The Hebrew Republic: Israel's Return to History 1442265973, 9781442265974

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Making of Modern Israel
Chapter 2. The Nation Builders
Chapter 3. The Zionists and Pre-War Nationalism
Chapter 4. The Road to Independence
Chapter 5. Israel in the Eyes of the History Makers
Chapter 6. The Slow Disintegration of Labour Zionism
Chapter 7. The Ascendency of the Right
Chapter 8. Israel and Pariah Regimes
Chapter 9. Evangelical Zionists
Chapter 10. The Struggle for Soviet Jewry
Chapter 11. Human Rights and the USSR
Chapter 12. The Life and Death of Yitzhak Rabin
Chapter 13. The Mystery of Ariel Sharon
Chapter 14. The Islamist Rejectionists
Chapter 15. In the Company of Critics
Chapter 16. Different Diaspora Voices
Chapter 17. Non-Jewish Jews and Israel
Chapter 18. Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions
Chapter 19. Twenty-First-Century Politics
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Hebrew Republic

The Hebrew Republic Israel’s Return to History

Colin Shindler

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shindler, Colin, 1946– author. Title: The Hebrew republic : Israel’s return to history / Colin Shindler. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056790 (print) | LCCN 2016056868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442265967 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442265974 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Israel–History. Classification: LCC DS126.5 .S45193 2017 (print) | LCC DS126.5 (ebook) | DDC 956.9405—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056790 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Jean The wife of a scholar is accounted one, too. (Avoda Zara, Babylonian Talmud)

Contents

Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii

1 

2 

3 

4 

The Making of Modern Israel

1

Tel Aviv: The First Hebrew City World War I and the Jewish Question The Left and the Right Avraham Stern and His ‘Gang’

1 8 13 20

The Nation Builders

27

In the Beginning After Herzl David Gruen from Plonsk

27 33 36

The Zionists and Pre-War Nationalism

44

The Germans The Italians The Irish The Ukrainians

44 49 52 56

The Road to Independence

65

The War Years The Aftermath

65 69 vii

Contents

viii

 5 

The Debate over Partition A Leap into the Unknown Diaspora Blues

74 80 85

Israel in the Eyes of the History Makers

88

Disraeli 88 Churchill 91 Stalin 95 The Kennedys 101 Nixon 104

 6 

 7 

 8 

 9 

10 

The Slow Disintegration of Labour Zionism

108

Imperialism, Zionism and Arab Nationalism Labour Dissension after 1967 Moshe Dayan Abba Eban

108 113 118 120

The Ascendency of the Right

125

The Persona of Menahem Begin Begin in Poland The Irgun and After Abba Ahimeir and the Attraction of Fascism The Influence of Other Struggles

125 127 130 133 135

Israel and Pariah Regimes

141

Turning Away from the Past The Afrikaners The Argentinians The Chileans

141 142 151 158

Evangelical Zionists

165

The Legacies of Christianity and Islam The American Religious Right and the Likud

165 168

The Struggle for Soviet Jewry

177

The Genesis of the Jewish Problem How the Soviet Jewry Campaign Started

177 179

Contents



11 

12 

13  14 

15 

16 

ix

The Change in Israeli Policy and Jewish Activism The First Trials of Soviet Jews The Village of Ilyinka

184 189 197

Human Rights and the USSR

201

Marxist-Leninist Zionists The Use and Abuse of Psychiatry Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov on the Jewish Question Speaking to Shcharansky

201 203 208 213

The Life and Death of Yitzhak Rabin

220

Rabin’s Resurrection Rabin’s Election and Government Incitement by the Right The Killing and Its Justification The Aftermath

220 224 225 227 233

The Mystery of Ariel Sharon

237

Mr ‘Inconsistency’

237

The Islamist Rejectionists

259

Hamas and Palestinian Resistance Negotiating with Hamas Gaza under Hamas Rule Hezbollah in the North

259 262 267 269

In the Company of Critics

274

Critical Friends Mrs. Thatcher, British Jews and Israel Nye Bevan and Zion

274 275 278

Different Diaspora Voices

288

A History of Dissent After 1945 Jewish Apostates? Uncivil War A Plethora of Jewish Critics

288 293 294 297 299

Contents

x

17 

18 

19 

Non-Jewish Jews and Israel

304

Isaac Deutscher and Elisha Ben-Abuya Ralph Miliband and Jewish Reality Eric Hobsbawm and 1940 The Long March of the Corbynistas

304 310 312 318

Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions

325

The Campaign and Its Origins The Anti-Normalisation Campaign Apartheid Israel Jewish Reaction to the Boycott

325 329 333 335

Twenty-First-Century Politics

340

The Rise of the Far Right In Government with Lieberman and Bennett Supporting the Right Recognising Israel as a Jewish State

340 344 349 350

Index 355 About the Author

375

Acknowledgements

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

So wrote Muhammad Ali in later life. His insights into the human condi-

tion often match his prowess as the world’s greatest boxer. It parallels the aphorism that someone who is not a communist at the age of twenty has no heart; someone who remains a communist at the age of forty has no head. Writing this book has allowed me to look back at a lifetime of writings on a wide range of subjects. Some of the early material was undoubtedly basic; other articles were still surprisingly interesting and indeed well crafted. Many of my views, expressed in those early pieces, have remained constant. So have I then remained stuck in time and wasted all those decades—as Muhammad Ali infers? Perhaps, but in the last resort that is for others to judge. My own feeling is that my views have evolved rather than changed. The benefit of hindsight and the experience of time have helped to fashion original opinions in a more sophisticated framework. My instinctive belief as to how Jews should have considered human rights for Soviet non-Jews in the USSR back in the 1970s—those dissidents who had helped Soviet Jews—is the same from the heights of the twenty-first century.

xi

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Acknowledgements

These writings have allowed me to construct an episodic history of Israel. It is not simply a collection of past scribblings, but rather, hopefully, the most interesting ones, linked by informative passages, based on current knowledge and later research. I am particularly grateful to my editor at Rowman and Littlefield, Marie-Claire Antoine. I appreciated her advice and suggestions—and the continuation of our past working relationship. I would like to thank the representatives of the following publications who have provided permission to publish past articles and reviews: New York Times, Jewish Quarterly, Guardian, Jewish Chronicle, Bustan, Jerusalem Post, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Jewish Renaissance, History Today, Journal of Jewish Sociology, Asian Affairs, Middle East Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, Fathom, Journal of Israeli History, Jewish Year Book, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Israel Studies. I would like to single out in particular Geoffrey Alderman, Stephen Pollard and Orlando Radice to thank for their advice. My son, Joshua, provided the impetus to collect all my articles and reviews electronically. I continue to be perplexed by the latest technological advances of the computer age, but I try my best. Joshua has helped me in times of need despite the preoccupation of a growing family. My gratitude to my other children, Sara, Ruthie and Miriam, who have always been there for me. Finally, Jean, my wife and partner of forty years—to whom this book is dedicated—has always stood by me. She has been my best friend and harshest critic. This book also marks my recent attainment of three score and ten years. Independent views on Israel are not always welcome—and especially in the age of social media. There are those friends who have always supported my efforts throughout the years, particularly in dark times. This book is for you too. Colin Shindler London, September 2016

Introduction

Most histories of Israel—whether academic or popular—tell an interest-

ing story. They present a necessarily broad chronological framework and then provide an interpretation of events and an examination of the principal actors and their policies. The saga of Israel is both fascinating and indeed often controversial. Not simply because of the continuing stagnation that is the Israel-Palestine conflict, but because the odyssey of Israel does not fit into a normal theoretical structure. In some senses the journey of the Jews through history is unique. For some commentators, being different is synonymous with being wrong—that Israel is an illegitimate entity and should be cast out as a pariah amongst the nations. Yet the whole of this unusual history is constructed from individual episodes—each absorbing in its own way. This book concentrates on relating such episodes to produce an overall sense of intellectual discovery which colours this historical journey rather than narrating a formal, conventional narrative. The subtitle ‘Israel’s Return to History’ implies a definition of ‘Israel’ that is older than the state which arose in 1948. It suggests that we live in a transitional period when a people that lived on the margins of history is now returning to the mainstream. The early Zionists believed that it was not solely Judaism that had allowed the Jews to survive two millennia of persecution and discrimination, but also the sense that the Jews regarded themselves as members of an exiled nation. Jewish historians xiii

xiv

Introduction

such as Heinrich Graetz only began to relate the history of the Jews—as a people—in the nineteenth century, the epoch of nation-states. They made a clear distinction between Judaic history and Jewish history. This work looks at the overlap between Diaspora and state which reflects the Jews’ return to history. It therefore examines the struggle of Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. This culminated in the mass migration to Israel of one million people following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It also examines the examples of national liberation movements which in earlier times influenced Diaspora Zionists who searched for a model to integrate into their own worldview. For some it was the Italian Risorgimento of Garibaldi and Cavour. For others it was the Irish Republicanism of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. David Ben-Gurion was impressed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks while Jabotinsky looked back to the national liberal uprisings in Europe in 1848. Max Nordau and many other early Zionist leaders held up the example of the French Revolution. In his speech to the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Nordau referred positively to ‘the men of 1792’, but added that they emancipated the Jews ‘only for the sake of principle’. Abba Ahimeir, who led the Maximalist wing of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, warmed towards the national dictatorships of inter-war Europe and was particularly sympathetic to the fascism of Benito Mussolini. Recent research suggests that Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Avraham Stern and many other founders of the Zionist Right were not unaffected by Polish nationalism in the 1930s—even though they later publicly expressed their disdain for it. The separation between Israel and the Diaspora after 1948 led to a strong but complex relationship between state and dispersion. For example, a survey by London’s City University, The Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel, in 2015, in which I acted as an adviser, suggested that Anglo-Jewry is a liberal community which identifies strongly with Israel, but does not look kindly on Netanyahu’s policies. How indeed is Israel perceived by Jews in the United States and Europe? The Israeli academic Jonathan Rynhold has described a move from ‘consensual solidarity to a more pluralistic form of solidarity’ amongst American Jews during the past decades. The existence of J Street in the United States and Yachad in Britain suggests that dissent has moved from the



Introduction

xv

periphery to the centre of Jewish communal life. In part, it is because many Diaspora Jews now discern between the policies of different Israeli governments. Was there no difference between the approach of Yitzhak Rabin and Bibi Netanyahu? Have the policies of Israel governments all been met with global criticism simply because anti-Semitism is ineradicable and eternal? While the Oslo Accords of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat gave new hope to both Israelis and Palestinians, there were also a considerable number of people on both sides who wished to undermine it. On the Palestinian side, many rejectionists embraced Islamism rather than nationalism—and expanded the ranks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The assassination of Rabin, the breakdown of negotiations with Netanyahu’s first government and the onset of the al-Aqsa Intifada gave the far Left in Europe the political space to initiate proposals of boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions (BDS) directed not solely against the state but also against the liberal Israeli intelligentsia. The al-Aqsa Intifada and the conflict with Sharon’s government allowed the hitherto peripheral ideas of BDS by Palestinian rejectionists to enter the Palestinian mainstream. In the absence of any meaningful peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, such ideas had crossed the Atlantic. This work therefore looks at the origins and proliferation of such boycotts—and asks whether BDS furthers the prospect of a final agreement or retards it. Israel has changed since the Six-Day War in 1967. But so has the international Left, which has become increasingly hostile not simply to Israeli policies, but often to the existence of the state itself. The Old Left lived through the rise of fascism, the Shoah and the establishment of Israel. The New Left of the 1960s came of age during an epoch of decolonisation and understood the Palestinians in that context—all before the settlement drive on the West Bank after 1967. The work therefore also examines the growing gap and deteriorating relationship between the Jewish Left and the Left in general. In one sense today’s situation can be linked to Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation after 1967. Following the victory in the Six-Day War, the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern Bloc broke diplomatic ties with Israel. Following the Yom Kippur War in 1973, many countries in Africa and the developing world—often due to Arab economic pressure— similarly broke off diplomatic relations. Israel was depicted—in Bob Dylan’s description—as ‘the neighbourhood bully’.

xvi

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The wars, the rise of militant Palestinian nationalism and Israel’s diplomatic isolation was not only a factor in the Likud’s election breakthrough in 1977, but also in forging contacts with unsavoury regimes such as apartheid South Africa and the military junta in Argentina. Was this a lazy betrayal of Zionist values or a sad necessity in a Hobbesian world? This development is in stark contrast to the past, which is covered here in chapter 5 about the shapers of modern history, ‘Israel in the Eyes of the History Makers’. This looks at the views of figures such as Disraeli, Churchill and the Kennedy brothers towards the idea of Israel. Yet even here reality interferes with perceived notions and treasured memories. There were times when Churchill was silent at crucial points in the Zionist movement’s attempts to establish a state. Nation-states, of course, place their own interests before others—and this can explain Churchill’s omissions. But Israel too has its national interests—as its arms supply to the Argentinean junta during the ‘Dirty War’ indicated. Was it therefore right to concentrate solely on the right of Jews to leave the USSR after 1967—and to remain silent when Soviet dissidents who had helped and supported the Jewish refuseniks were themselves arrested and placed on trial—for fear of antagonising the Kremlin? Chapter 11, ‘Human Rights and the USSR’, examines this question and demonstrates how Diaspora Jews—who lived amongst non-Jews—published the letters of the refuseniks to seminal dissenting figures such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Such episodes should provide food for thought—in that this work does not shy away from shining a light on both Israel’s tremendous successes and its moral failures. The journey of the Jews and subsequently the state of Israel is above all an interesting, unusual subject to read about. The rise of Zionism represented an unprecedented step into the unknown by the scapegoat of religions and empires. In one sense this work is a precursor to reading a formal history of Israel. Ben-Gurion once commented that he did not believe in the present; there was only a past and a future. Most would disagree, but for those who wish to understand Israel’s return to history, this comment makes perfect sense.

1 The Making of Modern Israel

TEL AVIV: THE FIRST HEBREW CITY

Jerusalem has always had an honoured place in the Jewish psyche due to

its prominence in Judaic liturgy. The suffering of its inhabitants in dark times is still recalled in Jewish prayers today. The Old City and the Kotel (the western outer wall of the Temple precinct) was deemed the centre of the Jewish world—even by the least observant. Indeed its historical relevance to the Zionist drama is beyond the realm of religion. It is associated with the trials and tribulations of the past. The defeats of ancient Israel at the hands of the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Romans were all symbolised by a prolonged siege of Jerusalem. Visitors to Rome today view the triumphal arch of Titus, which was erected to commemorate the victory in Judaea and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. The defeat of the Jews was deemed important. It symbolised control, stability and a new order following the chaos of the year of the four emperors the year before. It was commemorated by the Emperor Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, in a series of ‘Judaea Capta’ coins to symbolise Roman power and a warning to all colonised peoples to be subservient to the dynasty of the Flavians. According to Talmudic tradition, Yohanan Ben-Zakai, found the anger, self-righteousness and zealotry of the leaders of the revolt too much to bear. Escaping the siege of Jerusalem in a coffin, according to

1

2

Chapter 1

tradition, he predicted that Vespasian would return to Rome to become emperor. He would put an end to the civil strife that reigned and become the successor to the deposed Galba, Otho and Vitellius. Ben-Zakai would be allowed to establish Yavneh after the destruction of Jerusalem and thus ensure the teaching and survival of Judaism. Two millennia later, Jerusalem is still viewed as a holy city—a city treasured by many faiths. For centuries, Jews came to live, pray and die in Jerusalem. Sixth-century graffiti can still be identified around the Kotel. Their poverty and their piety was part of the necessity in awaiting divine deliverance. Judaism was ahistorical, and God’s blueprint for the unfurling of Jewish history should not be tampered with. It was understood that God’s hand should not be forced in the coming of the messiah. Intellectual endeavour should be directed towards the study of law and not the revelations of history. They were pious believing Jews, but they were not Zionists. The early Zionists believed in the opposite. They were determined to intervene in history, to divert its course and to return the Jews to the land of their forefathers. The rise of modern Israel is therefore not characterised by spiritual Jerusalem, but by secular Tel Aviv. The construction of ‘the White City’, with its Bauhaus architecture on its Mediterranean shoreline, was seen as the twentieth-century expression of the ‘New Jew’, so very different from the god-fearing relative who lived in fear in a European ghetto. Built mainly by German Jews fleeing Hitler, Tel Aviv represented a psychological break with the past. Today’s population is more than four hundred thousand, and this figure more than doubles if satellite districts such as Holon and Bnei Brak are also included. Tel Aviv rose from the sand dunes on the second day of Passover 1909. A small crowd famously gathered on 11 April 1909 and dreamed of building the first Hebrew city in modern times. The British Mandate bore witness to the development of Palestine in the 1920s and instigated a strong British connection to Tel Aviv. General Allenby, the British conqueror of Palestine in 1917, gave his name to the congested boulevard which runs parallel to the seashore. The Scottish town-planner, Sir Patrick Geddes, fixed the main traffic routes in the 1920s and rationalised the construction of buildings—‘no more than three floors high and facing westward’. Tel Aviv, as a suburb of Jaffa, was initially seen as a garden city in the tradi-



The Making of Modern Israel

3

tion of Letchworth and Welwyn, north of London, and influenced by the ideas of the Victorian innovator, Ebenezer Howard. The first Hebrew high school, the Herzliya gymnasium, was built in 1910 because of a gift of 80,000 francs by Jacob Moser, a one-time mayor of Bradford in the north of England. Yet one of Tel Aviv’s founders was not a secular socialist pioneer determined to build a modern state, but a small-time businessman, an ultra-orthodox Jew from London’s East End. Zerach Barnett arrived in the Holy Land a quarter of a century before the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, paid his first visit and a decade before Leon Pinsker wrote the classic Zionist tract, Autoemancipation. While he is virtually unknown in Europe and the United States, he is slightly better known in Israel as one of the founders of the town of Petah Tikva, together with Yoel Saloman, in 1878. The composer, Yoram Tahar-Lev inserted him as a minor character into ‘HaBalada al Yoel Moshe Saloman’, which was sung by the well-known Israeli singer, Arik Einstein, in the 1970s. A few streets are named after him in Israel, often mistranslated back into English from the Hebrew as ‘Baranet’ or even ‘Brandt’. Barnett’s first visit to Palestine in 1872 led to another fourteen in as many years. Much to the consternation of his wife and his growing, yet unsettled, family, each time that he ran out of funds, he returned to London’s East End to replenish the coffers. Barnett’s obsession with building the Land of Israel was not received with encouragement by his friends in either London or Jerusalem. In London, they thought his actions ridiculous, if not mad. In Jerusalem they were perceived as verging on the heretical. In 1890, Barnett purchased seventy dunams, abutting the Arab neighbourhood of al-Manshiye, named it Neve Shalom and settled there permanently. He soon started to build houses there for the growing number of Jews who were living in Jaffa, often in dire conditions. This unusual founder of Tel Aviv, the secular city, remained devoutly religious. He remained an independent spirit, refusing either to bow to the logic of his peers or to conform to what was expected of him by both religious and secular Jews. In this sense, Tel Aviv is a true monument to his memory.

4

Chapter 1

[The Building of Tel Aviv] was a reaction to the misery and deprivation of the East European shtetl. It was a desire to improve living conditions for the Jews of nearby Jaffa and to liberate them from Arab slumlords. It was a break with the ultra-orthodox of Jerusalem who believed that Jews should passionately await the coming of the messiah and not force God’s hand. It was an attempt to build a clean, efficient and economically sustainable European city on the shores of the Mediterranean. Not Vilna, but Vienna. For the socialist Zionists, the model was ‘Red Vienna’ with its public ownership of common utilities, wide open spaces, collective responsibility and community loyalty as important. Yet Tel Aviv with its high-rise buildings, booming economic development, high tech enterprises, frenetic stock exchange and an urgency to overcome all obstacles suggest that Herzl’s capitalism has triumphed over Borokhov’s Marxism. Yet the spirit of political dissent has not been extinguished. All mass demonstrations take place in Tel Aviv—from support for the West Bank settlements to the legalisation of marijuana. In 1982, over 400,000 Israelis demonstrated against Menahem Begin’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon. And it was here that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by bullets from a Beretta, following a Peace Now rally. Tel Aviv is famously known as ha’ir ha’ivrit ha’rishona—the first (modern) Hebrew city. It is also, of course, where escapees from Nazi Germany propagated their belief in the Bauhaus, but the earlier streets—Berdichevsky, Bialik, Brenner—were all named after East European Jewish intellectuals in transition. They no longer belonged to the world of religious learning in Eastern Europe, but neither could they strip themselves of the traditions of millennia. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the liberal-conservative founder of the Revisionist movement and founder of the Jewish Legion, vigorously promoted the evolution of the ‘New Jew’ and the burial of the old. In 1924, he wrote: The ghetto despised physical manhood, the principle of male power as understood and worshipped by all free peoples in history. Physical courage and physical force were of no use, prowess of the body rather an object of ridicule. The only true heroism of the ghetto acknowledged was that of selfsuppression and dogged obedience to the Will above.1

Jabotinsky’s political opponents, whether Ben-Gurion or Ahad Ha’am, also lauded the coming of the ‘New Jew,’ moulded in their own image. In one sense, Tel Aviv, a city with no history, was to become the location where they would dwell and build.2 It was a place to innovate and to



The Making of Modern Israel

rebel. On the twentieth anniversary of its founding in 1929, Jabotinsky idealised it as ‘a city spoken about all over the world.’3 The poet, Natan Alterman, called it ‘naughty and mischievous, joyful and daring.’4 Its ‘whiteness’ and plethora of architectural styles attracted writers such as Shai Agnon and painters as Reuven Rubin.5 Today Tel Aviv prides itself on its secularism, a place to disrobe religiously. Jews came to the city to shake off the past—a past often studded by persecution, insult and humiliation. It is a city where the little Jew could disappear and the Israeli warrior could emerge. The Israeli writer, Dan Ben-Amotz insisted for many years that he did not understand Yiddish and held the Galut (Diaspora) in utter contempt. Yet, as he revealed later on in life, he was really Moshe Tehillimzager from Rovna in Poland. Prior to the first wave of immigration in the 1880s, probably 1,000–2,000 Jews lived in Jaffa. Unlike the Jews of Jerusalem, these traditional, mainly Sephardi, Jews earned their own living through a multitude of professions rather than relying on halukah—donations for the pious from Jews abroad. The first aliyah [wave of emigration] after 1882 brought another 5,000 Jews who lived in squalid conditions in Jaffa. In 1884 the Rokach brothers, Eleazar and Shimon, established Ezrat Israel to help the new immigrants. Both believed in Jewish settlement beyond the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed. Eleazar was thus one of the founders of Gei Oni (Rosh Pinah). Ezrat Israel initiated the building of Neve Tsedek and acquired the land from Aaron Chelouche who had settled in Jaffa in 1840. Chelouche worked in his shop in the port and with the fruit of his labour purchased land outside Jaffa’s walls. It was appropriately named Neve Tsedek—‘a dwelling of righteousness’—from the Book of Jeremiah.6 Shimon Rokach lived in one of the first houses constructed there. It even boasted the presence of two synagogues—one for the Hasidim and one for their opponents. Neve Shalom, the next Jewish settlement outside Jaffa was founded by Zerach Barnett, a graduate of Kovna’s Slobodka yeshivah.7 Barnett married Rachel Leah of London in 1864, settled in the British capital and developed a trade in furs.8 He and his family travelled to the Holy Land for the first time in 1872 and reached Jerusalem after a perilous journey via Ramle and Bab-el-Wad.9 Zerach Barnett purchased one of the first houses in Mea Shearim, the first neighbourhood outside the walls of Jerusalem.

5

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Chapter 1

Indeed his deep desire to build in the Land of Israel was frowned upon by his fellow Jerusalemites as unseemly and unholy. His compatriots in London ridiculed him, asking him if he had rebuilt Jerusalem yet. His daughter, Hannah Treger, recalled her father’s attempts in the 1870s to survey land near Jaffa for purchase—and the reaction of his fellow inhabitants in Mea Shearim. But not all the faces I saw reflected the light in my father. There were faces of old men and faces of young men, framed all alike in black caps and earlocks and all equally intent on his words, but expressing various shades of doubt and even contempt and displeasure. I did not know then, but I know now, that they disapproved of the whole scheme. In their eyes, the duty of a pious Jew was to study the Torah and to wait for the restoration of Palestine by miracle, and all this talk of buying land, piece by piece, and of building and farming, was little short of sinful.10

According to his daughter, Zerach Barnett believed that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Yet despite his critics he remained true to the traditions of his fathers. Hannah Treger wrote that he was clearly disdainful of any ‘freethinkers who called themselves Jews, but in the eyes of our parents, were not.’11 Barnett established a Talmud Torah (house of study), Sha’arei Torah in Neve Shalom in 1896 and founded the Or Zore’ah yeshivah (seminary) in Jaffa. The second aliyah in 1904 increased the number of Jaffa’s Jews to 7,000. This catalysed a desire not simply to create another Jewish quarter, albeit on Jaffa’s outskirts, but a separate location, removed, yet in close proximity to Jaffa and to the foreign consulates. A first meeting on 5 July 1906 at Jaffa’s Yeshurun Club made a decision to move away and to establish a building society, Ahuzat Bayit, under the leadership of Akiva Weiss12 and Meir Dizengoff, in order to look for and to purchase land. They soon found Sheikh Jebali’s vineyard.13 This land was worked and occasionally lived on by local Arabs. There were also Bedouin who grew vegetables there and grazed their cattle. The Bedouin objected to the intentions of the Zionists, went to court and won their case. They were subsequently paid to leave the land peacefully. Since only Ottoman citizens could purchase land, two Jewish inhabitants of Jaffa actually made the purchase. In return, they received a plot of land in the new neighbourhood. Yet life in these new Jewish quarters was painfully hard. Arthur Ruppin, later the World Zionist organisation’s representative in Palestine, made his first visit to Palestine in 1907. As the archetypal



The Making of Modern Israel

yekke (German Jew), he found both Neve Tsedek and Neve Shalom, dirty and neglected, while the German colonies were clean and efficient. He wrote about Jaffa: In the areas inhabited by Arabs and Jews, many houses were dilapidated or were still being built, and the rubbish-filled streets were unpaved or the surfaces marked with innumerable holes. There was no drainage, and therefore an unpleasant smell hung everywhere. There was no running water, and as water was obtained from draw wells or pumped up by hand from—frequently heavily contaminated—wells, every summer there were typhoid epidemics; trachoma and malaria were also widespread. The roads were lined with beggars, men and women (often holding children) whose eyes, sick with trachoma, were covered with flies.14

In July 1907, Ruppin was already requesting a loan of 300,000 francs from the Jewish National Fund in Cologne.15 The loan, to be repaid over 18 years with 4% interest guaranteed on the capital, would be paid to Ahuzat Bayit to build the first houses that would become Tel Aviv. Since Arab labour was cheaper than Hebrew labour, they were employed to build the first 50 homes. These were ready by 1910. Various names were suggested for this new settlement including Herzliya and Yefe Yafo (Oasis of Jaffa). The name, Tel Aviv, was proposed by Menahem Sheinkin, after the title of Nahum Sokolov’s Hebrew translation of Herzl’s book, Altneuland. Set twenty years hence in 1923, its futuristic and utopian sentiment seemed appropriate. Ironically Tel Aviv (Abib) was originally a village of Jewish exiles in Babylonia near the River Chebar, which was visited by the Prophet Ezekiel.16 Herzl Street became the main thoroughfare of Tel Aviv. The settlement expanded at an astounding rate, amalgamating Neve Tsedek and Neve Shalom as well as other districts such as Mahaneh Yosef, Kerem Hateimanim and Ohel Moshe. Within four years, it had increased its area sixfold and effectively blocked the expansion of Jaffa northwards. Yet despite its desire to strike out, it held close to the East European model and its inhabitants still worked in Jaffa. Although they did not want Tel Aviv to resemble Whitechapel-on-Sea, there were no building regulations and each built according to his taste and means. The wellto-do tended to populate the north of the city and in the south was the Hatikvah quarter which was the residence of the poverty stricken. It was only when the British arrived at the end of 1917 that the city began to develop properly and Allenby Street became the main artery. By the 1920s there were so many different styles that such anarchy in planning not only gave Tel Aviv a distinctive character, but also its

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newly established municipal authorities, great heartache. In 1925, Sir Patrick Geddes, the revamper of Edinburgh, was asked to submit a blueprint for the city’s development. Geddes fixed the main traffic routes through the city from north to south along Dizengoff and Ben-Yehuda. The boundaries of the city were the Mediterranean, Jaffa and the German colony of Sarona. From these small beginnings, an ir metropolinit17—a modern metropolis—grew. The first inhabitants were both dreamers and realists. As one of the earliest inhabitants of Tel Aviv wrote in 1910: Can anyone living in Europe imagine with what a sense of pride and liberation we residents of Tel Aviv draw our breath? In the eyes of the tourist who visits our city and is shown Tel Aviv as a sight worth seeing, I always read astonishment. Of course, our Tel Aviv is small and has modest little houses, but it is ours and here we are ‘entre nous.’18

(‘Tel Aviv at 100: A Short Walk to Modernity’, Jewish Year Book, 2009)

WORLD WAR I AND THE JEWISH QUESTION Within five years of its founding, the inhabitants of Tel Aviv were confronted by the start of a world war and a suspicious Ottoman overlord who looked for any sign of rebellion from the subject minorities of the empire. It was a war which would shatter the old reactionary order, resulting in the rise and advance of both communism and fascism. It was a conflict which claimed the lives of millions—a world war unlike anything that had taken place before. All that could not have been known in August 1914 in the midst of the drumbeat of patriotic fervour. On the outbreak of war, the newly appointed chief rabbi of the British Empire, Joseph Hertz, issued a special prayer: Kingdoms shake and nations tremble The shout of the warrior and the roar of battle resounds To the ends of the earth because of the fury of the oppressor. The terrors of war are upon us: they have come close to our gates

Sixty thousand British Jews served in the armed forces and 3,500 were killed. In the United States, more than two hundred thousand Jews en-



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listed in the war effort after 1917. One hundred thousand German Jews also fought in the Great War, of whom some 12,000 were killed. In Russia, a reputed quarter of a million Jews fought for the tsar that they hated. Facing them on the Eastern front were three Jewish Field-Marshals and eight Jewish generals commanding the Austro-Hungarian forces. Despite all the declarations of loyalty, what was the meaning of Jewish unity when Jews were killing their brethren on the other side? Russian Jews perceived the Jewish national interest much more clearly than their British and German brethren did. Many simply could not understand why Great Britain—which had protested on numerous occasions on behalf of the oppressed Jews of Russia and Poland—was now fighting on the side of the tsar against civilised Germany. When the Zionist wunderkind Vladimir Jabotinsky paid a last visit to Russia, he was called a traitor from the pulpit of Odessa’s Yavneh synagogue for siding with Britain, the Tsar’s ally. This feeling was accentuated by Jewish sympathy for German military successes on the Eastern front in 1914. On the other hand, popular feeling blamed the Jews for Russian setbacks. In Poland and Lithuania, synagogues were sacked, shops were looted and Jews were hanged. Some Russian soldiers believed that pious Jews were hiding the newly invented telephone in their long beards so as to communicate with the German enemy. Yet the war also provided an opportunity for the embryonic Zionist movement. In early November 1914, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, told his audience that the Turkish government’s decision had ‘rung the death-knell of Ottoman dominion, not only in Europe but in Asia.’ The Jewish Chronicle noted this prescient remark and immediately asked ‘what is to be the fate of Palestine?’ It surmised that Jews displaced by the conflict might subsequently find new homes in Palestine. By January 1915 the British cabinet minister, Herbert Samuel, had submitted a memorandum to his colleagues which advocated a Jewish presence in Palestine while Chaim Weizmann of Manchester University was busily canvassing British politicians to support the Zionist experiment. The British had unofficially ruled Egypt for decades and it was clear that an expeditionary force would sooner or later invade Palestine to

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fight the Turks. It was imperative, therefore, to have a Jewish military force which would fight alongside the British. The idea of a Jewish battalion in 1914 was mooted even before Turkey entered the war, but the prospect divided British Jews. In 1861 a Jewish Rifle Volunteer Corps had been formed in London’s East End.19 It lasted only a few months. One continuing Jewish fear was that any whiff of separatism would stir anti-Semitic prejudice. After all, the Times in December 1914 had blamed Turkish ‘crypto-Jews’ for taking their country to war. They had been bribed by Germany, it was said, into betraying ‘a faith not their own.’20 Despite this, a Jewish military force did come into existence. It was not however an army in the lofty image of Bar-Kokhba which would fight to liberate Palestine, but a small unit of muleteers who would carry ammunition, water and bully beef to British soldiers as part of the grand plan to invade the Turkish mainland at Gallipoli, drive on to Istanbul and knock Turkey out of the war at an early stage. In Egypt there were thousands of Russian and Sephardi Jews who had been forced to leave Palestine because they were not Ottoman citizens—and many were eager to strike at the Turks. Joseph Trumpeldor, a one-armed veteran of the Russo-Japanese war and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist activist, had tried in vain to convince General Maxwell, the British Commander in Egypt of the need for a Jewish army. Trumpeldor even resorted to wearing his medals—two gold and two bronze St. George Crosses—to impress the general, but all that he suggested was a Zion Mule Corps. Known originally as the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Mule Corps, 562 volunteers sailed for Turkey in April 1915 on the Hymettus and on the Anglo-Egyptian. A few days before the arrival of the Zion Mule Corps, the British and Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) losses at Gallipoli had been extremely heavy. A British pilot, Air Commodore Samson, surveying the scene, reported that the sea was coloured blood red for 50 yards stretching from the shoreline. Eight Jews and six British non-Jews were the officers in charge, but the entire force was commanded by an Irish Protestant, well versed in both Jewish history and the Bible stories of his youth, LieutenantColonel John Patterson. He was conscious of the role that he was playing in this historic drama. The order of the day was given in Hebrew and he encouraged the depiction of traditional Jewish symbols throughout the unit. He



The Making of Modern Israel

was acutely aware that the Jews had not possessed an army for almost two millennia. As a boy, he had read about Joab who had been appointed by King David to command his army—and now he saw himself in a similar light. Patterson looked the other way when some of the muleteers actually took up arms and fought with the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers. Several were awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and mentioned in dispatches. Yet their role as the muleteers grew more and more frustrating and distant from their aim to oust the Turks from Palestine. In June 1915, 75 muleteers requested repatriation to Egypt. Patterson had the three leaders flogged, tied to the wheels of a wagon and put on bread and water for three days—much to Trumpeldor’s exasperation. Patterson’s rationale was that if the Zion Mule Corps was to become the nucleus of a Jewish army, then there had to be both unity and discipline. He recalled the example of Moses berating the wandering, squabbling, children of Israel before entering the Promised Land. As history records, this proposal of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to eliminate Turkey from the war became his greatest failure and ended with his resignation from government. It resulted in 34,000 British dead, 78,000 wounded and 145,000 ill with dysentery and malaria. By 1916, the Gallipoli campaign was over, an inglorious catastrophe and the Zion Mule Corps returned to the Middle East. The War Office refused to pay them a pension since they were regarded as temporary employees even though 14 had died and 60 were wounded fighting for the British Crown. They had spent eight months under fire without shelter, working day and night, to bring bullets and supplies to British troops. Yet something had changed dramatically. The name of the Zion Mule Corps was now widely known through repeated mention in the international press. For the Jews, the lowly muleteer became the exalted symbol of the courageous Jewish fighter. In 1915 Jabotinsky had been instrumental in using all his rhetorical powers to persuade the expelled Palestinian Jews to enlist. Yet he was aghast when all that was offered was a mule corps and not a fighting army. While Trumpeldor embraced the proposal, an aggrieved Jabotinsky left for Italy. Jabotinsky later admitted that he had been wrong. He understood that the mere existence of this small transportation unit had elevated the cause of Zionism and broken through the barrier of international indifference. He later wrote:

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Until then it had been almost impossible to talk about Zionism even to friendly statesmen: at such a cruel time as that, who could really expect them to worry about agricultural settlements or the renaissance of Hebrew? All that was, for the moment, simply outside their field of vision.21

The Zion Mule Corps was disbanded on 26 May 1916—it had existed for just over a year. Yet 120 of its members made their way to London where they enlisted as the 5th Company of the 20th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. Any mention of the Zion Mule Corps now opened doors and invited discussion with the British political and military establishment. This remnant of the Zion Mule Corps become the nucleus of a Jewish Legion, based on the model of the international legions that had fought for the French Revolution. It saw service in Palestine in 1918 and led to the establishment of the Haganah in the 1920s, which in turn was transformed into the Israel Defence Forces in 1948. (‘The Birth of the Zion Mule Corps’, Jewish Chronicle, 30 October 2014)

The First World War did nothing to ameliorate the Jewish condition in Europe. In hindsight, the slaughter in the trenches planted instead the seeds of death and destruction of the Second World War. Isaac Rosenberg, the war poet, evocatively wrote in 1917: I killed and killed with slaughter mad; I killed till all my strength was gone And still they rose to torture me, For Devils only die in fun.22

Rosenberg wished to join the Jewish Legion, but his transfer request arrived too late and he was killed in action early in 1918. He wanted to join thirty thousand Russian-born Jews living in the United Kingdom who did not wish to be conscripted into the British forces to effectively fight for the tsar—so to fight in the Middle East instead was a welcome option. In Palestine, the situation had become more ominous. The Turks had expelled more than a thousand Jews and banned Hebrew signs in Jaffa. There were fears that what had happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks would now happen to the Jews of Palestine. Jabotinsky’s campaign to establish a Jewish Legion finally came to fruition in 1917. A Jewish battalion was brought back from Plymouth and housed in the Tower of London. Preceded by the band of the Coldstream Guards, they



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marched through the East End into the City of London. The effect was both symbolic and political. Jews therefore died at Ypres and on the Somme fighting on opposite sides. The Jewish Legion, however, was reputedly the first Jewish military unit to fight for Palestine since Bar Kokhba’s rebellion, two millennia before. Its commanding officer, John Patterson wrote that Jabotinsky’s raison d’être for forming the Legion had been ‘an uncompromising revolt against the unorganised, formless Jewish dispersion with no state organisation, no leadership, no discipline, and no national policy’.23 The very idea of a Jewish fighting force attracted many. Both David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi—future leaders of Israel— joined the Jewish Legion. While the Legion saw action in Palestine, once the war was over, the British were quick to disband it and to imprison—albeit temporarily—Jabotinsky. In the early 1920s, the British attempted to row back from their wartime commitments to both Jews and Arabs. A subterranean fear was that the post-war wave of emigration from Russia would bring a hoard of Jewish Bolsheviks to Palestine who would then proceed to upset what was considered to be the natural order of things. While some of the early emigrants were indeed influenced by the October Revolution, those arriving later on were not.

THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT In Russia, the communists—especially the Jewish communists—were deeply opposed to Zionism. Jewish communal organisations were closed down. Hebrew was banned and the first trials of Zionists began in the early 1920s. Lenin had little understanding of the Jewish problem and ‘the dawn of humanity’ that he brought offered only assimilation and a denial that the Jews were a nation.24 Yet Lenin’s success impressed many Jews who demanded a change in how humanity acted, how it treated the other—but in particular, it attracted the attention of David Ben-Gurion.25 While opposed to Communism per se, he stood in awe before Lenin’s achievement—how one man with few resources could make a revolution.

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Many in the Yishuv were affected by the October Revolution—not least a rising star in the Labour Zionist firmament, Haim Arlosoroff. Born Vitaly in Ukraine, his family fled to Prussia as a result of the pogroms in the wake of the 1905 revolution. In Germany he became Viktor and established a reputation as a political theorist and ideologue of Zionism. Arlosoroff was influenced by two momentous events that took place in late 1917 within days of each other—and which would clearly set out the paths which Jews could follow in the twentieth century. One was the October Revolution in Russia, which purported to liberate all humanity. The other was the Balfour Declaration whereby the British promised a national home for the Jews within Palestine. The former appealed to universalism within Jewish tradition and repairing the world, the latter to particularism and the national interests of the Jews. The Balfour Declaration brought thousands of Jews to Palestine—a Palestine, conquered by and now ruled by the British crown. Many were Marxists who had decided to build socialism in Palestine rather than in Russia. In Palestine, the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) was led by the forces of socialist Zionism. The pioneering ethic and the belief in self-sacrifice, the creation of kibbutzim and the hope of a Jewish-Arab accommodation characterised these socialists and their political parties in the 1920s. Ben-Gurion wished to build a workers’ command economy and a collectivist society. His party, Ahdut Ha’avodah, fiercely fought any efforts made by the newly established Revisionist movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky, which passionately believed in the crucial importance of the bourgeoisie, free enterprise and a state of the Jews on both sides of the Jordan. In contrast, the broad Labour movement drew many young men to its standard. Its recruits included Moshe Sharett, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Haim Arlosoroff. Emigrating from Germany in 1924, Viktor Arlosoroff became Haim in Palestine, and his rise in the Labour Zionist hierarchy was rapid. It was also a period of deepening antagonism between the Labour movement and the young acolytes of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. Confrontational demonstrations and physical clashes took place. Jabotinsky wrote articles with incendiary titles such as ‘Yes, Break It’26 and ‘In the Grip of the Red Swastika’.27 On the eve of Arlosoroff’s murder, Yehoshua Hirsh Yeivin, a leading Revisionist Maximalist, accused him of ‘kissing the boots of Hitler and Goering’ because he had been instrumental in negoti-



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ating the Ha’avarah agreement, which allowed German Jews to leave for Palestine—as long as they spent the limited funds, permitted to them, on German goods. Labelled ‘the Red Diplomat’, Yeivin wrote: The Jewish public in the Land and overseas will greet the triple StalinBen-Gurion-Hitler pact with contempt and disgust and will not forgive those who for lucre sold their people’s honour in full view of the enlightened world to the anti-Semitic madmen.28

Today Arlosoroff’s name is known chiefly because of the manner of death—cut down in his prime during an evening stroll on the Tel Aviv seafront in June 1933. At the time of assassination, many believed that Arlosoroff was destined to become a future prime minister of a yet-to-beborn state of Israel. [Arlosoroff was] an activist in the non-Marxist pioneering Zionist party, Hapoel Hatzair. He argued that too many Jewish socialists had become fixated on Marx’s earlier writings rather than on his later more nuanced texts. In 1921 he visited Palestine and the disturbances of that year brought home to him that a national movement existed amongst the Arabs of Palestine. Indeed he castigated those Zionists who ignored it. They were ‘like a doctor who denies the existence of a malady in an obviously sick person because the microbes he finds in the blood of the patient are different from those he is used to seeing under the microscope.’ Following his appointment as head of the political department of the Jewish Agency in 1931, Arlosoroff attempted to find a way to defuse the rising tension between Jew and Arab. Land purchases in Palestine in the midst of a deepening Arab nationalism had led to confrontation. Arlosoroff discovered that a cash-strapped Emir Abdullah who ruled the East Bank of the Jordan was amenable to the possibility of selling land to the Zionists from the unpopulated tracts of his country. Interestingly Arlosoroff did not regard all British officials in Palestine as anti-Semites. Most, he believed, were clueless about Zionist ideology and ignorant about Jewish immigration. ‘The worldwide Jewish question interests them as much as last year’s snow.’ Many a British administrator became pro-Arab, argued Arlosoroff, not because of undiluted anti-Semitism, but because the Arab better reflected the imagery of the ruled in the colonial psyche than did the Jew. Such independent views led to arguments with Ben-Gurion and other labour Zionist luminaries.

