and thought that a Jewish presence in Palestine under British protection would help it solidify control. It also thought that Jewish settlement in Palestine would give Britain a solid base to counterbalance France's control of Lebanon and Syria.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George viewed a Jewish "garrison-colony" in Palestine as a buffer for Egypt and the Suez Canal, a view Weizmann encouraged by offering a Jewish Palestine as "an essential link in the chain of the British Empire." He said that Britain needed, "somewhere in the countries abutting on to the Suez Canal, a base on which, in case of trouble, she can rely to keep clear the road of Imperial communication." A foothold in Palestine would provide protection for Britain's vital Cape-to-Cairo and Cairo-to-india routes.
Britain also had interests relating to the prosecution of World War I, which had not yet ended. It needed to combat pacifism in Russia—Britain's ally—because the Bolshevik party was threatening a separate peace with Germany. The cabinet hoped that, since the Bolshevik Party counted many Jews as members and was anti-Zionist, British support for Zionism would draw Russian Jews away from Bolshevism.
Finally, Britain had a problem gaining the sympathy of neutral-state Jews for its war effort because of Russian anti-Jewish policies. Weizmann said that Britain, in issuing the Balfour Declaration, sought "to win the sympathy of world Jewry, especially of the American Jews." Lloyd George said later that the Zionist leaders had promised, in return for the declaration, to "do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause." He was satisfied that they had kept their word.
After the decline of colonialism Britain's sponsorship of Zionism would engender dispute over its character. Zionism had been used, said some, as a cover for British imperialism. The political scientist Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who worked in Jewish relief organizations, found Zionism a movement that originally was idealistic. But she said that "by taking advantage of imperialistic interests," Zionism had "sold out at the very first moment to the powers-that-be." In a reference to Palestine's Arabs, she said that Zionism had "felt no solidarity with other oppressed peoples."
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Excerpted from Palestine and Israel by John Quigley. Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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