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Their differences were kept quiet and the exchanges not published for another fifty years. All this endeared him to some and antagonised others. Arlosoroff’s killers were immediately equated with his ideological adversaries in the newly emergent Revisionist movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky. The finger of suspicion was pointed at one of its leading intellectual figures, the writer Abba Ahimeir, a recent defector from Arlosoroff’s party, Hapoel Hatzair.29 Many members of the party had suffered in Soviet prisons and particularly at the hands of Jewish communists.30 They were therefore astonished at the pro-Soviet approach of Hapoel Hatzair in Palestine. The new immigrants had remained long enough in Soviet Russia to make a distinction between the dream and the reality. This eventually led them to move from the Left and to transform themselves into radical rightists in the process. Ahimeir not only joined the Revisionist movement but became the leader of its maximalist wing. In November 1927 Ahimeir wrote an article entitled ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’31 Well-known as a saying of the sage, Rabbi Hillel, he noted that it had been transformed into the slogan of the Irish Republican Sinn Fein—and that this should be the Zionist pathway as well. In this article and in others which followed, he argued the case for Italian fascism—at a time when it was not anti-Semitic. He wrote a series of eight articles entitled ‘From the Notebook of a Fascist.’ Much to Jabotinsky’s anger, Ahimeir described him as ‘Our Duce.’32 Passionately anti-communist, Ahimeir began to sympathise with the national dictatorships that were beginning to cover the map of Europe.33 As a teacher of the leaders of the youth group, Betar, he was able to gather around himself a group of committed followers. Affronted by the continuing Arab disruption of Jewish services at the Western Wall—and without informing the official leadership of Betar in Palestine—they organised a disciplined march to the Wall on behalf of ‘Zionist Revolutionary Youth.’ The following day, however, a Muslim demonstration took place which was anything but orderly. It ended with the dispersal of Jewish worshippers and the burning of prayer books with little interference from the understaffed police. This was the catalyst for the disturbances of 1929 and the deaths of many Jewish civilians by Arabs—and many Arabs by British troops. Ahimeir compared those Jews killed in Hebron and Safed in 1929 to those killed in past massacres in Europe. They were, he wrote, ‘martyrs to the building of the Jewish homeland.’34 Ahimeir further asked



The Making of Modern Israel

whether Jewish youth were prepared to do something about this and whether they were up to the task. Young Jews in Palestine and in the Diaspora such as Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir rallied to the maximalist call. Ahimeir’s network formalised itself by creating Berit Ha-Biryonim. It was named after the biryonim (sicarii), the zealots of the Second Temple period. For some the biryonim were recalled as the assassins of the perceived enemies of the Jews—both Jewish and non-Jewish. Significantly those Jews with ‘moderate’ views were especially deemed worthy of assault. Yet it was Lenin rather than Mussolini who was held up as the exemplar. During one of lectures to the Berit Ha-Biryonim, Ahimeir commented: ‘Our teacher is not Herzl or Jabotinsky, but Lenin. We reject the doctrines and philosophies of Lenin and his followers, but they were correct in their practical path. This is the path of violence, blood and personal sacrifice.’35 Yet Ahimeir’s ‘revolutionary Zionism’ was militant but not violent. For example, there was a protest in October 1930 against the visit of the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies Drummond Shiels who was perceived as being responsible for the Passfield White Paper which effectively condemned the entire Zionist enterprise. Ahimeir and two others were arrested at the demonstration. Ahimeir and his acolytes became a thorn in the side of the British in Palestine and an irritant for the Zionist establishment. The killing of Arlosoroff therefore presented the authorities in Palestine with a golden opportunity to liquidate the maximalists by sending them to the gallows or sentencing them to long terms of imprisonment. In the eyes of Berit Ha-Biryonim, Arlosoroff was held responsible for the controversial transfer agreement so that Jews leaving Nazi Germany could leave with part of their belongings. Ben-Gurion had taken a pragmatic view that the Zionist movement should not provoke the Nazis by initiating ‘an irresponsible battle against Hitler.’ Even Stalin’s Soviet Union maintained diplomatic relations with Hitler’s Germany.36 Five weeks after the assassination, the police seized the Revisionist archives and some of Ahimeir’s writings. The British discovered Ahimeir’s unpublished script, ‘The Scroll of the Sicarii,’ which was dedicated to Charlotte Corday and Dora Kaplan. The former had famously assassinated the French revolutionary Marat in his bath in 1793 while the latter had wounded Lenin in 1918. Both were swiftly executed.

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Ahimeir argued that the legacy of the biryonim (sicarii) was that history changes its course because of ‘the work of negative heroes—not the divine but the satanic.’ Ahimeir argued that history seemed to permit killing if it was deemed to be for the public good but criminal if conducted for private reasons. He gave the examples of Julius Caesar, Henri of Navarre, William of Orange and Tsar Alexander II. All this was in the realm of intellectual theorising—Ahimeir’s private scribblings—the British, however, viewed it as concrete evidence.37 On the evening of the assassination, Ahimeir was lecturing at the Revisionist Club in Jerusalem. The central figure in the case, Avraham Stavsky, had recently arrived in Palestine and was lodging with Ahimeir. On the night in question, Stavsky was staying at the Turjeman hotel in Jerusalem. The police said that he had slipped out unnoticed, travelled to Tel Aviv, committed the act and returned swiftly to Jerusalem. Another accused, Ze’ev Rosenblatt, said that he had been at a social gathering in Kfar Saba. Ahimeir was seen as the inspiration for the deed while Stavsky and Rosenblatt were charged with the actual murder of Arlosoroff. Ahimeir claimed that he and his co-defendants were ‘the Dreyfus and Beilis of our generation’ and were being made scapegoats because of their political activities. After months of investigation, the evidence proved flimsy and eventually the accused were released from prison or acquitted at the trial. The suspicion between Left and Right, however, deepened. Mapai, the leading labour Zionist party, viewed the Revisionists as fascists, seeking to overturn the hope of a socialist tomorrow. The Right saw Mapai as devious, untrustworthy, ideologically subservient and willing to use any dirty trick to entrap leading nationalists. Although opposed to the radicalism of Berit Ha-Biryonim, the Revisionist leader, Jabotinsky came out in open support of the arrested men. While describing Arlosoroff as ‘an honest, quiet, hardworking Jewish patriot,’ he described the case against Berit Ha-Biryonim as ‘a lie which has no legs to stand on.’38 Despite an inability to make the charges stick, the extensive police searches located sufficient incendiary material to arrest Ahimeir once more. Although the charges relating to the killing of Arlosoroff were formally dropped on 16 May 1934, Ahimeir was charged on several counts of sedition a few weeks later and sentenced to 21 months in the Jerusalem Central Prison.



The Making of Modern Israel

Jabotinsky himself suspected that the killers had been Arabs—and that it had been part of a chain of events, starting with the mass killings during August 1929 and ending more recently with arson in the Balfour forest and murder in Nahalal. At the beginning of 1934, Abdul Majud, a Jaffa Arab claimed responsibility for the killing together with Issa Ibn Darwish. It was portrayed as a fumbled attack to ward off Arlosoroff so that they could sexually assault his wife. A few weeks later, Abdul Majud retracted his confession, stating that he had been bribed by the Jewish defendants in prison. He was never cross-examined in court. In the mid-1970s, it was suggested in the Israeli press that Joseph Goebbels had sent two Nazi agents, Theo Korth and Heinz Geronda, to murder Arlosoroff. It transpired that before her marriage to the Nazi leader, Magda Goebbels had been Arlosoroff’s lover in Germany. Brought up a Catholic with a Jewish stepfather, Magda had even sported a Star of David, given to her by Arlosoroff and had attended Zionist meetings. Their ways eventually parted and they followed different paths. A few weeks before his death, Arlosoroff visited Berlin. Passing a bookshop, he stared in total disbelief to see a marriage photograph of his old flame, arm-in-arm with Goebbels. One still existing opposition newspaper carried the headline, ‘Nazi Chief weds Jewess.’ Once the shock had subsided, Arlosoroff began to view Magda as his conduit to Goebbels with the aim of securing an arrangement for the transfer of German Jewish assets to Palestine.39 According to the German writer, Anja Klabunde, Arlosoroff did manage to talk to Magda and they arranged to meet again. This meeting never took place, but Arlosoroff subsequently received a message from Magda to warn him that he was in extreme danger and should leave Germany immediately.40 Despite an inquiry initiated by Menahem Begin in the 1980s, all theories continue to reside within the confines of conjecture in the absence of any hard evidence. An accidental bungling? A well-planned assassination? Unlike contemporary television drama, this mystery remains unsolved. As time recedes from the event, it is unlikely that we will ever know the identity of the killers of Haim Arlosoroff. (‘Zionist History’s Murder Mystery’, Jewish Chronicle, 14 June 2013)

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AVRAHAM STERN AND HIS ‘GANG’ One event which strengthened the Revisionist movement and gave birth to the Irgun Zvai Leumi were the killings in 1929 in Hebron, Safed, Motza and other locations. One hundred and thirty-three Jews and 116 Arabs lost their lives with many more injured. It spelled the end of dreams for a reconciliation between the two sides and a dramatic change in their relationships. Most Jews were unarmed and killed in their own homes. Most Arabs were killed by British forces. In a recent detailed and comprehensive book on these events, the author comments: When the Arabs attacked, they made no distinction between Jews of different political views, or between those who came from long-established families and those who were relative newcomers. The clearest proof of this comes from the screams of the Cohen and Afriyat families of Safed, and of the Abushedid and Kapiluto families of Hebron, who in vain beseeched the neighbours who were attacking them, saying that they were natives of the country who had done no harm to the Arabs.41

The differences between Jews, Zionist and anti-Zionist, religious and secular, Right and Left became telescoped in many Arab eyes—not withstanding the fact that some Arabs had helped Jews during these violent disturbances. The events of 1929 and the Shaw Commission, HopeSimpson Report and the Passfield White Paper which all followed were deemed less than satisfactory by the Zionists—who felt that they were being unfairly blamed. It further radicalised the Right. Abba Ahimeir’s affection for Mussolini before 1938 and for Irish Republicanism was shared by a young immigrant from Poland, Avraham Stern. Unlike Ahimeir, Stern did not confine his beliefs to the realm of theory. Menahem Begin erroneously dubbed Jabotinsky ‘the Father of the Revolt’. Yet it was Stern who carried out military action against the British years before Begin’s leadership of the Irgun. The British labelled Stern and his followers ‘the Stern Gang’. Its genesis was situated in an internal split in the Irgun on the outbreak of World War II. One faction under David Raziel believed in working with the British to defeat the common enemy, Nazi Germany. The other, led by Stern, did not. It believed that the primary task was still to harass the



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British authorities in Palestine and ultimately ensure their departure. On 10 June 1940, following Germany’s defeat of French forces, Mussolini’s Italy entered the war on Hitler’s side. A week later Stern was released from prison and thereafter signed Communiqué 112, which is regarded as the genesis of Lehi (the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). Yet Stern was no unthinking thug, but more an unworldly intellectual, anchored in the world of the Greek classics. He was also an admired poet whose collective works have been published several times during the last few decades. Yet his poetry was suffused by a spirit of self-sacrifice and the inevitability of death on the battlefield. All events were understood as part of a historical progression even if depicted in the language of utopianism. Jewish tradition heavily influenced Stern. He looked to the Bible rather than to the British Mandate to define the borders of the future state of Israel. Growing up in Suwałki, in northern Poland, Stern’s Zionist idealism was manifested at an early age. He even played the role of Shabtai Zevi, the false Jewish messiah in Jerzy Żuławski’s play Koniec Mesjasza (The End of the Messiah).42 Moreover, there were later clear messianic tendencies in his ‘Principles of Renaissance’, which all of his followers in Palestine were instructed to read and adhere to. The borders of Israel would thus be defined according to the Book of Genesis rather than to the decisions of the British Mandatory authorities.43 The Land of Israel would stretch from ‘the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates’. A state of the Jews would be established—as in biblical times—only through conquest. Stern renounced the diplomatic efforts of both Chaim Weizmann and his rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky. In his mirror, Stern saw his reflection as ‘a poet and soldier’.44 Yes I am both a soldier and a poet Today I write with a pen, tomorrow I will write with a sword Today I write in ink, tomorrow I will write in blood Today on paper, tomorrow on the torso of a man Heaven gave us the book and the sword Fate has decreed it Soldier and poet

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Significantly, he signed many of his poems as Eleazar Ben-Yair, the Jewish rebel of two millennia before. According to tradition, Ben-Yair had instructed his followers to kill each other in a mass suicide when surrounded by the Romans.45 Stern also used Jewish motifs in his poems to illustrate the contemporary struggle to be waged. In a poem about Succot46 (the Festival of Tabernacles), the lulav (date palm) and the etrog (citron) became weapons of war. The field is our synagogue The prayer: the realm of Zion restored In my left hand, the lulav-rifle In my right hand, the etrog-handgrenade

Italy’s entry into the war and its early success in advancing on Egypt certainly impressed Stern. It also provided a window of opportunity. Mussolini, Stern believed, could be persuaded to participate in the ousting of the British from Palestine. The Italians would train the Jews to fight the British, a benevolent Mussolini would then transfer the Jews of occupied Europe to Palestine and ‘a corporate regime’ would be established there. Pope Pius XII would control the Old City of Jerusalem. When Italy was defeated in the western desert and in Greece at the end of 1940, Stern turned to Nazi Germany on the basis of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. This too led nowhere and eventually Stern was tracked down by the British Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and met his death in questionable circumstances. A few weeks after Stern’s demise, the sinking of the unseaworthy refugee ship, the Struma, led to the deaths of hundreds of mainly Rumanian Jews. The Turkish authorities refused to repair her engines and towed her out to sea. The British reiterated its refusal to allow more Jews into Palestine. A Soviet submarine, now authorised to attack all shipping entering the Black Sea, following the Nazi invasion of the USSR, torpedoed the Struma. The captain and crew of the submarine were commended by their superiors for ‘their courageous act’.47 In Palestine, the tragedy of the Struma encapsulated the imagery of the homeless Jew in a hostile and indifferent world. Stern was resurrected as an iconic freedom fighter who had stood up for the Jews when no one else would.



The Making of Modern Israel

[Avraham Stern’s] group was inspired by Irish Republicanism and the Narodnaya Volya in tsarist Russia which preached the assassination of officials. Stern was killed by British policemen in early 1942, but his successors eliminated officials such as Lord Moyne, the British Resident Minister in Cairo in 1944 and the UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Some 48% of all killings by the group were those of fellow Jews who were thought to be working for British intelligence. Its head of operations in the early 1940s was ‘Michael’—after Michael Collins, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) icon—who later emerged as Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel after 1983. Following his emigration to Palestine in 1926, Stern found himself on the political periphery and soon joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi which opposed Ben-Gurion’s policy of self-restraint—no retaliation against Arab attacks. In 1940 the Irgun was faced with the choice of whether or not to collaborate with the British in fighting Nazism. The Irgun split, but Stern’s group regarded the British as the central enemy—not Germany. Stern rationalised that since the enemy of my enemy must be my friend, it was logical to approach Berlin for assistance. His plan was to seek German aid in creating an army of Jews in occupied Europe and to bring them to Palestine to oust the British. This was no different from other anti-colonialist figures in Ireland, Egypt and India who similarly sort aid for their national liberation struggles. At a time when the Holocaust had hardly commenced, Stern believed that Hitler was simply another persecutor in the millennial parade of enemies of the Jews—and not a liquidator, ideologically committed to their total destruction. British detectives regarded Stern and his followers as ‘Jewish Quislings,’ a fifth column of Jews who were bizarrely working for Nazi victory in the Middle East in the belief that Field Marshal Rommel would bring them independence. Stern’s approach was condemned by mainstream Zionists and even by the maximalist right-wing intelligentsia. Unlike Menahem Begin who saw him as a rival in pre-war Poland, Stern dismissed the possibility of negotiation. He labelled Vladimir Jabotinsky, regarded as the father of the Zionist Right, as ‘Hindenberg’— yesterday’s man. Stern’s poetry, influenced by the Russian Futurist, Vladimir Mayakovsky, exhibits a profound sense of messianism. Moreover Stern may well have seen himself in the role of meshiah ben yosef, a catalytic messianic figure, destined to fall in battle so that another messianic figure, meshiah ben david, would finally emerge, wage a successful struggle against the enemies of the Jews and usher in a golden era of world peace.

23

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Did [Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey] Morton shoot him while trying to escape? Or was it a premeditated act of murder to eliminate a dangerous foe? If Stern regarded himself as a messianic figure, then his death for the good of the cause should be considered. His poetry is suffused with the need for self-sacrifice and the embrace of death. Stern’s demise was hardly noticed by the Jews of Palestine, but the remnant of his followers recast him as a martyr. They held Morton’s men responsible—‘the murderous gang of the Palestine Gestapo.’ The sinking of the unseaworthy Struma off Istanbul a few weeks later resulted in the deaths of nearly 800 Jews escaping Nazism. The British had refused to allow them into Palestine—for amongst other reasons a fear of Arab anger. This incident and others like it turned the Jews of Palestine against the British authorities. It also helped to give birth to a mythological Stern. (Review of Patrick Bishop’s The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land, in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 July 2014)

NOTES 1.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, Introduction to Chaim Nachman Bialik: Poems from the Hebrew, ed. L. V. Snowman (London, 1924). 2. Natan Harpaz, ‘Shel Shanot Hashloshim be-Tel Aviv’, in Tel Aviv bereshitah 1909–1934, ed. Mordechai Naor (Jerusalem: Yad Yitshak Ben Tsvi, 1984), pp. 91–106. 3. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Tel Aviv Zu: Al Shum Ivlah?’, Doar Hayom, 10 April 1929. 4.  Natan Alterman, ‘Diana’, in Little Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 1979). 5.  Dalia Manor, Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 119–21. 6.  Jeremiah 31:23, ‘Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Yet shall they utter this word again in the land of Judah and in the cities there. When I will bring again their captivity: The Lord bless you, o dwelling of righteousness, O mountain of holiness’. 7.  Zerach Barnett, Zikhronot (Jerusalem, 1929), p. 1. 8.  Jerusalem Post, 19 September 2008. 9.  Ibid., Barnett, Zikhronot, p. 7.



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10.  Hannah Treger, Stories of the First Pioneers in Palestine (London: Routledge, 1923), p. 5. 11.  Ibid., p. 39. 12.  Akiva Arieh Weiss, ‘Kaysud nosud “Ahuzat Bayit”’, in Tel Aviv be-reshitah 1909–1934, ed. Mordechai Naor (Jerusalem: Yad Yitshak Ben Tsvi, 1984), pp. 2–3. 13.  Karm al-Jabali in Arabic and Kerem Jebali in Hebrew. 14.  Arthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. Alex Rein (London, 1971), p. 90. 15.  Ibid., pp. 120–21. 16.  Ezekiel 3:15. 17.  Ya’akov Shavit and Gideon Biger, ha-Historiyah shel Tel-Aviv (Tel Aviv, 2001), p. 23. 18.  Sarah Leah, ‘Tel Awiw: Der Hilgel des Fallings’, in Palestina: Eine Werbeschrift fur die jüdische 24, Arbeit in Erez Israel, published by the Zionist Central Office in Cologne, 1910, quoted in Joachim Schloer, Tel Aviv: From Dream to City (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 48. 19.  Illustrated London News, 24 November 1860. 20.  Jewish Chronicle, 18 December 1914. 21.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Story of the Jewish Legion (New York: B. Ackerman, 1945), p. 43. 22.  Isaac Rosenberg, ‘The Immortals’, in Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Jean Liddiard (London: Enitharmon, 2003), p. 98. 23. Jabotinsky, The Story of the Jewish Legion, p. 13. 24. Colin Shindler, Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimisation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 16–35. 25.  David Ben-Gurion, Yoman, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971), p. 201; English translation in Israel Kolatt, ‘Image and Reality’, in David Ben-Gurion: Politics and Leadership in Israel, ed. Ronald W. Zweig (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 16–19. 26.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, Haynt, 4 November 1932. 27.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, Rassviet, 23 October 1932. 28.  Yehoshua Hirsh Yeivin, ‘Mr Arlosoroff: The Red Child’, Hazit Ha’am, 16 June 1933, in Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 211. 29. Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 110–15. 30.  Ziva Galili and Boris Morozov, Exiled to Palestine: The Emigration of Zionist Convicts from the Soviet Union 1924–1934 (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 22.

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31.  Ha’aretz, 15 November 1927. 32.  Abba Ahimeir, ‘On the Arrival of Our Duce’, Doar Hayom, 10 October 1928. 33.  Abba Ahimeir, ‘Dictatorship in the Wider World’, Doar Hayom, 29 January 1929. 34. Abba Ahimeir, ‘The Desert and the Garden of Eden’, Doar Hayom, 4 September 1929. 35.  Kalman Katznelson, ‘Ha-Dugma: Lenin’, in Berit Ha-Biryonim: The First Anti-British Organisation, ed. Yosef Achimeir and Shmuel Shatski (Tel Aviv, 1978), p. 130. 36.  David Ben-Gurion, Davar, 27 August 1935. 37.  Abba Ahimeir, Megilat ha-sikarikin (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute Archives). 38.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Moscow-Style Methods’, Moment, 25 July 1933. 39. Anja Klabunde, Magda Goebbels (London: Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 186–88. 40.  Ibid., p. 192. 41. Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 256. 42.  Ha-Boker, 13 February 1942. 43.  Genesis 15:18. 44.  Avraham Stern, ‘Florence’, 20 June 1934 in Be-damai la-’ad tihyi: Shirim (Tel Aviv, 1976), p. 40. See also file 98/25-29, Stern archive, CZA Jerusalem. 45.  102/12 Stern archive, CZA Jerusalem. 46.  Stern, ‘Florence’, p. 68. 47.  Jerusalem Post, 18 August 2000.

2 The Nation Builders

IN THE BEGINNING

Zionism emerged out of European nationalism—with the Bible as a back-

drop. More often than not, it was a rebellion against the authority of the rabbis and their acceptance of passivity in the face of persecutors and pogromists. ‘Dropping out’ and joining the ranks of progressive humankind did not prove to be a solution. Following the killings of Jews in 1881– 1882, many of their non-Jewish comrades were torn between choosing solidarity with ‘the people’, who were often the willing practitioners of murder and pillage, and the Jews who were their victims. Many chose ‘the people’ and remained silent about the atrocities. Such selective outrage prompted many Jewish revolutionaries to drop their aspirations ‘to go to the people’. This in turn caused a return to ‘Jewishness’, but it was to a different type of Jewish identity—one which was defined by a national consciousness and not by religion per se. Many adopted the principles of a cultural nationalism which then evolved into Zionism. Some belonged to the ‘Am Olam’ movement, which favoured the establishment of agricultural settlements in the United States along socialist lines. Several instead became ‘Biluim’,1 the members of the first aliyah— the first emigration to Palestine in 1882. He came to us, young, thin, wearing glasses and clad in a red blouse after the manner of the young radical and socialist leaders. He said: 27

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Tchelenov told me that you are going to found an organisation to leave Russia and emigrate to Palestine in order to set up a Jewish state there. I am ready to join such a group and to leave Russia. But one thing is not clear to me. Why does it have to be Palestine?2

Indeed many possibilities for a national territory were mooted, but the historical significance of Palestine was embedded within Jewish memory. The required reading material of these embryonic Zionists included Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) and Leon Pinsker’s AutoEmancipation (1882). The early Russian Zionist, Moses Leib Lilienblum, commented in 1883 on an unfathomable Jewish predicament. The opponents of nationalism see us as uncompromising nationalists, with a nationalist God and a nationalist Torah; the nationalists see us as cosmopolitans, whose homeland is wherever we happen to be well off. Religious gentiles say that we are devoid of any faith, and the freethinkers among them say that we are orthodox and believe in all kinds of nonsense; the liberals say we are conservative and the conservatives call us liberal. Some bureaucrats and writers see us as the root of anarchy, insurrection and revolt, and the anarchists say we are capitalists, the bearers of the biblical civilisation, which is, in their view, based on slavery and parasitism. Officialdom accuses us of circumventing the laws of the land—that is, of course, the laws directed specifically against us. . . . Musicians like Richard Wagner charge us with destroying the beauty and purity of music. Even our merits are turned into shortcomings. ‘Few Jews are murderers’, they say, ‘because Jews are cowards’. This, however, does not prevent them from accusing us of murdering Christian children.3

A decade later, the Budapest-born journalist, Theodor Herzl, living in the Vienna of the Hapsburgs, embarked on his own search for the meaning of Jewishness. Unlike his contemporaries in Russia and Poland, Herzl had never read Zionist thinkers such as Pinsker or Hess—and knew next to nothing about the lives of the impoverished and oppressed Jewish masses in Eastern Europe. Unlike the East European Zionists, Herzl’s Jewish background was sparse—it is not certain that he even had a barmitzvah. At university, he attempted to shed both his Jewish and Hungarian affiliations by join-



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ing the German nationalist fraternity, Albia, to show his adulation for all things Prussian. His fraternity name was ‘Tancred’—the Christian conqueror of Jerusalem of the First Crusade, a religious war machine which greeted Jewish communities with murder and mutilation. Like his Viennese contemporaries, Freud and Mahler, he hoped to transcend and indeed escape Jewish identification. In his plays in the 1880s, Herzl’s depiction of Jews—and the Jewish bourgeoisie in particular—was, to put it mildly, both unflattering and unsympathetic. He fervently embraced assimilation and outmarriage. ‘Crossbreeding of the Western races with the so-called oriental one [the Jews] on the basis of a common state religion—that is the desirable great solution.’ Indeed in 1893, he proposed that if the Pope moved against anti-Semitism, then he would initiate ‘a great movement for the free and honourable conversion of Jews to Christianity.’ Herzl’s gradual awakening to the idea of a Jewish State was a response to an anti-Semitism which had blocked his own progression in Viennese society. In Herzl’s eyes, the State of Israel would be ‘assimilation under Jewish self-rule.’ Judaism would only be utilised to promote ‘social cohesion.’ Herzl thus reinvented himself as a Zionist to solve his own personal Jewish problem. His charisma and mastery of public relations entranced the Jewish masses with the possibility of liberation. Zionism was the solution to Jewish continuity in 1896—a different type of Jewish continuity as an answer to Jewish ambiguity. (‘Jews Behaving Badly’, Judaism Today, Spring 1996)

Herzl was a ‘General Zionist’ before the advent of factions, viewing Zionism as neither revolutionary nor messianic, an archetypal Viennese liberal who wanted to create Vienna-on-Sea, and a mutualist who favoured a new economic model poised between capitalism and socialism. Herzl’s evolution was not due to an overnight revelation due to the Dreyfus affair—the standard story—but was a more gradual process, taking place over years in which anti-Semitism was rampant in the so-called civilised countries of Europe; the multi-cultural Austro-Hungary, imperial Germany and republican France—the hallowed birthplace of liberté, fraternité and égalité. It was the reactionary tracts of Wilhelm Marr and Eugen Dühring—and the apologetic speeches of acculturated Jews as Alfred Naquet in response—that offended. It was not the Dreyfus affair that led Herzl to write The Jewish State, but the election of the anti-Semite, Karl

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Lüeger, as Mayor of Vienna in May 1895. Herzl labelled that event ‘a new St. Bartholomew’s night’—referring to the mass murder of Protestant Huguenots by Catholic mobs in France in 1572. What comes across (in his diaries) is the supercilious sense of superiority of those who condescended to meet him. ‘Do you think that the Jews are going to give up their stock exchanges and follow you?’ questioned the Chancellor of the German Reich. ‘The common Jews would,’ replied Herzl. Pope Pius X told Herzl that the Catholic Church could not approve the Zionist movement: ‘The Jews have not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish people.’ Herzl refused to kiss the hand of the pontiff or kneel before him—and described the Holy Father as ‘a good natured corpulent village priest.’ The Russian Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte, genially told Herzl how he had advised Tsar Alexander III that he would have had no objection to drowning ‘our six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea. But if it isn’t possible, we must let them live.’ The Turks simply used Herzl’s proposals—proposals which had no political or financial backing—to increase pressure on the French. As Herzl wrote subsequently: ‘I have left the cave of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.’ Herzl’s sense of universalism has been marginalised by both Zionists and their ideological opponents. He supported the Egyptian national movement and advocated establishing a fund to help the Turkish wounded in their clash with the Greeks. No doubt Herzl did this to advance the Zionist cause, but he was also influenced in his vision by the Russian anarchist, Prince Kropotkin and the Welsh social reformer, Robert Owen. As a Zionist, Herzl did not renounce his liberal principles. He wrote, ‘Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. . . . Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.’ Even so Herzl hardly acknowledged the presence of the Arab inhabitants in the geographical area of Palestine in his writings. The notion of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ popularised by Israel Zangwill, was far more prevalent. In his 1899 letter to Yusuf al Khalidi, a former Mayor of Jerusalem, Herzl assured him that the Zionists’ intentions were benevolent and would benefit everyone. (Review of Shlomo Avneri’s Herzl [Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2013], in Fathom, Winter 2014)

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Funeral cortège of Theodor Herzl, founder of the modern Zionist movement, Vienna, 7 July 1904. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

Herzl looked to Britain where he observed civilised behaviour and fair play. He believed that Britain was ‘one of the last remaining places on Earth where there is freedom from Jew-hatred’. Yet his visits to London to stoke the fires of enthusiasm met with disdain and indifference amongst the leadership of British Jewry. London was the heart of a great empire which had in effect ruled Egypt since 1882. If the Ottoman empire crumbled—as it did during World War I—then, he reasoned, the British could fill the vacuum in neighbouring Palestine. Invited by the writer, Israel Zangwill, he addressed the Maccabean Club—to which the Anglo-Jewish elite belonged—in London in November 1895. Smoothing the way, he spoke in English and appealed to their philanthropic sense of duty to help the poor and the young. It cut no ice. The chief rabbi, Hermann Adler, opposed Herzl’s political Zionism yet supported Jewish settlement in Palestine. The Sephardi Haham, Moses Gaster, however, was an enthusiastic advocate of Zionism long before the arrival of Herzl. Sir Francis Montefiore was also a supporter,

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but his cousin Claude Montefiore, later a founder of Liberal Judaism, argued that ‘a man cannot live in two houses’ as it would cause ‘discomfort.’ Herzl noted that Montefiore was an Italian name. Montefiore retorted that he was ‘nearer and had more sympathy with his British gardener than with Polish Jews.’ Although Herzl regarded it as ‘one of the leading anti-Zionist newspapers,’ it was the Jewish Chronicle in January 1896 which first gave him a platform for his views. A month later, it published his article on The Jewish State—a week before the German original.4 In July 1896, Herzl once more spoke to the Maccabean Club and again received a lukewarm reception.5 A week later, he received a rapturous welcome by mainly Jewish immigrants at the Jewish Working Mens’ Club in the East End. As he famously described them, it was ‘an army of schnorrers possessing a dream.’ It was this kind of response that convinced Herzl to abandon a topdown approach whereby a solution would be imposed by the AngloJewish ‘Cousinhood’ and their European relatives. With democracy effectively forced upon him, he established the Zionist Organisation in 1897. The first meeting of the English branch took place at Clerkenwell Town Hall in March 1898. Over 130 delegates represented 10,000 British Zionists from locations as far afield as Limerick and South Shields.6 At the end of 1898, Herzl visited London once more and spoke to a crowd of 10,000 people at the Great Assembly Hall in Mile End Road.7 He told them that ‘the East End is ours!’ This was a recognition that Zionism was embedded in the hearts of the immigrant masses and not in the pockets of the anglicised elite. By then, he was no longer pulling his punches and launched a scathing attack on the ‘protest bankers.’8 He also returned to his assault on the ‘protestrabbiner,’ a group of German rabbis who considered Zionism as ‘counter to the messianic prophecies of Judaism.’ Two Reform rabbis, Sigmund Maybaum and Heinemann Vogelstein, were concerned that Zionism would undermine the rights of Jews as citizens of the German Reich. The communal leadership in Munich was successful in opposing the staging of the first Zionist Congress in their city, and ensuring that it took place in Basel instead. Orthodoxy also had little time for Zionism. The Kamenitzer Maggid, a brilliant speaker for the Federation of Synagogues (in the UK), regarded Herzl as a second Shabtai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17th century. Even the Lubavitcher Rebbe of the time announced that religion had been substituted by nationalism. ‘The Zionists,’ he argued, ‘had cast off the yoke of the Torah and mitzvot.’



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In tsarist Russia, Orthodox families split over the issue of Zionism. Yet at the 4th Zionist Congress in London in August 1900, over 200 people came from Russia. If it was in eastern Europe where Herzl found his supporters, his assimilated background and dearth of Jewish understanding distanced him. After all, he listened to Wagner in between writing sections of The Jewish State. Yet when Herzl died in 1904 at the pitifully young age of 44, thousands in eastern Europe mourned his passing. Over 30 years ago, I interviewed a very old man in Israel who told me that his family had formally sat shivah for Herzl in their shtetl. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Because he was the King of the Jews.’ (‘Zionism’s Hated Hero’, Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2010)

AFTER HERZL Herzl’s short life and his activities influenced a generation—some of whom can truly be labelled the founding fathers of Israel. For many, Herzl was cloaked in the guise of a holy liberator. For the young assimilated Russian writer, Vladimir Jabotinsky—in search of a raison d’être in life— Herzl in death assumed an almost mystical significance. Sometimes from the midst of a nation’s gifted individuals there arises a personality who is endowed with an exceptional sensitivity which other mortals lack. Everything sacred that is scattered in fragments in the souls of millions is collected in the soul of this man, is welded into one piece—and then the God of the nation speaks through the lips of this man and creates with his hands, and he becomes the chosen leader of the masses with the right to achieve their elementary will. Happy are those nations to which destiny grants such a leader.9

Like others before him, Jabotinsky was suddenly drawn by the magnetic pull of Zionism, by the vision of a Jewish future and a break with an unpalatable past. Shortly after Herzl’s death in 1904, he characterised the Jewish condition in fin de siècle Europe. We were sitting at the time in the gutter, at the end of the great highway of life and on this road we watched the majestic procession of nations

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on their way to their historic destinies. And we were sitting aside, like beggars with outstretched hands, begging for alms and swearing in different languages that we merited the charitable offering. Sometimes it was given to us, and then it appeared that we were pleased and contented because the master was in a good mood and had thrown us a gnawed bone. So it only appeared, for deep in our souls was growing a repulsive disgust for the beggar’s spot in the gutter and for the outstretched hand, and we felt a confused attraction for the great highway, a desire to walk upon it like others, not to beg but to build our own happiness.

Moreover, he reflected on his own conversion to Zionism—and Herzl’s influence in that conversion—in the language of redemption and salvation. We changed; we were brought to life by touching the earth upon which he moved. It is only recently that I felt that earth and it is only from that moment that I understood what it meant to live and breathe—and if on the morrow I should have awakened to learn that this was merely a dream, that I am what I had been, and that ground is not and cannot be under my feet, I would have killed myself, for it is impossible for one who has breathed the mountain air to return and be reconciled to sprawl once more in the gutter.10

Jabotinsky evolved into one of the brightest stars in the Zionist firmament. Yet he also remained the archetypal rootless cosmopolitan, the Russian writer in exile. He astounded Jewish audiences with his command of a plethora of languages and his inspirational rhetoric. In 1925 he founded Revisionist Zionism, which advocated a return to Herzlian Zionism—a back-to-basics approach which differentiated him from the liberal Weizmann and the socialist Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky saw himself as a disciple of Herzl—and unspoken successor. Chaim Weizmann, however, did not perceive Herzl in such adulatory terms then. Unlike Jabotinsky and Herzl, he was a son of the shtetl and was a youthful opponent of Herzl’s approach. He believed that Herzl’s The Jewish State contained ‘not a single new idea for us’.11 He later commented in his autobiography, Trial and Error, that Theodor Herzl was ‘not of the people’ despite being an inspiring leader and brilliant organiser.12 Herzl, he later came to understand, was a product of his Viennese milieu—encased by it and unable to transcend it. Consequently,



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he was light years removed from the drudgery of the lives of traditional east European Jews. Many of the early Zionists believed that it was national consciousness—and not Judaism—which had been the vital life-force that constituted the kernel of Jewish identity down the centuries. Moses Margolin had written Basic Trends in the History of the Jewish People in 1901, and this had influenced many Russian Jewish intellectuals. The practice of Judaism had been the shell—the external scaffolding which allowed a marginalised people to survive. This, of course, flew in the face of conventional wisdom and aroused the ire of religious Jews—including religious Zionists. Indeed Max Nordau—Herzl’s second-in-command—believed that civilisation had developed not because of religion, but in spite of it.13 Nordau came from a religious background, but had distanced himself subsequently. This was in distinct contrast to the assimilated Herzl. In a letter to his family on arriving in Basel for the first Zionist Congress in 1897, Nordau wrote: As soon as I arrived this morning, I went looking for Herzl. I hired a carriage and drove to the synagogue where I found him. I had quite forgotten that it was Saturday. There I found myself in the midst of the service. And there was Herzl draped in a talit (a prayer shawl). They wanted to honour me with an aliyah (a calling up to the reading of the weekly portion from the five books of Moses), but I refused and fled in confusion.14

This reflected the desire of many young Zionists not to be weighed down by the yoke of Judaic tradition. Weizmann was one of an entire group of impoverished Russian Jewish students who were studying in Berlin. They imbibed the intellectual openness and nonconformity of the city. The traditional world of their observant parents—however enlightened in comparison to ultra-orthodoxy—receded and they often regarded it with some measure of disdain. This came to the fore when the issue of Zionist education was debated. What did such education mean? Was it a broad cultural discipline or should it be the domain of a committee of eminent rabbis? As children of the haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) who had emerged from the shtetl, Weizmann and his friends attacked the rabbis in no uncertain terms: ‘Who has in fact demonstrated this fear of culture? Was it not

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these rabbinical gentlemen, those who for years have confused the souls of the Jewish people?’15 Weizmann warned the rabbis that they were welcome if they came as representatives of the people. But if they came as representatives of the synagogue, ‘then this is anti-Jewish’.16 Weizmann and his supporters then established the Democratic Faction within the Zionist movement—much to the consternation of the acculturated Herzl, who possessed no real understanding of the debates and struggles within east European Jewry. Herzl instead was focused on his mission to win over rabbis as communal leaders to the cause of Zionism. Weizmann was a disciple of Ahad Ha’am, Herzl’s intellectual rival and protagonist of cultural Zionism. The English title of Herzl’s work The Jewish State was in fact a mistranslation from the German and should have read The State of the Jews. But Ahad Ha’am asked whether a future state should be like any other state? Did not a Jewish state imply something else, something different? While both Jabotinsky and Weizmann evolved into experienced negotiators on behalf of Zionism in the corridors of power, it was the younger David Ben-Gurion who emerged in the 1940s as the central founder of the State of Israel and who guided it through its war of independence. Yet all three while following different ideological pathways were determined to break with a Jewish past, dominated by rabbinical authority and defined by the walls of the ghetto.

DAVID GRUEN FROM PLONSK David Ben-Gurion (Gruen) however was by comparison calculating and unemotional. Unlike Jabotinsky, he did not possess ‘the soul of a poet dissatisfied with daily humdrum’.17 Ben-Gurion instead admired the Bolsheviks who had taken power in 1917. A leading Israeli historian later described him as both a revolutionary Jacobin and ‘the helmsman of the state’.18 Unlike Herzl, Weizmann and Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion was, at the time of Herzl’s passing, a Marxist-Zionist who would emigrate to Palestine to build socialism. He did not relate to the bourgeois Zionism of this new breed of diplomats and writers. Instead he regarded himself—and other



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members of the second aliyah—as the Zionist wing of the revolutionary forces which were emerging to confront tsarist oppression. Ben-Gurion came of political age during a period when the paths to socialist redemption in the twentieth century were being mapped out. In the year 1897–1898, three choices were offered to the Jews—all of which appealed to themes within Jewish tradition and history. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of Lenin and Trotsky attracted those who wished to repair the world. The Bund attracted Jews who wished to struggle for labouring workers and for civil rights—and wished to create autonomous Jewish institutions in the tsarist empire. And finally there was Herzl’s Zionist Congress in Basel whose delegates were persuaded to sport dinner jackets to create a veneer of respectability and order. While Ben-Gurion had read the works of Moses Hess and the tracts of Nahman Syrkin on the centrality of socialism for Hebrew workers, he soon realised that fin de siècle Palestine was not a Russia, seething with revolutionary fervour. A Jewish nation was emerging from its twothousand-year-long slumber and the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, possessed only the rudiments of class structure. Yet after 1917 it was not Ber Borokhov, the ideologue of Marxist Zionism, the seminal figure with whom Ben-Gurion identified, but Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the man who made a revolution with little at his disposal. Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that (Lenin’s) penetrating gaze perceives reality as through a clear prism, impeded by no formula, proverb, phrase or dogma. For this man has been blessed with the ingenious ability to look life in the eye, to articulate matters neither in concepts nor in words, but rather in the basic terms of reality.19

Ben-Gurion regarded Lenin as a master tactician who was determinedly and obsessively focused on the task ahead. In this regard he was ruthless: ‘a man of iron will who will spare neither human life nor the blood of innocent babes for the sake of the revolution’. While following his own ideological path, Ben-Gurion viewed Lenin as an initiator of expediency, to adapt when necessary, ‘to crawl on your stomach through the mire’. Ben-Gurion identified strongly with this notion and regarded Lenin as more central to the success of the revolution than the

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lofty, admired intellectual, Trotsky. Lenin made decisions according to the reality that he perceived and was not entrapped by theory. Yet Ben-Gurion was a lifelong anti-communist—in that he was never seduced by confusing the building of socialism with Soviet national interests. Despite the deep split in World Poale Zion in 1920 as to the meaning of the October Revolution for Zionists, he suggested that if the Bolsheviks were prepared to endorse a socialist Zionist party, then he would certainly advocate its joining the Comintern. Ben-Gurion, Syrkin and many others believed that it was only a matter of time before Lenin actually recognised the socialist Zionists, and they were somewhat perplexed why it had not already taken place. However with the failure of the revolution in the West—in Poland and Germany—Lenin turned towards the East and the Arab world. This anticolonial approach at the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in September 1920 appealed to the embryonic forces of Arab nationalism. But when this was combined with Lenin’s ideological views on Zionism from 1903—which were almost an appendage to his campaign against the Bund—it provided little space for a rapprochement between Bolshevism and Marxist Zionism. Lenin had little idea about the Jewish masses outside his limited experience in Russia and he identified Zionism with solely bourgeois Herzlian Zionism. While Weizmann detested the leaders of Bolsheviks—he had debated with them in Switzerland while still a student—Ben-Gurion continued to express his admiration for the founder of the Soviet Union. On Lenin’s death at the beginning of 1924, he delivered a eulogy to the creator of Bolshevism. Many followed Ben-Gurion’s lead. The poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg, then still a man of the Left, wrote about the Hebrew proletariat standing on a Hebrew island, facing Moscow, as Lenin’s funeral cortège passed by. In the 1930s Ben-Gurion admired Churchill’s opposition to appeasement and the bulldog spirit of the British at the prospect of a Nazi invasion. He saw this as an example of leadership in times of adversity and forging a national coherence out of the stubbornness of a people when facing attack. Yet as with Lenin and Communism, he did not allow his appreciation to deflect from his central goal. During the Second World War, Ben-Gurion identified with Churchill— ‘a courageous, cautious, far-seeing, enterprising leader.’ He admired Brit-



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ain in 1940 but instructed the Haganah to carry out sabotage operations against the British five years later. Watching the celebrations from his London hotel on VE Day, he quoted the prophet Hosea: ‘Rejoice not, O Israel, unto exultation.’ The Nazi decimation of European Jewry reflected reality for Ben-Gurion. How [was Ben-Gurion] to implement the impossible task of welding together Jews from a hundred different countries and cultures? Despite the centuries-old yearning to return, Ben-Gurion also realised that the Jews were ill-prepared for statehood. He demanded that his colleagues hebraise their names—only Teddy Kollek refused. An admirer of the Hebrew writer, Micha Berdyczewski, Ben-Gurion nonetheless opposed both the closing down of a Yiddish theatre at the behest of his education minister and a motion from Menahem Begin’s party that Arabs be prevented from speaking Arabic. Ben-Gurion was a self-educated man—someone who compulsively bought books. He initiated the translation into Hebrew of Plato, Spinoza, Darwin, Confucius and Kant, and preferred to talk to Isaiah Berlin in Oxford than to dignitaries in London. (Review of Anita Shapira’s Ben-Gurion [Yale University Press, 2014], Jewish Chronicle, 15 January 2015)

While Ben-Gurion was driven in forging a nation out of disparate Jewish communities, he also exhibited a ruthlessness in dealing with his opponents. Despite his advocacy of a national-liberal Zionism, Jabotinsky attracted many hero-worshipping youthful disciples who were often involved in clashes with Ben-Gurion’s followers in the early 1930s. In 1935, Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion privately negotiated an agreement in London to settle their ideological differences—and they seemed to have got on well with each other. Their respective supporters, however, were having none of it—and vehemently opposed any accord. Menahem Begin reminded Jabotinsky that his opponents had labelled him ‘Vladimir Hitler’.20 Within a few years, a politically weakened Jabotinsky found himself in a state of siege. Implicitly criticised by the youth of Betar, castigated by his old colleagues from the Revisionist movement and getting nowhere in securing a mass emigration from Eastern Europe despite his belief in Britain. Ben-Gurion perceived a political opportunity and hardened his stance. He told Eliahu Dobkin, who had been involved in

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negotiations with Jabotinsky’s followers: ‘These biryonim (hooligans) imitate the tactics of the Nazis. They are our sworn enemies. When you speak to them, you should always remember that you talk to an enemy lacking a conscience’.21 Throughout his life, Ben-Gurion proved pragmatic about the final borders of Israel—and often gave different answers at different times. He avoided the inclusion of areas of Arab population from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire up to Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War. Yet he saw that access to natural resources was important. So while Sidon was excluded in 1918, the river Litani was included. Ben-Gurion’s accommodation with Arab nationalism was rooted in his proposal of autonomous regions for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. His hopes for an alliance with Arab workers in the 1920s, however, dissipated when he realised that the Palestinian Arabs had adopted nationalism rather than socialism as their defining ideology—due in part to a weak Arab middle class. Such hopes finally disappeared with the Tarpat disturbances and killings in 1929 and the Arab Revolt of 1936. Ben-Gurion, of course, helped to construct and shape the State of Israel after 1948, but his actions in the arena of the Knesset testify to his sense of mission. It also led to unforeseen consequences in later years. In the early years of the state, Ben-Gurion wielded tremendous power in party and government as the architect of Labour Zionism and the decisive founder of Israel. Idiosyncrasies were viewed instead within the realm of enigmatic wisdom. As the author comments, ‘Not only was Ben-Gurion totally identified with the state he had established, he felt he owned it, and passionately loved it.’ This paralleled the approach of leaders of other newly emergent nations. The emphasis on statism meant that any expression of independence and individuality on the part of the Knesset members was viewed by Ben-Gurion as divisive and counterproductive in the creation of a cohesive and united society. Israel was different from the developing world, however, as Zionist politics had constructed a model that suggested all wisdom did not reside within the executive arm. The Zionist congresses since 1897 and the Asefat Hanivharim, the assembly of the Jewish settlers in Palestine, provided the background experience for parliamentary opposition. Ben-Gurion viewed the Knesset, the legislative arm, as a talking shop that should support the government and refrain from criticizing it. More-



The Nation Builders

over, he preferred to blur the differences between the executive and the legislative. However, when he understood that the Knesset was not content to become a rubber stamp, he began to marginalize its position in political life and to regard it almost as a rival. There was no attempt to achieve a balance of forces between government and the executive, no checks and balances, only an apparent zero sum game approach. BenGurion’s campaign against the Knesset initially rendered it somewhat docile and on the defensive such that not a single private member’s bill was proposed in the first Knesset and only two enacted in the second. In the early years, the continued existence of Israel was in the balance. Israel was ‘a mobilized democracy.’ Its exposition of democratic behaviour therefore projected flaws. Israeli Arabs lived under military government, and some political parties, such as the ultra-orthodox, were highly selective about which parts of democracy they accepted and which they rejected. In addition, the militant undergrounds of the early 1950s, such as Brit HaCanaim, were quite happy to commit acts of violence against elected representatives. In such circumstances, Ben-Gurion’s approach during these years was more akin to that of a Kenyatta or Nyerere than his Knesset colleagues. Ben-Gurion’s ardour for government by the executive led to ensuring that the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committees were left in the dark regarding decisions and developments on the 1949 armistice agreements. When the Law and Justice Committee wished to meet Ben-Gurion to discuss the Israeli constitution, the prime minister first refused to participate and then cancelled meetings. He took the view that a constitution would ignite a kulturkampf between secular and religious and was thereby detrimental to building a stable state. During his sojourn in Sde Boker, when Moshe Sharett was prime minister, Ben-Gurion neither frequented the Knesset nor refused his salary as an elected member. Ben-Gurion was also averse to granting Knesset members a broad immunity from prosecution, as is the case in many other democracies. They pushed the immunity bill through because they simply did not trust Ben-Gurion. During the first and second Knesset elections, Ben-Gurion was highly influential as to who should be placed on the Mapai list of candidates. In the 1949 election, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi was given a highranking position; seven seats were reserved for women and six for kibbutzim and moshavim. However, Ben-Gurion rejected a proposal in which lawyers—who knew a little about making laws—would be favoured. Goldberg suggests that such a move would have enhanced

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the legislative ability of the Knesset. Most Mapai members went along with Ben-Gurion, but one member of its central committee commented, ‘I have seen the Knesset choose a government, but I have never seen the government choose the Knesset.’ Ben-Gurion was also happy to aid his party’s chances by obtaining information about the preparations for Herut’s first conference from the security services. In addition, members’ correspondence was monitored, and scheduled radio broadcasts were withdrawn. A poem by Natan Alterman lauding the Palmach—the fighting force of the rival Ahdut Ha’avodah—was prevented by the censor from being published in Davar. Goldberg argues that Ben-Gurion was responsible in part for the unruly style of Knesset debates in that he did not set an example for his colleagues. His provocative language often led to unparliamentary scenes. In the case of Menahem Begin and his followers in Herut, he employed this to good effect with a studied display of bile and sarcasm. Irritated and nonplussed, Begin always responded in kind and thereby propagated the imagery in the public mind of Herut as ‘extremist.’ As Ben-Gurion envisaged, this probably retarded the coalescence of the Right in Israeli politics by many years and tarnished Begin’s repeated attempts at respectability. As Israel’s future became more certain, parliamentarians both inside and outside his party were unwilling to accept Ben-Gurion’s actions in reverential silence. This can be observed by the increase of the number of private members’ bills passed. By 1960, when he declared, ‘I have dismissed the government,’ Ben-Gurion’s rationalized authoritarianism provoked an alliance that cut through party lines. (Review of Giora Goldberg, Ben-Gurion against the Knesset [London: Routledge, 2003], in International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 1 [February 2008])

NOTES 1.  Beit Ya’akov Lekhu Venelkha (O House of Jacob, let us go [up]). 2.  Menahem Ussishkin, Sefer Ussishkin (Jerusalem, 1933), p. 331, quoted in Chaim Chissin, A Palestine Diary: Memoirs of a BILU Pioneer 1882–1887 (New York: Herzl Press, 1976), p. 12.



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3. Moses Leib Lilienblum, ‘The Future of Our People’ (1883), in Arthur Hertzberg The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), p. 173. 4.  Jewish Chronicle, 16 February 1896. 5.  Theodor Herzl, address to a meeting of the Maccabean Club, 6 July 1896, in Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings, vol. 1, January 1896–June 1898 (New York: Herzl Press, 1973), pp. 34–43. 6.  Theodor Herzl, ‘At Clerkenwell Town Hall’, Die Welt, 4 March 1898. 7.  Die Welt, 14 October 1898. 8.  Theodor Herzl, address to a meeting at the Great Assembly Hall, 3 October 1898, in Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings, vol. 2, August 1898–May 1904 (New York: Herzl Press, 1975), pp. 24–29. 9.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Shiva: On the Death of Herzl’, Evreiskaya zhizn’, no. 6, June 1904; Hadar, November 1940. 10. Ibid. 11.  Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1949), p. 43. 12.  Ibid., p. 45. 13.  Max Nordau, ‘The Psychological Roots of Religion’, in The Meaning of History (London, 1910), p. 214. 14.  Anna and Maxa Nordau, Max Nordau, translated from French (New York, 1943), p. 127. 15.  Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 63. 16. Ibid. 17.  Binyamin Akzin, Mi-Riga l’Yerushalayim (Jerusalem, 1989), p. 157. 18.  Anita Shapira, Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 174. 19.  David Ben-Gurion, Yoman, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971), p. 201; English translation in Israel Kolatt, ‘Image and Reality’, in David Ben-Gurion: Politics and Leadership in Israel, ed. Ronald W. Zweig (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 18. 20.  Davar, 25 February 1933. 21.  David Niv, Ma’arakhot ha-Irgun ha-Tseva’i ha-Le’umi, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1965), p. 116.

3 The Zionists and Pre-War Nationalism

THE GERMANS

The early governments of Israel and the leadership of the Zionist move-

ment before 1948 had to make difficult decisions about contact with unsavoury regimes. The Ha’avarah (Transfer) agreement was concluded between Nazi officials and the Jewish Agency in 1933. This allowed some German Jews to leave for Palestine with £1,000 in cash and to transfer up to 20,000 Reichsmarks in the form of German goods in lieu of their life’s savings. The Germans were thus able to expel Jews as well as boost their economy. As Francis Nicosia’s excellent book Zionism and AntiSemitism in Nazi Germany (2008) illustrates, this complex controversial arrangement divided opinion amongst both Jews and Nazis. Yet 53,000 Jews were saved from a probable extermination during the Shoah. Would it have been more intellectually palatable, therefore, if they had remained in Germany? Socialists and social democrats in pre-war Palestine saw themselves as internationalists—several hundred Jews and Arabs fought Franco in the International Brigades in Spain. Brigaders came from fifty-three countries and Jews were disproportionately represented in their ranks— probably just under a fifth of all those who went to Spain. Comparing this number to the world Jewish population, it is likely that the Jews were by far the largest contributor of any single nationality which fought fascism in Spain. 44



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Yet, conversely, a prime motivation was helping Jews in distress—particularly when authoritarian nationalist regimes discriminated against their Jewish communities. If Jews could be brought to safety in Palestine, then, it was argued, back channels should be opened with the devil himself. Even so, twentieth-century socialist Zionists felt distinctly uneasy about this. They pointed to both universalist teachings within Judaism and to the past treatment of Jews by state-sponsored persecutors. The Zionist Right, however, did not exhibit such qualms. Many were fatalistic about the state of the world and projected a Hobbesian outlook. Indeed, in 1910 Jabotinsky wrote his well-known article, ‘Homo Homini Lupus’ (Man Is a Wolf to Man). Yet both Left and Right felt that there was a pragmatic need to talk to one’s opponents and enemies when necessary. In 1903, Herzl met Russian Minister of the Interior von Plehve, who was associated with anti-Jewish persecution and held responsible for pogroms. Weizmann met Mussolini several times during the 1930s, while Arlosoroff tried to contact the Nazi leadership on a visit to Berlin shortly before his assassination. While this was distant from expressing a political sympathy, there were some on the Zionist far Right that expressed an understanding for Italian Fascism. The intellectual, Abba Ahimeir, an admirer of Oswald Spengler’s works, wrote about his appreciation for the national dictatorships that had taken root in Europe. Parliamentary politics only worked, he argued, in ‘strong states’ such as Britain and France. In Palestine Ahimeir advocated a ‘revolutionary Zionism’ which was designed to awaken youth and prevent the ossification of Zionist endeavour.1 Ahimeir favoured Jabotinsky in the image of authoritarian European leaders. One of Ahimeir’s articles was entitled ‘On the arrival of our Duce’ to commemorate the emigration of Jabotinsky to Palestine at the end of 1928. Jabotinsky was not best pleased by this declaration of adoration. As he wrote: ‘Buffaloes follow a leader. Civilised men have no “leaders”’.2 Yet Jabotinsky did not distance himself from the idol-worship of Polish Jewish youth after his visit in 1927. The sudden electoral victory of the Nazis in 1932 presented the Maximalist faction of the Revisionist Zionists with a problem. On the one hand, the Nazis were Jew-haters. On the other, they also hated the communists—and often equated the two. Ahimeir regarded Hitler as merely another persecutor in a long line of anti-Semitic tormentors. In March 1933

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he wrote: ‘Hitler has not yet treated us as badly as Stalin has done. . . . The anti-Semitic shell must be discarded, but not its anti-Marxist kernel’.3 An aggrieved Jabotinsky regarded such commentary ‘as a stab in the back’. He believed that anti-Semitism was actually at the core of Nazi ideology and not at its periphery. He had read Mein Kampf and regarded its author as someone who was ‘without talent, naïve and peddling pedestrian ideas’. Within a few weeks the Nazis initiated its boycott of Jewish businesses. The Maximalists suddenly awoke from Ahimeir’s ‘understanding’ for the new German nationalism. Many were swept up by the strong ideological currents prevalent during the years between the two world wars. Abba Ahimeir in this sense was no exception. The German communist, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was imprisoned both in Stalin’s Gulag—in a labour camp in Karaganda—and in the Nazi death camp for women at Ravensbrück.4 Totalitarianism was dominant—and anyone who was thought to have dissented, ended up incarcerated or in the graveyard. Decades later, remarkable stories emerged from this turbulent, brutal period. [Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels] is known mostly for the manner of her death—she poisoned her six young children—in Hitler’s bunker in April 1945. The Russians found her six beautiful children in their white nightgowns—the girls with huge white bows in their golden hair—as if asleep. Yet the death of Magda Goebbels and her family is only matched by the bizarre odyssey of her life. She was attracted to men of great charisma and power. Her lovers included the ‘shrunken Aryan,’ Goebbels, the business magnate Günther Quandt, the nephew of Herbert Hoover—and the ardent Socialist Zionist, Haim Arlosoroff. An illegitimate child of the fin de siècle, Magda Goebbels’s father did the right thing shortly afterwards. The marriage lasted three years, whereupon an assimilated Jew, Max Friedländer became her stepfather. Friedländer kept Pesach and Yom Kippur, but Magda was given a convent education in Belgium and, presumably, only a rudimentary Jewish identity. The Friedländers and the Arlosoroffs both arrived in Berlin as refugees during World War I. This common bond drew her to Lisa Arlosoroff and later, in a more intimate fashion, to her brother.



The Zionists and Pre-War Nationalism

[The Russian] Vitaly became Victor in Germany and under the spell of Zionism emerged as Haim. He was a fiery and passionate orator—as at home with the poetry of Heine and the works of Goethe, as well as the socialist theories of Syrkin and Borochov. Magda sported a Magen David which Arlosoroff had given her and she attended meetings of Tikvat Zion. She was attracted to Arlosoroff because of his personality and sense of purpose rather than an independent commitment to Zion. It was this, her biographer Anja Klabunde argues, that distanced Arlosoroff from her. It was simply not possible to keep up with Arlosoroff’s frantic pace of involvement. Both drifted into other relationships and subsequent unhappy marriages plus children, yet there was undoubtedly a closeness and admiration which existed between them even when they met occasionally during the 1920s. After being brought up as a Catholic and mixing with Jews, she converted to Protestantism on her marriage to Günther Quandt. He certainly paid the bills and gave her the bourgeois life which she desired, but it did not cure her craving for something indescribably more. Her spiritual emptiness was filled after a visit to the Nordic Ring. As Klabunde comments: She sat down among thousands of people whose language was crude and uneducated, people who smelled of sweat and leapt frantically to their feet when Hitler’s leather-jacketed agitator passed, limping slightly with one foot.

The ennui suddenly disappeared; she had discovered Nazism and its puppeteer, Joseph Goebbels. Beauty had met the beast. Her dark secret of a Jewish stepfather had to be buried, yet this did not stop one opposition paper parading the title ‘Nazi Chief weds Jewess’. Like many other Germans, Magda identified with the thousand-year Reich and felt protected in her devotion. When Arlosoroff, now head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, arrived in Berlin in May 1933, he was greeted by his old friend Robert Weltsch, the editor of Jüdische Rundschau. His horror at the nazification of the capital was hardly dispelled when he noticed a marriage photograph in a bookshop—the love of his youth arm-in-arm with Goebbels. Forty years later in Israel, Weltsch could still describe the utter shock and disbelief which Arlosoroff felt—to the point of semi-collapse. Arlosoroff later suggested to Weltsch that perhaps Magda could be utilized to seek an interview with Goebbels aimed at securing an arrangement for the transfer of German Jewish assets to Palestine.

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Weltsch tried to dissuade Arlosoroff from embarking on such a course, but without success. According to Klabunde, Arlosoroff did manage to talk to Magda and she promised to meet him after his return from Warsaw. This meeting did not transpire, as Magda left unexpectedly for Italy. However, a message from Magda warned Arlosoroff of the extreme danger of any meeting, and that he should leave Germany immediately. He then conveyed this news to his sister, commenting that he had made the greatest mistake in his life. A couple of weeks later, Arlosoroff was gunned down by unknown assailants on the Tel Aviv beach. For years, conventional explanations suggested that the assassins were either Arabs or members of the far Right group, Brit Ha’Biryonim. In the mid-1970s, the late Haviv Kanaan suggested in the Israeli press that Goebbels had sent two agents, Theo Korth and Heinz Geronda, to murder Arlosoroff. Klabunde adds no new conclusive evidence to substantiate this theory, and it must still remain in the realm of speculation. Even so, it is quite credible that Goebbels could have instigated the deed. The Berlin Jewish journalist, Bella Fromm, described Goebbels as ‘a kind of combination of Mephisto and Savonarola, sinister and fanatic, intriguing and obsessed.’ It was this combination of magnetism and repulsion that, in essence, destroyed Magda as a balanced human being. Goebbels, the womanizer, conducted at least 40 affairs during the first part of his marriage, yet needed Magda to be both the mother of his children and his confidante. This stretched as far as the revelation of Nazi atrocities in the east which seems to have traumatized her. Yet Magda previously was untouched by the suffering of Jews and rarely adopted an independent stand on any aspect of Nazi policy. When the Salon Kohnen closed after Kristallnacht, she opined ‘What a nuisance that Kohnen is closing, we all know that when the Jews go, so will the elegance from Berlin.’ On another occasion, she refused to help a Jewish friend from her boarding school days—the friend perished in Auschwitz. Yet such an action seems more an explicit denial of her past than an ideological anti-Semitism. Outwardly the good mother and loyal wife, her private life with Goebbels was one of torment and humiliation. It was for this reason that she was the only wife of a Nazi leader who chose to die with her husband. Goering’s wife, for instance, lived on in Adenauer’s Germany. As she told her closest friend in a rare recognition of the reality near the end:



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If I stay alive, I will be arrested immediately and interrogated about Joseph. If I were to tell the truth, I would have to portray him as he was. I would have to describe what went on behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in revulsion. As far as the outside world is concerned I have lived by his side amidst brilliance and luxury, I have enjoyed his power.

It seems that Magda Goebbels’ life was simply theatre, reinvention upon reinvention. Only when things turned bad for her personally did she throw off the mask—and then only in the most private of private conversations. Was Magda evil? Perhaps in the sense that all bystanders and witnesses who close their eyes are evil. Anja Klabunde’s book is by no means an academic tome and indeed reads on occasion like a television soap, but she has reclaimed from extremely sparse sources the disturbing story of a sad, insecure woman who was attracted by power, but ultimately closed her eyes to evil. A terrible but compelling tale. (Review of Anja Klabunde’s Magda Goebbels, in the Jerusalem Post, 16 August 2002).

THE ITALIANS The year 1938 was one of foreboding and premonition—the last full year of peace before the Shoah. It was a year filled with fateful events— Czechoslovakia, Kristallnacht, the Evian Conference. It was also the year when fascist Italy forsook its ambivalence toward Nazi Germany and introduced a series of racial laws designed to discriminate against its Jewish citizens—a decision taken by Mussolini. The legislation passed at the end of 1938 placed Jews outside of Italian society.5 Jewish university professors were ousted from their posts and their careers. Jewish students not admitted. Revisionist Zionist youth were no longer welcome for naval training in Civitavecchia. Mussolini had attempted to develop his anti-British policies in the Middle East and quietly funded the Mufti of Jerusalem, the acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement. Italy paid 138,000 pounds to facilitate the Arab Revolt in Palestine between September 1936 and June 1938.6

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By the turn of the century, Jews were totally integrated into Italian life. One Prime Minister, Luigi Luzzati was Jewish. Another, Sidney Sonnino, had a Jewish father. The late Cecil Roth commented that for most Italians ‘the profession of Judaism was regarded as an amiable eccentricity rather than a social mistake.’ Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist theorist also remarked on the lack of anti-Semitism amongst Italians. Not surprisingly, therefore, a number of Jews supported Mussolini when he embarked on his political career and assisted in the exorcism of socialism from his political soul. There were at least five Jews who were founders of the fighting Fasci while another three were regarded as ‘martiri Fascisti,’ having fallen for the cause even before the march on Rome. Although some Jews were active in the early anti-fascist movement, many others were attracted by Mussolini’s narrow appeal to middle-class conservative values. Jews were among the business fraternity who financed the early Fascist movement and some 200 were thought to have participated in the march on Rome. In her recent book The Italians and the Holocaust, Susan Zuccotti revealed that slightly more than 10 per cent of the Italian Jewish population were members of the Fascist Party between 1928 and 1933. Mussolini himself commented in 1932 that ‘we too have our Jews. There are many in the Fascist Party and they are good fascists and good Italians. A country with a sound system of government has no Jewish problem.’ Yet Mussolini was complex in his attitude to Jews despite the fact that he was highly influenced by his Jewish mistress, Margarita Sarfatti. Throughout his political career, Mussolini veered irrationally between judeophobia and philo-Semitism. For example, he attributed the October Revolution in 1917 to a Judeo-Bolshevik plot—a view he later recanted probably under pressure from Jewish fascists. With the rise of Nazism, many Italian fascists refused to imitate the Nazi model. Indeed the irony of fascist Italy’s policy toward the Jews must lie in the spectacle of Jewish officers participating in a goose-stepping parade in honour of Hitler when the Führer visited Rome in May 1938. A few months later, Mussolini drew up a ten point ‘Manifesto of the Race’ which declared that ‘Jews do not belong to the Italian race and are therefore unassimilable.’ Historians such as Meir Michaelis and Renzo de Felice have argued that this was not simply the result of direct German interference. It was more an opportunist policy decision engineered by Mussolini to totally break with the West and to move closer to Hitler as the Czech crisis loomed. Mussolini like Franco in Spain decided to



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advertise his solidarity with Germany through the vehicle of anti-Jewish laws in which few Italians and few fascists actually believed. Even so, it was a tremendous psychological wrench for most Jewish fascists and assimilationists who had regarded themselves as Italian patriots first and foremost—a catastrophe enacted in Giorgio Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis. (‘Jewish Fascists’, Jewish Quarterly, Summer 1988)

The Maximalist wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement looked towards fascist Italy as an exemplar. Jabotinsky did not. He strongly opposed Italian fascism and regarded it as an attempt ‘to reaffirm the principle that the state has the right and the duty to coerce—and the actual power too’.7 Although a convinced anti-communist, Abba Ahimeir admired Lenin for his revolutionary zeal. He admired the gatherings of the Bolshevik faithful in Zimmerwald and Kunterhal during World War I, when any political upheaval seemed light-years away. He therefore regarded Jabotinsky as Zionism’s Kerensky and the Maximalists as the true exponents of a revolutionary spirit. Indeed Ahimeir was waiting for the appearance of ‘a Jewish Mussolini’. The establishment gathering of the good and great at Zionist Congresses was not for him.8 The Vienna conference of the Revisionists in 1932 produced an acrimonious confrontation between the Maximalists and their opponents. The Italian representative spoke of ‘the elective affinities between fascism and Revisionism’ and raised his hand high to give the fascist salute. To which Ahimeir and his Maximalist supporters responded in kind.9 Jabotinsky who had spent many years in Italy before World War I was deeply rooted in its pre-fascist liberal values and culture. His opposition to authoritarianism was profound. Yet it made no difference to his opponents in the Labour movement, who utilised these internal schisms to label him ‘a Jewish Mussolini’ and his followers ‘fashistlekh’ (little fascists). While Mussolini never warmed to either Jews or Zionists, the Jews in Italy were not subjected to isolation and persecution until the anti-Jewish laws were promulgated in 1938. Fascist Italy was not Nazi Germany. Yet the contemporary public tarring of ‘Jabotinsky the fascist’ has endured.

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THE IRISH When the Irish rebels were pulled out of the General Post Office on Dublin’s O’Connell Street just over a hundred years ago, they were jeered and spat upon by the locals. Decaying fruit was hurled at the wounded and the maimed. The Easter Rising in 1916 was a courageous, futile affair—another link in the chain of glorious failures that peppered Irish attempts to throw off the English yoke. The victorious British commander, however, made the mistake of shooting many of the rebel leaders and turning them into martyrs, thus igniting the passions of republicanism which eventually led to the founding of the Irish Free State. Few Irish Republicans today know that their struggle deeply impressed Jewish nationalists and influenced their revolt against the British in the 1940s. Zionists and Irish republicanism both confronted British imperialism at approximately the same period in history. Indeed Jabotinsky quoted from the poetry of Thomas MacDonagh who was executed by the British for his participation in the Easter Rising. Understanding and learning from Irish republicanism became an integral part of devising a more militant stand for Zionist nationalists particularly after the killings of Jews in Hebron and Safed in 1929. In particular the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and the later establishment of an Irish republic, led by Éamon De Valera, was a subject of analysis—and possibly a template for the Zionists. One hundred years ago a small group of Irish men and women staged a military uprising from Dublin’s General Post Office in a futile attempt to throw off the British yoke and achieve Irish independence. The leadership of the uprising were foolishly executed after courts-martial. They became martyrs in a religious country which believed in martyrdom. But the manner of their deaths fuelled a national movement which confronted the British military to secure an Irish Free State in the 1920s. Its participants were witnesses to civil war and to a partition of the island—a period characterised by a nationalism bent on reclaiming Irish history and culture. The Easter Rising in 1916 made a tremendous impression on a second generation Irish Jew, Robert Briscoe—the subject of an excellent new biography by Kevin McCarthy. Briscoe, who is hardly known on this side of the Irish Sea, was, as the book’s sub-title states, a ‘Sinn Féin Revolutionary, Fianna Fáil Nationalist and Revisionist Zionist.’



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This rising tide of Irish national awareness went hand-in-hand with the deaths of thousands of Irishmen, fighting for Britain at the battle of the Somme in 1916. Briscoe who was in New York running a Christmas light factory, became involved in the broad Irish-American republican movement. In August 1917, he returned to Ireland, established a clothing business as a front and operated as an independent gun-runner using the pseudonym of Captain Swift. Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary leader, was also in charge of arms procurement for the IRA, and Briscoe’s operation came to his attention. Appointing Briscoe to his personal staff, Collins sent him to post-war Berlin which was awash with arms after Germany’s defeat. Briscoe successfully smuggled arms into Ireland on board the tugboat, Frieda and also the City of Dortmund. A delighted Collins affectionately referred to Briscoe as his ‘Jewman.’ Briscoe however disagreed deeply with Collins over his support for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 which instituted partition. The civil war which ensued drew Briscoe to Éamon De Valera and the antitreaty camp. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and the beginning of De Valera’s close ties with the Irish Jewish community and its chief rabbi, Isaac Herzog. For Briscoe, De Valera possessed ‘the moral grandeur of the Prophet Elijah.’ Briscoe entered the Dáil as a member of De Valera’s Fianna Fáil party in 1927 and remained until 1965. Kevin McCarthy’s work highlights the anti-Semitism within Irish republicanism and the willingness of the local Catholic Church to endorse the imagery of Jews as Christ-killers. Even before the Easter Rising, Sinn Féin periodicals ran ‘No Jews’ advertisement. The celebrated writer and poet, Oliver St. John Gogarty—James Joyce modelled one of his characters in Ulysses on him—depicted the Jew in the crudest fashion. ‘The blood in him is worming and he fattens on decay.’ Briscoe met anti-Semitism from pro-treaty Irishmen and on election for Dublin South as a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ and ‘an alien ruffian.’ McCarthy records that on one occasion in December 1927, an unmarked car drew alongside him and fired shots. In the 1930s accusations were imported from the French proto-fascist press that Briscoe operated [as] an agent for the American investment bank Kuhn Loeb while others insinuated that he had instigated the assassination of Michael Collins. Briscoe’s Jewishness was not central to his identity at this stage in his life, but it was the rising tide of Nazism and the sympathetic attitude of the Catholic Church towards the anti-Communism of international fascism that made him a contact for Jews desperate to get their relatives out of Germany. The Blueshirts arose in Ireland with their overwhelmingly

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Catholic membership while the Irish Christian Front supported General Franco in Spain. Yet there were other groups such as the Legion of Mary and the Pillar of Fire Society which confronted such anti-Semitism. Briscoe was labelled as ‘a Zionist Jew’ even though he knew little about Zionism. Yet the gathering of the storm clouds in Europe during the 1930s and his pivotal role as the sole Jewish parliamentarian in a predominantly Catholic country, imbued by both a resurgent nationalism and a reactionary clergy, was only too clear. Briscoe was drawn magnetically to the Revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who sent him on missions to the US and Poland. His fundraising trip to South Africa enabled the Revisionists to purchase boats to bring East European Jews to Palestine. Briscoe successfully intervened in the case of Yehezkel Altman, a youthful follower of Jabotinsky who had been sentenced to death by the British in Palestine. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Jabotinsky’s opposition to partition in Palestine projected a resonance in Irish circles. Through Briscoe, Jabotinsky visited Dublin in January 1938 and met De Valera. Briscoe had to operate within the constraints of successive Irish administrations which were often anti-foreigner, anti-British and suspicious of Jews—all fortified by the dead hand of the clergy. Despite many attempts, Briscoe failed to secure visas for many German Jews including his aunt Hedwig and her daughter who were in Berlin. Hedwig died in Auschwitz along with 150 other members of Briscoe’s extended family. Briscoe was told by Paddy Ruttledge, the Fianna Fáil Minister of Justice that ‘the Jewish community should not be increased by way of immigration’ as it would undoubtedly stimulate anti-Semitism in Ireland. After Kristallnacht, the Irish Minister of State in Berlin, Charles Bewley, wrote a report that the Nazi assault was an appropriate response. In this deteriorating situation, Briscoe and Rabbi Herzog were supported by De Valera who within the constraints of the situation tried to help. De Valera insisted that the 1937 Constitution include full protection and equality for minority faiths including Judaism, and resisted all attempts to make Catholicism the state religion. Irish fascists dubbed De Valera ‘the son of a Portuguese Jew.’ During World War II, all the efforts of Briscoe and Herzog met a brick wall, erected by the government of a neutral Ireland. Briscoe attempted to obtain a rescue ship for Hungarian Jews, sailing under Irish colours, while on another occasion, Briscoe attempted to persuade the administration to send a legation to Budapest along the lines of Raoul



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Wallenberg and the Swedes. All this came to nought. Indeed, at the war’s end and in correspondence with Briscoe, Joe Walshe, the Secretary at the Department of External Affairs, repeated Nazi assurances that ‘the Germans were not murdering Jews.’ Briscoe’s inability to stop the slaughter of European Jewry weighed heavily. He took to therapy and to gambling. Even after the Shoah, there were concerted attempts in Ireland to stop Jewish refugees from entering in order ‘to preserve the Christian character of the State.’ De Valera was more sympathetic. He intervened to secure the admission of 100 child survivors of the camps to go to Clough Castle in County Westmeath, but only for one year. According to the 1946 census, there were fewer than 4,000 Jews in Ireland. In the rise of a Hebrew republic in 1948, Briscoe saw a parallel with the Irish experience. Indeed both the Irgun and Lehi had studied the military struggle of the Irish republicans. Even so, following the partition of Palestine, Briscoe advised Menahem Begin and the Irgun not to embark on civil war. He bitterly regretted the conflict in Ireland over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. ‘The sorrow, misery and death it caused—no good came of it.’ In 1950 an out-of-office De Valera visited Israel with Briscoe and they dined with Ben-Gurion at Chief Rabbi Herzog’s home. Briscoe was passed over for office in his own country—perhaps his Jewishness was a factor—yet he became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1956. The odyssey of Robert Briscoe—his frustrations and his travails—is a fascinating one. He was at the crossroads of both Irish and Jewish nationalism. Kevin McCarthy has recovered his story for a wider audience and has thereby made an important contribution to Jewish as well as to Irish history. Padraig Pearse, a leader of the Easter Rising, proclaimed: In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past 300 years they have asserted it in arms in the face of the world. We hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a sovereign independent state and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of freedom, of its welfare and of its exaltation among the nations.

Such words convey meaning to Jews. Perhaps Irish nationalism and Zionism have more in common than Gerry Adams and the current leaders of Sinn Féin care to admit. (‘The Jew at the Centre of Irish Nationalism’, Jewish Chronicle, 1 April 2016)

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THE UKRAINIANS The Ukrainians like other peoples in the tsarist empire strove for independence during the nineteenth century—and failed. Such revolts were fuelled by a strong resistance to a creeping cultural Russification. In the cosmopolitan seaport of Odessa, the stronghold of the Zionists, only 10 per cent of its population were Ukrainian, according to the 1897 census. Jabotinsky recalled that the twenty pupils in his class at school represented some thirteen nations. The Ukrainians, he noted, provided ‘the sailors, masons . . . and tramps—“the salt of the earth”’. Yet Ukrainian-Jewish relations had been coloured by massacres and pogroms. The Chmielnicki Uprising, 1648–1656, took the lives of tens of thousands of Jews at the same time as Cromwell’s republic was allowing the Jews to return to England. During the war between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’ in the Ukraine in the wake of the October Revolution, it is estimated that a probable 150,000 Jews died in the massacres of 1918–1920.10 In January 1919 there was a massacre in Proskurov which was perpetrated by the Cossacks of the elite Zaporej Brigade. There were further mass killings in Zhitomir (March), Vasilkov (April), Elizabetgrad (May), Teophipol (June), Tulchin (July) and Fastov (September).11 The enormity of such killings of Jews was only exceeded by the Shoah in the twentieth century. Jabotinsky’s interest in the Ukrainian national question began before this when he began to address the question of minorities in the tsarist empire. He first wrote about the Ukrainian question in an article in 1904.12 In it he suggested that the Jewish national movement should ‘find and unite with allies whose interests overlap to some extent with ours. Herein lie our tasks in the general political area’. The co-operation of national movements was quite distinct from the coalescence of ideologies. Jabotinsky understood that as the Jews were a minority within minorities, they were especially vulnerable to being used as unwitting agents of Russification in an attempt to undermine the Ukrainian national movement. Indeed, this is how many Ukrainians perceived such assimilated Russified Jews—a view Jabotinsky attempted to combat. Tsarist Russia’s tactic of playing one nationality against another was by no means novel. Russia had used Ukrainian nationalism to effect the defeat, partition and elimination of Poland in its sweep westwards in



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the eighteenth century. St Petersburg did not recognize Ukraine, only ‘Little Russia.’ It was only in 1905 that the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences acknowledged Ukrainian as the distinct tongue of a distinct people. In 1897 almost 3 million Jews inhabited Ukrainian ethnic territories—some 28 per cent of world Jewry. It therefore made sense for Jabotinsky to work with the nascent Ukrainian national movement and identify common goals and aspirations. This conception prefigured his emphasis on working with Piłsudski’s Poland—although there were clear differences, especially with regard to his various evacuation plans in the interwar years.13 Prior to the First World War the Austrians oppressed the Poles, who in turn oppressed the Ukrainians.14 The attempts to Polonize both Polish and west Ukrainian territories affected Jews and Ukrainians alike. Jabotinsky thus supported the Ukrainians in the Polish-Ukrainian dispute over Galicia. But in Austro-Hungary and Russia he supported the Polish minority. His support for Ukrainian nationalism and other minority national movements between 1904 and 1914 must be understood in the context of his struggle against Jewish assimilationism and rival ideologies such as those advocating national-cultural autonomy in the Jewish Diaspora.15 Thus Jabotinsky began to contribute articles to the nationalist publications Ukrainskii vestnik (in 1906) and Ukrainskaia zhizn’ (in 1912). The Vestnik’s editor was Mykhail Hrushevsky, who became president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918; the Zhizn’s editor was Symon Petliura. Jabotinsky saw close similarities between the goals of the Ukrainian and Jewish national movements. Both peoples had been stateless for centuries but had attempted to keep alive their national and cultural identities. Both were systematically discriminated against by the empires in which they lived, though for different reasons and to differing degrees. Both suffered from reactionary enemies—the Black Hundreds in Russia and the Polonizers in the Russian and Austrian areas of Poland. National liberation for Ukrainians and Zionists alike could come about only through democratization. The fact that before the First World War the Ukrainian national movement adopted a positive attitude towards the Jewish national movement impressed Jabotinsky. Perhaps most important of all, the concept of co-operation between the two national movements was symbolic of an emerging independent Jewish national policy and a pragmatic understanding of Zionist aims. In an exchange with the Russian liberal Petr Struve, Jabotinsky took issue with the overt nationalism and latent assimilationism which

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characterized Russian liberalism. He argued in a series of articles that democratization and a liberal Russia would not automatically solve the nationalities question. For his part, Struve contended that the Ukrainians were part of the Russian nation while the Jews were unable to progress from their narrow societal base to create an evolving culture. While the Cadets continued to support an integral Russian Empire including the Ukraine and Poland during the years of revolution and civil war. The Jews, Kleiner argues, began to appreciate the Ukrainian nationaldemocratic forces only in 1917—and by then it was too late since Russification had become partially identified with the Jews. Moreover, Jabotinsky’s views on the national question, his opposition to Russification and his support for the democratic forces of national minorities did not mean hatred of Russia, antipathy to Russian culture or a renunciation of his background. In 1926, in an affectionate rebuke to the songstress Ida Kremer, Jabotinsky wrote: ‘You are yourself an incarnation of all the fun, devilment and melancholy [of Odessa].’16 Almost 20 years after the Revolution, he still referred to his birthplace Odessa as ‘my beautiful toy of a city.’17 Perhaps the most fascinating part of Kleiner’s book is his analysis of the Jabotinsky-Slavinsky agreement of September 1921 where it was concluded that Jewish gendarmes would accompany Petliura’s army in a new invasion of Ukraine to prevent further anti-Jewish atrocities. The agreement followed pogroms by nationalists in the war against the Bolsheviks. Although he does not come down on one side of the fence or the other, Kleiner questions the accepted wisdom that the Ukrainian government and Petliura in particular were totally—or even in part—responsible for the killings. He notes, for example, that in his last stronghold on Ukrainian territory between January and August 1920 Petliura’s forces put an end to ‘all attempts to carry out pogroms against the Jews.’ Kleiner argues conventionally that many Ukrainians viewed Jews and Bolsheviks as interchangeable entities. He takes issue with the quote on the jacket of a book published in the mid-1970s which describes Petliura as ‘the Jew-hating leader of a Jew hating people,’18 suggesting that this description dovetails nicely with the Soviet approach. He further notes that the fewer Soviet atrocities against the Jews such as in the town of Hlukhiv in February 1918 were conveniently airbrushed out of the history books. Arnold Margolin and Solomon Goldelman, prominent Jewish participants in these events, claimed that Petliura and the Ukrainian government actually attempted to combat the pogromists.



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Joseph Schechtman, later Jabotinsky’s secretary and biographer and a member of the Central Rada and Small Rada, proposed the creation of self-defence units in November 1917. Petliura agreed to this proposal in principle but the Jewish socialist parties deemed the idea overtly nationalist and counter-revolutionary, scuppering the idea with terrible results for the Jewish population. This was the background to Jabotinsky’s formal meeting with Petliura’s representative Maksym Slavinsky at the twelfth Zionist congress in Karlovy Vary in September 1921. Slavinsky, a minister in Petliura’s government, was an old friend of Jabotinsky from Odessa. His wife was Jewish and he was a known ‘friend of the Jews.’ In the elections to the second Duma in 1907, Slavinsky and Jabotinsky both ran for office in the same constituency, which boasted a large Jewish population. Slavinsky was elected, but, perceived as a proJewish candidate, was blocked by anti-Semitic groups from reaching the Duma. The two men subsequently collaborated on the publications Ukrainskaia zhizn’ and the Moscow liberal daily Russkie vedomosti (which sent Jabotinsky to Western Europe following the outbreak of the First World War). In his message to the twelfth Zionist congress, read out by Jabotinsky, Slavinsky stated: The upheavals that made victims of them [Ukrainian Jews] wounded the Ukrainian people as severely as they did the Jewish people. That section of the Ukrainian people that is aware of its tasks can in no way be held responsible for this, since it rejects and condemns those criminal attacks, for which irresponsible elements must be blamed.

Slavinsky concluded with an appeal for brotherhood between the two peoples. However, all this did not go down well with the delegates, particularly the East Europeans and the Anglo-Americans, who laid the blame for the anti-Jewish atrocities firmly on the Ukrainian government. The accord itself did not commit the Jewish gendarmarie to participate in any military operations on behalf of Petliura’s forces and provided them with a great deal of independence and autonomy. Kleiner notes that whereas the pogroms in Ukraine had deeply distressed the Jewish world, the international community was less concerned. Both sides had an interest in preventing further atrocities. Jabotinsky also understood the iconic value of a Jewish army. This had been his raison d’être in his struggle to create the Jewish Legion. With its disbandment, resurrecting this symbol of the Jewish national movement in military guise had considerable symbolic and inspirational value. Only Weizmann supported Jabotinsky in his efforts to form the Jewish Legion and he

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encountered considerable hostility from fellow Zionists. This hostility, Kleiner claims, lingered despite the success of the Legion. Jabotinsky’s individualism, dynamism and intellectualism did not please everyone in the Zionist movement, least of all Poalei-Tsion19 and the Zionist Left overall, who looked on the October Revolution with respectful ambivalence. The accord thus provided an opportunity to accuse Jabotinsky of allying himself with anti-Semites. Another objection was that Zionists should remain neutral in the conflict between Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik forces. This view resembled the majority view among Zionists against forming the Jewish Legion since it meant backing the British against the Germans and ditching a policy of neutrality. Some asked why it was necessary to seek Petliura’s agreement to create Jewish self-defence forces; others wanted to know why Jabotinsky had broken ranks by not consulting the leadership of the Zionist organisation. All this became part of the staple criticism of Jabotinsky and his followers especially in the 1930s when Betar’s imagery of militarism and singlemindedness led to comparisons with the étatist states of interwar Europe. Although the Ukrainian incursion planned for 1922 never took place, the vehemence of the reaction of the Jewish world took Jabotinsky aback. In a letter written in New York, several months after the agreement, Jabotinsky noted that he had certainly not forgotten the Slavinsky affair: he considered it a serious matter and planned to reopen it on his return to Europe.20 Clearly, he felt he had been judged unfairly. He returned to the subject on several occasions during the next 20 years but never renounced his original position.21 (Review of Israel Kleiner’s Jabotinsky and Ukrainian Nationalism: A Reinterpretation, from Nationalism to Universalism, in East European Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2, 2001)

The armed conflict between Ukrainian nationalists, the Bolshevik Red Army, the Monarchist White Russians and a host of free-lance irregulars was characterised by the mass-murder of Jews. Many Jews at the time held Petliura responsible for a large number of these pogroms. Thus, when a Jewish watchmaker, Shalom Schwartzbard, shot him dead in Paris in May 1926, most Jews did not mourn the manner of his passing.22 An editorial in the Yiddish daily, Der Morgen Zhurnal, in New York—where many East European Jews now lived—commented: ‘We are not grieved



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by this incident. Nor are we afraid of the possible consequences. Would that every pogrom leader feel unsafe’.23 Schwartzbard’s pregnant mother had been killed in an earlier pogrom. His uncle Israel was killed as he left synagogue in Baloskow during Passover 1919. His mother’s brother and all his family had been killed in Balta, where the women were raped beforehand. These were not exceptions—the Proskurov pogrom left over twelve hundred dead and more than three thousand orphans. In Uman, the Jews had dug their own graves. At Łaszków, most girls over the age of fifteen were raped. In Mariampol, the age fell to twelve.24 Schwartzbard fought for France at the battle of the Somme during the First World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was also the author of three books of poetry and prose in Yiddish. One volume consists of Yiddish poems, entitled Truman un Wirklichkeit. Another, Milchome Bilder, contained descriptions of his war experiences from 1914 to 1916 and a diary, Fun Tiefen Obgrund, in which he describes his experiences in the Ukraine from 1917 to 1919.25 But, in recalling the historic massacres in the Ukraine by forces under the command of Chmielnicki and Gonta and contemporary ones by Bulak-Balachovitch and Denikin, he also wrote: ‘They call upon me to avenge them. What does the world know of all the libels at Damascus, Kiev, now at Lemburg and thousands of others? To many, this is all past history, done with and forgotten. To me it is an open wound, bleeding and sore which can never be healed’. A defence fund for Schwartzbard was immediately established. Large numbers of Jews generously contributed to this cause célèbre, as did Chaim Weizmann and H. G. Wells. Albert Einstein, Leon Blum and Maxim Gorky all volunteered to give testimony for the defence at the trial. When the trial opened in the autumn of 1927, French synagogues held services for the victims of the massacres while the inhabitants of Tel Aviv demonstrated, carrying Torah scrolls and black-edged flags. The positive Jewish reaction towards the assassination of Petliura in Paris in May 1926 and the public support for the assailant, Shalom Schwartzbard, induced a cautious reaction in Jabotinsky. The Jews

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saw in the judicial investigation a trial of Petliura rather than one of his assassin[s]. Kleiner writes that Petliura was ‘easily transferred in the national consciousness into the villain of the Jewish tragedy. In actual fact, he was the scapegoat.’ In contrast, the Ukrainian press compared Petliura with Garibaldi—ironically Jabotinsky’s hero. In the Revisionist journal Rassvet, which was published in Paris at the time, Schechtman attempted to steer a middle course by distinguishing between the pogromists and genuine Ukrainian nationalists, accompanied by a plea ‘to establish the truth . . . and not to put the entire Ukrainian people in the dock.’26 Schechtman also recognized Jewish anger by condemning Petliura for tolerating the pogroms but did not accuse him of instigating them. Kleiner raises a very pertinent question: why did Jabotinsky not write about the Petliura assassination in Rassvet? Indeed, he only began to write about it a year after it had taken place. Moreover, although he wrote about the Schwartzbard trial, he omitted any reference to Petliura.27 Kleiner has discovered that Jabotinsky did write about Petliura days after the assassination, but chose to publish in the New York-based Der Morgen Zhornal—and even then buried his views in a piece about Jewish colonization efforts in the USSR. In this article Jabotinsky reiterated his defence of the Slavinsky accord and commented that: Petliura was well acquainted with that type of Ukrainian intellectual nationalist holding socialist views. I grew up with them and conducted a joint struggle with them against anti-Semites and Russifiers, both Jewish and Ukrainian. Neither I nor other thinking Zionists from southern Russia can be convinced that people of that type can be considered anti-Semites.28

However, a year later an article in Rassvet signed ‘Iust’ (one of Jabotinsky’s pseudonyms) attacked the anti-Semitism of François Coty, the owner of the French newspaper Le Figaro. ‘Iust’ went along with the widespread Jewish ‘understanding’ for Schwartzbard and his reasons for killing Petliura. Kleiner argues that this article is not in the style of Jabotinsky and that it employs uncharacteristic phrases such as ‘a crusade against communism.’ Although the article does not condemn Petliura, Kleiner postulates that it was not Jabotinsky but someone close to him who wrote the piece. Jabotinsky clearly still held out hope that some vestige of Jewish-Ukrainian co-operation could be salvaged from the affair. On the other hand, he did not wish to associate either Rassvet or the newly formed Revisionist movement with his personal views in standing up to the full force of Jewish anger over the pogroms. Solomon Godelman visited Jabotinsky in Paris and asked



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him to testify as a witness in the trial if he was satisfied that Petliura had no hand in the pogroms. Jabotinsky, who was always ready to defend his views firmly, declined. On this occasion, he felt that ‘the Jewish community’s clear will’ could not be countermanded and that any opposition would assist his opponents who were attempting to strangle the Revisionist movement at birth. (Review of Israel Kleiner’s Jabotinsky and Ukrainian Nationalism: A Reinterpretation, From Nationalism to Universalism, in East European Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2, 2001)

NOTES 1. Peter Bergamin, ‘An Intellectual Biography of Abba Ahimeir’, D.Phil (Oriental Studies), Mansfield College, Oxford, 2016. 2.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Zionist Fascism’, The Zionist, 25 June 1926. 3.  Abba Ahimeir, Hazit Ha’am, 31 March 1933. 4.  Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (London: Random House UK, 2009). 5.  Michele Sarfatti, ‘Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy and after, 1938–1946’, in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule 1922–1945, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 71–80. 6.  Nir Arielli, Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933–1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 110–17. 7.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Jews and Fascism’, Jewish Echo, 10 May 1935. 8. Abba Ahimeir, ‘Problems of the World Revisionist Conference’, Hazit Ha’am, 15 July 1932. 9.  Hazit Ha’am, 20 September 1932. 10.  Howard M. Sachar, Dreamland: Europe and the Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 18. 11. Marius Schattner, Histoire de La Droite Israelienne: De Jabotinsky à Shamir (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1991), p. 70. 12.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘K voprosu o natsionalizme (otvet g. Izgoevu)’, (On Nationalism: A Reply to Mr Izgoev), Obrazovanie, no. 10, October 1904. 13.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘De Profundis’, Nasz Przeglad, 29 March 1936. See also Laurence Weinbaum, ‘Jabotinsky and the Poles’, Polin 5, 1990, pp. 156–72; Yaakov Shavit, ‘Politics and Messianism: The Zionist Revisionist Movement and Polish Political Culture’, Studies in Zionism 6, no. 2, 1985, pp. 229–46.

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14.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Homo Homini Lupus’, Odesskie novosti, 18 July 1910. 15.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Pismo ob avtonomizme’, Evreiskaia zhizn’ nos. 6 and 7, June, July 1904. 16. Handwritten note on Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Ida Kremer’s City’, Jewish Tribune, 14 May 1926. 17.  ‘Al tokhnit ha-evakuʼatsyah’, address by Jabotinsky to the Warsaw Society of Jewish Physicians and Engineers, September 1936, in Ne’umim 1927–1940, Ketavim 5, ed. Eri Jabotinsky (Jerusalem, 1958), pp.197–212. 18.  Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura (New York: Hart, 1976). 19.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, letter to Richard Lichtheim, 6 January 1922, in Igrot December 1918–August 1923, ed. Daniel Carpi and Moshe Halevi (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 1997). 20. Vladimir Jabotinsky, letter to Yona Machover, 9 March 1922, in Igrot December 1918–August 1923, ed. Daniel Carpi and Moshe Halevi (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 1997). 21.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Vopros o Petliure’, Rassvet, 8 March 1925; Nahum Levin, ‘Jabotinsky and the Petliura Agreement’, Jewish Standard, 16 August 1940. 22. Sachar, Dreamland, pp. 1–19. 23.  Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 28 May 1926. 24.  Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 21 June 1926. 25.  Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 28 May 1926. 26.  Joseph Schechtman, Rassvet, 12 September 1926. 27.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, letter to Chaim Belilovsky, 24 October 1927, in Igrot January 1926–December 1927, ed. Daniel Carpi and Moshe Halevi (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 1997). 28. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Di “Krim” kolonizatsye’ (The establishment of [Jewish] colonies in the Crimea), Der Morgen Zhornal, 4 June 1926.

4 The Road to Independence

THE WAR YEARS

The

struggle against Hitler during World War II changed the broad outlook of Diaspora Jews. Many had looked towards local communist parties and the Soviet Union for leadership in the fight against fascism. They had supported the Spanish republic against the military insurgency of Franco and they had served in disproportionate numbers in the International Brigades. The Nazi-Soviet pact strongly changed that perception. It was the beginning of a decades-long process of shaking off subservience to others in favour of national interests. A secret clause in the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement allowed for the handing over of German communists who had sought refuge in the USSR to the Gestapo. This included many Jewish communists. Margarete Buber-Neumann was released from her camp in the Gulag, escorted by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, to the border at Brest-Litovsk, handed over to the Gestapo and imprisoned once more, but this time in Ravensbrück.1 All this took place when Hitler’s forces had overrun most of Europe. In the summer of 1940, Britain awaited a Nazi invasion. The Nazis planned to land forces on England’s south coast. German paratroopers would land near Brighton, Franz Six would establish Einsatzgruppen to deal with British Jews and the Nazi seat of governance would be situated at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Churchills.

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It was also at this time that the death of Vladimir Jabotinsky at the age of fifty-nine occurred in the United States. More than 25,000 New Yorkers accompanied his funeral cortège. In Palestine, Habimah suspended its performances and black-edged flags were flown at half-mast in Tel Aviv. His Labour political opponents described him as ‘that highly gifted violin that ever seemed destined to play the first role in the orchestra of Jewish revival’ while the writer Arthur Koestler regarded him as a successor to Garibaldi. Jabotinsky was unequivocal in his support of Britain’s war effort— unlike his youthful followers, Menahem Begin and Avraham Stern. Both saw Britain as a major enemy because of its presence in Palestine. Stern believed that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and subsequently approached the German Legation in Beirut while Begin, who had escaped from Warsaw, did not want to align himself with the British in Palestine. On the day after war was declared in 1939, Jabotinsky wrote to Chamberlain pledging the support of his New Zionist Organisation. Two days later, he saw the Colonial Secretary in an unsuccessful attempt to lift the quotas on Jewish emigration to Palestine, imposed by a White Paper the year before. Jabotinsky realised what could lay in store for the three million strong Polish Jewry. The Jewish Chronicle correspondent in Poland described ‘the disastrous, last-minute panic trek, of vast masses of the civilian population, away to anywhere, so long as it was to safety, beyond the range of the merciless raiders who spared neither man nor woman, old nor young.’ The devouring of Poland by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in September 1939 persuaded Jabotinsky to go to the US in early 1940 to rally support for the formation of a 100,000-strong Jewish army and to urge American entry into the war. It was not by chance that he read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—a tale of the downtrodden—on the journey. Yet Jabotinsky was not a well man. He had concealed his heart problems for many years. In 1940, the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway, the entry into Paris, the retreat from Dunkirk, and the black future of European Jewry under the heel of the Nazi jackboot, weighed heavily upon him. It seemed then that Britain, too, would go under. He formulated a synopsis for a book entitled Jews after the War. If the Nazis won the war, Jabotinsky predicted: ‘European Jewry will face either destruction or expulsion to some kind of big concentration camp; unless



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the conquerors prefer to let them rot slowly where they are under a reinforced ghetto regime.’ Two chapters were to be devoted to the prospect of Nazi victory. He also contemplated whether there could ever be ‘a negotiated peace between the Nazi phenomenon and the Jews as an entity.’ His response to the deteriorating situation in Europe was to urge the British High Command to establish a Jewish army, which would initially be based in Canada, expanding to 150,000 men and two air-force squadrons. The inaugural convention for the campaign was due to be held in New York at the beginning of September 1940. Neither his book nor his plans for a Jewish army convention were realised. Jabotinsky died suddenly on August 4, 1940. Jabotinsky was also troubled by his inability to control his youthful acolytes. He often proclaimed that his hopes still resided in ‘the conscience of the world.’ Some of his supporters were not so sure. In Palestine, many now viewed him as an outsider abroad and considered his approach similar to that of Labour-Zionism’s Ben-Gurion. In particular, there was a growing split in the ranks of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, of which Jabotinsky was the nominal head, which had conducted military attacks on both Palestinian Arabs and British officials. David Raziel, the Irgun commander, aligned himself with Jabotinsky’s approach while Avraham Stern did not. Stern’s followers clearly felt that, despite the common Nazi enemy, Jewish national interests were not the same as those of the British. Britain had declared war against Germany, not to save the Jews but to defend and protect its own position and security. Moreover, while Britain was fighting the Nazis, it was doing its utmost to bar the gates of salvation to millions of Jews trapped in Europe. In this unfolding situation Stern signed Communiqué 112, regarded as the genesis of the group that the British labelled ‘the Stern Gang,’ later known as Lehi. In 1936, in his poem, ‘To the British Empire,’ the radical poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg, predicted the flight of ‘Amalek eagles over Westminster’ foreshadowing the Battle of Britain. As history records, the pilots of the Royal Air Force (RAF) ensured that Amalek did not prevail. (‘Jabotinsky and the Prospect of a Nazi Invasion’, Jewish Chronicle, 7 August 2015)

Jabotinsky did not live to bear witness to the extermination of European Jewry. He did not expect it at the war’s outset and even envisaged a

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Versailles-type peace conference at its end where Zionists would promote their programme. When the full extent of the extermination of European Jews was revealed after 1945, Jews in countries which had not been occupied by the Nazis asked why the Allies had resigned themselves to the abandonment of the Jews. Why had the British not bombed the railway lines leading to Auschwitz? Why had the Red Air Force held back when it was within striking range?2 While British Jews regarded themselves as loyal patriots in the fight against Hitler, many were scarred by the conduct of Churchill’s wartime coalition in barring shiploads of escaping Jews from seeking a haven in Palestine. If Churchill was so pro-Zionist, it was argued, why did he not abrogate the 1939 White Paper? In October 1940, the British cabinet actually approved a plan for a 10,000 strong military force including 3,000 to be recruited from Palestine. Hebrew would be the language of instruction and the Star of David would be emblazoned on the Union Jack. By August 1941, the government withdrew its offer when it realised that it would not suit its interests in the Arab world. Before 1939, British Jews had been deferential to those in power. Those who wished to participate in a more activist, public approach as a measure of their Jewishness often joined the Communist party. After 1945, the abandonment of the Jews persuaded many to transcend their reticence. Following the arrests of the Jewish leadership in Palestine in July 1946, 8,000 Jews marched from the East End, led by the war hero, Thomas Gould VC, to Trafalgar Square. There they sang both ‘God save the King’ and the Zionist anthem, Hatikvah, in public. In part, such outbursts arose because of the growing realisation that British Jews had been unable to save their brethren in mainland Europe. In the summer of 1944, there were German offers to barter Jewish lives for goods. Wendehorst quotes from a letter to Chaim Weizmann from his supporter, the industrialist, Lord Melchett, that any negotiations would lead nowhere. It was a wasted effort, a futile gesture. The mantra of British policy was predicated on the belief that only an allied victory could save the Jews of Europe. British Jews, however, increasingly began to ask the pained question ‘what if there were no more Jews to save?’ Such sentiments emerged strongly after 1945. More synagogues affiliated themselves to the Zionist Federation. Even the Jewish communists



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(associated with) the party journal Jewish Clarion began to utter ‘understanding’ comments. When the refugee ship, the Exodus, was turned back from Palestine and eventually forced to return to Germany—its passengers interned in camps—even the conservative United Synagogue decided to act and declared a Palestine Sabbath in June 1947. (Review of Stephan E. C. Wendehorst’s British Jewry, Zionism and the Jewish State 1936–1956, in the Jewish Chronicle, 1 March 2014)

THE AFTERMATH During the weeks before VE Day in Europe, the festival of Passover was commemorated by Jewish members of the Allied Forces in locations of long-time Jewish settlement—in Frankfurt, Cologne, Trèves and Worms. One recitation of the story of the exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt—from slavery to freedom—was held in the conference room in the Breeson Hotel, Bad Gotesberg, where Hitler had negotiated with Chamberlain in 1938. It was presided over by a Jewish chaplain, Sidney Lefkowitz of Richmond, Virginia. While the actual number of Jews murdered in the Shoah was not then known, there was a growing realisation that this figure was growing exponentially. The first testimonies of survivors, liberated from Dachau on April 29, had begun to reach London. Sàndor Regner, a middle-weight wrestling champion from Budapest and a Warsaw University philosopher, Professor Josef Muskat were just two inmates who related how Dachau’s prison population of more than 30,000 had been brutalised until the very moment that the Americans arrived. The chief surgeon of the Nagyvarad hospital in Hungary, Dr Wilhelm Molnar had been beaten to death by SS guards on the day of liberation. The showing of scenes from within the death camps in the spring of 1945 stunned London cinema audiences into silence. It was perhaps only then that British Jews fully began to appreciate how lucky they were in that it was only 20 miles of clear blue water which had prevented a similar fate befalling them in 1940. While non-Jews often looked upon the stacked bodies of the dead and the emaciated ones of the living in a broad, universalist, quasi-religious

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sense, British Jews understood it personally. For them, it had been literally a matter of life and death. The revelations of the Shoah transformed many Jewish Britons into British Jews. . . . Life was generally returning to normal. The Committee for a Jewish Army organised a ‘victory ball’ at Grosvenor House to raise funds and there was hardly a murmur when Oswald Mosley was released from prison. In British-ruled Palestine, a concert at the Edison Hall in Jerusalem, given by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Liverpool’s Louis Cohen, was interrupted by the official announcement of VE Day. The audience rose to their feet instantly and sang not only ‘Hatikvah’ and ‘God Save the King’, but also ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘The Internationale’. As in London, Jews in Palestine reacted in a strange mixture of happiness and resentment. After all, the railway lines to Auschwitz had not been bombed. The Allies may have won the war, but the Jews certainly lost it. The Jewish Chronicle’s Jerusalem correspondent wrote: [There was] a tone of solemnity in all the celebrations as the people remembered the millions of Jewish dead, who had been mercilessly exterminated, but who could have been alive, happy and rejoicing with their families in Eretz Israel—had not their path been barred by the terms of the White Paper.

Wishing to neutralise pro-German sentiment in the Arab world, the White Paper of 1939 permitted the entry of 15,000 Jews per annum for five years—after which Jewish immigration would require the permission of the Arab majority. This was enforced during all the years of persecution and now, in 1945, prevented displaced Jews from entering Palestine. One large gathering in Tel Aviv to celebrate the end of the war in Europe concluded with chanting: ‘Open Up the Gates of Palestine!’ There were significantly no festivities in Nablus, Jaffa, Nazareth and Gaza. The Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, authorised the reciting of Psalm 118, which urges its readers not [to] place their trust in princes, but to commit themselves to God alone. It proclaims: ‘I shall not die, but live’ and recalls that although ‘the Lord had chastened me sore, He has not given me over unto death.’ (‘VE Day and the Jews’, Jewish Chronicle, 8 May 2015)



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In 1944 the British Labour Party conference actually advocated the transfer of Arabs out of Palestine. By the summer of 1945, the new Labour government of Clement Attlee was promoting a diametrically opposite policy by continuing to implement the White Paper and prevent Holocaust survivors from reaching Palestine’s shores. The ‘Keep Left’ group within the party strongly opposed official policy, while George Orwell bemoaned the indifference of too many British citizens to the fate of the survivors.3 Zionism moved from a minority concern amongst American Jews to occupying a central role. In 1939, American Jews had donated $1.745 million to the Jewish National Fund. It increased to $13.067 million in 1946 and $39.006 million in 1948.4 The immediate post-war years, therefore, saw an intense involvement by the Jewish Diaspora to secure a state of the Jews. There were, however, severe divisions about the acceptance of the partition of Palestine. It was an argument between fidelity to ideology and the pragmatism of the present reality. Menahem Begin’s Irgun however was deeply wedded to its belief in a military struggle and its ideological goal of a state on both sides of the Jordan. The Irgun had commenced its revolt against the British in the spring of 1944. The timing was deliberate, since the five-year period to allow in fifteen thousand Jews per annum—as designated by the White Paper of 1939—was expiring. From now on, any decision to admit the survivors of Shoah would depend on the goodwill of the Palestinian Arabs. Begin’s decision to initiate military action—even before the D-Day invasion had established a second front—was also controversial because it was taking place while the war against Nazism continued. The unexpected ousting of Churchill and the election of a Labour government in 1945 persuaded the Haganah, the Irgun and Lehi to form an uneasy military coalition due to the growing perception that Clement Atlee and Ernest Bevin were distinctly unsympathetic to Zionist aspirations after the Shoah. Ben-Gurion still kept open the diplomatic option despite the decision to cooperate militarily with the Irgun and Lehi. The bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun in the summer of 1946 ended this cooperation and allowed Ben-Gurion to pursue political initiatives to induce an end to the British presence in Palestine.

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Seventy years ago, on July 22, 1946, the Irgun Commander, Menahem Begin, sat by his radio, eagerly anticipating a dramatic announcement on the BBC. It was not, however, the news that he had expected. A crestfallen and shocked Mr Begin heard that scores of civilians had been killed in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Operation Malonchik, which had been designed so that the hotel’s western wing, reportedly a centre of British intelligence, would be destroyed only after those inside it had been given the chance to evacuate, was an unmitigated disaster. The 91 people killed comprised 28 British subjects, 41 Arabs and 17 Jews. This included Jeffrey Walsh, an economic adviser to the British government in Palestine, and Brigadier Peter Lockwood Smith-Dorrien, the head of the Commerce and Industry department. The 350kg of gelignite and TNT, placed in milk churns in the basement café, also killed the most senior Jew in the administration, Julius Jacobs, a Mancunian who served as under-secretary of the Palestine treasury. Edward Sperling, an American who often wrote for the Jewish Chronicle under the pseudonym ‘Caisson,’ perished, as did the former Londoner Victor Nissim Levi, who served as principle assistant secretary for finance. Mr Levi had served in the British forces in the First World War, while Mr Jacobs and Mr Sperling had seen action in the Jewish Legion in Palestine. In Britain, Prime Minister Clement Attlee termed the action ‘insane,’ while the Board of Deputies referred to those who had carried out the bombing as ‘a gang of terrorists.’ David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann were joined by Arieh Altman, the leader of the right-wing Revisionists, in formally condemning the killings. Mr Begin, as his biographer, Avi Shilon, has pointed out, was far more a traditionalist, a man of the Diaspora, than a stereotypical, religious Jew. Yet he repeatedly deferred to the military wisdom of ‘the New Jew’—whether the Irgun’s Gidi Paglin or later Ariel Sharon—with often disastrous results that he had to explain away. The head of Operation Malonchik was Yisrael Levi, who was barely 20. Unlike Lehi, which carried out political assassinations, Mr Begin considered the Irgun to be an underground army which should conduct itself as a regular military force. Its fighters were soldiers, not terrorists. The Irgun’s warnings to the hotel’s switchboard, the French consulate and the Palestine Post came to nought—and the game of blame and counter-blame started in earnest. Among the factors that led to the bombing was the determination of the newly appointed head of military



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forces in Palestine, General Sir Evelyn Barker, to take a much tougher approach. He strongly supported the death penalty. In this he was often in conflict with the High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, who had the last word. General Barker wished to execute several captured Irgun members; the Irgun responded by kidnapping British officers. Sir Alan’s diplomacy saved both groups, but it ignited the events which led to the bombing. General Barker initiated his hardline approach through Operation Agatha in June 1946, which led to the arrests of over 2,500 Jews including central political figures such as Moshe Sharett. Operation Malonchik was a reaction to this. The operation was originally a part of a three-pronged attack by the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah’s task was to raid the British arsenal at Bat Galim, where an extensive arms cache of mortars, hand grenades, rifles and bullets, uncovered a few weeks earlier at Kibbutz Yagur, were stored. Lehi’s objective was to attack the David Brothers Building in Jerusalem, which housed the government information office. During the first half of 1946, the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi uneasily coexisted as a broad military coalition. The debacle of the hotel bombing persuaded the Haganah to withdraw. The Irgun continued with its military campaign against the British. General Barker, who was in his office in the King David Hotel at the time of the bombing, gave full rein to his enmity towards the Jews of Palestine. He implemented a policy of collective punishment so that the Jews should be ‘made aware of the contempt and loathing with which we regard their conduct.’ Despite the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and a gradual improvement over time in relations with Britain, the bombing of the King David Hotel was not easily forgotten. When Mr Begin, now the leader of the opposition, visited Britain in the early 1970s, the bombing was recalled with great bitterness in the British press. Ten years ago, on the 60th anniversary, Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud luminaries and Irgun veterans unveiled a plaque which included the wording: ‘For reasons, known only to the British, this hotel was not evacuated.’ The firestorm of responsibility was once more ignited—and provoked a vehement protest from the British envoy. Eventually a more neutral form of words was agreed. On the day following the bombing, the Labour Member of Parliament (MP), Sydney Silverman, asked in Parliament whether the perpetrators

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were indeed Jews. After the Shoah, it was unimaginable that Jews could have carried out such destruction of human life. Did it advance the cause of Israel? Today, the Israeli Right regards the Irgun’s campaign as a sad necessity while the Left sees it as an irrelevance to the march of history interpreted correctly by Mr Ben-Gurion. History’s joke is that Julius Jacobs’s house in Jerusalem became the prime minister’s official residence for two decades. Its last occupant was Yitzhak Rabin, who then moved to the new residence on Smolenskin Street. Mr Begin, the succeeding prime minister, was thus saved from having to confront the ghosts of the past each day and to be reminded of a British Jew who had died unnecessarily in such tragic circumstances. (‘The Day that Shook the Foundations of UK-Jewish Ties’, Jewish Chronicle, 22 July 2016)

THE DEBATE OVER PARTITION The urgency of the survivors in post-war Europe induced a change of mind. Golda Meir and Eleanor Roosevelt who had opposed partition ten years before now supported it. Majorities for partition emerged in Zionist parties which had adamantly opposed it previously. Nahum Goldmann’s speech in July 1946 in which he proclaimed that the three choices—trusteeship, bi-nationalism, and partition—had now been reduced to one, brought fundamental differences to the surface. He argued that there were now simply not enough European Jews to create a Jewish majority in a non-partitioned state, Abba Hillel Silver opposed this approach, claiming that a maximalist pitch was necessary since the British would whittle down even minimalist borders. Goldmann predicted to Dean Acheson, acting Secretary of State, on 7 August 1946, that partition would be welcomed by the Jewish Agency, Britain, and TransJordan. If this proved not to be the case, the Irgun would eventually triumph and Weizmann would resign.5 Weizmann wrote to Secretary of State for the Colonies, George Hall, on 16 August 1946, formally stating that the Jewish Agency was ready to discuss a scheme for the establishment of a Jewish state ‘in an adequate area of Palestine,’ Britain opposed any idea of partition and



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Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin continued to press his favoured plan of federation within a unitary state, Bevin did not want the Jews to leave Europe. The British case was that the Shoah had been ‘a solitary historical phenomenon’ that would not be repeated. British policy was therefore directed at separating the aftermath of the Shoah from the Palestine question. Despite the advocacy of the Foreign Office, the cabinet was divided—Creech-Jones, Dalton, and Bevan supported partition, Atlee and Morrison wavered, and Bevin and Alexander were against. Ben-Gurion rejected partition, but if Britain raised the issue he would consider it. He had advocated this approach as early as October 1941 when he argued that if asked, the response should be a state in the whole of Western Palestine ‘Extravagant and indefinite claims based on “historical boundaries” should not be proposed.’6 Almost alone of Zionist leaders, Abba Hillel Silver had refused to testify to the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry (AACI). He condemned the Morrison-Grady plan for its advocacy of a trusteeship where the Jewish province would be based on 17% of Palestine. He initially opposed the majority United Nations Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) report, which advocated partition and a two-state solution, because it asked the Jews to give up claims to the western Galilee and to Jerusalem. The offers had evolved from a trusteeship with no division between Arab and Jew to Jewish and Arab autonomous areas and now finally to two states. Seven of the 11 member UNSCOP commission—Canada, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Sweden, Guatemala, Peru, and Uruguay— voted for partition. Australia abstained. Yugoslavia, India, and Iran, with large Muslim populations, voted against. Immigration would be permitted at 75,000 for two years and then 60,000 a year. There would be an economic union between the two states for ten years. The minority report wanted a system of cantons. Displaced people would be allowed in for three years only and would not exceed the absorptive capacity, which would be evaluated by an international commission. Zionists generally were not enthusiastic about the majority report, but the Arabs rejected both majority and minority reports. Silver understood that this was the only possibility for a Jewish state. He noted that whereas the AACI willingly visited the displaced persons (DP) camps in early 1946 and witnessed the shipwreck of a people, the Indian, Iranian, and Yugoslav members of UNSCOP a year later strongly opposed a visit.

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Following his return from a meeting of the Zionist Actions Committee in Zurich in September 1947, Silver accepted the UNSCOP recommendations for partition as ‘a basis for discussion, a basis for a solution.’ The realization that the Zionists might achieve a two-thirds majority at the UN persuaded him to marginalize his distaste for partition. The situation had clearly changed since the beginning of 1947, when Zionists believed that both the USSR and the Vatican would use their influence to halt the emergence of a Jewish state. If Silver had accepted partition as a realization that he had taken the tactical argument as far as it would go, others began to understand that the Jewish reality after 1945 had relegated their strongly held ideological convictions. (‘Opposing Partition: The Zionist Predicaments after the Shoah’, Israel Studies 14, no. 2, 2009)

The religious Zionists also bowed to the pragmatic choice available. Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog had condemned partition in early 1945.7 Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan) told a Mizrahi conference in April 1946 that he still desired a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.8 Yet there were many who were of German origin and the revelations of the Shoah and its aftermath had clearly shifted their position. There was support for partition despite a continuing belief in the biblical borders of the land. In October 1946, Berlin’s bloc against partition was outvoted by those led by Yehuda Leib Fishman (Maimon). The haredim, the ultra-orthodox, faced similar problems to those of the Religious Zionists. Their worldview was predicated on the traditional anti-Zionist view that there should be no human intervention in God’s work. Yet they, too, had to strike a balance between ideology and reality in the wake of the Shoah. [In 1946, the Aguda leader, Yitzhak Breuer,] told the AACI: ‘For us, the state is not a goal in itself.’9 Zionists were adamant that a united front with complementing testimonies should be presented to the UNSCOP committee. In 1947, Yitzhak Meir Levin of Agudat Yisrael asked Ben-Gurion for a ruling on where a future state would stand on issues such as Sabbath observance, kashrut, the jurisdiction of halakhah (Jewish law) on matters of personal status, and whether parties such as Agudat Yisrael could maintain their autonomous system of schools and



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educational institutions. Levin’s leverage was the arrival in Palestine of the UNSCOP delegation whose recommendations could affect the future course of events. He received appropriate assurances to his questions in a letter signed by Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Maimon, the Mizrahi leader. Levin thereby testified in a measured fashion, neither criticizing Zionism nor espousing it. The price of muting vehement ultra-orthodox opposition to a Jewish state was the promise of fortifying religious traditions within its portals. In May [1947, the Soviet delegate,] Andrei Gromyko, [unexpectedly informed] the UN that the best solution was a bi-national state and failing that, a partitioned state. . . . The Zionist Left was profoundly affected by this Soviet volte-face, Hashomer Hatzair had been prone to expressions of strong support for the USSR over the decades. . . . It had supported the principle of bi-nationalism on Tito’s Yugoslav model and initially believed that Gromyko’s speech had been misreported. Despite its misgivings, its organ, Al Hamishmar, labelled the speech ‘the Soviet Balfour Declaration.’10 The Soviet change caught the communists unaware. On the day of Gromyko’s speech at the UN, its organ, Kol Ha’am, called for a federated Arab-Jewish state—the old Soviet line, but immediately readjusted their approach.11 The Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League, the Palestinian section of the Fourth International, argued that the new Jewish state would be ‘an excellent instrument in the hands of the imperialist states,’ while the Palestinian state would be a feudal one.12 The other major left-wing Zionist group, Tabenkin’s HaKibbutz Hameuhad, had vehemently opposed partition in 1937.13 It split from Mapai over the Biltmore Program as Ahdut Ha’avodah had in 1944 and was suspicious of any whiff of partition, Tabenkin’s socialist imagery and sense of internationalist belonging was based on an affinity with the Narodnaya Volya and the Social Revolutionaries of tsarist times. (‘Opposing Partition: The Zionist Predicaments after the Shoah’, Israel Studies 14, no. 2, Summer 2009)

Only the Right through its warring factions—the Revisionists, the Irgun, and the Lehi—never accepted partition in 1947. There was never even a scintilla of compromise in their belief in a Jewish state in all of Eretz-Israel. The first partition of Palestine, following the San Remo Conference in the spring of 1920, laid the ideological basis for their op-

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position. The conference established the Emirate of Transjordan and this evolved into the new Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in March 1946. The possibility of a second partition rekindled Revisionist anger. An editorial in a Revisionist paper commented: We may have been robbed of our territories east of the Jordan, but we will never give up our claim to them and that no power on earth will be able to carve up the territory west of the Jordan . . . the Revisionist movement has had no part in the farce of the latest commission. It refuses to recognise the inevitability of any other solution but Jewish statehood in integral Palestine as the way of the present catastrophe.14

The Revisionists’ chairman, Arieh Altman, declared at the end of April 1946 that ‘neither he nor his children nor his children’s children’ would recognize the changed status of Transjordan. The Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry (AACI), he pointed out, had accepted this fait accompli by its silence on the matter. Yitzhak Shamir and Natan Yellin-Mor of Lehi also opposed partition. When the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) published their recommendations in 1947, Lehi declared that those Jews who accepted partition were not true representatives of the Jewish people—and any such decisions would not be binding. The Irgun was the most detailed, articulate and scathing tribune of the right-wing groups on partition. Menahem Begin’s pen reserved its animus in particular for the British. The AACI was denounced as ‘an English trick’. The acceptance of the UNSCOP recommendations by mainstream Zionists was seen as the latest episode in the sequence of past betrayals, such as the handing over of its fighters to ‘the British Gestapo’ during the ‘saison’. A broadcast from the Voice of Fighting Zion entitled ‘Jewish Vichyites’ in September 1947 predicted that in the near future ‘the people will put them on trial’ for their past and present misdemeanours.15 In a memo, pointedly addressed only to the US members of the AACI, the Irgun argued that the American Revolution of 1776 was a prime example of how to free a nation from British tyranny. It quoted the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson, and asked the US delegates whether they still believed in these truths.16



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The Irgun’s memorandum to UNSCOP argued that Britain desperately wanted to remain in the Middle East and to perpetrate its rule through a puppet, satellite government in Palestine, similar to those in Jordan and Iraq. She was solely interested in oil and wished to turn the Greater Middle East into a trade empire—including Iran, Baku and the land of the Turkoman—ruled by various native potentates, advised and financed by the British, free to develop splendour and luxury in their courts and to deal with their people in the old way; but held in complete subservience in all spheres connected with the requirements of colonial exploitation (cotton, oil, minerals and other raw materials) and of imperial security.

Begin argued that Eretz-Israel was to be transformed into a strategic base for the imperialists.17 Britain’s hand behind partition was invoked constantly. The loss of the East Bank and now the proposed division of western Palestine was anathema to the Irgun. Begin spoke of the historic connection to all of Eretz-Israel. Jerusalem, Masada, Betar, Gush Halav, and Yodefat were symbols of Jewish military rebellion. Moreover, he believed that the Jews constituted a clear majority of the population on both sides of the Jordan by including ‘those of our people, numbering millions, who strive to return to it immediately but are unable to realise their right because the British occupation regime . . . has placed itself in their path.’ Begin referred to the part of the proposed Jewish state along the coast as ‘the ghetto whose density approaches 300 people per sq km.’ He further argued that the Negev Desert was unsuitable for the immediate absorption of any serious number of immigrants since ‘it would take decades to develop.’ Invoking the demographic argument, the Arab population of the state would be between 40–50% even after the DPs had been repatriated. On the question of transfer to the Arab state, he said, ‘This option granted to the Arabs will most certainly remain unused. They will not leave their homes—and rightly so. (It will be) a federal state along the lines of the Morrison plan which means a continuation of the British occupation.’ Throughout 1947, he rejected any hint of partition and regarded the notion as treasonous. Even the legitimacy of a future government in Irgun eyes was conditional on retaining both sides of the Jordan. It was willing to support the creation of ‘a Provisional Hebrew government,

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headed by any man’ as long as it was a government of the whole of Eretz-Israel—‘and not just a Jewish ghetto in Eretz-Israel.’18 (‘Opposing Partition: The Zionist Predicaments after the Shoah’, Israel Studies 14, no. 2, Summer 2009)

A LEAP INTO THE UNKNOWN The war between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs commenced the moment that UN Resolution 181 was passed by a two-thirds majority on 29 November 1947. It endorsed partition and the establishment of two states. The state of the Jews was almost a bi-national state—55 per cent Jews, 45 per cent Arabs. The higher Arab birth-rate would be offset, it was argued, by an influx of Jews from the four corners of the world. The British restrictions, set in stone in 1939, were swept away. Yet as history records, the two-state solution never came to fruition. This internecine conflict evolved into a war between the new State of Israel and the Arab world. What was a war for independence and survival for the Jews was simultaneously the Nakba (the catastrophe) for the Palestinian Arabs. Around three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs left—either through the fear of conflict or by the initiative to expel Arabs by some military figures as Yigal Allon and Moshe Carmel. While Israel extended its territory, a State of Palestine never came into existence. Jordan annexed the West Bank, while Farouk’s Egypt took Gaza. For the Jews, the establishment of a state with a Jewish majority meant a break in Jewish history. Before and after. From Jewish Trotskyists to Jewish capitalists, there was both amazement and incredulity about the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth. Many found an ideological explanation to justify the emergence of such a state. For even the most committed Zionist, there was a huge psychological gap between the tradition of generational passivity to actually realising the dreams of ancient prayers. Ben-Gurion’s aides believed that there was only a fifty-fifty possibility that Israel would survive an Arab military campaign. Moshe Sharett later declared that despite his outer calm demeanour on signing the declaration of independence, he felt ‘as though he were standing on a cliff with a gale blowing up all around him and

Mobilisation leaflet for Israel’s War of Independence 1947/1948. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

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nothing to hold onto except his determination not to be blown over into the raging sea below’.19 Ben-Gurion pushed through the formal declaration of independence. His diary hardly mentions the thirty-two-minute ceremony on 14 May 1948 in which a state arose after two millennia of dispersion. Arieh Handler was the only British Jew who was present during the ceremony in the Tel Aviv museum. A founder of the religious Zionist youth group, Bnei Akiva and a member of Hapoel Hamizrahi, he recalled the event fifty years later. What was the mood of the people on the eve of independence? In May 1948 the mood of the country was hopeful, but people just did not know what was going to happen. Jerusalem was encircled and several members of the provisional government council were isolated. The only way out was by airplane. Therefore many prominent figures were unable to come to the Declaration of the State. Ben-Gurion insisted that Rabbi Fishman (Maimon) should be present and he sent a plane to bring him to Tel Aviv. Ben-Gurion was completely secular and Rabbi Fishman was a leader of Mizrahi, the religious Zionists. Yet there was a special relationship between them. They had both been in prison together in Turkey during World War I. What was the view of the Diaspora, especially American Jewry? There were different messages from the Jewish world about the timing of establishing the state. There was pressure from the United States and by Nahum Goldmann to delay the declaration by a few days. He believed that Truman would be able to convince Britain to support the establishment of the state. Goldmann believed that if all the nations of the world gave their support, it would avert the threat of immediate war. He believed that, faced with a wall of international support for a Jewish state, some Arab countries would accept partition. There was a deep animosity between Goldmann and Ben-Gurion on the issue. Ben-Gurion held the view that if the state would not be declared then and there, it would never come into existence. So how was the decision made? Detailed discussions took place in the few days before the declaration and the council of the provisional government voted 6–4 in favour of declaring a state. Ben-Gurion and Sharett of Mapai, Aharon Tzisling and Mordechai Bentov of Mapam, Moshe Shapira of Hapoel Hamizrahi and



The Road to Independence

Peretz Bernstein of the General Zionists were in favour. Eliezer Kaplan and David Remez of Mapai, Pinhas Rozenblueth-Rozen of the Progressives and Behor Shitrit of the Sephardi party were against. Ze’ev Sharef, the secretary of the political department of the Jewish Agency, was told to organise invitations for the declaration at the Tel Aviv museum, literally the day before. The invitations were all typed, but he was told not to send them out. Firstly, no one knew if it would actually take place and secondly if it did take place, it had to be arranged quietly for security reasons. Then what happened on the day of the declaration? I received an invitation on that Friday morning, 14 May, by motorbike. It requested us not to divulge the contents and the locations. We were told to be in our seats by 3.30 that afternoon in ‘dark festive attire.’ It was signed ‘the Secretariat’—there was no name. Even the name of the state had not been decided. It could have been Judaea, Ivriya—we just didn’t know. What about the text of the declaration? The wording of the declaration had been fought over for some time before. Sharett redrafted the original document in a beautiful but highly detailed Hebrew. Ben-Gurion shortened and simplified Sharett’s declaration. The religious—and many others—wanted a reference to ‘Almighty God.’ Ideological secularists like Aharon Tzisling from Ein Harod, a kibbutznik, did not want any mention of God. Then came this beautiful compromise which only Jews can put together. They decided to include the phrase tsur Yisrael—‘the Rock of Israel.’ The religious understood tsur as ‘God’ while the secularists believed that it was simply that—a rock. Different interpretations, but in the end they were all there—they wanted to get on with the establishment of the state. Was there still uncertainty at this late stage? Even a few hours before the actual signing, we still did not know whether it would take place. There was tremendous pressure from London on Truman. The British had an ally in Marshall who wanted to wait. Even some in the council were unsure whether to proceed with the declaration—everyone wanted a state, but it was a question of timing. Even Moshe Shapira who was moderate in all things asked if it really mattered if we waited another 24 or 48 hours. Ben-Gurion gave three reasons for an immediate signing.

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Firstly, the British formally withdrew from Palestine at lunchtime on that Friday. This would leave a power vacuum. Who would have the final authority amongst the Jews? Secondly, he argued that the British could easily change their mind and call another meeting of the United Nations which would delay things perhaps for months. There could be all sorts of changes. How and where and who? He said that we could not wait for this. Thirdly, he said that at present the Soviets, the Latin Americans and others were in agreement, but tomorrow there might be a totally different political constellation. Where would we be then? Was the Irgun a factor in Ben-Gurion’s considerations? The Haganah was ready and prepared for war with the Arabs, but within the Yishuv there was division. There were rival armed forces, the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi. My cousin, Yehiel Handler, was a member of the Irgun which was led by Menahem Begin from the underground. Yehiel and his entire group of six boys were all killed when the Irgun attacked Jaffa shortly before the establishment of the state. Ben-Gurion feared that there would be a military struggle between the Haganah and the Irgun if the state was not declared. There would be complete chaos in the country. The last argument convinced everyone and the invitations were sent out by motorbike. What happened at the actual ceremony? I arrived at 3.30. By 3.45 we were all sitting down. In addition to the intended signatories, there were visitors, journalists and the Tel Aviv Philharmonic Orchestra. Then there were a few minutes of music. Then without any kokhmas (official deliberations), Ben-Gurion stood up at four o’clock on the dot. We were all shaking. Without any introduction, no nice words, he read the declaration of independence. He asked the members of the council of the provisional government to come forth and sign it. No discussion, no dissent. One by one, they stood up. It was beautiful to see. Then Hatikvah. People got up and we were out of the museum at ten to five. For me, it was the greatest moment of my life. Although we were all moved, no one lived in a fool’s paradise. No one knew what was going to happen. We had a little neshek (arms), but we knew that the situation was extremely dangerous. What took place then? Ben-Gurion went to his home with his friends. I went with Rav Fishman and his friends to the malon Talpiot, a small kosher hotel in Rehov Ahad Ha’am. We drank a little l’haim and then each one of us returned



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home. I went back to my family to get ready for shul (synagogue), for kabbalat Shabbat (Friday night service). There was an atmosphere of both joy and fear at the same time. We knew that whatever neshek we had—it was not enough. I remember it as if it was yesterday. When I returned from shul, the Egyptian planes were already over Tel Aviv and dropping their bombs. This strange experience continued throughout the entire evening, up to midnight. On the one hand, people were singing and dancing and on the other, north Tel Aviv was being bombed. (Interview with Arieh Handler, Judaism Today, Spring 1998)

DIASPORA BLUES Yet not all Diaspora Jews welcomed the coming of the state. Many felt it created identity problems, while others were worried about accusations of dual loyalty. Moreover, it was accentuated in Britain because the UK had been the mandatory power in Palestine. In Britain there had been riots in the north of England when the Irgun had hanged the two British sergeants in 1947. The British press attacked its Jewish citizens for ‘not performing their civic duty and moral obligation’ despite widespread Jewish opposition to the Irgun’s campaign.20 This had been apparent since the passing of UN Resolution 181, which called for partition into two states on 29 November 1947. Many leaders of the Jewish community in Britain were distinctly unhappy with the emergence of Zionism as a major force in communal life. This included the president of the mainstream orthodox United Synagogue, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, the Liberal Synagogue’s Rabbi Israel Mattuck, the Lords Bearsted and Swaythling and an array of Jewish Conservative MPs. Lt. Col. Louis Gluckstein, the former Conservative MP for Nottingham East, believed that the UN Resolution had been a grave error and voted against the Board of Deputies’ resolution which welcomed it. Leonard Stein, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, argued that ‘the allegiance and loyalty of British Jews was and would remain an undivided allegiance and loyalty to Britain—allegiance and loyalty not merely in name and in law, but in feeling, thought and deed.’ Some non-Jewish parliamentarians resorted to time-honoured stereotypes. The Conservative MP Major Harry Legge-Bourke said that Jewry was only interested in Palestine because of the economic resources of

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the Dead Sea and that the inspiration of political Zionism was similar to that of Bolshevism. On the other side of the political spectrum, the ‘Keep Left’ group within the Labour Party passionately espoused the Zionist cause. The day after the UN vote, its leading light Richard Crossman spoke, with Labour MPs Sidney Silverman and Barnett Janner, at the Kingsway Hall in London. Thousands attended and the meeting concluded with the blowing of the shofar. The Orthodox Rabbi Eli Munk argued that halakhah would guide the new state while Reform’s Rabbi Leo Baeck welcomed the Jewish renaissance in Palestine. Even the long-time anti-Zionist Lubavitch hasidim combined a service to commemorate the reprieve of the sixth Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, from a Stalinist firing squad, with a thanksgiving ceremony for the UN vote. In parallel, British communists, noting the Kremlin’s volte-face and its support for a Jewish state, now argued that the Jews in Palestine were fighting a British puppet state, Jordan, and reminded its members that its Arab Legion was staffed by British officers and financed by His Majesty’s Government. Bill Rust, the editor of the communist Daily Worker (Morning Star), told an audience at Stoke Newington Town Hall that the conflict between Zionist Jews and Arab nationalists was a war instigated by British capitalism. There were reservations within British Jewry about the merits of partition. The supporters of Menahem Begin’s Irgun vehemently opposed the idea of a second partition of Palestine. Ivan Greenberg, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle for a decade, had been sacked in 1946 for his pro-Irgun views. He commented that the UN resolution was tantamount to ‘ripping from them four-fifths of their birthright under a show of legality.’ Many religious Zionists, however, welcomed partition. Arieh Handler’s pioneering Hapoel Hamizrahi supported it while Yehezkel Abramsky, the senior dayan of the London Beth Din, commented that Jews had lost faith in the ‘civilised world.’ Therefore, they had to accept that part of Palestine to which they could return. Jews, he remarked, needed two things at this moment in time—self-restraint and unity. His son, Chimen Abramsky, later a famed historian of the Jews, but then a central figure in the Jewish Committee of the Communist Party, was arguing a similar approach, albeit it from a Marxist standpoint. In the immediate aftermath of the revelations of the Holocaust, a majority of British Jews understood that they had to take matters into their



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own hands. The war was over and there was a profound difference of opinion between British Jews and Attlee’s Labour government over the future of Palestine. (‘Everything Changed When Israel Was Proclaimed’, Jewish Chronicle, 3 May 2014)

NOTES 1.  Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (London: Random House UK, 2009), pp. 143–60. 2.  Jeffrey Herf, ‘The Nazi Extermination Camps and the Ally to the East: Could the Red Army and Air Force have stopped or slowed the Final Solution’?, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 4, Fall 2003. 3.  George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, Polemic, October 1945. 4. Samuel Halperin, The Political World of American Zionism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961), app. IV. 5.  Zvi Ganin, Truman, American Jewry and Israel 1945–1948 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979). 6. David Ben-Gurion, ‘Memorandum, 15 October 1941’, in The Rise of Israel: The Zionist Political Program 1940–1947, ed. Michael J. Cohen (New York: Garland, 1987). 7.  Jewish Herald, 2 March 1945. 8.  Jewish Herald, 26 April 1946. 9. Yosef Fund, Separation or Participation: Agudat Yisrael Confronting Zionism and the State of Israel (Jerusalem, 1999), 210–11. 10.  Jewish Herald, 23 May 1947. 11.  Kol Ha’am, 14 May 1948. 12.  ‘Against Partition’, Kol Hama’amad, 31 September 1947. 13.  Shmuel Dotan, The Partition of Eretz Israel in the Mandatory Period: The Jewish Controversy (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1979), pp. 98–99. 14.  Jewish Herald, 12 April 1946. 15.  Voice of Fighting Zion, broadcast, 21 September 1947, k(af) 4–15/8, Jabotinsky Institute Archives. 16.  K(af) 4-15/1, [n.d.], Jabotinsky Institute Archives. 17.  K(af) 4-15/1, [n.d.], Jabotinsky Institute Archives. 18.  Voice of Fighting Zion, broadcast, 1 October 1947, k(af) 4-15/1, Jabotinsky Institute Archives. 19.  Golda Meir, My Life (London: Cox and Wyman, 1975), pp.74–75. 20.  Sunday Times, 5 January 1947.

5 Israel in the Eyes of the History Makers

DISRAELI

There were many prominent politicians—both before and after 1948—

who welcomed the rise of Israel. They were motivated to do so for a plethora of reasons, but the common thread was that it was an event unprecedented in world history which could not be ignored. Benjamin Disraeli was undoubtedly caught up in the romanticism of a possible return of the Jews to their ancient homeland during the early nineteenth century. In an epoch of dispensationalist millennialism, Disraeli infused proto-Zionist themes into his novels Alroy and Tancred. Converted to Christianity at the age of thirteen, Disraeli spent a lifetime trying to make sense of his Jewishness. His public persona cultivated exoticism and orientalism, which certainly appealed to Victorian notions of empire. It was an imagined fantasy which never reflected the Jewish reality. As a well-to-do young English gentleman, he embarked on ‘a tour of the East’ which included Palestine. As he had no reference point for his Jewishness due to his upbringing, his relationship to Palestine was rooted solely in a national understanding of the past. In conversation with Lord Stanley in 1851, he therefore waxed lyrical about the possibilities of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land.1 Disraeli initiated the purchase of a major shareholding in the Suez Canal Company—and this, it can be argued, drew Britain into Palestine—a 88



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presence which ended in 1948. Yet Disraeli was highly complex in his relationship to Jewishness. The late David Cesarani describes him as ‘one of the last court Jews and one of the first victims of modern anti-Semitism’.2 It is significant that he was silent during the Damascus Affair in 1840 and during the abduction and conversion of Edgardo Montara by the agents of the Vatican. While he supported the right of Jews to enter parliament—as Jews—he was absent during the debates in the House of Commons when he could have made a contribution. Only Churchill in the following century has such lacunae in his history. Cesarani comments that ‘Disraeli was more a disciple of Lord Palmerston than a follower of Moses. He actually knew very little about the situation of Jews in other parts of the world and, unlike the Jewish MPs who entered parliament in the wake of Lionel de Rothschild, never lifted a finger to assist them.3 Even so, the figure of Benjamin Disraeli continued to attract the attention of the early Zionists—and they too tried to decipher him. It is said that when Menahem Begin was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in Lithuania in 1940, he took with him a copy of Andre Maurois’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli to stave off the intellectual isolation of an uncertain future. Disraeli, a converted Jew and British prime minister, was a figure of fascination for anyone in those dark times who wished to comprehend both the multiplicity of Jewish identities in Europe and anti-Semitism in seemingly liberal England. How did he, as a Jew in the Judeophobic Conservative Party, climb to ‘the top of the greasy pole’ of politics? Disraeli told a bemused Queen Victoria that he was ‘that blank page’ between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, neither an adherent of Judaism nor of Christianity, but the interpreter of one to the other. Even his friends and later admirers such as Winston Churchill regarded him as ‘foreign’ and not fully English. For many, he was still ‘an immigrant’ even though both he and his father had been born in England and had made tremendous efforts at anglicization. Disraeli, in this sense, was yet another talented European Jew with aspirations and pretensions who wished to embrace modernity, but was unsure what to do with his Jewishness. His contemporaries, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle and many others, tried to find a convenient balancing point within the societies in which they lived. Indeed, for some, escaping Jewishness was

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a definition of their Jewish identity. Like Marx, Disraeli did not have the religious and cultural emotional baggage which many other 19thcentury Jews carried. Unlike Marx, Disraeli uniquely invented his own brand of Jewishness, one which was exotic, romantic, aristocratic—but devoid of the reality of the historical Jewish experience. In 19th-century England, Jew-baiting and folk anti-Semitism were symbolized by hook-nosed cartoon caricatures, jokey exhortations to Jews to become pork-eaters and Rabelaisian sing-along. Rushing out of church on Easter Sunday, the poet Robert Southey noted in 1807 a gaggle of choirboys singing: ‘He is risen, he is risen, all the Jews must go to prison.’ So when Disraeli became a prominent Conservative Party politician, it was almost inevitable that Punch magazine produced a verse, labelling him ‘a curly haired Jew-boy’ with a ‘hilarious’ Germanic accent. As the author cleverly shows, the highly motivated Disraeli displayed ‘the unbearable pain of frustrated ambition’ throughout his early life. First as an incompetent international financier, then as a successful writer, he wanted to make his mark. He paid a visit to Palestine in 1830 and became infatuated with the 12th-century Kurdish messianic figure David Alroy. In his own novel about Alroy, Disraeli turns this ‘king of the Jews’ into an Eastern Alexander the Great to present a positive imagery of Jewishness to a sceptical and ignorant English public. Alroy and Tancred were Disraeli’s two proto-Zionist novels which exemplified his desire to portray the Jews in an admirable light, and here a distinction between Jewish solidarity and Jewish belief is made. Yet in Parliament, he said nothing about the Damascus blood libel that virtually coincided with the publication of Alroy. Disraeli was highly sensitive to being associated with Jewish interests. He refused, for example, to recommend a peerage for Sir Moses Montefiore. Perhaps his writing was the only way in which he could truly express the Jewish side of his identity. One rare confidante was a certain Mrs. Brydges-Willyams, a well-to-do colonel’s widow, formerly known as Sarah Mendez da Costa, a Sephardi Jewess—another ‘blank page’ between Judaism and Christianity. The author argues that perhaps Disraeli entertained the idea of becoming a Jewish leader and then settled on a determination to reach the top of British politics. Theodor Herzl’s name is evoked by Kirsch, but it is really Vladimir Jabotinsky—not Herzl—who is the original Zionist blank page between Russian literature and Zionist nationalism. In his later novels,



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Jabotinsky, like Disraeli, disassembled his Jewishness through his literary creations. (Review of Adam Kirsch’s Benjamin Disraeli in the Jerusalem Post, 1 August 2009)

CHURCHILL Winston Churchill was, of course, intimately involved in the political odyssey of the Jews during the twentieth century. For many, he remains a lofty and inspiring leader. His rhetoric is an exemplar to be imitated by lesser politicians. He undoubtedly inherited a philo-Semitism from his father, who had grown up in the company of the Hirsches, Cohens, Wertheimers and Bischoffsheims. After eating at several Jewish homes, Randolph Churchill told his then fiancée, the American Jenny Jerome, in 1873, ‘Like all Jews’ places, it is a wonderful place for eating, every kind of food. I must confess I rather like it’. When his gentlemen’s club banned Jews, he promptly tendered his resignation. Yet like Disraeli, Winston Churchill has his critics as well as his admirers. Michael J. Cohen has written that there was ‘a huge gap between Churchill’s rhetoric and his actions—or inactions’.4 While pointing out Churchill’s achievements, Cohen also drew attention to the fact that he was ‘a man of great contradictions’. Churchill supported Zionism because it complimented British interests. If the two diverted from each other, then it was clear which path he would support. He therefore attacked Jewish communists whose internationalist Jewishness ran counter to British interests. Indeed Churchill described Bolshevism as ‘a Jewish movement’. On the other hand, he told Weizmann in 1943 that he would hand Hitler over to the Jews.5 Yet Weizmann’s request to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau ended in no action being taken and a negative response from a junior Foreign Office official. One excuse given was that RAF aircraft were out of range. Yet the RAF flew further in August 1944 to drop supplies to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw.6 The non-bombing of the railway lines remains a source of controversy and commentary on Churchill’s record.

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As Cohen records, Churchill was silent when UN Resolution 181 was passed in support of a two-state solution on 29 November 1947. There was similarly no reaction when Ben-Gurion declared a state of the Jews on 14 May 1948.7 Churchill clearly was a figure of complexity; even so, both ordinary Jews and non-Jews are not yet ready to demythologise him and reduce him to human form because of the great debt they still feel that they owe him. In 2002, the BBC ran a phone-in competition to discover who was the greatest Briton of all time. Nearly half a million people voted for Winston Churchill, leaving Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Princess Diana and John Lennon far behind. Despite the crassness of 21st-century celebrity culture, it was remarkable that people who had not even been born during World War II instinctively remembered Churchill with deep gratitude. His words in 1940 so impressed David Ben-Gurion that he repeated them in a letter to his wife: We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

These words, so often quoted, are even today no mere slogans, worn out by the passage of time and coloured by sentimental hindsight, but the symbolic defiance and resilience of the British people to oppose the ushering in of a new dark age for humankind. With the Nazi-Soviet pact in operation and the US neutral, Britain stood isolated and in retreat. Hitler was on the brink of invasion, hoping to be the first to repeat William the Conqueror’s achievement in 1066. David Low’s famous cartoon, depicting a British soldier at the cliff’s edge, waving his fist at incoming German bombers, bore the caption ‘Very well, alone.’ This evocative and powerful image, published after the fall of France, has carried its meaning down the decades. As Ben-Gurion wrote to Churchill in 1961: ‘I saw you then not only as the symbol of your people and its greatness, but as the voice of the invincible and uncompromising conscience of the human race at a time of danger to the dignity of man, created in the image of God. It was not only the liberties and the honour of your own people that you saved.’



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Yet it could have all turned out so differently. There were all too many British politicians who resented Churchill’s elevation to the premiership—those who wanted to press for a deal with Hitler in 1940 through the good offices of Mussolini. If Churchill had not defiantly opposed such a course at a time when Britain was at its lowest ebb, if he had been defeated by his political adversaries during those fateful days, it is no exaggeration to state that the victory of Nazism would have created a new demonic order in the world where there would be no place for the Jew. Gilbert devotes a chapter to Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission in 1937—which was kept secret by the commissioners. The testimony reveals Churchill’s passionate defence of the Balfour Declaration and his long-term support for the Zionist cause. He spoke about the eventual rise of ‘a great Jewish state, numbered by millions’ and about the importance of Jewish immigration. Churchill rebuked the Peel commissioners for their argument that the Jewish influx had been inflicted on the indigenous Arab population. He responded: Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.

As Michael Makovsky argues in his book, Churchill saw the Zionists as ‘civilizers’ and the promoters of 19th-century liberalism. Churchill’s orientalist approach would be deemed politically incorrect today, but then again he was a product of Victorian romanticism, an admirer of Benjamin Disraeli and a profound believer in the benefits of the British Empire. It seems that following his time as a soldier in Sudan and Egypt, he did not become an uncritical devotee of the Arab world as were many in the British upper classes. Yet he often spoke with pride in establishing Transjordan in the 1920s and that a stable state had emerged under the Hashemites. In contrast, he exhibited disdain for the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs, not least because they aligned themselves with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Significantly, Churchill opposed partition in 1937. Martin Gilbert discovered Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s letter to him in July 1937 in the Churchill papers with details of a meeting with the Revisionist leader at the home of James de Rothschild. Churchill was clearly influenced by Jabotinsky

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and condemned Peel’s proposals—in stark contrast to Chaim Weizmann’s endorsement of them. Churchill’s long life—he was born in 1874 and died in 1965—parallels the rise of the Zionist movement. Weizmann and Churchill were born three days apart and their friendship spanned half a century. He represented Northwest Manchester as a Liberal MP when Weizmann was a chemistry lecturer at the city’s university. The constituency had a sizable Jewish electorate, and it was here that he was first introduced to the aspirations of the Zionist movement and the depth of British antiSemitism. Ironically, it was Churchill who condemned the anti-aliens legislation, designed to keep out thousands of East European Jews from Britain, while Arthur Balfour endorsed it. Makovsky draws attention to the fact that Churchill’s embrace of Zionism was not linear. For example, he did not raise Jewish claims to Palestine when in government during World War I and neither said nor wrote anything on the Balfour Declaration when it was issued. In part, he naturally placed British interests before Jewish concerns. His vocal support for Zionism was often muted by the Irgun’s refusal not to retaliate against Arab attacks in the 1930s and its campaign against the British military in the 1940s. He was silent after Lord Moyne’s assassination by Lehi in 1944 and pointedly refused to meet his old friend, Weizmann. In reality, Churchill dipped in and out of active support for the Zionist cause. While his support for a Jewish state was permanent, political constraints in Britain and Palestine often reduced him to inactivity. Above all, he was also extremely weary of the ingrained anti-Semitism in the Conservative Party and a periodic dislike for Jews within Britain in general. As colonial secretary in the 1920s, Churchill rebuffed all attempts to halt Jewish immigration. Yet there were many ranged against him. Gilbert quotes from a debate on the Mandate in the House of Lords in 1922 when Lord Sydenham suggested that the Palestinian Arabs would never have objected to ‘the establishment of well-selected Jews; but, instead of that, we have dumped down 25,000 promiscuous people on the shores of Palestine, many of them quite unsuited for colonizing purposes, and some of them Bolsheviks, who have already shown the most sinister activity.’ In the 1930s, it was not the innate anti-Semitism of the Nazis that offended, but the slight against liberal sensitivities and English gentility. As prime minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to his sister a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, ‘No doubt Jews aren’t a loveable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to ex-



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plain the pogrom.’ Churchill throughout his life refused to kowtow to such a mentality. He was personally devastated by the destruction of European Jewry and frustrated by the profound opposition to Zionism he often encountered. He was seen as being ‘too fond of Jews.’ Within a few days of his ascension to the premiership, there were calls for the return of all eleven British battalions from Palestine because the Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent. In view of Arab hostility and pro-Nazi sentiment, Churchill suggested that the Jews of Palestine should be armed. His colonial secretary strenuously opposed this idea for fear of ‘the worst possible repercussions on the Arab world.’ Following the sinking of the refugee ship Patria, General Wavell wanted to ship the survivors to Mauritius. Again Churchill intervened and telegrammed Wavell: ‘Personally, I hold it would be an act of inhumanity unworthy of the British name to force them to re-embark.’ Gilbert mentions a meeting in 1993 in London on the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where Churchill’s grandson was the speaker. A woman in the audience told him: ‘We had one of the few radios in the ghetto and, whenever your grandfather was due to broadcast on the BBC, my family and friends would gather round. I could not understand English, but I knew that if I and my family had any hope of coming through this war alive, it depended upon that one, strong, unseen voice. . . . I was the only member of my family to survive. I was liberated by British forces in 1945.’ (Review of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship and Michael Makovsky’s Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, in the Jerusalem Post, 27 December 2007)

STALIN Churchill’s ally during World War II, Joseph Stalin, always had a problem with Jews. As early as 1905, he had exploded at the leaders of the Mensheviks: ‘Who are these people anyway? Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Yids. You can’t go into a fight with them and you can’t have a feast with them’.8 In the post-war Soviet Union as well as in its satellite states in Eastern Europe, Stalin increasing saw Jewish plots and Zionist machinations. In 1947, the Soviet Union supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a sovereign Jewish national state. Stalin’s overturning

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of traditional Soviet antipathy towards Zionism was a measure of expediency designed to quicken the exit of the British from the Middle East and to prevent the Americans from taking their place. The USSR and its satellites provided the Zionists with the votes to secure the necessary two-thirds majority on passing UN Resolution 181, which advocated the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Indeed if Stalin had not intervened so decisively, would there have been a State of Israel? Yet while Stalin embraced Zionism externally, he ordered the arrest of multitudes of Jews internally who identified with Israel and wished to emigrate there. Many Soviet Jews wished to fight for Israel in the War of Independence. In April 1948, Major Joachim Shperber attended a three-week course at the Tushino air base near Moscow and was told by a high-ranking officer that a plan to create a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan was being pushed by the Kremlin on Marshal Voroshilov’s initiative. Moreover there was a plan to organise an expeditionary force, tens of thousands strong. Shperber believed that he would be one of 800 pilots sent. When the existence of the State was officially proclaimed, 20 Jewish officers gathered to celebrate. After the first statutory toast to Stalin, one General Levin lifted his glass and proposed a toast to the State of Israel, saying. ‘Today is a great holiday for us: after 2,000 years, an independent Jewish State has come into being.’ This was followed by yet another toast—this time to Chaim Weizmann. Even the Hatikva was sung in Russian. Throughout the entire course, Jewish officers talked about the possibility of volunteering to fight for Israel. In Leningrad, medical student Leonid Rutshtein collected 50 signatures on a petition asking for the right to go and fight for Israel. When the Israeli Embassy opened in Moscow, it, too, received its fair share of requests to leave. Ex-Major M. wrote to the Israeli military attaché from Kiev: ‘Is it possible for a Jew who has spent four years fighting the fascists to go to the land of our birth, to our dear country, in order to be together with the remnant of our people, which demands the freedom of the oldest of nations? All praise to the head of the Army, Ben-Gurion. With honour and blessings to Zion.’ Even in the camps there was great concern for the security of the new State. As early as 1942, a Lithuanian Betarnik, Yechezkel Pulerevich, wrote to Stalin from his camp suggesting that a Jewish army be formed.



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This, he concluded, would speed up the opening of a second front against the Nazi armies and relieve the pressure on the USSR. On hearing the proclamation of the Jewish State on Moscow Radio late at night in the far reaches of Northern Russia, one Jewish prisoner recorded: ‘All the non-Jews who were there with me became silent with astonishment. Then they rose from their bunks and spontaneously shook the hands of the Jews and congratulated them.’ In honour of the festive occasion, each of us produced the little food in his possession and we camp Jews held a feast together. We could not sleep all night. In our hearts and thought, we were at the front with our brothers and sisters who had begun a bitter war, rifle in hand, against the invading Arabs.

The coming of the State produced new demands for the teaching of Hebrew, which had been banned for decades. David Hofshtein, the Yiddish writer who had lived in Palestine and written in Hebrew, began openly to advocate the teaching of Hebrew in the USSR. A quiet group of Hebrew writers, calling themselves MARAK—M’dabrim rak Ivrit (We speak only Hebrew), revealed their existence. In a letter to Stalin, the Hebrew writers, Zvi Praegerson, Meir Baazov, Zvi Plotkin and Aron Krikheli, asked for permission to leave for Israel. The arrival of the Israeli legation in Moscow, headed by Golda Meir, had a remarkable effect on Soviet Jews. The legation became the natural address for pleas of help to emigrate to Israel. An impromptu visit to the Jewish theatre in Moscow prompted the number two in the Israeli legation, Mordechal Namir, to reflect: We were deluged with questions about Israel, about the Embassy, the war, the Hebrew language and many other topics. Here and there, people asked after relatives in Israel. They told us, some quite openly, some loudly and some in a whisper, ‘You can’t imagine how much Jewish joy you have brought us. For God’s sake, take us with you to Israel. Don’t desert us.’

Even so, the demonstration on the first day of Rosh Hashanah surpassed anything that even the Israelis had expected. When Golda Meir and her entourage reached the street which housed the synagogue, they were greeted by thousands of Soviet Jews. When they were noticed, spontaneous applause broke out. A narrow path was made for them and they entered the synagogue. Yet, during a four-hour service, all eyes were on the visitors. When they finally went back into the street, a tremendous roar went up. Shouts of ‘Shalom’ and ‘l’shanah haba’a b’Yerushalayim’ (Next Year in Jerusalem) greeted them.

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Jews sat on cars and clambered over parked lorries for a better view. They leaned out of windows and stood in stairways. The street was packed from one end to the other by an estimated 30,000 people. It was Soviet Jewry’s declaration of solidarity with Israel. It was also an answer to an article by Ilya Ehrenberg which had appeared in Pravda a few days previously. In it, the Jewish masses were warned that they were first and foremost Soviet citizens and that Zionism was a reactionary creed. The Kremlin had replied in no uncertain fashion to Mrs Meir’s requests for Jewish emigration from the USSR. The Soviet leadership was shocked by the magnitude of these demonstrations of affection. It had probably believed that the Jewish problem had been laid to rest and that Zionist sentiment no longer existed in the USSR. In pursuit of this policy to cleanse the USSR and eventually Eastern Europe of nationally conscious Jews, the Kremlin had permitted its satellites to allow emigration to Israel. The Soviet Union itself allowed a total of some 175,000 Polish Jews to return to Poland from the USSR in the post-war years. Yet it was well known to the Kremlin that a majority of these people would finally leave for Palestine. The realisation that the Zionist ideal was alive and well in the USSR after 30 years of Marxism-Leninism brought with it a terrible vengeance, From November 1948, the Kremlin put into force anti-Jewish policies which have labelled that era as the Black Years of Soviet Jewry. Those Jews who had openly applied to leave or to fight in the war, or simply to be able to speak Hebrew, became new members of the zek (prisoner) fraternity in the slave labour camps. They were dubbed ‘Golda’s prisoners.’ Leonid Rutshtein was sentenced to ten years in 1950 for his collection of signatures. One of the accusations was that he had read the works of William Shakespeare—‘decadent bourgeois literature.’ Iosif Shmerler, from Novosibirsk, was also given ten years for propagating ‘bourgeois nationalist propaganda’ because he had asked to fight for Israel. David Hofshtein’s demand for Hebrew died with him on that dark day in August, 1952, when the cream of the Yiddish writers and poets were executed as a prelude to the Doctors’ Plot. Major Shperber’s plan to enlist as a volunteer for Israel was aborted when he learned from a non-Jewish officer that Stalin had turned down the scheme for volunteers for Israel and had subsequently ordered the arrest of all those who had openly expressed such a wish. Although he avoided the camps for



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one more year, Shperber was finally arrested at the Turkish border in an attempt to steal an aircraft and fly to freedom. (‘How Russia’s Jews Welcomed Israel’, Jewish Chronicle, 27 April 1979)

During his last years, Stalin exhibited a growing paranoia about plots against him and conspiracies at the behest of foreign powers. Molotov and Mikoyan were being excluded from Stalin’s governing inner circle. Molotov was accused of taking an anti-Leninist line while Mikoyan was deemed to be behaving like a Trotskyist.9 Others close to Stalin were labelled as British spies. While the hated Beria was thought to be ‘a secret Jew’. An accelerating vortex of accusations had begun to suck in even the most loyal Jewish servants of the Soviet regime. The assimilated, the acculturated joined the quietly religious and the silently Zionist in being blamed for a plethora of crimes. In March 1950 an indictment was drawn up against a large number of Jews including Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina. Many had been members of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. By April 1952, the minister of state security, Semyon Ignatiev, proposed to Stalin that a smaller group of well-known Jews, having been tried and found guilty, should be sentenced to death and shot. The trial commenced in May 1952 and the sentences duly carried out in August—with the exception of Professor Lina Shtern, who would receive ten years in the Gulag. Forty years later in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, an eight-volume record of the trial’s proceedings was located in a closed Komitet gosvdarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB) archive. Some of the defendants, such as the poet Peretz Markish and Solomon Bregman, a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, pleaded not guilty, while others admitted their guilt only in part. The old Bolshevik Solomon Lozovsky similarly retracted his forced confession and led a spirited denunciation of the fabricated accusations—ridiculing them and denouncing anti-Semitic innuendo.10 This was possibly the first occasion that a Soviet trial did not go according to plan and the defendants did not play the role assigned to them. With the trial falling apart, the military judge remarkably suggested an acquittal—only for the proposal to be vetoed by Malenkov. Clearly they did not go to their deaths quietly.

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Stalin’s long-time antipathy towards Jews had surfaced with a vengeance. The trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee members laid the foundations for a new plot in which Jews would be widely implicated and its premeditated outcome would lead to catastrophic consequences for Soviet Jews. At the beginning of 1953, arrests and rumours of mass deportation abounded. Chaim Weizmann’s sister—whom he had not seen for decades—was arrested, as was Ivan Maisky, the Soviet diplomat and former Ambassador to London. The Black Years of Soviet Jewry only ended with Stalin’s death at the beginning of 1953. When Stalin died on Purim in 1953, beggars in Jerusalem rattled their tin cans and cried ‘Haman is dead!’ In the USSR, there were public tears and private joy. Huge, inconsolable crowds appeared in the streets and many participants were crushed underfoot in the mêlée. The body of the composer, Prokofiev, who had expired the same day, was unable to be moved from the house because of the large number of people outside. Special services had been held in the Great Choral Synagogue as Stalin lay dying. Moscow’s chief rabbi called for a day of fasting and prayer so that Stalin should not meet his maker just yet. As the writer Andrei Sinyavsky put it: ‘Stalin was inside everyone.’ Joshua Rubenstein’s extremely interesting account of the ailing Stalin’s last days draws upon personal memoirs and new research—and conveys the deep fear inculcated during ‘the Black Years of Soviet Jewry.’ In the weeks before Stalin was felled by a stroke, an alleged ‘Doctors’ plot’ to murder Kremlin leaders was uncovered. A majority of those arrested were Jews. Rubenstein vividly describes how paranoia reigned. Young mothers refused to give medicines to their children if prescribed by Jewish doctors. Medical journals accused doctors with Jewish names while Jewish psychiatrists were charged with perpetrating ‘the false and harmful theories’ of Freud and Bergson. Yet, when Stalin lay unconscious while nervous physicians applied leeches, one imprisoned doctor, pathologist Yakov Rapoport, was approached by his suddenly reverential interrogators for his opinion. When asked for the names of specialists, he named nine, but all had been arrested. In his last years, Stalin spent an increasing amount of time in the Caucasus and left his team to run the government. He was old and lonely, having executed, exiled and estranged his relatives; his inner circle became his family.



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While the Doctors’ Plot was the apogee of Stalin’s lurid campaign against Jews, it was probably also an instrument to eliminate his loyal, long-term associates, Molotov and Mikoyan. Was this, as the author surmises, also directed at Beria, long involved with the Soviet security services, for his lack of vigilance? Yet Kaganovich, the sole Jew in Stalin’s political entourage, was, remarkably, never accused of any misdemeanour. Within days of his death, things began to change. Molotov’s Jewish wife was brought back from exile and the doctors released from prison. One had died during interrogation. An 18-year-old Jewish student in Lvov had been sentenced to 10 years for muttering ‘let him rot’ during a memorial service. She, too, was freed, and the process of releasing the two-and-a-half million inhabitants of the Gulag initiated. (Review of Joshua Rubenstein’s The Last Days of Stalin in the Jewish Chronicle, 8 July 2016)

THE KENNEDYS What if JFK had lived? Would the Vietnam imbroglio have been shortlived? Would Bobby Kennedy have made a good president if he had not been cut down in 1968? Such counter-factuals, the ‘what ifs’ of history have no answer—they only elicit a mixture of regret and nostalgia. Jack Kennedy was seen as the great hope for liberal America and the idealistic young in 1960. Nahum Goldmann, a central figure in post-war Diaspora Jewry characterised him as ‘a man who believed in Israel, and would protect it against its enemies’. Kadish Luz eulogised Kennedy during a special meeting of the Knesset in the days after the assassination and said that he had ‘showed understanding of the spiritual motif of Zionism and the vision of Israel’s independence in its homeland’. Yet Kennedy and Ben-Gurion had conducted an acrimonious correspondence over Israel’s access to US nuclear weapons. The Kennedy administration was very suspicious that Israel’s development of nuclear energy was not directed towards purely peaceful purposes. Kennedy felt strongly about nuclear proliferation and did not wish the club of nuclear nations to expand. Egypt’s introduction of ballistic missiles in 1962 and

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the signing of a military protocol with Syria and Iraq to secure ‘the liberation of Palestine’ alarmed Ben-Gurion. But Kennedy told him that he had to make a concrete choice: either an independent nuclear deterrent without the United States or a US commitment to security without an independent nuclear deterrent.11 Ben-Gurion’s resignation and Kennedy’s assassination removed both from the political equation—leaving Eshkol and Johnson to sort out a more amenable arrangement. Even so, the mythology surrounding Camelot percolated into the Jewish psyche. Despite his deep disagreement with Ben-Gurion over nuclear weapons, Kennedy reversed the policy of refusing to sell conventional arms to Israel by the previous republican administration of President Eisenhower. In 1961 Kennedy permitted the sale of Hawk ground-to-air missiles to Israel. Kennedy was also the first American president to appoint an aide, Myer Feldman, to deal specifically with Jewish issues. However, it was the struggle of the Kennedy brothers in the domestic civil rights arena that galvanised an already sympathetic American Jewry. The identification of an overwhelming majority of American Jews to end the segregation of blacks in the South was deep and profound—it resonated with the experiences of their parents and grandparents. The day before his assassination, in a message to a Hillel rabbi, Kennedy acknowledged Jewish efforts on behalf of civil rights and racial integration. He also proposed legislation to abolish ‘national origins quotas’, which built discrimination into the issuing of immigration visas. The questions of discrimination and civil rights featured strongly in the many eulogies in Israel and the Diaspora. His career was as brilliant and promising as it was meteoric and shortlived. His advent seemed to usher in a new era flashing a ray of hope to a darkened world. He faced the desperate problems of our age with courage, with youthful vigour, with profound understanding and deep sympathy for the underprivileged, the disinherited and the oppressed.

So spoke the American Zionist leader, Emanuel Neumann, days after the assassination of President John Kennedy. For Jews of a certain age, that expression of hope and grief has never faded. Today is exactly 50 years since the killing—and we all know where we were on hearing that unimaginable news.



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Memorial services were held in synagogues in all parts of Britain. At St. Johns’ Wood Synagogue, the chief rabbi, Israel Brodie, spoke and El Ma’ale Rahamim was intoned. In Israel, the radio played solemn music and schools devoted special assemblies to the life of the president. Israel’s president, Zalman Shazar, and the Foreign Minister, Golda Meir, attended the funeral and the requiem mass at St Matthew’s Cathedral. A few hours after the assassination, a distraught Jack Ruby who would later kill the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had attended a Friday-evening memorial service at Temple Shearith Israel, in Dallas. Kennedy’s father, the US ambassador to wartime Britain, disliked Jews, sought to meet Hitler during the Battle of Britain and was regarded as an appeaser and defeatist. The sons were different. Kennedy’s brother Bobby visited Palestine during the war of 1948 and compared the struggle of the Israelis to that of the Irish in fighting for independence. JFK visited Israel in 1951 and pressed the Eisenhower administration to lift the US arms embargo following the Soviet-Egyptian arms agreement in 1955. When JFK decided to seek the presidency, he met 30 Jewish community leaders at Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel who grilled him. Kennedy stood his ground. He was a new type of candidate, intellectual and articulate. During the election campaign, he asked: ‘Are we going to admit to the world that a Jew can be elected mayor of Dublin, a Protestant can be chosen Foreign Minister of France, a Muslim can serve in the Israeli parliament—but a Catholic cannot be President of the United States?’ This statement communicated—and 82 per cent of American Jews voted for him. (‘JFK: A Breath of Fresh Air Stifled’, Jewish Chronicle, 22 November 2013)

Robert Kennedy, like his brother, had a way with words. He paraded a soaring rhetoric which inspired many. In an address to students in apartheid South Africa in 1966, Kennedy had told his audience: Each time a man stands up for an ideal or seeks to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

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His convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan, said that it was the injustice of Kennedy’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War that was a reason for his lethal act. The assassination took place on the first anniversary of the war in June 1968. Bobby Kennedy had visited the newly established State of Israel in June 1948 and reported for the Boston Post. He depicted the war between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs in almost fatalistic terms—a war without respite, a war without end. The die has long since been cast; the fight will take place. The Jews with their backs to the sea, fighting for their very homes, with 101 percent morale, will accept no compromise. On the other hand, the Arabs say: ‘We shall bring Moslem brigades from Pakistan, we shall lead a religious crusade for all loyal followers of Mohammed, we shall crush forever the invader. Whether it takes three months, three years, or 30, we will carry on the fight. Palestine will be Arab. We shall accept no compromise.’12

NIXON Richard Nixon, as the White House tapes indicate, did not care for Jews. Henry Kissinger was perhaps the exception. Nixon was vice president during the Eisenhower administration, which refused to intervene with the Kremlin during the period of the Doctors’ Plot and rejected requests to supply arms to Israel during the 1950s. The Eisenhower administration was scathing about the cover-up of the collusion at Sèvres between Britain, France and Israel during the Suez crisis in 1956. It led directly to Anthony Eden’s resignation in the UK. In 1957, Ben-Gurion, under American pressure, instructed Israel to withdraw from territory conquered the year before. As president, Richard Nixon was reluctant to help Soviet Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel because he felt that this would irreparably damage his policy of détente with the USSR. Moreover, three-quarters of American Jews remained steadfast supporters of the Democratic Party. In their eyes, Nixon could never live up to the hopes and aspirations which JFK had aroused. Yet it is clear that without Nixon’s resolve to supply Israel with arms during the height of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the conflict would have gone badly for the Israelis.

The cover of Mein Kampf in Arabic, which was issued to Egyptian officers during the Sinai Campaign, November 1956. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

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During the early afternoon of 6 October 1973 the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and overran the Israeli Bar-Lev line on the Eastern Bank. This assault on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, was designed to reverse Israel’s conquest of the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 Six-Day War. Six hundred Syrian tanks, outnumbering Israel’s 178, also advanced to reclaim the Golan Heights and to threaten a penetration of Israel’s heartland. The mehdal (blunder) indicated a profound intelligence failure and cost 2,691 Israeli lives. Forty years on, Asaf Siniver has gathered his colleagues to dissect this war in a series of essays. The October or Ramadan War—as it is known in Egypt—is celebrated as a holiday even though Arab losses were around 18,000. The Yom Kippur War—as it is known in Israel—is regarded more as an enforced stalemate, even though Israeli forces crossed back over the canal, encircled the Egyptian Third Army and were 60 miles from Cairo. The Syrians, too, were pushed back and the Israelis shelled the outer suburbs of Damascus. Soviet threats to involve the USSR directly in the conflict forced President Nixon to stop the Israelis in their tracks. The Egyptians established three bridgeheads across the canal and five divisions poured over into Sinai. The Egyptian plan was to secure a ten kilometre strip, where Egyptian troops were protected from Israeli air attacks by Soviet SAM missiles. This meant that the Egyptians were wary of advancing into Sinai beyond the range of the protective umbrella. The Syrians, too, halted a short distance from the Jordan, fearing Israel’s nuclear capability. Jordan’s King Hussein had participated in the 1967 war, losing half his kingdom. As Assaf David relates, this time he sent a token brigade to fight alongside the Syrians. However, Hussein had been warning both the Americans and the Israelis that an attack was imminent. Two weeks before the crossing of the canal he had clandestinely met Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, in Tel Aviv and warned her again. He even informed the head of Mossad about Syrian positions close to the Golan. Despite the demands of the heads of the oil companies, Exxon, Mobil and Texaco, to cancel US military aid to Israel, a Watergate-troubled Nixon continued it—in order to match Soviet deliveries to Egypt. As David Painter recalls, once the war had started to go in Israel’s favour, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, called upon the Arab states to stop oil exports to the US. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cut their oil production by 10 per cent and Nixon responded by advocating self-sufficiency in the US by the end of the 1970s.



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The political backlash in Israel in the aftermath of the war was profound, with resignations by the military and intelligence leadership as well as by senior politicians. It persuaded a new generation of Israelis to endorse Menahem Begin’s Likud in the December 1973 election. The Yom Kippur debacle marked the end of the old Israel, the emergence of Likud and Begin’s eventual electoral victory in 1977. (Review of The October 1973 War: Politics, Diplomacy, Legacy, Asaf Siniver (ed.) [London: C. Hurst & Co., 2013] in History Today, July 2014)

NOTES 1.  Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Schocken, 2008), pp. 90–91. 2.  David Cesarani, Disraeli: The Novel Politician (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 236. 3.  Ibid., p. 4. 4.  Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 332. 5.  Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 180. 6. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, pp. 349–53. 7.  Michael J. Cohen, ‘The Churchill-Gilbert Symbiosis: Myth and Reality, Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews’, Modern Judaism 28, no. 2, May 2008, pp. 204–28. See also Ha’aretz, 27 January 2017. 8. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 130–31. 9.  Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 312. 10.  Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Post-War Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 218–85. 11. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 129. 12.  Boston Post, 6 June 1948.

6 The Slow Disintegration of Labour Zionism

IMPERIALISM, ZIONISM AND ARAB NATIONALISM

The origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict lies in the fact that both Jew-

ish and Arab nationalism emerged during the same period of history. Zionism emerged out of European nationalism and was unique in that the Jews were separated from the land which they considered their historical homeland. The Jews were also latecomers to the idea of a nation-state. During the nineteenth century, European nationalism had moved from the Left to the Right, from being a progressive force in the wake of the French Revolution to the imposition of colonial rule in the heyday of imperialist adventure. The identification of Zionism with European colonialism commenced when the Middle East was essentially integrated into the British and French empires after 1920. During World War I, the British and the French were eager to defeat the Turks and to dissect the Ottoman Empire. Promises were made to both Zionist Jews and Arab nationalists. Their national aspirations would be realised by a grateful Britain in return for assistance in the war against the Turks. British interests were different from those of both Jews and Arabs. Promises could be interpreted differently after the war if the wording was suitably vague. At the height of the war, the British and the French concluded an agreement which served as the template for the division of the Middle East after 1918. 108



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The spiritual mentor of Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave a sermon in the Great Mosque in Mosul (in 2015). The advance of Daesh will not stop, he proclaimed, ‘until we hit the last nail into the coffin of Sykes-Picot.’ He was referring to the secret agreement, concluded 100 years ago this week by the Conservative MP, Sir Mark Sykes and his French opposite number, François Georges-Picot, to divide the Middle East after the First World War. It started the process whereby the Arab world would be sectioned into nation states and areas of colonial influence. In al-Baghdadi’s world-view, today’s borders are artificial—as Daesh has demonstrated by controlling large areas of Syria and Iraq. With Turkey’s entry into the war on Germany’s side in November 1914, British politicians immediately began to think about its inevitable defeat and the dismemberment of its vast empire. Sir Herbert Samuel, the first practising Jew to serve in a British cabinet, mooted to Lord Grey, the Foreign Secretary, the idea of a state being granted to the Jews. But he counselled caution, advising that this should be done gradually. He wanted to avoid confrontation with the Arab world. In January 1915, he submitted a memorandum to his cabinet colleagues arguing that ‘to attempt to realise the aspiration of a Jewish state one century too soon might well throw back its actual realisation for many centuries more.’ In parallel with Sir Herbert’s initiative, the British started an exchange of views with Sherif Hussein of Mecca, the founder of the Hashemite dynasty. Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, corresponded with Hussein and, as with the Zionists, promises were made, couched in ambiguous language. Both sides were strung along by the British in the hope of securing independent states, but the price to be paid was support for the British war effort. The aged Hussein, who believed that British diplomats were men of honour and integrity, eventually assembled a guerrilla force of 20,000 men from the desert and hill tribes. At the beginning of 1916, the conflict had run into a war of attrition on the Western Front with no victory in sight—and instead the distinct possibility of defeat loomed. The British began to look for a means of soliciting American support. The British Foreign Office was particularly worried about pro-German sentiments among US Jews. Many were immigrants from Eastern Europe who had experienced anti-Semitism. They hated the Tsar and hoped that the Germans would prove victorious on the battlefield. As Sir Mark Sykes, the leading British negotiator in the Middle East arena, commented

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in a telegram to the Foreign Office: ‘with Great Jewry against us, there is no positive chance in getting the thing through.’ In addition to promises to Jews and Arabs, the British began to prepare secret guidelines about their real intentions after the war—to divide the Middle East between themselves and the French. At the heart of the Sykes-Picot vision were two nominally independent Arab states or a confederation. The northern state would be within the French sphere of influence, the southern one under the British. Abutting them were two areas where Britain and France would exert direct control. The French zone consisted of the Syrian coast, Lebanon, the greater part of Galilee and northern Iraq. The British zone was designated as southern Iraq, the ports of Haifa and Acre, and access to the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris. A shrunken Palestine was to be placed under the protection of the international powers. The writer Leonard Stein later referred to it as ‘a wantonly mutilated Palestine.’ Russia was later awarded Armenia, the Turkish Straits and Istanbul. Italy similarly gained territory in Turkish Anatolia. This dissection of the Ottoman Empire by Sykes and Picot was never communicated to either the Zionists or the Hashemites. C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and a Zionist sympathiser, discovered the broad outline of the plan by sheer chance in conversation with a French journalist in April 1917. Chaim Weizmann confronted Sir Herbert, who refused to divulge any details because he had been a member of the cabinet at the time. The outline was finally revealed to Weizmann by Lord Robert Cecil, acting Foreign Secretary. An angry Harry Sacher, a leading British Zionist, wrote to Weizmann: ‘We have been lied to and deceived all along and I shall never forgive the gentry . . . who have done this.’ Hussein also began to get a whiff of the deception. Sykes met him and was convincingly vague about the details. He spoke about an Anglo-French presence that would solely support the new Arab states in their infancy. Hussein was appeased, but not satisfied. His son, Faisal, too, remained sceptical and suspicious. British officials in Jeddah had been kept in the dark about the SykesPicot agreement while it also negated promises that Lawrence of Arabia had made to the Arabs. The Zionists, while appalled at British conduct, could not afford to fall out publicly, but it did make them determined to secure a guarantee in writing—which came to pass in the form of the Balfour Declaration.



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Following the end of the war, British politicians and civil servants tried to row back from their commitments in the Declaration. Balfour’s successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, stressed the part of the document that stated that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ As history records, the Sykes-Picot agreement served as the template for the British and French Mandates in the Middle East in the 1920s. Contrary to expectations, it was Russia that collapsed while Turkey was saved by Ataturk. Within a few weeks of taking power, the Bolsheviks published the full text of the agreement in Pravda and Izvestia. British diplomats had to quickly find convincing explanations for their actions. In explaining the Balfour Declaration to Prince Faisal, Sykes wrote: ‘I know that the Arabs despise, condemn and hate the Jews, but passion is the ruin of princes and peoples . . . those who have persecuted or condemned the Jews could tell you the tale.’ He concluded that, contrary to the popular perception, the Jews were ‘universal, all powerful and cannot be put down.’ A perplexed Faisal responded that he never despised anyone because of their religion, but would welcome ‘any good understanding with the Jews.’ Sykes subsequently became a supporter of Zionism. Shortly before his early death at the age of 39, a victim of the flu pandemic, he wrote to early Zionist pioneer Nahum Sokolow: Your cause has about it an enduring quality which mocks at time. When all the temporal things the world now holds are as dead and forgotten as the curled and scented kings of Babylon who dragged your forefathers into captivity, there will still be Jews and so long as there are Jews, there must be Zionism.

Were these Sykes’ real feelings or merely the pragmatism of a Whitehall mandarin? Jack Straw and William Hague, two recent (British) foreign secretaries, have both said that, in hindsight, this was not Britain’s finest hour. Sir Mark Sykes served the British Crown in its hour of need during the First World War and British interests were always paramount. A century on, both Israel and the Arab world are living with its consequences. (‘One Hundred Years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement’, Jewish Chronicle, 19 May 2016)

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The seeds of conflict between the two national movements—Israeli and Palestinian—were sown in part by such British and French designs on the Middle East. Even so, it is unlikely that a struggle between the two sides could have been avoided. While socialism characterised the Jewish motivations, nationalism and Islamism defined the Palestinian Arab struggle. UN Resolution 181, which advocated a two-state solution in November 1947, was strongly resisted and resented by the Arab world. The labour movement, far and beyond any other Zionist movement, was responsible for the development of the Yishuv, the struggle for independence and navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of superpower ambitions. The Palestinian sense of nationhood became more accentuated with the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964 and the first hints that it was ready to accept a two-state solution came in the early 1970s. Yasser Arafat publicly declared his acceptance of the partition of historic Palestine in 1988, and this led in essence to the Oslo Accords in 1993. Yet even in 1993, there were many in both Israel and Palestine who would not accept partition and the notion of territorial compromise. In Israel, the Right looked back to 1967 when it first joined an Israeli government. Menahem Begin had done so to prevent the return of the West Bank—territory conquered during the Six-Day War. Even the name of the territory—the West Bank of the Jordan, according to the Left, Judea and Samaria to the Right—was a matter of ideological dispute. The Left wanted to hand it back in exchange for peace while the Right wanted to colonise it with settlements and effectively annex it. While the status quo and the need for territorial strategic depth favoured the Right, the Left proposed to give up the fruits of the victory of 1967, to initiate change with no hard security guarantees. It also exposed the ideological rifts within the ruling Labour elite. The Labour Alignment of 1969 was actually composed of four parties—each with its different world outlook and political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The conquest of the West Bank in 1967 thus evolved into a poisoned chalice for Labour and led to its demise as a leading political force in the twenty-first century. The profound differences within Labour were already present in the aftermath of the victory in the Six-Day War.



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LABOUR DISSENSION AFTER 1967 In June 1967, Israel’s territory expanded almost fourfold. Much of this territory was the Sinai Desert, but the crucial problem was the future of the West Bank—Judea and Samaria—which many in Israel regarded as a natural part of the state. The retention of the West Bank was justified religiously, historically, politically and strategically by many public figures in Israel. The signatures on the Land of Israel manifesto in 1969 included the Nobel Prize winner Shai Agnon; the Israel Prize winners Yehuda Burla and Haim Hazaz; the national poet Natan Alterman; Isser Harel, head of the Mossad; Yitzhak Zuckerman and Ziva Lubetkin, leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—and many generals, ambassadors and iconic figures from the Labour movement. This sea change after 1967 marked an ideological turning point whereby many who had formally been associated with the Left ostensibly crossed over to the Right. If in the past there had been a coalescence around figures such as David Ben-Gurion, the seminal figure in the 1970s was Menahem Begin. The Labour Party itself was in danger of disintegration. It had been formed in 1968 from three constituent parties of the social democratic Left—Mapai, Ahdut Ha’avodah and Rafi. In 1969, the Marxist Mapam joined to complete the Labour Alignment. Yet this was a pantomime horse with more than one head and facing in several different directions at the same point in time. The nub of contention was first and foremost the future of the West Bank. The options open to Israel were personified by three leading Labour politicians. Rafi’s Moshe Dayan wanted economic integration with Israel and the introduction of Israeli law into the West Bank. Ahdut Ha’avodah’s Yigal Allon, however, distanced himself from his mentor, Yitzhak Tabenkin, who believed in establishing socialism on the West Bank through new kibbutzim. Allon instead suggested a partition of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan. The Allon plan—albeit in different variations—became Labour Party policy in the 1970s. The idea of a sovereign Palestinian state was resisted for two decades. Mapai’s Abba Eban, the diplomats’ diplomat, was the archetypal Western liberal who raised the standard of the doves in the party in advocating territorial compromise.

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The ideological tensions in the party were deep and the rivalry between the two frontrunners, Allon and Dayan, to succeed Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, was intense. When Eshkol died suddenly in 1969, the party bigwigs brought back a member of the old guard, Golda Meir, to head the government rather than catalyse an internal war and cause splits. This amounted to a postponement of looking towards the succeeding generation for leadership. Golda Meir’s first task was thus to preserve party unity at all costs. It meant that no peace initiatives could be made for fear of antagonising one faction or the other. Both Allon and Dayan were military men who came from pioneering families. Yigal Allon was born in 1917—and like many children in that year was named Yigal (the Hebrew for ‘he will redeem’) because the British were about to invade Palestine from Egypt and drive out the Turks. In contrast to Dayan’s relatively privileged and intellectual upbringing, Allon came from an impoverished, motherless, non-ideological background. Allon’s grandfather, an adherent of Hovevei Zion, arrived in Palestine from Belarus in 1890. (Anita) Shapira tells well the story of the grinding poverty and bottomless frustration of the early Jewish settlers in the Lower Galilee [trying] to provide for their families. Allon’s father, Reuven Paicovich became a tenant farmer on the barren land of Um-J’abal in November 1908—and spent the rest of his life attempting to coax it into life. Paicovich was obstinate and determined—and he demonstrated this to both his family and his neighbours. When the neighbouring Bedouin Zbekh tribe blocked his way, his anger superseded his common sense—and he used his rifle. The Zbekhs respected his courage and believed him to be a member of the Ashuri tribe from northern Syria since no Jew in their experience could ever act in such a bold fashion. Allon’s childhood in the village of Mes’ha was both hard and dangerous—such was the frontier nature of the location. Indeed, Allon received a Browning semi-automatic firearm as a barmitzvah present from his father. The Arab revolt of 1936 drew him into military service, first as a sergeant in the Jewish Settlement Police and then as a field commander for the Haganah. It was in this milieu that he first met fellow commanders and future rivals such as Dayan, Yossi Harel and Shimon Avidan. His abilities quickly brought him to the attention of leading figures such as Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Sadeh and Israel Galili. All this allowed him to enter the circle of the Marxist Zionist theorist, Yitzhak Tabenkin and



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the leadership of his movement, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad—to which Ginossar affiliated at Allon’s behest. The sequence of rapid defeats in Europe and the real threat of a Nazi invasion of Palestine forced the British and the Zionists to work together militarily. This led to the formation of the Palmach, an elite military unit which confronted the Vichy French in Syria in raids, organized with the Australians. Allon’s military coolness led him to be appointed, together with Dayan, as one of the first company commanders of the Palmach. Indeed, by 1942 there was a real fear that Rommel’s advance would catalyse the evacuation of British forces and leave the Jews of Palestine to their fate. This, in turn, persuaded the Palmach to be absorbed by the HaKibbutz HaMeuhad movement so that settlements could be defended. By 1944, this movement, as Ahdut Ha’avodah, led by (Yitzhak) Tabenkin, split from the umbrella social democratic party, Mapai, essentially over the prospect of a post-war partition of Palestine. Shapira interestingly reports that when the Haganah established a coordinating body to conduct the ‘saison’ against Menahem Begin’s Irgun, Allon was second-in-command. Yet he and other members of the Palmach baulked when it was proposed to hand over Irgun fighters to the British with the result that Allon tendered his resignation. Yet Allon favoured an armed struggle against the British, but objected to being in alliance with both the Irgun and Lehi because it legitimized them in the minds of the public. The inevitable British crackdown in 1946 resulted in widespread raids and the burning of the Palmach archives. The British also discovered the Palmach’s membership card index, yet their intelligence officers failed to crack its encryption. In early 1947, Allon visited Auschwitz and Birkenau, chaperoned by a Mossad emissary, Zvi Netzer, in a general tour of illegal Palmach operations in Europe. Allon never openly mentioned his visit except for a reference to ‘this cursed continent’ in a letter to his wife. Yet it certainly informed his actions before and during the war of 1948. Already at this time Allon was becoming disillusioned by life in the Palmach, in part because of Ben-Gurion’s quiet manoeuvres to diminish Tabenkin’s influence both politically and militarily and to insert Mapainiks into pivotal positions. This seemed to have catalysed a deeper interest in politics and an advocacy to forge a leftwing opposition to Mapai through a coalition of Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hashomer Hatzair. Yet although these two groups, together with Left Poale Zion, merged to establish Mapam in early 1948, there were ideological differences between the two Marxist groupings. As Shapira recalls, Hashomer

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Hatzair believed in a bi-national state and expressed an unrequited love for the USSR—they had sent Stalin two red leather-bound copies of a Hebrew translation of his Problems of Leninism.1 Ahdut Ha’avodah shared this adulation for all things Soviet despite the persecution of Zionists and the transportation of Marxist Zionists to the Gulag.2 In a letter to his wife in March 1947, Allon wrote that ‘Class consciousness, loyalty to the workers’ party and the trade union war, eagerness for ties with the forces of tomorrow (the Soviet Union), political realism and pioneering—constructivism.’ Like many of his ideological generation, Allon reacted to the reactionaries and not to the issue. The United States was seen as Britain’s unquestioning ally and the fount of capitalist advance. Stalin’s Red Army, on the other hand, was admired for its military prowess during the struggle against Hitler. Indeed, Allon believed that the British would never leave Palestine or would do so temporarily only to be welcomed back following a Jewish military and political debacle. He claimed that the British had prepared camps in Greece to receive Jewish refugees from Palestine. Allon followed Tabenkin’s line in 1947 in support of an international trusteeship, opposition to partition and a belief that the building of a socialist society should be uppermost in the minds of Marxist Zionists—not the immediate establishment of a nation state as the be-all-and-end-all of Zionist ideology. Yet Shapira does not elucidate in depth Allon’s—and Ahdut Ha’avodah’s—approach to the Palestinian Arabs and how it fundamentally differed from the much more dovish and conciliatory Hashomer Hatzair. Significantly, Allon spoke of his vision of the future at Mapam’s founding meeting on 23 January 1948. He commented that ‘a very large Arab population’ would remain within the borders of the Jewish state and that there would be Jews living both in the Palestinian Arab state and in internationalized Jerusalem. There would have to be vigilance—a Haganah ‘out of uniform.’ Clearly, there was no hint here of a premeditated plan to expel Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. Shapira deftly relates the growing tension between Ben-Gurion and Allon during the war of 1948. While Allon would have had no qualms in carrying out Ben-Gurion’s orders to fire on the Altalena, he pointedly disobeyed him in dropping Latrun as an important target and concentrating on the Burma Road instead. Although Allon commanded the southern front, Ben-Gurion made several futile attempts to detach him from ‘Tabenkin’s private army’ as a first step towards dismantling the



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Palmach. Shapira comments on Ben-Gurion’s ideological and personal double-standards: ‘Things for which Ben-Gurion never forgave Allon— irresponsibility, lack of discipline, doing as he liked—skimmed over Dayan without touching a hair. Dayan was no less crafty than Allon and was far more ruthless in the pursuit of his aims.’ Shapira devotes several pages to the issue of Allon and the expulsion of the inhabitants of Ramleh and Lydda in July 1948. Allon regarded the presence of a hostile population remaining behind the lines of an advancing army as extremely dangerous. He therefore wished to expel some 50,000 inhabitants in the direction of the Arab Legion. Shapira seems to confirm Benny Morris’s view that Ben-Gurion desired this outcome, but was averse to stating it openly.3 She cites an interview with Yitzhak Rabin in October 1982, stating that Ben-Gurion did wave his hand and say ‘Remove them.’ She further quotes from Mula Cohen’s book,4 published in 2000, Allon’s comment that ‘Ben-Gurion, as head of state, could not give the order. I do what a commander has to do in the heat of battle.’ Allon rationalized this in terms of what the Arabs of Palestine would do to the Jews if the latter lost. Moreover, in locations where they were on the losing side such as in Tiberias and Haifa, the local Arabs preferred to leave en masse, encouraged by both their own leadership and the British, and to await the arrival of the Arab armies whom they hoped would carry them back to their homes on their bayonets. Allon explained his rationale in a lecture to HaKibbutz HaMeuhad on 17 June 1950—from which Shapira quotes extensively. On that occasion, Allon argued that the expulsion was the central factor in halting the advance of the Arab Legion and averting the threat to Tel Aviv. However, he did not define this as solely a military necessity, the reality of a brutal war, part of the ‘them or us’ syndrome, but as a means of securing a Jewish majority in Palestine: ‘I think that the process of Arab flight was a positive process. Furthermore, I think that our activity to empty large, militarily valuable areas of a hostile Arab population, this too was a justified case of no-choice, not only momentarily, in the heat of battle, but justified over time.’ Allon clearly would have liked to have pressed on into the West Bank up to the River Jordan as well as down to Gaza to secure a wider exodus of Arabs. Shapira does not explain if this was ideologically driven—after all, Ahdut Ha’avodah’s Moshe Carmel commanded the northern front where similar expulsions took place. This clearly created an ideological ruction with the Hashomer Hatzair half of Mapam which

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believed in Arab-Jewish workers’ cooperation in the building of socialism in Palestine. Mapam summoned Allon and the party’s commanders to an internal inquiry. Yet, as Shapira notes, there are no minutes of what was said and what was the outcome. Eventually, Ben-Gurion replaced Allon with the loyalist Dayan as head of Southern Command despite his reputation as one of the leading Israeli military figures of 1948—and still only 30 years of age. In addition, it seems that Allon also grew tired of being a party man and distanced himself from its heavy hand. (Review of Anita Shapira’s Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], in Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 1, January 2009, 149–60)

MOSHE DAYAN In contrast, Moshe Dayan was charismatic, courageous and innovative as well as conniving, ruthless and devious. He was a troubled, yet remarkable, man. He was noted for being the ultimate womaniser during Israel’s halcyon days. Admired by some for his sexual exploits, for others he was the betrayer of childhood friends, such as Dov Yirmiyahu, whose wife he had an affair with.5 He had a remarkable talent to convince multitudes. His use of language was unusual. Amos Oz wrote that ‘cemeteries are what give him the inspiration for his best speeches, and he rises almost to the level of a poet in his eulogies’.6 Like Sharon, Peres and many others he was a dedicated follower of Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and followed him into the political wilderness when he broke with Mapai in 1965. But Dayan refused to remain with Ben-Gurion when the opportunity arose to join a reunited Labour Party in 1968. As minister of defence in Golda Meir’s government, he believed that the initial reverses in the Yom Kippur War placed Israel’s very existence in peril. He famously told Hannah Zemer, the editor of Davar, that ‘the Third Temple’ was in great danger of being destroyed. There was even a hint of the use of nuclear weapons.7 Unable to achieve his goal of the premiership and held responsible for the military failures of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he gradually became



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estranged from mainstream Labour and drew closer to Menahem Begin. By 1977, as an independent, he sat in Begin’s first cabinet as foreign minister and clandestinely facilitated Sadat’s visit to Israel. Dayan was also viewed as the authentic, blunt Israeli—someone who did not mince his words. He projected himself as someone who cared little for the niceties of diplomacy and its exponents. During a eulogy in 1956 over the grave of Ro’i Rothberg, an admired commander of Kibbutz Nahal Oz near Gaza, Dayan articulated the dilemma that Israel faced, the growing realisation that peace would not, perhaps would never, break out, yet the deeply instilled hope that it would remained. In Dayan’s outlook, it was important not to be lulled into a false sense of security—always to be vigilant: The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders? Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.8

In a foreword to a book of poems by Natan Alterman many years later, Dayan wrote: ‘Man goes into battle because he, personally, does not want to surrender, to be defeated—he wants to fight not for the existence of his life but for the meaning of life. Death is merely the supreme expression of the courage of his struggle.’ Those of a certain age will remember photographs of the one-eyed general being placed in the windows in Jewish-owned shops in London during the Six-Day War. Dayan emerged as the hero of the hour. Six years later he left office as a figure of blame, responsible for the deaths of thousands in Ha’Mehdal (the Blunder) of the Yom Kippur War. As a consequence, Dayan lost an opportunity to succeed Golda Meir as Prime Minister. Both he and his great rival, Yigal Allon, were ulti-

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mately passed over in the appointment of Yitzhak Rabin. Banished to the margins of the Labour movement and at odds with the party’s leadership, Dayan was unexpectedly resurrected from his political grave by the ascendency of Menahem Begin in the elections of 1977. Begin’s tactics over the years had been to create an umbrella under which General Zionists who promoted private enterprise, redemptionist Zionists who wished to settle the West Bank, the far Right who wanted both Banks including Jordan and disaffected members of the labour movement such Arik Sharon could all shelter from the Left’s disfavour. Dayan was the latest member of this motley crew to join when he accepted Begin’s offer to become Foreign Minister. As history records, this undiplomatic diplomat then went on to forge the Begin-Sadat agreement which brought over 30 years of peace to Egypt and Israel. Dayan also wanted to solve the problem of the Palestinians and quickly found himself in dispute with Begin. Resignation and death shortly followed, but Dayan left a legacy which many other military men—in particular Sharon—attempted to imitate. A hero and a villain at one and the same time who was full of political contradictions. Dayan was famously, magnetically attracted to regiments of women. Dayan was the bull in the marital china shop. He did not care whom he offended—his long-suffering wife, his long-suffering mistress, the wife of an old Nahalal friend. As his daughter commented: ‘I knew of them all; the thin and the fat, the Frenchwoman and the student, the officer and the journalist.’ She did not condemn him, but ‘was merely shocked by the vulgarity of it all.’ (Review of Mordechai Bar-On’s, Moshe Dayan: Israel’s Controversial Hero, in Jewish Renaissance, January 2013)

ABBA EBAN Abba Eban was the very antithesis of the beloved public predator, Moshe Dayan. He was seen externally as prim and proper—and ‘un-Israeli’. He was regarded as Talleyrand’s heir by many statesmen and diplomats in the international community. But in Israel itself he was not admired, but instead was derided for his Jewish liberalism and quintessentially English intellectual approach to diplomacy. The Labour prime minister Levi Eshkol called him in Yiddish der klug na’ar—‘the wise fool’. His



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opponents in Menahem Begin’s Herut ridiculed him as ‘a proletarian in a Cadillac’. He was undoubtedly a most foreign foreign minister of Israel. In mitigation, his cousin, the British writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, described him as painfully shy with three people, but at ease with an audience of thousands. Someone who could exude warmth privately amidst an aura of aloofness publicly. It was therefore not unexpected that the strident Golda Meir did not like intellectuals such as Abba Eban—individuals who were not straighttalking, who refused on principle to answer her back. She was not impressed by Eban’s effortless witty perorations—he could be sarcastic in ten languages. He famously commented that Golda chose to use only two hundred words, although her vocabulary stretched to five hundred. In essence, Eban never conformed to the imagery of the early Zionists who dreamed of transforming the ghetto scholar into ‘the New Jew’—the intellectual who left Eastern Europe to become a proletarian in Palestine. Eban’s soaring rhetoric and incisive erudition during the period of the Six-Day War was later matched by his humiliation and marginalisation by better operators in the bear-pit of Israeli party politics between 1974 and 1988. While he opposed Dayan’s policies in the Labour Party during Golda Meir’s administration, his poor relationship with the incoming prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1974 meant that he was pushed into permanent exile from the Foreign Ministry, which he felt was his natural home. Rabin instead appointed his fellow member of Ahdut Ha’avodah Yigal Allon in his place. Yet Eban’s ascent from the high spires of academia to arguing the case for Israel in the international arena was never inevitable. He could easily have become a Labour MP in the House of Commons rather than a Labour Member of the Knesset (MK). During World War II, the polyphonic Eban was sent from Oxford to Cairo to become part of the Arab censorship department and subsequently to act as advisor on Jewish affairs to the minister of state in the Middle East. It was here that he met his future wife, Suzy, and almost by chance embarked on a political career. Captain Aubrey S. Eban, a Cambridge don at 24 when war broke out, appeared on the scene as another suitor, John Kendrew, the future Nobel Prize winner, was leaving it. The intellectual and middle-class Eban

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fitted in almost naturally into this milieu. In the memoir, Suzy Eban courageously publishes some of her late husband’s ‘love letters’ to her. Eban’s wooing technique was clearly predicated on the intellectual as well as the emotional—and even here his lofty use of language was a portent of the shape of things to come. Yet there is also his devotion to the Zionist cause and his prediction that this would not be any ordinary journey through life as a couple. Abba Eban often seemed aloof to even his admirers and elitist to his detractors. This book sheds some light on this projection. Eban never knew his natural father, who died of pancreatic cancer in South Africa when he was a baby. His mother returned to Britain and sent him away at three to a boarding school in Herne Bay on the English coast. Eban’s sister was separated from him and taken to Belfast by their mother. Eban remarked to his wife shortly after their marriage that he had been brought up “like an orphan.” His mother eventually married Dr. Isaac Eban, but the household never exuded an emotional warmth. (Review of Suzy Eban’s A Sense of Purpose: Recollections, in the Jerusalem Post, 12 August 2008) By 1945, Eban could have returned to academia or run as the Labour candidate for the hopeless constituency of Aldershot. Instead he accepted an offer from Moshe Shertok (Sharett), later Israel’s first Foreign Minister, to work for the Zionist cause. A few days after Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, he was appointed as ambassador to the UN, writing to the Home Office to give up his British citizenship. While his speeches were deeply admired by politicians and public alike in the US, he actually did not return to settle in Israel until July 1959, aged 44. The besuited bespoke Eban did not fit the imagery of the open-necked socialist Zionist pioneer, reclaiming the promised land by the sweat of his brow. Israelis deemed him to be incomprehensible in a plethora of languages, but significantly unable to master either Yiddish or Russian—the two languages that mattered in 1950s Israel. As he commented: ‘people here still think of an academic as nothing more than a fine decoration or a luxury toy.’ . . . Eban was never the clubbable, backslapping politician. He shrank in horror at such a spectacle—and thereby never established a solid base in Israeli Labour circles. Moreover after 1967, Israel had unexpectedly expanded near fourfold and many Israelis did not wish to return conquered territory. Eban’s liberalism did not match the times. In February 1968, he commented that the stark solution was ‘peace



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without part of the territories or all of the territories without peace.’ While Sinaver depicts him as never ‘an over-zealous peacenik,’ compared to Golda, Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, he was a dangerous, otherworldly radical. His demeanour also put him at odds with Yitzhak Rabin, war-hero and ambassador to Washington whom Eban described as ‘the repelling pole of a magnet.’ Their relationship became so bad that Eban unsuccessfully moved to dismiss him in November 1971. When his nemesis became prime minister in 1974, Rabin refused to appoint Eban to even the nominal post of deputy prime minister. His attempts at a come-back were eclipsed by the election of Menahem Begin’s Likud in 1977 and the petty indifference of lesser politicians to Eban’s considerable talents in the world arena. (Review of Asaf Sinaver’s Abba Eban: A Biography, in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 2016) Yitzhak Rabin’s appointment of his old commander in the Palmach, Yigal Allon, as foreign minister and his rival, Shimon Peres, as defence minister in 1974 reflected the final victory of the Rafi and Ahdut Ha’avodah factions in the Labour Party over its Mapai component. It manifested itself in Eban’s political exclusion. By 1988, Peres had facilitated Eban’s “crude ouster” from Labour’s Knesset list. The Jerusalem Post at the time vehemently condemned this move. It commented: ‘But Abba Eban is not a moshav secretary, nor a hawk, nor a Sephardi. He is merely the most renowned Israeli alive. So for Peres he was expendable.’ Teddy Kollek spoke of ‘a historical mistake,’ while Haim Guri wrote of “the public’s abandonment” of Eban. Following the viciousness of his humiliation, Eban resigned from the party and involved himself in academic and literary pursuits. (Review of Suzy Eban’s A Sense of Purpose: Recollections, in the Jerusalem Post, 12 August 2008)

NOTES 1.  Jewish Herald, 23 May 1947. 2.  A. Rafaeli (Tsensiper), B’Ma’avak L’Geulah (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1956), pp. 139–41; B. West, Struggles of a Generation: The Jews under Soviet Rule (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1959), p. 96; N. Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, vol. 1 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 117–18.

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3.  Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 290. 4. S. (Mula) Cohen, La-Tet u-le-Kabel: Pirkei Zikhronot Ishiim (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 2000). 5.  Ha’aretz, 8 February 2016. 6.  Amos Oz, Be-Or Ha-Tekhelet Ha-Aza (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1979), p. 82 quoted in Ha’aretz, 12 October 2006. 7.  Avner Cohen, interview with Arnan ‘Sini’ Azaryahu (2008), Wilson Center Digital Archive. 8.  Mordechai Bar-On, Moshe Dayan: Israel’s Controversial Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 247.

7 The Ascendency of the Right

THE PERSONA OF MENAHEM BEGIN

Menahem Begin was the first Likud prime minister of Israel. His election

in 1977 was termed ‘an earthquake’—for up until then, government had been the fiefdom of Labour Zionism. It was his ninth attempt to secure power for the Israeli Right—a commentary on Israeli political culture as well as Begin’s tenacity. Yet he had been an astute analyst of Israeli politics. In January 1949 he expected his Herut movement to win forty seats and thereby to pose an alternative to Ben-Gurion’s Mapai. Instead, Herut polled very poorly at fourteen seats and emerged as only the fourth-largest party. Yet through coalitions with other parties during the next three decades, Begin ensured that the Right coalesced as the Left fragmented. Begin’s career stretched from interwar Poland to Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In essence, it was a microcosm of twentiethcentury Jewish history. His odyssey encompassed the eras of both Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion. Begin inspired great loyalty as well as great antagonism. Yet his life was beset by both elation and depression, a soaring rhetoric in office and a withdrawal from public activities at the end of his life. According to a recent biographer, Menahem Begin’s highs and lows were due to a probable bi-polar disorder.1 Begin was shy with women and often distanced himself from relationships with individuals. He believed that the nation came before the individual, but that individual freedom was paramount. He was famously 125

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keen on ceremony and well known for disengaging from practical solutions to problems. Begin psychologically needed an audience to exist, which explained his theatrical manner and the drama of his political proclamations. He was driven by a compulsion to act—isolation was disastrous for him. Although he was profoundly interested in ideas, Begin cared little for intellectuals, as Jabotinsky’s adherents discovered in Herut in the early 1950s. They left the movement in droves. He identified the intelligentsia with the Left and with an ideological softness. As intellectuals, they asked questions and analyzed opinions and situations. They could therefore answer back—they could respond in kind—an ability that Begin did not care for. Different internal challengers—Hillel Kook, Shmuel Tamir, Ehud Olmert, Ezer Weizmann, and many others all wished to steal the crown, but were themselves either marginalized or expelled. Although the Likud did eventually develop the accoutrements of democratic behaviour, Herut was originally a one-man show based on the leader principle. The acceptance of this by his unquestioning followers from the Irgun days until his premiership in the late 1970s was the basis of his power. When occasionally challenged, he brought out emotional blackmail and rhetorical pathos as effective weapons in his political arsenal. He fought an unheard-of nine elections before becoming prime minister in 1977—probably a record for political longevity in opposition in the democratic world. Begin was ruthless in pursuing his policy of amalgamating with other parties but with Herut at the core and himself at the helm. He was willing to ditch Amihai Paglin, his chief of operations in the Irgun, and Yohanan Bader, his longtime comrade from Poland, to create the space for new allies. He also had his fair share of political luck, from his lack of association with Ahimeir’s pro-Italian sympathies in the 1930s to his decision to resign from Golda Meir’s government in 1970, thus avoiding a share in collective responsibility for the reversals and losses during the Yom Kippur War. Indeed, at the beginning of 1967 [the Herut-Liberals bloc] Gahal was in imminent danger of disintegration, following the disastrous 1965 election. A few months later, the crisis in the run-up to the Six-Day War suddenly ensured that Gahal was in Eshkol’s coalition government.2 Begin was very interested in the flow of modern history and the attempts of the Jews to swim in its current. He regarded the historical continuum as stretching from the Tanakh to ‘The Jewish State.’ For Begin, Avraham avinu (the biblical patriarch Abraham) was as real as



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Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.3 Shilon also explains Begin’s willingness to give up Sinai—since he regarded it as not being part of the Land of Israel—as opposed to his determination to hold on to the West Bank, which, as Judea and Samaria, was indeed part and parcel of the historic Land. On the one hand, this differentiation allowed him to pose as being flexible in making territorial concessions and to create the illusion of giving up the West Bank as well at some point in the future. On the other, it caused concern among the far Right and the hard core within Herut that he was becoming ideologically soft in his old age by giving up territory—and that the West Bank would be next. In fact neither perspective was true, but it allowed the astute Begin to play one off against the other. (Review of Avi Shilon’s Menachem Begin: A Life, in the Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture)

BEGIN IN POLAND According to his biographer, Menahem Begin’s father, Ze’ev-Dov, was a Zionist who had studied at the yeshiva of the anti-Zionist Haim Soloveichik in Brest-Litovsk. Moreover, he was the head of the local branch of the Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair. The family was originally well-off but suffered during the economic crisis of 1924—yet unlike many other Polish Jews they did not decide to emigrate to Palestine, and were therefore not part of the Fourth Aliyah. All three Begin children joined the nationalist youth group, Betar, in 1929 after the Hashomer group in Brest-Litovsk fell apart because of internal disagreements amidst a broader turn to the Left. The killings in Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem in 1929, the awakening to the murderous nature of Stalinism in the USSR, and the general hostility of Polish nationalism under Piłsudski all played a catalytic role. Yet Polish nationalism undoubtedly formed a crucial part in Begin’s political evolution. In White Nights, he quotes from Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, in particular Almanzor’s revenge against the Spanish occupiers. The Canadian academic Daniel Heller has written about the identification of such Jewish youth with Polish nationalism—perhaps to a degree that was not understood previously. After all, Menahem Begin proclaimed that

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he was willing to sacrifice himself for the glory of Poland. Some believed in ‘two fatherlands’—the Land of Israel and Poland. Heller’s research, based on archival records of provincial Poland, offers a counterbalance to Begin’s often repeated comments, later in Israel, about the humiliation, harassment and undiluted anti-Semitism of 1930s Poland. For example, Heller located a police report of a Zionist rally in Kobryn in northeastern Poland in October 1933. The policeman was moved by the Polish patriotism and the desire to defend Poland’s borders by the rhetoric of nineteenyear-old Menahem Begin.4 Begin also admired and was influenced by Garibaldi and the Risorgimento. Begin delighted in the spectacle of military ritual and discipline within Betar. He quickly imbibed Jabotinsky’s teachings during the 1930s. He also strongly set his face against the Labour Zionist movement. In a pamphlet, published in 1934, Begin spoke out against the class war and wrote about the ‘red poison’ of the socialists. The Maximalists of the Revisionist movement preferred the doctrine of military Zionism—the armed struggle rather than the possibility of negotiations with perfidious Albion. Betar, they argued, should be the conduit for the Irgun and its members, participants in a national liberation movement. Indeed Begin signed an early Maximalist attack on Jabotinsky’s policies in 1933. Moreover, Begin strongly opposed the diplomatic endeavours of the official Revisionists. Begin rarely referred to himself as a Revisionist, but only as an adherent of ‘the Jabotinsky movement’. For all this, he idolized and idealized Jabotinsky—for his inspiration, his leadership, and his analysis of the Jewish condition in interwar Europe. Nevertheless, there were significant differences between them which were papered over after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940. Following the Irgun’s retaliation against Arab targets (on ‘Black Sunday’) in November 1937, Begin and others in Poland published the manifesto of the ‘Activist-Revisionist Front’, an unequivocal attack on Jabotinsky’s policies. Yet Jabotinsky was not disavowed, but selectively endorsed. His inspiration rather than his policies was embraced. In September 1938, the famous confrontation between Begin and Jabotinsky took place at a Betar conference in Warsaw. Begin proposed an amendment to the Betar oath, which Jabotinsky had formulated in 1934. Instead of ‘I will train to fight in the defense of my people, and

Vladimir Jabotinsky (centre) in the company of members of the Grynberg family, BrestLitovsk, Poland, probably 26 November 1930. A bespectacled, youthful Menahem Begin is just to Jabotinsky’s left. Begin’s father, Ze’ev Dov, hands in pockets, with a bow tie and white shirt, is the first person standing from the left. Begin’s brother, Herzl, kneeling, is in the front row (first person from the left). Both father and brother perished in the Shoah. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

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I will only use my strength for defense’—Begin proposed: ‘I will train to fight in the defense of my people and to conquer the homeland.’ This change displaced the interpretation from a primarily defensive understanding to one which entertained the idea of offensive action. Although this effectively reversed Jabotinsky’s understanding of the Iron Wall, Begin’s speech was greeted by tumultuous applause. Jabotinsky, however, was considerably irritated; he had interrupted Begin several times during his speech. He said that ‘there is no place in Betar for this kind of nonsense’ and compared Begin’s speech and its reception to the sound of a squeaking door. The Betar leadership still voted for the change and thereby moved away from the Revisionists toward the Irgun, from diplomacy to armed struggle, from belief in England to fighting her. As prime minister of Israel in 1980, Begin denied that he was ever in any serious dispute with Jabotinsky and that there had been a misunderstanding. (‘Ze’ev Jabotinsky versus Menahem Begin’, Jerusalem Post 2 April 2006)

THE IRGUN AND AFTER In his last years, Jabotinsky’s authority waned dramatically amongst his supporters who were a generation younger. Although he headed the New Zionist Organisation, the Irgun and Betar, in spite of all his political acumen, he found it impossible to straddle them because they projected such different political philosophies and a different view of the Jewish future. All could justify their policies by selecting from the wide range of Jabotinsky’s writings. The ambiguity often inherent in his approach was beginning to lose its practicality. Jabotinsky discovered by chance that many members of the Irgun were being trained by the Polish military—a scheme established by Avraham Stern without his knowledge. The members of Betar, discriminated against even more so in post-Piłsudski Poland, felt a greater affinity with the Irgun than with the New Zionist Organisation. Jabotinsky’s declining influence was reflected when Begin was appointed head of Betar in Poland in 1939 to replace the more moderate Aharon Propes. Jabotinsky was labelled as ‘Hindenberg’ by Stern and his followers—truly yesterday’s man.



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Israel Eldad, one of the great figures of the Zionist Right, knew Begin well and recalled: ‘Jabotinsky often closed his eyes to see more clearly and remained tight-lipped to think more deeply. His pupil, not so. The teacher exuded an inner beauty compared to his charge. But the reality of the situation (the rise of Nazism) overwhelmed both of them—and it was here where they were forced to act.’ The outbreak of war saw Jabotinsky and Raziel strongly supporting the British war effort. Stern, however, still viewed the British as the main enemy. In 1940, he saw the Nazis as persecutors and not exterminators. This precipitated a split—the Irgun, led by Raziel, which collaborated with the British—and Lehi (the Stern Gang) led by Stern, which tried to kill them. Begin believed that Britain’s weak position in 1940 should be exploited. In a letter to a friend in Palestine, he wrote that ‘Zionist support for Great Britain was unrealistic. . . . This war is not our war.’ Yet unlike the pro-fascist Stern, he did not regard ‘the enemy of my enemy as automatically my friend.’ The death of Jabotinsky in New York in August 1940 was a grievous blow to Begin, despite their political differences. Having fled before Hitler’s armies, Begin was arrested by the Soviet NKVD and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, vividly depicted in his book, White Nights. Rescued by Stalin’s agreement to allow Poles to join General Anders’ army and leave the USSR, Begin reached Palestine in early 1942, to be reunited with his wife. Almost 18 months later, he was made Irgun commander and soon proclaimed the revolt against the British. Begin was not captured by the British or by the Haganah. He left military decisions to his commanders but inspired his fighters with militant rhetoric. The Irgun were courageous and determined in their struggle and several went to the gallows. In response to the flogging of the teenager, Benjamin Kimhi, the Irgun seized a British major from a Netanya hotel and administered 18 lashes. Begin believed that captured Irgun fighters should be considered as prisoners of war. The British military leadership, commanding 100,000 troops, regarded them as terrorists. The breakout from Acre prison in May 1947 resulted in the hanging of three members of the Irgun, Nakar, Weiss and Haviv. Within hours, the Irgun hanged two British sergeants. A spate of attacks against Jewish premises took place in several British cities. In Tel Aviv British troops ran amok.

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Yet unlike the Haganah, the Irgun could not reach its level of military discipline and efficiency. There were botched operations, which became the stuff of debate down the decades, and were often followed by Begin’s tortuous explanations afterwards. Ben-Gurion always saw Begin as a pivotal political figure and an ideological threat. The Irgun, on the other hand was viewed as a military sideshow whose exploits could be utilised as an instrument of political pressure on the British. Ben-Gurion’s military preparations were not directed at the British, but at the Arab armies which would confront Israel on independence. Following the declaration of the state in May 1948, Begin turned the Irgun into a political movement, Herut. Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party, however, still existed, and together they contested the first Israeli election in January 1949. Begin, claiming that it was the Irgun which had ousted the British from Palestine, won 14 seats and the Revisionists sank without trace. His proclaimed mentor, Jabotinsky, and potential rivals, Raziel and Stern, were long dead and Begin emerged as the undisputed leader of the nationalist camp, a believer in the democratic system, but also a strong centraliser. Many of Jabotinsky’s comrades and the right-wing intelligentsia began to drift away. Unlike Jabotinsky, Begin was an astute political operator, outmanoeuvring his rivals within Herut. In 1948 all the Zionist parties accepted partition including the predecessors of today’s religious Zionist settlers on the West Bank. Begin refused to compromise. Thirty years later he still believed that the East Bank—the state of Jordan—also belonged to Israel. He was perhaps the only Israeli prime minister who refused to meet King Hussein clandestinely. But he allowed Herut to join the Histadrut, something to which Jabotinsky was adamantly opposed. Over the years Begin cultivated the General Zionists, the religious Zionists, the Mizrahim and an excluded underclass. In 1973, Herut, the General Zionists and defectors from the Labour movement, such as Ariel Sharon, established Likud. The debacle of the Yom Kippur War brought a new generation into Begin’s camp, a generation that knew little about Begin’s background and viewed him as a founding father of the state. Labour politicians, such Moshe Dayan, drew close to Begin. As Labour disintegrated through indolence and corruption, Begin picked up the pieces and expanded his coalition of the disaffected. At his ninth



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attempt as party leader and at the age of 64, Begin saw his Likud party elected in 1977 and become the central party of government. Begin’s greatest accomplishment was seen as the Camp David agreement with Anwar Sadat’s Egypt. Sinai in Begin’s eyes was never part of the historic land of Israel—it could be traded for peace with Israel’s strongest Arab neighbour. On the other hand, the West Bank—Judea and Samaria—with towns such as Hebron and Jericho which resonated with history, could never be given up. Although Begin often spoke in quasi-religious language, the land of Israel for him never extended beyond the borders of the British Mandate. Yet the Camp David agreement fragmented this grand coalition that he had constructed. Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizmann left disillusioned because of the Palestinian question, while the far Right departed because Begin had returned territory to the Arab foe. The divisive war in Lebanon and the death of his wife in 1982 contributed to his descent into the depths of depression and eventual decision to step down. (‘Menahem Begin: One Hundred Years of Rectitude’, Jewish Chronicle, 18 August 2013)

ABBA AHIMEIR AND THE ATTRACTION OF FASCISM Both Menahem Begin and his eventual successor as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, were influenced in the 1930s by the writings of Abba Ahimeir—who, like Jabotinsky, equally merited the title of ‘Father of the Revolt’. If Jabotinsky had provided the inspiration, Ahimeir provided the intellectual scaffolding. It was the shadow of the October Revolution which loomed large. His experiences in Russia contrasted sharply with the romantic imagery of the Labour elite in Palestine. It facilitated his movement from the pioneering Hapoel Hatzair to Jabotinsky’s Revisionists in 1928. An admirer of Oswald Spengler’s views, he put forward his own thesis of ‘revolutionary Zionism’ as a means of keeping at bay the inevitable civilising cultural influence which he believed would spell the decline of the Zionist experiment.5 It took him towards an appreciation of Mussolini and Italian fascism. His political philosophy influenced a coterie of youthful followers—some of whom became major figures in the Israeli right decades later. His doctrine of ‘revolutionary Zionism’ would

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inspire a belief in ‘military Zionism’ which was not solely anchored in the Right, but in the broader understanding of revolutionary endeavour. Ahimeir admired the national dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in inter-war Europe. With Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yehoshua Hirsh Yeivin, he led the Maximalist wing of the Revisionist movement and was a clear rival for Betar’s political affections. He established Berit Ha-Biryonim, which staged demonstrations, and Hazit Ha’am as the periodical of the Maximalists. Abba Ahimeir taught at the school for the Betar madrikhim (leaders). In part, this was deliberately established to define the evolving identity of Betar. Was it a pioneering youth movement similar to those in other Zionist parties? Or was it an embryonic military organisation? The school followed an increasingly radical line. Military training was seen not as preparation for a new Jewish Legion, as Jabotinsky had envisaged, but as the means of establishing the military wing of a national liberation movement. The preference of the school’s cadets for direct action provided the nucleus for the maximalist tendency in the Revisionist movement. Ahimeir truly believed that ‘whoever has the youth—has the state’ and thereby directed all his intellectual and organisational energies towards influencing the youth. Ahimeir joined the Revisionists from the labour movement in 1928. His revolutionary zeal was an implant from the Left. He spoke about preparing and training for ‘our own 1917’ and facilitating an ‘October Revolution’ in Zionism. He was highly influenced by the writings of Osvald Spengler and by the work of Robert Michels, a German sociologist and socialist who had followed Mussolini into fascism. Abba Ahimeir’s nom de plume in Revisionist publications was often Abba Sikra, whom the Babylonian Talmud refers to as the head of the zealots, the biryoni. Assassination of public figures could therefore be justified for national reasons. Throughout 1932 Jabotinsky attempted in several articles to apply ‘corrections’ to the growing exuberance of the Maximalists and their adherents in Betar in the Diaspora (‘when to press the accelerator, when to use the brake’). The electoral breakthrough of Hitler in July 1932 convinced Jabotinsky that it was important that his movement should not be contaminated by acts and accusations of extremism. The maximalists initially viewed the wave of idealism that swept through German youth with a certain sense of vindication. Germany, they reasoned, now



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had a direction and a determined leadership. It was a return to the era of Bismarck and Prussian values. The pernicious influence of the Marxists had been halted. In the eyes of the Maximalists, Nazi anti-Semitism was deemed unreal, and thereby assumed a secondary importance. Jabotinsky’s fury, however, knew no limits. He angrily complained that such articles about Hitler were ‘a stab in the back for me personally and for all of us.’ He ridiculed those who found elements of ‘a national liberation’ movement in Nazism. Events in Germany quickly educated Ahimeir and his supporters, yet Maximalism was not extinguished; instead it became increasingly influential and dominant within Betar. While pro-fascist inclinations declined, this did not alter the general approach of the Maximalists. In Poland in the early 1930s many members of Betar supported the Maximalists, including the local commander in Brest-Litovsk, Menahem Begin. In a Legend in His Lifetime, Begin praised Ahimeir as ‘a brilliant journalist’ whose articles came from within the genre of ‘spiritual literature that incites the blood.’ Begin significantly wrote this article in August 1935, on the eve of the founding conference of the New Zionist Organisation. It was an implicit criticism that Revisionism had not evolved into a body embracing direct action—and ultimately the armed struggle. (‘Ze’ev Jabotinsky vs. Menachem Begin’, Jerusalem Post, 2 April 2006)

THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER STRUGGLES One significant difference between Jabotinsky and his youthful acolytes such as Begin and Shamir was an appreciation of the struggle of the IRA against the British. Jabotinsky may well have published incendiary articles and made passionate speeches to energise Polish Jewish youth and attract them to his movement, but did he really substitute ‘military Zionism’ for negotiations with England? He significantly never wrote adulatory articles about Irish republicanism as did his supporters. In October 1930, Abba Ahimeir, one of the originators of the Zionist far Right wrote that ‘One of the greatest sins of Zionism is its faith in the kindness of nations. Zionism has forgotten Sinn Fein’s principle, the

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principle of ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ the principle that the nationalist Irish have placed first and foremost in their movement.’ Lehi’s Avraham Stern later translated part of P. S. O’Hegarty’s book The Victory of Sinn Fein into Hebrew. Both Stern and Menahem Begin proclaimed their revolts against British rule in Palestine when the British were still fighting the Nazis— albeit at different stages of the conflict. Yitzhak Shamir studied Irish Republican literature during his time in the underground and adopted the name ‘Michael’ as his nom de guerre after Michael Collins. As head of operations for Lehi, Shamir based himself on Collins among others. Yet the mentor of Begin’s generation, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, throughout his life virtually ignored the fight of the Irish republicans because he clearly believed that the path of armed struggle on the Irish model would not succeed in Palestine. Jabotinsky was totally dismissive about the Easter Rising. In 1916, he was, of course, cultivating the British in the hope of establishing the Jewish Legion—and even a fleeting sympathy with Irish nationalism would have been counterproductive. In an article in the Russian press in mid-May 1916, he commented that ‘the worst thing is not that these people [the rebels] perished, but that they perished for an unjust cause and the country which loved many of them was obliged in both conscience and honour to reject them and abandon them to their destruction.’ Jabotinsky further commented that although Ireland’s past was terrible, a revolution could not be undertaken simply to avenge the past. In further articles, he argued that life was actually becoming better under British rule and Irish demands could have been attained through non-violent means. He suggested that a Home Rule compromise was the best solution with autonomous status for the six Protestant provinces of Ulster. It was only in 1938 that Jabotinsky acknowledged Irish Republicanism when he met Éamon de Valera—but as the head of the Irish state rather than as an IRA revolutionary. The Irish had opposed the proposed partition of Palestine because of their own experience. (‘Jabotinsky and the Troubles’, Jerusalem Post, 20 April 2006)

While Begin’s Irgun still proclaimed Jabotinsky to be their mentor, Shamir’s Lehi was post-Jabotinsky and certainly more aligned with Ahimeir’s doctrine of revolutionary Zionism, accompanied by political assassinations. Whereas Begin proclaimed the Irgun to be an under-



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ground army, Lehi was keen on ‘individual liquidation’ as practiced by the Narodnaya Volya. Shamir was originally a member of the Irgun and would have returned to Poland in 1939 to be trained by the Polish military in one of the Irgun’s camps, had war not broken out. Yet he decided to side with Avraham Stern rather than David Raziel over the issue of working with the British to oppose the Nazis. Shamir, however, was profoundly different in outlook from Avraham Stern. Stern’s poetry, influenced by the Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, exhibited an all-pervading sense of messianism. Moreover, Stern may well have seen himself in the role of meshiah ben yosef (messiah the son of Joseph), a catalytic messianic figure, destined to fall in battle so that another messianic figure, meshiah ben david (messiah the son of David), would finally emerge, wage a successful struggle against the enemies of the Jews, and usher in a golden era of world peace. In 1940 Stern believed that the central enemy of the Jews was still the British Crown—albeit before the full extent of the Shoah became known. Stern evaded the complexity of the situation and instead approached both the Italians and the Germans for assistance. During this time, Shamir remained a loyal member of the Stern group. With Stern’s killing by the British CID in 1942, the triumvirate of Natan Yellin-Mor, Yitzhak Shamir and Israel Eldad took over the leadership. They trod a different, more pragmatic pathway while promoting the dead Stern to promethean proportions. During this period, the official Revisionists condemned both the Irgun and Lehi. On becoming commander of the Irgun, Begin dreamed of repairing the damage caused by the split in the organisation in 1940. He attempted to reunite the two groups in 1944 without success. Lehi did not wish to worship at Jabotinsky’s altar and preferred an independent existence. The leadership of Lehi never warmed to Begin’s mode of leadership. Natan Yellin-Mor commented: ‘Begin imagines himself standing on a high hill, carrying his utterances to those at its foot, whose eyes are uplifted to him. If they gaze at him with enthusiasm and admiration, he gives the one who so gazes a fatherly caress’.6 Shamir was similarly disdainful of Begin’s theatrical pretensions. Yet Yellin-Mor, Shamir and Eldad—Begin’s compatriots in Poland—could not ignore the fact that he had succeeded where Jabotinsky had failed.

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He had brought the Right to power through a combination of keen insight, ambition and a good measure of luck. By the 1980s, Shamir found himself in a leadership position in the Likud and eventually became Begin’s successor. It is one of history’s ironies that the commander of the Irgun was followed by the head of operations for Lehi as prime minister in 1983. Yitzhak Shamir was the accidental prime minister. When Menahem Begin resigned in 1983, the mantle of responsibility fell on Shamir’s shoulders. The colourless, uninspiring, 68-year-old was the stop-gap choice instead of the feared Ariel Sharon and the lightweight David Levy. Yet, including the two years when he almost shared power with Shimon Peres in the Labour-Likud rotational government, Shamir was at the helm for nine years—a period exceeded only by David Ben-Gurion. Shamir was lucky in politics. He entered its arena late in 1970 and was elected for the Likud in 1973, becoming Knesset speaker in 1977. When Moshe Dayan resigned as foreign minister, Begin could not persuade other notables to take the post and wanted to stave off claims from the Liberals. Shamir was deemed a safe pair of hands and led his ministry for three undistinguished years before unexpectedly becoming prime minister. The smooth path to power was also due to Shamir’s stewardship of Lehi, pejoratively dubbed ‘the Stern Gang,’ in the struggle against the British authorities in the 1940s. The commander of the Irgun, Begin had therefore passed the baton of political power to the head of military operations of Lehi. Yet Shamir was not an admirer of Begin. He found Begin’s speeches ‘filled with pathos and overstatement’ and complained of his need for popularity, his acceptance of ‘fawning and flattery.’ This rivalry was anchored in Avraham Stern’s breakaway from the Irgun in 1940. The Irgun had decided to collaborate with the British military in the struggle against the Nazi enemy. In a period before the implementation of the Final Solution, the British, for Stern, remained the real enemy— he saw the Nazis as persecutors but not exterminators. On the basis of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ Stern approached the German Legation in Beirut—which dismissed his proposals out of hand. It was at this time that Shamir aligned himself with Stern. Shamir had arrived in Palestine in 1935. His parents had been members of the Jewish socialist Bund, but Shamir had been captivated by the



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rhetoric of the Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had urged his followers ‘to learn to shoot.’ He had meant it in an educational sense, as a means of raising the self-esteem of downtrodden young Jews. Begin, Shamir and their generation took it at its face value—and pursued a far more radical approach than their mentor. While Begin saw the Irgun as an underground army, Lehi indulged itself in political assassinations. Although Lehi was far smaller than either the Haganah or the Irgun, it carried out 71 per cent of all assassinations between 1940 and 1948. Nearly half were of Jews who worked for British intelligence. Ben-Gurion refused to allow Lehi veterans to enter the Mossad until the mid-1950s. Until that time, Shamir worked in a factory in Kfar Saba. Shamir’s expertise came from studying revolutionary tracts while in the Lehi underground. He studied Trotsky and in particular Irish Republican literature, detailing the struggle with the British. He appreciated the military campaigns of Mao Zedong in China and later the Viet Cong in driving first the French, then the Americans, from Vietnam. He owed more to the revolutionary tradition of the Russian populists than to Jabotinsky’s teachings. In Lehi, he took the underground name of ‘Mikhail’ after his hero, Michael Collins, the progenitor of the IRA. In 1944, he strongly opposed any merging with Begin’s Irgun. Shamir was certainly not the conventional right-wing ideologue. Shamir looked like a cuddly grandfather, but in reality he was tough and silent—someone who did not consider the possibility of compromise. A 1984 Likud election advertisement contained the line: ‘His pleasant smile hides an iron will.’ Friend and foe alike will recognise Shamir in that phrase. (‘Shamir: A Colourless Tough Guy’, Jewish Chronicle, 5 July 2012)

NOTES 1.  Ofer Grosbard, Menachem Begin: Dyokano shel manhig—biografiyah (Menachem Begin: Portrait of a leader—a biography] (Tel Aviv 2006); Ha’aretz, 12 May 2006. 2.  Yechiam Weitz, ‘The Road to the ‘Upheaval’: A Capsule History of the Herut Movement, 1948–1977’, Israel Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 54–86. 3.  Arye Naor, ‘Hawks’ Beaks, Doves’ Feathers: Likud Prime Ministers between Ideology and Reality’, Israel Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 154–91.

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4.  Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 5.  Peter Bergamin, ‘An Intellectual Biography of Abba Ahimeir’, D.Phil (Oriental Studies) Mansfield College, Oxford, 2016. 6. Sasson Sofer, Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership (London: Blackwell, 1988), p. 250.

8 Israel and Pariah Regimes

TURNING AWAY FROM THE PAST

The State of Israel and its socialist internationalist approach went into

decline in the 1950s. By then, the world was beginning to move on from the ravages of World War II and the decimation of the Shoah. A hot war, however, was replaced by a Cold War. Despite Israel’s preference for neutrality and non-alignment, Israel had to choose. Moshe Sharett strongly favoured non-alignment, but Ben-Gurion wanted an identification with the West—and was supported by Abba Eban and Chaim Herzog at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Yet Eisenhower’s America effectively refused to sell arms to Israel, whereas Stalin via the Eastern Bloc would. Sharett supported China’s application for UN membership and refused American demands for Israeli troops to be sent to Korea. All this helped neither to facilitate diplomatic relations with newly independent Asian states nor to secure the free emigration of Soviet Jews. The polarising situation globally, American pressure, Soviet hostility and its overt anti-Semitism—plus a parlous economic situation in Israel strengthened Ben-Gurion’s position. A third-way position of non-alignment had become untenable. The period of decolonisation, symbolised by Indian independence, coincided with the establishment of Israel. The organisers of the Bandung conference in 1955, at the behest of feudal Arab monarchies as well as 141

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nationalist regimes, refused to allow Israel to attend. Nehru had to choose between the twenty Arab states or the state of the Jews. He chose the former as he was not prepared to allow his coalition of the non-aligned nations to fall by the wayside at its very inception. By the 1960s, it was clear to Israel that no matter how much it condemned apartheid at the United Nations or sent experts to the developing world, the attraction of the Arab world was much stronger. It was easier for newly emergent nations to identify with Arab nations which had fought against British or French imperialism than with an established State of Israel with its roots in European nationalism. Following the Yom Kippur War and the growing influence of the oil states in the Middle East, many countries in the developing world broke their ties with Israel. In addition, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967 and pursued a policy of increasing hostility—only Ceauşescu’s Romania maintained ties with Israel. By the 1970s, Israel was forced to place its national interests first and to relegate its concern for human rights and righting the wrongs of the world. This also coincided with the decline of old-time socialist Zionism and the rise of the Right in Israel. This created a dissonance both within Israel and between Israel and the Diaspora. Should Israel continue to be involved in the human rights of others? Yet the Jews had suffered one of the greatest violations of human rights in history. Moreover, Jews—who lived amongst non-Jews—in the Diaspora remained deeply sensitive to questions of human rights. This applied to Jews in South Africa, who voted for anti-apartheid candidates, to Jews in the Soviet Union, who wrote collective open letters to express solidarity with the embattled Andrei Sakharov, to Jews in the United States, who were disproportionately represented in the civil rights struggle.

THE AFRIKANERS The struggle against apartheid in South Africa was one of the great causes in the English-speaking world. As history records, Nelson Mandela walked seemingly unscathed ‘from slavery unto freedom’ in 1990 after almost three decades of incarceration. He subsequently set an example as the leader of



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his country which won him the universal admiration of humankind—and certainly averted a bloodbath and civil war in South Africa. The end of apartheid was also initiated by President F. W. de Klerk, formerly regarded as an archconservative and defender of Afrikanerdom. This was a remarkable volte-face, given the troubled history of South Africa. Jews and Afrikaners mutually suspected each other’s motives. While there were formal cordial relations between official representatives of both communities, South African Jews could not forget that Afrikanerdom had reflected the authoritarianism of many inter-war European regimes, even though it had greeted the rise of Israel positively in 1948. The Jews were represented disproportionately in the struggle against apartheid. Many who found their salvation in the Communist Party and the far Left campaigned both before and after World War II. In part, a factor in their political actions was the sympathy which Afrikaner leaders such as Vervoerd and Vorster felt for German nationalism and its accompanying anti-Semitism. Many acculturated and assimilated Jews expressed their Jewishness through universalism and joined the anti-apartheid movement and later the African National Congress (ANC). Many identifying Jews similarly expressed their revulsion at apartheid, but distanced themselves from the revolutionary fervour of a Joe Slovo or a Ruth First. Many Jews left the country—especially after the Soweto uprising in the 1970s. Those who remained wanted to live their lives in peace in a stable, fair society—and expressed their liberal opposition in continually voting for Helen Suzman and opposing successive nationalist governments through a plethora of ways. Yet many representative Jewish organisations also kept quiet during the apartheid era because they felt that they could become entangled ‘in politics’ to the detriment of the community. Many feared a resurgence of pre-war Afrikaner anti-Semitism. Some rabbis such as the Orthodox Louis Rabinowitz and the Reform Arthur Super did address the moral issues and asked how such policies could be compatible with Jewish teachings, but many other clerics avoided the question. When identifying Jews such as the leading journalist Benjamin Pogrund—the friend of Robert Subukwe, then held on Robbin Island—wrote about the apartheid system and how it affected non-whites, this served to increase the degree of nervousness amongst South African Jews. While South African Jews took great pride in a renascent state of the Jews, they similarly

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felt uneasy with Golda Meir’s passionate denunciations of apartheid and Israel’s refusal to align itself with Verwoerd’s policies. Within the past few days, opponents of apartheid commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre when South African police gunned down 67 Africans. Afrikanerdom would not bow before the winds of change or even sway in the breeze. Sharpeville was a political watershed, for it turned South Africa into a feared and wealthy pariah among the democratic nations. In this splendid isolation, the Jews and the Afrikaners have coexisted uneasily in South Africa. However, throughout the long history of their relationship, there has been a fundamental difference of outlook between the adherents of Judaism and their Calvinist cousins. The gold and diamond rush attracted many Jews hoping to make their fortune. Most were impoverished immigrants from Lithuania and the Baltic States, escaping from tsarist persecution. They worked hard and they prospered. In Afrikaner eyes, however, their cultural and economic enemy was the conglomerated British-Jewish capitalist. The Boers never forgot nor forgave. The leaders of Afrikanerdom, Herzog and Malan, saw it as their life’s task to stand fast by their Calvinist principles, to raise their people up from the depths and eventually to re-establish the Boer republic. Jewish immigration worried Afrikanerdom so much that Dr Malan, as Interior Minister, introduced the Quota Act in 1930 which essentially restricted Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. When Hitler came to power, Jews from Germany also began to arrive. As Nazi persecution intensified, the numbers increased, reaching a maximum of 3,000 in 1936. For the purist advocates of Afrikaner nationalism, this was a cause célèbre, a suitable stick with which to goad their opponents. The Nationalists were rapidly becoming infected with the Nazi virus. Fascist groups such as the Greyshirts aped their German counterparts and openly expressed anti-Semitic views. The secret cultural association, the Broederbond, which guided the affairs of Afrikanerdom, absorbed Nazi ideas. Germany sent Graf von Durckheim Montmartin to consult with Dr Malan and other leaders of the Broederbond to reorganise the body on Nazi lines. In return, Broederbond members were sent to Germany for instruction. One Nationalist Senator, Visser, circulated a pamphlet which rewrote the constitution on the lines of the corporate State. Eventually,



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the Government succumbed to Nationalist pressure and introduced restrictions on emigration, thus leaving many who could have been saved to perish in Hitler’s concentration camps. The Nationalists and their Nazi allies were not satisfied. When the last refugee ship, the SS Stuttgart, bringing 600 German Jews, arrived in Cape Town, thousands attended protest rallies. Throughout 1937, Dr Malan lost no opportunity to attack the Jews. At a meeting at Stellenbosch on April 10, he commented: ‘By means of international organisation, the Jews endeavoured to monopolise the credit systems and banks of the world.’ Malan criticised Jews for their participation in the Communist movement and the trade unions and for their condemnation of racial discrimination. At a meeting at Parys in July of that year, the chairman introduced Malan with the words, ‘what Hitler and Mussolini have been to their countries, Dr Malan will be to South Africa.’ Malan certainly said nothing to dispute the sentiment of those remarks. He told his audience that the Labour party was nothing but a subdivision of the Board of Deputies in Johannesburg. When asked if he was against Jews in South Africa, he replied: ‘I am against Jews in South Africa because they are parasites.’ When asked if Jews could become members of the Nationalist Party, he answered: ‘If the Jews were prepared to become Christians and lead a Christian life, they would be allowed to join the Nationalist Party.’ At a Nationalist meeting at Nieuwoudtville, Malan attacked the opposition candidate, Dr Steenkamp, as the candidate of the Jews. Die Suiderstem reported Malan as commenting: ‘I am going to fight Jewry. This will be a fight to the end.’ Another Afrikaans language newspaper, Die Burger reported Malan’s statement that the time had arrived to discriminate against the Jews. ‘My point of view was always that there must be no discrimination between white and white in this country, but the Government has not taken effective measures to avert the Jewish danger from South Africa.’ There were many others who advocated such policies. J. G. Strijdom, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1954 to 1958, spoke of the ‘unassimilability’ of the Jew. Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966, as editor of Die Transvale, propagated proNazi and anti-Jewish opinions through the columns of his newspaper. He suggested a quota system for Jews in each profession: ‘Jews should be refused further trading licences until every section of the population has its proper share.’

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Eric Louw, later Foreign Minister of South Africa, announced in Parliament a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘I am convinced that if it were possible to remove Jewish influence and pressure from the press and from the news agencies, the international outlook would be considerably brighter than it is today.’ Louw, Malan and the others regarded the war as of concern to Afrikanerdom. It was a ‘Jewish imperialistic war.’ The adherents of Afrikaner nationalism proposed in Parliament that South Africa should remain neutral. The vote was lost by the narrow margin of 13 votes. Malan hoped that Nazi Germany would win the war, but kept his options open. For example, he refrained from an electoral alliance with the Greyshirts, but F. C. Erasmus, secretary of the Cape Nationalist Party and a future Minister of Defence, wrote to the organising secretary of the Greyshirts expressing ‘sincere appreciation of the useful work done’ on the Jewish problem. After the war, a captured German document reported a meeting between Malan and a Nazi agent in 1940 in which Germany promised to recognise an independent South African republic whose territory would include the three British protectorates. Indeed, in the entire course of the war, Louw, Strijdom and Verwoerd continued to expound anti-Jewish policies. While Jews were dying in Auschwitz and Treblinka, Nationalists ranted and raved against Jewish immigration into South Africa. Many refused to believe the first reports of mass extermination. For example, in 1942, leading Nationalist J. L. Brill walked out of the Johannesburg City Council while a motion of protest against Nazi crimes was being discussed. ‘How do you know the Nazi atrocities are true?’ he asked. Verwoerd’s newspaper, Die Transvaler, carried material which was nothing less than Nazi propaganda. When the Johannesburg paper, The Star published an article entitled ‘Speaking up for Hitler,’ Verwoerd filed a law suit. The case was eventually lost. The judgement stated that Verwoerd was fully conscious of his action and of making his paper a tool of the Nazis. In later years, Verwoerd hinted that the case had gone against him because the judge had been a Jew. It would have been thought that in the expectation of an allied victory, the Nationalists would have seen the error of their ways. Yet, in November 1944, Verwoerd’s Die Transvaler accused the Vocational Guidance Bureau of the Board of Deputies of capturing the skilled trades for Jewish youths to the exclusion of the Christians.



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Even in the aftermath of the revelation of the full horror of the concentration camps, the Nationalists’ vehemence against the Jews and specifically Jewish immigration continued unabated. Anti-Jewish Nationalist leaflets handed out at the Hottentots-Holland by-election in January, 1947, ended with the phrase,’ ‘South Africa first! South Africans first!’ By 1948, with an election in the offering, Malan attempted to play down the now-embarrassing issue of anti-Semitism. Even so, Eric Loew could not contain himself. When a certain Johannes M. Rust suggested a rapprochement between South African Jewry and Afrikaanerdom, Loew asked what price would have to be paid in coming to an accommodation, since ‘A Jew gives nothing away gratis!’ Ten days after the declaration of independence of the State of Israel, the Nationalists swept to power in South Africa’s 1948 elections. Dr Malan assumed the premiership. Those who faithfully uttered antiJewish sentiments were given top government posts. R. Swart, who was appointed Minister of Justice, had labelled his opponents a few years earlier ‘the backwash of the ghettoes of Europe.’ One of his first acts was to release imprisoned Nazi collaborators. These included Robey Leibrandt, who had been landed by German submarine on the South African coast, and Holm, who, like Lord Haw-Haw, had broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin. Most South African Jews were unhappy, to state the obvious, and the introduction of the apartheid system did nothing to dissipate their nervousness. The communal leadership, however, anxiously tried to secure acceptance and approval from Malan and his cohorts. The Nationalists, too, shared a common desire to put the politically dangerous spectre of Nazism and anti-Semitism behind them. Malan’s pragmatism permitted the immigration into South Africa of relatives and those required for the well-being of the community. By the early 1950s, communal leaders were stating that Malan had never been anti-Semitic, and in 1953 he visited Israel. Nonetheless, Jewish people in South Africa of different ideological outlooks have opposed the oppression of the non-whites even when they were in the position of being privileged whites. They have paid the price with long terms of imprisonment, and many have been forced into involuntary exile. Every now and again there are disparaging remarks from the high priests of Afrikanerdom. Verwoerd and Vorster, and more recently police chief Kruger, expressed their opposition to Jewish involvement in anti-Government protests and gestures.

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Jews have been prominent in the Progressive Party and the National Union of South African Students. Mrs Helen Suzman, the lone bearer of the standard of racial harmony for so many years in the South African Parliament, is Jewish. However, 30 long years of unyielding oppression meted out by successive disciplinarian Nationalist leaders have effectively fatigued Jewish opposition. In the 1970s, and particularly after Soweto, many Jews left for England, the United States, Israel and more recently Australia. Most young people who have the capacity to analyse the situation leave the country after their studies. Those Jews who remain indeed profess their opposition to apartheid, but at the same time accept the comforts of the system. Neither is the Jewish commitment to human rights appreciated by the black races of South Africa. In a report published last year by the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations, coloureds, Indians, Zulus, Tswanas and South Sothos were asked to indicate in order of preference the ethnic groups of South Africa. In every case, out of a dozen groups listed, the Jews were placed near the bottom of the pile. Only the Afrikaners were disliked more. It was more than symbolic when, in 1976, the liberal Jew, Dr Melville Edelstein, was murdered in the Soweto revolt in of all places, the Morris Isaacson High School. The writing is on the wall for South African Jewry. It has been there for some time and they have read it many times. Does the wall have to collapse on them before they pack their suitcases? (‘South Africa’s Nazi Record’, Jewish Chronicle, 4 April 1980)

Despite previous positions towards the Jews, the Afrikaners changed political direction after 1948 and welcomed the rise of Israel. They identified with the new state since, like South Africa, in their eyes it was no more than a settler regime and it too was surrounded by enemies. When Israel voted against apartheid at the United Nations, it was accused of not being true to itself.1 Liberally minded South African Jews were bemused by this turn of events There was essentially a polarisation amongst South African Jews. Members of the community voted either with their feet or for Helen Suzman, then the only anti-apartheid MP in the South African Parliament. Cartoonists in the press depicted the Jewish Suzman with an exaggerated hooked nose. Any risks either to the community or to their families were minimised by extreme caution in word and deed. Figures such the Rand



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Daily Mail’s Benjamin Pogrund found himself caught in an invidious position. He was a friend of Donald Woods who knew Steve Biko—a member of a select coterie to be kept at arm’s length.2 By the 1970s and the 1980s, the attitudes of Israel and South African Jewry began to change—and effectively changed places. Israel became more inward looking and became almost fatalistic about South Africa. While South African Jewish organisations, particularly pressured by the younger generation, began to throw off the shackles of caution and to speak out more openly about apartheid. If Israel adamantly opposed apartheid in the 1960s, a decade later, it had been forced into clandestine deals with the South African regime following the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The lack of a clear-cut victory in the war, the evolution of Palestinian nationalism under the aegis of the PLO and the tremendous increase in oil prices produced a desertion of vulnerable states. Under Arab economic pressure, many African countries suddenly broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Such isolation forced Israel to pursue apartheid South Africa. In November 1974, Shimon Peres visited South Africa clandestinely in an attempt to sell Chalet missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear payload, to the regime. It was based, Peres asserted, on ‘the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it’.3 This gradual move away from past principles culminated in the election of Menahem Begin in 1977. Begin had already defined his attitude towards South Africa many years before. While he denounced apartheid, he also argued that it was not in Israel’s national interest to antagonise South Africa’s government. In 1961, he opposed Israel’s stand against apartheid at the United Nations and wrote an article, entitled ‘A Stupid Vote’.4 Yet during the 1980s the winds of change were truly blowing and a post-Begin Israel began to wake up to the fact that its national interests were not best served in the avoidance of a clear stand against apartheid. Under American pressure, Israel began to voice criticism a few years before the end of apartheid. Although Israel had been marginalised in the forums of the developing world due to Arab influence, its South Africa policy was undoubtedly counterproductive amongst blacks, white liberals and coloureds in South Africa. In one sense it was only the example of South African Jews in opposing apartheid—even if on occasions mildly—

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that retrieved a bad situation after the ANC came to power in 1994. It redeemed Jewish teachings from the political exigencies of the day. Mandela was arrested in August 1962, formally for his work in Umkonto we Sizwe, the underground wing of the ANC whose activities were directed at sabotaging installations—often ineptly. Nearly a year later, the entire leadership of Umkonto we Sizwe was surprised by a police raid on the home of Arthur Goldreich in Rivonia near Johannesburg. The seventeen who were arrested included Sisulu and Kathrada, the respective leaders of the banned African and Indian National Congresses. The five whites amongst them were all Jews. Goldreich himself managed to escape and flee to Israel where he still lives. There are countless examples of individual Jews involved in anti-apartheid activities, covering the left-liberal spectrum. Even so—and despite the emergence of ‘Jews for Justice’ in South Africa and other such Jewish groups in Israel, the United States and Britain—there are discernible signs of a movement to the Right, away from the Progressives and towards the National Party, by South African Jewish voters. Sam Bloomberg succeeded in capturing the Johannesburg constituency of Bezuidenhout for the once detested National Party in the 1987 general election, and became that party’s first Jewish MP. Gideon Shimoni, of the Hebrew University, in an article in the 1988 American Jewish Yearbook, points out that ‘the total number of Jewish members of the White Chamber remained at four, the same as at the close of the previous parliamentary session, but the fact that the number was now equally divided between the parliamentary (National) party and the progressive opposition was surely indicative of this trend.’ Clearly, many South African Jews have absorbed the views and attitudes of the indigenous white population. The recent departure of Rabbis Isaacson and Franklyn, whose opposition to apartheid was highly vocal, appeased the wishes of many who wanted a quiet life. South African Jews have also been disturbed by the emergence of political groupings, further to the Right, who are at worst anti-Semitic and at best ambivalent to Jewish concerns. An additional factor has been the increasingly negative reaction of the black leadership to Israel and Zionism as well as the deepening hostility of South African Muslims. Both Bishop Tutu and Reverend Boesak, whilst recognizing the contribution of South African Jews, have attacked Israel’s military cooperation with South Africa. Even Chief Buthelezi who opposes the ANC recently commented that ‘Jews criticize, through their liberal press, the policies



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of the government but secretly pray for the retention of Afrikaner power because they feel secure with it.’ In a book to be published at the end of 1988, The Jews of South Africa: What Future? (Southern Book Publishers, Johannesburg), the widening gulf between Jews and blacks is documented in interviews with leading figures in the struggle against apartheid by the authors, Alan Fischer and Tziporah Hoffman. They quote Neo Mnutrizana, an ANC spokesperson at the United Nations: Jews like all people, would ‘have a choice to either abandon segregation as practice and join with the rest . . . in building a free, united, non-racial and democratic South Africa or to exercise their freedom to leave the country and go to those climates which would be more conducive to Zionism.’

Such hardening attitudes probably represent the future for South African Jews. Arab propaganda and assistance may well have had an important effect on black perceptions, but clearly the policies of successive Israeli governments seem to have been incredibly short-sighted. Israeli government sanctions against South Africa last year seem classically too little and too late. (‘South African Jews and the ANC’, Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1988)

THE ARGENTINIANS The military junta which took power in Argentina in the mid-1970s was known for its suspicion and dislike of Jews—some of whom were associated with the Argentinian Left. They equated revolution and subversion with a hybrid of Marxism and Judaism. Even before the coup, Catholic religious tracts began to appear which further stimulated hatred of the Jews. In 1975 the annual ceremony to commemorate the Holocaust was banned. When the coup finally took place in March 1976, some members of the junta issued express orders regarding la lucha antisubversiva (war against subversion). Instructions were issued to eliminate those who were deemed to imperil ‘the national character of western Catholic civilization, which stressed order, hierarchy and authoritarian power’.5 Yet the Catholic Church seemed to sit on its hands while the most terrible atrocities were carried out by the junta. In 2012 Ceferino Reato, an Argentinian journalist, published Disposicíon Final, a series of interviews

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with Jorge Rafael Videla, the leader of the coup in 1976. According to Videla, many leaders of the Argentinian church were supporters of the coup while others closed their eyes to the stories that were reaching them. The ‘war against subversion’ singled out Jews for special attention amidst an admiration for interwar authoritarian regimes. When the Jewish community began to protest, the military kidnapped the son of its president. His disappearance lasted only a few days because American pressure forced his release. Badly beaten, he was quickly put on a plane for Israel. Others did not fare so well and permanently ‘disappeared’. The communal leadership—as in South Africa—was cowed afterwards and conducted its initiatives to protect the community through quiet contacts with the military. As in South Africa, it distanced itself from Jews who did not conform. Like their fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended.

So wrote a Jewish Chronicle special correspondent from Buenos Aires in April 1976. The misplaced hope was the culmination of a longing for law and order amid the instability of the Peron administration. The Montoneros guerrillas who took their inspiration from the Argentinian-born Che Guevara were increasing their attacks on the police and military. A thousand people had been killed since 1969, many more injured, the Sheraton hotel bombed in the Argentinian capital and business executives in the car industry targeted. The Catholic Church in Argentina enthusiastically welcomed this new regime as the defender of God, the motherland and the family. Archbishop Adolfo Tortolo, the army’s spiritual mentor, was grateful and certain that the military would stop what he perceived to be the moral disintegration of Argentinian society. After all, the junta’s head, Jorge Rafael Videla, commented that a terrorist was someone who spread ideas ‘contrary to western and Christian civilisation.’ Within a few years, up to 30,000 people had been ‘disappeared.’ This included a disproportionate 10 per cent who were Jews—both assimilated sympathisers with the Montoneros and apolitical liberal members of the Jewish community. If the Left had been the central target of the



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military’s policy of torture and execution, Jews—that ‘unpatriotic tool of the White House and the Kremlin, the agents of unbridled capitalism and unscrupulous communism’—came a close second. The bodies of the desaparecidos were never found—hence no legal case could be brought. The Argentinian military pioneered new methods such as ‘the death flights’ in which drugged victims would be dropped far out to sea. Inhabitants of the Paraná Delta, north of Buenos Aires, reported ‘bodies falling out of the sky.’ The babies of executed parents were handed over to ‘good’ military families. The military leadership and the Catholic hierarchy had been inspired by the ideology of Vichy France and Franco’s Spain—and acted accordingly. Initially, the Republican White House of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger supported this military dictatorship with the intention of suppressing leftist revolts and limiting Soviet influence in its own backyard. Funding, military parts and assistance was stopped only in 1978 by President Carter. While there were ties between the Montoneros and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the regime suspected ‘Zionists.’ When the Jewish editor of Opinion, Jacobo Timmerman, was arrested, his interrogators questioned him about an imaginary meeting that had taken place between Menahem Begin and Montoneros journalists in Buenos Aires in 1976. This had emerged because Begin’s book, The Revolt, had been discovered in a Montoneros hideout. It recorded the Irgun’s campaign against the British in Palestine in the 1940s. Interrogators often quoted from the tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and believed that the Jews wanted to establish the Republic of Andinia in Patagonia. ‘How many troops would the Israelis send to the new state?’ asked Timmerman’s tormentor. Anti-Semitism was such a feature of closed detention centres that a section on it was included in the official 1984 report of that period, after Argentina had returned to democracy. Nazi regalia and portraits of Hitler were often observed and anti-Semitic taunts often heard. Swastikas were painted on the backs of Jews while others were ordered to walk on all fours like dogs, bark and lick the boots of their torturers. Timmerman records that Jewish prisoners were given reduced food rations, while visiting rabbis were humiliated by guards. In July 1977, Nora Strejilevich was packing for a trip to Israel, when people entered her home searching for her brother Gerardo. After searching the whole house, removing books and documents, they arrested her. Here is an extract from an interview she gave:

The tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion claimed that the Jews conspired to take over the world. It had an international currency and appeared wherever there were anti-Semities including the Argentina of the 1970s. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive



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They threatened me for having uttered Jewish words in the street (my surname) and for being a bloody Yid, someone whom they would make soap out of. They took me straight away to the torture room where I was subjected to the electric prod. . . . They kept asking me for the names of the people travelling with me to Israel. . . . One of them could speak Hebrew, or at least a few words, which he could place in the correct order in a sentence. He tried to find out if there was any military training in the kibbutzim. They asked for a physical description of the organisers of the study tours, like the one I was on (Sherut La’am), a description of the building of the Jewish Agency (which I knew very well), etc. They assured me that they were primarily concerned with ‘the problem of subversion’ but the ‘Jewish problem’ was second in importance and they were gathering information for their files. (file No. 2535 CONADEP report)

Nora Strejilevich was released after a few days, but she never saw her brother again. Within a year of the military takeover, the president of the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), the main communal organisation, was making broad condemnatory remarks about anti-Semitism in Argentinian society. His 22-year-old son was then kidnapped. Only the intervention of President Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, procured his release. The young man had been badly beaten. His father put him on the next flight out of the country. The 17-year-old daughter of the head of the DAIA in Cordoba was similarly taken. She never returned. Cordoba’s La Perla camp was said to be particularly vicious towards Jews. After this, official Jewish organisations in Argentina became more restrictive and circumspect in their public comments. They were selective about which issues to espouse and which to downgrade. Jews arrested for non-Jewish reasons were often deemed to be outside the authority of such representative bodies. Yet anti-Semitic innuendo was directed at even the most assimilated Jew during interrogation. Some Jewish prisoners even hid their Jewishness behind traditional Catholic names. Esther became Maria. As in South Africa and in the Soviet Union, communal organisations were later accused of an insular cowardice by those who suffered and survived. Others, such as the courageous American-born conservative rabbi, Marshall Meyer, a disciple of Abraham Joshua Heschel, was less concerned for his personal safety. As was Pérez Ezquivel, a Catholic human-rights activist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. The campaign to rein in this brutal, primitive regime was not characterized by mass demonstrations by Jews in European capitals, but by quiet negotiations.

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The cause of his colleague, Jacobo Timmerman, was certainly espoused by the former Jewish Chronicle editor, Geoffrey Paul, in the pages of this newspaper, but the deaths of so many Jews—no matter how distant from their Jewishness—remains a political stain on the Jewish conscience. The official Argentinian CONADEP report on this terrible period in recent history is called Nunca Más in Spanish. It translates as ‘Never Again.’ The Israeli government later set up the Comisión Israeli por los Desaparecidos Judios en Argentina, which collected the testimonies of family members whose loved ones fell victim to the regime—in order that they should not be forgotten. Even today, aged grandmothers—the Madres de Plaza de Mayo—still look both for their missing children and their kidnapped grandchildren. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, wrote: The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant Whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth

The questions remain. How indeed could this have happened? (‘The Desaparecidos: Forty Years After’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 March 2016)

While Israel opened up back channels to the junta and used its diplomatic contacts to place pressure on its leaders, there was no overt condemnation from the Begin government—as was the case in the United States and Europe. The Falklands War in 1982 brought matters to a head when the British press suggested that Israel was supplying arms to General Galtieri’s regime including the Gabriel missile, an effective anti-ship weapon, through third countries.6 Israel had longstanding unfulfilled arms contracts with Argentina. In 2011 Hernan Dobry, an Argentinian journalist, published Operación Israel which indicated that the Begin government had been deeply involved in supplying arms to the junta via the Peruvian ports of Lima and Callao. Israel supplied Skyhawk jets before the conflict, which were responsible for the sinking of four British warships including the Sir Galahad, anchored in Bluff Cove. In the summer of 2016, declassified Foreign Office files from 1984 stated that ‘Israel was one of the few countries to supply arms during the Falklands conflict’. Hernan Dobry in his book asserted that Israel sup-



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plied spare parts and long-range fuel tanks to keep the Skyhawks in action during the war. Even after Britain’s victory, Israel was prepared to sell the junta spy planes whose task was to gather intelligence.7 All this selling of arms to Argentina was justified as Israel’s need to sustain its domestic arms industry—just as Britain was prepared to sell arms to Israel’s enemies in the Arab world. The national interests of Israel and the desire to protect Jews abroad sometimes coalesced and other times diverged. What then happens when assimilated, leftist, often anti-Zionist Jews are victimised as Jews? This happened in Argentina in the 1970s. Others were similarly challenged as to how to react to this situation. Today Pope Francis has shown himself to be an understanding pontiff—someone who has shaken off the conservative ossification of the Vatican, someone who cares for the poor, forgotten and downtrodden. This all resonates with Jewish history, and Jewish organisations have been quick to embrace him. Moreover, in December 2015 the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews overturned the Catholic imperative to convert Jews—after centuries of trying to do so. The Pope also brought together Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas in an attempt to build a spiritual bridge between Israel and Palestine. Despite all this, did the Catholic Church in Argentina stand up to be counted when it mattered? Indeed the situation of Argentinian Jews under the junta was so precarious that US Jewish organisations made contingency plans for a mass evacuation of 300,000 Jews. The US State Department was ready to issue 100,000 visas to Jewish refugees. There has been a great welcome for the new Pope from Jewish groups. They point to his good relationship with Jews—‘our elder brother’—and his strong condemnation of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. He has even co-authored a book with a rabbi that will appear in English shortly. And yet there have been critical voices, some Jewish, asking ‘what did you do during the dirty war, Holy Father?’ Following a military coup in 1976, the generals tortured, murdered and terrorised in the name of God and Christian civilisation. Their victims ranged from the far Left to liberals and human-rights advocates. Around 10,000—almost certainly a conservative estimate—were apprehended and disappeared, never to be seen again. Some were drugged

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and dropped by aircraft out at sea. Pregnant women were allowed to give birth, killed and their newborns given to ‘good’ military families. Although Catholic clergymen were among the victims, the leadership of the church in Argentina was at best apathetic and at worse complicit. This contrasted dramatically with the Catholic Church in Chile after the Pinochet coup. The local cardinal there formed an inter-faith group including representatives of the Jewish community, which protected many people and helped them leave the country. In the 1980s, Emilio Mignone, whose daughter ‘disappeared,’ wrote Iglesia y Dictadura, a scathing, bitter indictment that documented the indifference of many in the Catholic Church in Argentina. In 2005, the Jewish writer, Horacio Verbitsky, published El Silencio—the name of a small island where the military built a holding camp for prisoners and where the only substantial building was the summer residence of the then Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Its sub-title was (Pope) ‘Paul VI to Bergoglio.’ The latter is now Pope Francis I and opinion is strongly divided regarding his apparent inaction during those dark years. In contrast, the revered US Conservative rabbi Marshall Meyer, 25 years a rabbi in Buenos Aires, spoke out and campaigned openly. The generals exalted their faith, but the church fathers were muted in their response. No calls for excommunication. No appeals to good Catholics to obey God instead. No protests, no hunger strikes, just the abandonment of the doomed. The Pope has inherited the legacy of those times, regardless of his own conduct. It is a heavy burden to carry. (‘Pope’s Role in Sordid History’, Jewish Chronicle, 29 March 2013)

THE CHILEANS In Chile, General Pinochet staged a military takeover in 1973 to oust the democratically elected leftist government of President Allende. The coup in Chile became a cause célèbre for the international Left. In Israel, Golda Meir was said to be ‘deeply affected’ by events in Chile. Aharon Yadlin, the secretary-general of the Israeli Labour Party put out a statement: ‘The Israeli Labour Party expresses its horror at the coup d’état carried out by the armed forces of Chile, a country that for decades was the backbone of the democratic and parliamentary system of Latin America’.



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Pinochet established a regime that became a byword for reaction, terror and torture. Operation Condor was an ongoing operation to root out and eliminate political opponents. Yet, unlike Argentina, there was no overt anti-Semitism as had been the case in Argentina. Jewish leftists were arrested and imprisoned, but not on the basis of their Jewishness. The head of the Chilean air force, later Pinochet’s ambassador to Israel, General José Berdichewsky Scher, was a Jew. Pinochet made a point of stating that he was not persecuting Jews and even attended synagogue on Yom Kippur. In contrast, there were many Jews on the Left who detested everything Pinochet stood for. During the election campaign of 1970, the Zionist Left Front invited Allende to address them—the community leadership was not pleased. Moreover, the leader of the Chilean Communist Party was Volodia Teitelbaum. In essence, there was a division within the Chilean Jewish community which reflected both class and an ideological outlook. Following Salvador Allende’s election, probably a quarter of Chile’s Jews left the country. The Jewish middle class feared the transformation of Chile into a second Cuba and Castro’s visit in November 1971 did not decrease their apprehension. With Pinochet’s coup, members of the Jewish middle class began to return to Chile. Despite the close ties between Israeli Labour figures and the socialist government of Chile, Allende’s foreign policy moved towards the Arab world and away from Israel. Yet the manifesto of the Unidad Popular coalition of socialists, social democrats and communists which won the election proclaimed in December 1969 that: The anti-imperialist struggles of the people of the Middle East may count on the support of the Unidad Popular government. The government will also help to seek a peaceful solution in that region based upon the interests of both the Arab and the Jewish peoples. All reactionary regimes which encourage or practise racial segregation or anti-Semitism will be condemned.8

With Pinochet’s accession to power, Chilean foreign policy veered favourably once more towards Israel. Chile, for example, opposed the UN Resolution which equated Zionism and racism. During this period both Israel and Chile—for decidedly different reasons—shared the prospect

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of diplomatic isolation and ostracism in the international community. During the Likud administration of Menahem Begin, the arms trade between Israel and Chile began to seriously develop. Whereas President Carter refused to sell Sidewinder missiles to Chile in 1979, Begin and Sharon were happy to supply Pinochet with 1,500 AIM-90 Shafrir air-toair missiles and 6 torpedo boats. In the 1980s Chilean army contingents underwent training in Israel. Yet Pinochet refused to extradite Walter Rauff from Chile and protected him. This was the same SS Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff who would have ordered his Einsatzkommandos to liquidate the Jews of Palestine, had it not been for Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. The same Rauff who as Sicherheitsdienst was responsible for the persecution and deaths of hundreds of Tunisian Jews in SS labour camps during the German occupation. The same Rauff who as advisor to the post-war regime of Hosni Zaim in Damascus was allegedly responsible for the torture of Syrian Jews. The same Rauff who was associated with the Colonia Dignidad of German emigrants in Chile, which served as a torture and interrogation centre for Pinochet’s opponents—a location where mass graves and sarin gas were found after Pinochet’s fall. In October 1998, Pinochet was arrested at a London clinic and the British government agreed to extradite him to Spain on a principle of universal jurisdiction which was predicated on legal arguments enunciated during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. He was held for an eighteenmonth period and eventually allowed to return to Chile. The legal battle to secure this end was fought by Pinochet’s lawyer, Pablo Rodriguez Grez, a leading ultra-nationalist and founder of the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad. This was a far Right group which initiated actions to subvert the Allende government before the coup in the name of defending Christian civilisation. Fifty years ago the United Nations approved a Declaration of Human Rights. It pledged to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.’ The Declaration was motivated by the Holocaust and the destruction of millions of innocents of many nationalities by the madness of the Nazis. The arrest and detention of General Augusto Pinochet in London this autumn was thus greeted by many in Britain and beyond with a



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feeling that there was indeed justice in the world. For many, Pinochet is a mass murderer, a fascist beast from the past who raised his head in the 1970s to confront a new generation, a generation educated by the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, in his formal request to extradite Pinochet, spoke about genocide, torture and terrorism—and the 3,176 desaparecidos who have no grave. The decision of the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to issue an authorisation for extradition to Spain underlined the fact that the European democracies would no longer let sleeping dictators lie. International law finally possesses teeth and is prepared to bite. The heirs of Hitler are no longer safe. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Chile, fear has changed sides. The many harrowing accounts in the British press by Chilean exiles who have retrieved buried memories bear witness to a terrible savagery. One spoke of a roll call in the national stadium immediately after the coup of names of prisoners who were marshalled into two columns— one to work, the other to the firing squad. For Jews, the very mention of ‘selection’ sends a chill down the spine. And yet, apologists such as Lady Thatcher, William Hague, the practitioners of the arms trade and the editor of The Times indignantly attempted to explain away the General’s crimes. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hope that the good general would be treated ‘compassionately’ jarred and seemed out of place. It was left to Lord Hoffman— symbolically a Jewish white South African—to cast the deciding vote on behalf of the Law Lords and to demonstrate that the shallow graves of the murdered cannot be trampled on with impunity. One might have thought that the Jewish people—history’s witness to persecution—would have had an opinion on such an issue. Even in 1998, sixty years after Kristallnacht, the phrase ‘never again’ has a special resonance. Nazi war criminals have been brought to book long after their crimes. Serb exterminators have been plucked from Bosnia and flown to the Hague. Here was a profoundly moral issue on which British Jewry could, and should, have made a stand. Instead, a deafening silence. No Jewish organisation considered it appropriate to offer an opinion. Even the Jewish press found no need to mention the Pinochet affair at the outset (although this was later remedied)—there were no editorials, and letters on the subject were not published. Even the claphappy practitioners of vaudeville Judaism were for once lost for words. An enthusiasm for the dissection of ‘kosher sex’ was accompanied by a kosher silence on Pinochet’s crimes against humanity.

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This was in sharp contrast with the plea of the well-known author Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in the United States. He revealed that twenty years ago Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit, his friends and co-workers at the Institute for Policy Studies, were murdered on the streets of Washington by a car bomb planted by the Chilean secret police. In a letter to Tony Blair, Rabbi Waskow compared Pinochet to a war criminal and asked if Hitler would have been exempt from trial on the grounds that he was a head of state. It is as if ignorance of the significance of the arrest of Pinochet has fused with an indifference to Jewish values. Yet Jews have always involved themselves in disproportionate numbers where human rights are concerned. Why? We are told that all human beings were created, b’Tselem, in the image of God. The Babylonian Talmud tells us: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour.’ And a midrash informs us that God created only one man, Adam, so that no one can say ‘My father was greater than your father.’ And yet, too many seem to believe that the lessons of the prophets should best be left to the Shabbat morning haftorah and the rabbi’s sermon rather than provide an active guide as to how we should act in difficult circumstances. How many practise what they preach and what is preached? How many, in the words of Amos, ‘Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gates of the land’? Or understand Jeremiah that ‘If one practises justice and righteousness, if one champions the cause of the poor, then it is well with one, this indeed is to know Me, says God.’ The irony is that, where human rights are concerned, assimilated Jews who are far from their Jewish roots often readily respond to the cry of the prophets, while those who are Jewishly literate and Torah-true see no connection between learning the teachings and applying them. Even if the prophets preached only to their fellow Israelites and saw justice only in terms of their covenant with their God, their ringing words have carried from age to age the notion that justice is for the weak as well as for the strong; that its fulfilment is as much the spirit as the letter of the law; that one cannot serve God at the same time as mistreating one’s fellow men; that to love God is to love justice; and that the love of justice places within the conscience of each human being an inescapable obligation to denounce evil where he sees it, to defy a ruler who commanded him to break the covenant, and to live in the law and the love of God no matter what the cost. (Harry Orlinsky, Ancient Israel, 1954)

Instead of proud defiance, the central story in the British Jewish press in the week of Pinochet’s arrest was the Chief Rabbi’s acceptance of a



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royal invitation on a Friday night. Little insight was required to decipher this move as an error of judgment and a bad example to the younger generation: it was explained away by suggesting that it did not substitute for the Jewish warmth of a family Shabbat but complemented it. Yet the problem was not merely attempting to be all things to all people or causing offence to the Royal Family or even breaking the spirit of Shabbat. The real issue was not tackled because it was not perceived. It was the juxtaposition of a silence on Pinochet with a vulgar loudness on the wisdom of attending Prince Charles’s birthday bash. It was the choice between siding with the dissident and downtrodden or cocktails with a munificent establishment. No doubt, it can be argued that Pinochet’s crimes should not be considered because it is not a Jewish issue. Nevertheless, Pinochet cancelled his trip to Israel last year at the invitation of members of the industrial-military complex when a representative of the ultra-secular Meretz demanded that he be prevented from leaving the country and brought before the courts to hear the charges of numerous Chilean Jews. Perhaps then, a statement by British Jews condemning Pinochet would affect the status of Chilean Jews and place them in unnecessary danger? The same, of course, was said about South Africa. Yet when organisations such as the American Jewish Congress consistently condemned the apartheid regime, the sky did not fall in on South African Jewry. What then is the value of a campaign to ensure Jewish continuity through Jewish commitment when there is silence on issues of human rights? What kind of example is it to those young people in whom we wish to catalyse a sense of belonging when Jewish leadership fails to lead—and to lead on such a fundamental issue? On the eve of the millennium, a principled stand in demanding justice for General Pinochet’s victims was called for. Yet, in order to remain both invisible and respectable, Anglo-Jewry missed this opportunity to appeal to the young and the alienated. (‘Human Rights, Pinochet and the Jewish Community’, Judaism Today, Winter 1998–1999)

Pinochet was held under house arrest in luxury in an eight-bedroomed house while he awaited the outcome of the extradition appeal. Home Secretary Jack Straw twice concurred that there was a case to extradite Pinochet, but he was under great pressure from the political and military establishment—as well as from the Vatican—to allow him to return to

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Chile. Margaret Thatcher defended Pinochet in a letter to the Times and publicly thanked him for his help during the Falklands campaign. She also wrote privately to Prime Minister Tony Blair. An independent medical review unexpectedly indicated that Pinochet was not fit to stand trial.9 He was returned to Chile in March 2000, but the spell that he was untouchable was broken. While Pinochet was never tried and died in his bed in 2006, many of those involved in the human rights abuses in the 1970s finally faced a court of law and were subsequently imprisoned. Even so, many today still remain free and unchallenged.

NOTES 1.  Gideon Shimoni, Jews and Zionism: The South African Experience (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 219. 2.  Benjamin Pogrund, War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), pp. 108–11. 3.  Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Pantheon, 2010), p. 80. 4.  Menahem Begin, ‘A Stupid Vote’, Herut, 1 December 1961. 5.  Graciela Ben-Dror, Anti-Semitism in Argentina: From the Military Junta to the Democratic Era (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2009). 6. Azriel Bermant, Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 86. 7.  Daily Telegraph, 24 August 2016. 8.  Salvador Allende, Chile’s Road to Socialism, ed. Joan E. Garces (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 51. 9.  ‘The Reunion’, BBC Radio 4, 6 May 2016.

9 Evangelical Zionists

THE LEGACIES OF CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

A Pew Research Center poll taken a week after the 2016 American presi-

dential election suggested that 81 per cent of white born-again evangelicals voted for Donald J. Trump. In contrast, only 24 per cent of American Jews indicated their preference for the new president. Despite his often proclaimed support for Netanyahu’s Israel, the result indicated the great ideological chasm that existed between Trump and the liberalism of most American Jews. In Israel the situation was profoundly different. Trump supporters in Israel subtitled their campaign ‘the Israeli interest’ and opened a West Bank office. The Republican manifesto contained no mention of a two-state solution. David Friedman, a supporter of West Bank settlements, was subsequently appointed as American ambassador to Israel. In the past, individual Jewish philanthropists have supported settlement projects through groups such as the American Friends of Ariel. In parallel, evangelical Zionists have created organisations such as the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, the Hebron Fund and Christians United for Israel to generate similar financial support. All this has been fortified by the reaction to the wave of Islamist violence that has swept the Arab world since 2010 and the fear generated by the San Bernardino killings in 2015. In recent decades, Likud governments in particular have come to rely on the support of Christian evangelicals to support their policies—not least the establishment of settlements on the West Bank. The overlap of 165

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the evangelicals with the US Republican party often meant an espousal of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. Netanyahu’s sophisticated expertise in the public relations arena and his telegenic charisma deeply appealed to evangelical Christians. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, once called Netanyahu ‘a second Ronald Reagan’.1 When Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2012 came to Israel, he was effusively greeted by Netanyahu. During that trip, he raised $1.5 million for his campaign from an accompanying philanthropic entourage—and this included some $200,000 from former Americans who had emigrated to Israel. Mitt Romney attracted the support of 85 per cent of American Jews in Israel—in distinct contrast to three-quarters of American Jews in America, who supported Obama despite the best efforts of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel. Mike Huckabee, a Republican hopeful in recent US elections often referred to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and understood the settlement policies of the Israeli Right as fulfilling biblical prophecy. Ted Cruz, an early frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination in the 2016 election, was similarly sympathetic to the aspirations of the settlers and was strongly condemnatory of any attempt to distinguish products made in the West Bank settlements from those bearing the label ‘Made in Israel’. While the embrace of Israel by candidates for political office during election years is de rigueur and often less than informed, one underlying current has been the decades-long exodus of Palestinian Christians due to the dominance of Islam. This has been emphasised in recent times by the persecution of long-established Christian communities due to the rise of Islamism as a consequence of the Arab Spring. Ironically, Christians played a disproportionate role in fostering Arab nationalism as opposed to the pan-Islamism championed in earlier times by the Ottomans and today by movements like Hamas. Both the Popular Front’s George Habash and the Democratic Front’s Naif Hawatmeh were Christian Palestinians—albeit lapsed ones. The secularized Hanan Ashrawi dismisses her Christian background in one paragraph in her autobiography. The Jews have a historical memory of being caught between the warring religions of Islam and Christianity. In 1453, Islam conquered Constantinople and converted the churches into mosques. At the other end of Europe, the Catholic Reconquista of Spain finally defeated the Emirate of Grenada in 1492—and converted all the mosques into churches.



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Isabella and Ferdinand soon issued the Alhambra Decree, which instructed all Jews to leave the country within four months if they did not convert. They did so because the Christians believed that Jews were deicides—the killers of God, the crucifiers of Jesus. While Islam certainly believed that it had surpassed Judaism, it did not see Jews in that light. In times of religious intensity, Jews may have been discriminated against and humiliated in Islamic lands, but it did not rival the massacres and persecutions in Christendom. Even if sages such as Nahmanides were victorious in public disputations with Christian scholars, such a victory had to be expunged from public memory by expelling such a ‘turbulent priest’ from his native land. The Alhambra Decree was only revoked by the Second Vatican Council in December 1968. While the advent of Protestantism advocated a more tolerant attitude towards Jews, it did not mollify the theological temptation of its rival to challenge Judaism and Jews. It did not stop a nineteenth-century pope from abetting the kidnapping of a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 1858 in order to prevent the child from being brought up by his heretical parents. During the Spanish Civil War, forty-eight out of fifty-one Spanish bishops supported the cause of Franco. Cardinal Goma, the primate of Spain, explained in a radio broadcast that the Nationalists were fighting ‘the Jews and Masons who had poisoned the ingenuous pueblo with Tartar and Mongol ideas and who were erecting a system manipulated by the Semitic International’.2 As in Vichy France later and in many other European countries, the Catholic attempt to push back the influence of the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment was coated with the veneer of anti-Semitism. Since Catalonia was a stronghold of the Spanish Republic, an anti-Semitism without Jews was promoted. Its inhabitants became ‘Judeo-Catalanes’ and its leaders, such as Luis Companys, were reported to be ‘secret Jews’. It was perhaps only the revelations of the Shoah that finally catalysed the dropping of the shades from Catholic eyes. Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, apostolic delegate to Turkey, later Pope John XXIII, initiated many efforts to save Jews during World War II and facilitated the using of protective schutzpasses by Hungarian Jews in 1944. Similarly, Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, helped and protected Jews in German-occupied Poland. Wojtyla was the first pope to visit a synagogue, the first pope to visit Auschwitz, the first pope to establish diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel, the first pope to pray at the Western Wall, the first pope to address the Jews as ‘our elder brothers’. Yet, as Claude Lanzmann’s

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film Shoah demonstrated, even in the 1980s, there were still some older Poles who could never come to terms with the Jews who had once been their neighbours. In the twenty-first century, the difficulties which some Poles faced in explaining the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941 were graphically illustrated in Anna Bikont’s The Crime and the Silence.3 The dislike of the foreigner was recently recalled by the head of the Polish Law and Justice party and a former prime minister, Jarosław Kaczyński: ‘Migrants have already brought diseases like cholera and dysentery to Europe, as well as “all sorts of parasites and protozoa”’.4 If, however, Christianity has in general been more accommodating in contemporary times, the rise of Arab nationalism has led to discrimination in Muslim states. In June 1941 the Farhud took place in Baghdad. One hundred and fifty to 200 Jews lost their lives to rioters who believed that the Jewish community had been in league with the British forces which had overcome the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali. Yet the occupation of North Africa by German forces also produced many acts of individual heroism from Muslims who endangered their own lives and those of their families to save Jews. Khaled Abdul Wahab ferried two dozen Jews to safety when the Nazis occupied Mahdia in Tunisia and cared for them for two years until the danger had passed. Si Kaddour Benghabrit, an imam who had founded the Muslim Institute in Paris provided false papers to Jews, declaring them to be Muslims—and thus saved them from the round-up and deportation to the East. Mohammed Helmy, an Egyptian-born doctor gave sanctuary to four Jews throughout the war years in Berlin.5 Even so, during the conflict between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Palestine between 1947 and 1949, vulnerable Jewish communities in the Arab world were not protected by their governments. In Iraq, Jews were equated with communists—and effectively expelled en masse. In Syria, nearly half the Jewish community of Aleppo was forced to leave in December 1947 after attacks on individuals, property and synagogues. In Egypt a similar situation occurred. Over a third of Jews living in Islamic lands left for Israel between mid-1948 and the beginning of 1952.

THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS RIGHT AND THE LIKUD In the United States, the establishment of a state of the Jews in 1948 and Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1967 had a far-reaching spiritual sig-



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nificance. It catalysed a deep attachment and political identification with Israel and coincided with a more general rising tide of the importance of religion in US political circles. It also coincided with the growing isolation of Israel within the international community—and particularly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was a time when Israel had to reach out to gain the support of unsavoury regimes such as apartheid South Africa. Such a climate also fortified the friendship between the American religious Right and the Israeli political Right. It also created an uneasy relationship between liberal American Jewry and a conservative evangelical constituency. The pro-Israelism of Tea Party enthusiasts and populists such as Glenn Beck left many American Jews perplexed and unhappy. Ambiguity about whether or not Judaism is ‘a false religion’ has added to this sentiment. In parallel there has been a growing secularisation of young American Jews. This has propelled them towards the Democrats rather than the Republicans, whose candidates seemingly embrace God and Jesus at any given moment.6 In 2015, Ted Cruz’s disparaging remark about ‘New York values’ was viewed by some as a subterranean comment on the intertwining of Jewishness, secularism and liberalism. The close alliance between the Israel government, the governing Republican Party and the Christian Right was a source of great unease amongst many American Jews who perceived themselves as liberal, mainstream, and lifelong Democrats. There was a perception that the Christian Right differentiated between the Jews of Israel, who were an instrument in bringing about the second coming, and the Jews of the United States, who were seen as liberals, dissenters, and the target of conversionist efforts.7 Indeed, the latter was construed by many American Jews as manifestations of anti-Semitism and a dislike of Jews per se. Such resentment welled up at an early stage when [Jerry] Falwell [of the Moral Majority] was awarded the Jabotinsky Medal by Prime Minister Begin in November 1980 at a ceremony in New York to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the founder of the Revisionist movement. Former Senator Frank Church refused to accept his medal because he felt that the Christian Right had effectively forced him from office amidst an undercurrent of anti-Jewish innuendo. Rabbi Alexander Schindler, head of the Reform movement in the United States actually condemned the award to Falwell as a representative of ‘right-wing evangelists who constitute a danger to the Jews of the US’. In maintaining his pro-Israel credentials, Falwell was careful not to adopt a conversionist line; yet in

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remarks to non-Jewish audiences, he occasionally revealed a populist streak, which did not endear him to Jews. I know a few of you here today don’t like Jews, and I know why. He can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose . . . still [the Jews] were the apple of God’s eye.8

Such comments were indeed rare, but, from the Likud’s viewpoint, his support for their policies far outweighed any damage caused to Diaspora sensibilities. Indeed, as a countermeasure, Begin introduced him to a sympathetic writer who subsequently produced a book, Jerry Falwell and the Jews.9 Pat Robertson, a fellow televangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition, held views similar to those of Falwell on the importance of retaining the West Bank and Gaza, but he often alluded to the admixture of Jewish communists, Jewish Capitalists, the conspiratorial nature of world Jewry, and the supremacy of Christianity—all views that were common on the Right in pre-war Europe.10 In his writings Robertson refers to Nesta Webster’s publication Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, which was required reading for British fascists both before and after World War II.11 Jacob Heillbrunn has drawn attention to the fact that Robertson also referred to the works of George Sylvester Viereck, who was indicted as a German agent during World War II and sentenced to four years in prison.12 Thus, ‘Communism was the brainchild of German-Jewish intellectuals’ and Moses Hess—‘the communist rabbi’—was the link between German Illuminati and the beginning of world Communism.13 Despite such stereotypically conspiratorial and often debunked views, Robertson could still allude to [the founder of Christian Zionism, William Eugene] Blackstone’s sundial analogy: ‘The nation of Israel is God’s prophetic time clock.’14 In his writings, Robertson still adhered to the Armageddon syndrome in which most of Israel’s Jews would be destroyed by the forces of Satan—probably the Soviet Union before its dissolution. Significantly, he implied that the day of reckoning would be hastened by liberal Jewish provocation of American Christians.15 Despite this, the Christian Coalition’s support for Likud’s policies was all-important; thus, Robertson was the guest of honour at a dinner in 1987 hosted by a government minister, Avraham Sharir.16 The Christian Right’s determination to press their political program in the United States inevitably met with opposition from liberals—and that opposition included an often-disproportionate number of Jews, particularly in the legal profession. Although there were cultural and



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religious hints of the past, the Christian Right essentially opposed the historic liberal agenda of American Jews rather than American Jews per se. Even so, this concerted opposition, plus a frustration at the Jews’ refusal to see the theological light and convert to Christianity, sometimes produced instances of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish prejudice at worst— an indifferent insensitivity at best. Pat Robertson’s primitive conspiracy theories, which evoked the subtle criticism of Jews in the past under ‘Christian’ authoritarian regimes such as those of Franco or Verwoerd, added to the sense of unease amongst American Jews. None of these sentiments made any impression on the leadership of the Likud, who, on the contrary, wished to fortify the alliance with the Christian Right—and thereby with the Republican Party—in order to maintain a Congressional bulwark against Presidential moves toward a peace settlement in the Middle East. This was strengthened by the Likud’s historical disdain for liberalism, anti-traditionalism, and the United States as the goldene medina and an alternative to Zion. Evangelical Enthusiasm for Israel However, once the Likud was out of office in 1992, the Anti-Defamation League published a two hundred page report in 1994 entitled The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America— in essence a reversion to their historic liberal agenda. This caused a counter-attack from the Jewish neo-conservatives, who glossed over and downgraded Robertson’s antipathy toward Jews because of the Christian Right’s support for Israel.17 Even so, there were at least two arguments for a dialogue between these two political, cultural, and religious sub-cultures. Firstly, there was a need for the two groups to understand each other religiously and thereby combine their efforts to support Israel. Secondly, there was a political need to bring together both Jewish and non-Jewish neo-conservatives to work for Israel within Republican Party circles. Although only 20–25 percent of Jews voted Republican, Jewish adherents formed the National Jewish Coalition in 1985 in the heyday of Reaganite America. It essentially performed a co-ordinating function between the Jewish community, the Republican Party, and the Christian Right. It attempted, particularly during the Clinton Presidency, to present a more acceptable face of the Christian Right to Jews. This effort was assisted by the young director of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, who tended to downplay Pat Robertson’s more extreme views and broaden his organisation’s approach—more a religious neo-

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conservatism than radical dispensationalism. Although Reed wrote to Senate Majority leader Bob Dole and Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 that Jerusalem should remain undivided, an official invitation for him to visit Israel was blocked. Yossi Beilin, the deputy Foreign Minister in the Rabin government justified his decision by suggesting that Reed represented ‘a grave phenomenon of the American Right.’18 Although Reed was a highly influential figure and had certainly attempted to neutralize Robertson’s faux pas, he had little sympathy with the policies of the Rabin government. He believed that Israel should not return the Golan Heights and that the PLO should not receive aid.19 Part of the National Jewish Coalition’s tactics was to accuse the Christian Right’s detractors as ‘scare-mongers’ and hidden Democrats. Yet, although efforts were made to build bridges, even Jewish Republicans continued to have reservations about the Christian Right.20 It was, however, difficult to categorize the Christian Right. There were even liberals who suggested that such accusations of antiSemitism were wide of the mark. What threatens Jews is something else, something more insoluble. It is the Christian fundamentalist belief, protected by the First Amendment, that their religious precepts are the only ones that will save everyone else. In all good conscience then, would it not be ill-willed of them not to want the political state to pass laws that their religion says are necessary for everyone’s salvation? If Christian fundamentalists were a large majority in this country and gained political control, they would have to do just that—not because they are evil or antiSemitic, but because of their integrity.21

In the early 1990s, ‘Voices United for Israel’ was established to promote Jewish-Evangelical support for Israel. At the outset, its executive committee included senior representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the National Jewish Coalition, and Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Within a couple of years all these organisations had pulled out citing proselytization of Jews and overt support for the Republicans. Eckstein resigned because Voices United for Israel was partisan, ‘anti-Rabin, pro-Likud’.22 Even so, it provided a platform for Netanyahu in April 1997, when he addressed an audience of mainly evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews. The only non-messianic Jews to attend were the President of the pro-Likud Zionist Organisation of America, the executive director of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and representatives from Americans for a Safe Israel and the Women in Green—all opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.



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Voices United for Israel expanded its horizons when it asked other groups to join it after Netanyahu’s election to form a ‘National Unity Coalition for Israel.’ Only those Jewish organisations that supported the Israeli Right joined. [They did so because it was] perceived primarily to be a political asset for the Likud rather than an opponent of the social agenda of United States Jewry. [There was criticism of Netanyahu’s policy to reach an agreement on Hebron in 1997 with the Palestinians.] In an advertisement in the Jerusalem Post, they commented: When Gamla and Massada fell two thousand years ago, Jerusalem fell. Today Hebron, tomorrow Jerusalem. You have almost lost the battle for Hebron, and as you back away from your right and your decision to build homes for Jews on Jewish-owned land next to the Mount of Olives (Ras el-Amud), we see that even the red lines within Jerusalem are being whittled down.23

Despite their disdain for the Hebron Accord, the Christian Right continued to support Netanyahu. In 1996, Netanyahu forged an alliance between the Israel-Christian Advocacy Council and the Ministry of Tourism. The three thousandth anniversary of Jerusalem was utilized by calling for a united Jerusalem and to urge Netanyahu not to give way. At a mass meeting in January 1998, organized by the National Unity Coalition, Netanyahu’s presence on the eve of the Lewinsky affair became a symbolic rallying point of opposition to the Clinton administration. Following Netanyahu’s speech, the crowd of evangelical Christians chanted ‘not one inch.’ The rally evoked an unusually open criticism from Jewish leaders in the United States—that it was undermining Jewish communal opposition to the Christian Right and ‘poking a finger in the [Clinton] administration’s eye.’24 The proximity to the Republican Party was further cemented through Netanyahu’s meeting with Newt Gingrich, who promptly attacked the White House for its Israel policy. Falwell once more called upon an American President not to pressure a Likud Prime Minister and offered to mobilize evangelical churches to oppose an Israeli redeployment on the West Bank.25 The International Christian Embassy The International Christian Embassy under its spokesman, Jan Willem van der Hoeven, aligned itself quickly with Likud policies. It congratulated the second Begin government for annexing the Golan, ‘knowing that the Golan was part of the Promised Land of Israel—the tribe of Manasseh.’ In the hope of seeing Israel’s return to the borders of the

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Promised Land, it demonstrated in support of the invasion of Lebanon, chaperoned the Christian media to Lebanon, and took issue with those who opposed the war. It condemned a Vatican meeting with Arafat, but criticized the Likud when Begin agreed to return Sinai to Sadat: ‘The Bible does not say you will receive half the land of Canaan. We are better Zionists than you Israelis. You don’t fully believe in your cause.’26 Such views were further propagated through an information service encompassing news digests, radio, television, and, in more recent times, the internet. It faithfully reflected the official explanations of the Likud except where the latter parted company with the maximalist approach of Genesis. It also began to enlist evangelicals outside of Israel to campaign actively against the return of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.27 The policy toward the Palestinians followed the traditional Revisionist Zionist position of individual autonomy and functional rights rather than transfer. It also reflected the religious categorization of the Palestinian as a ger toshav (resident alien) and dispensationalist antipathy toward Islam. Those Arabs who are willing to live within Israel’s borders, as faithful Israeli citizens, must have all their rights concerning property and individual freedom fully protected. This is a clear command from the God of Israel (See Ezekiel 47:22–23). But the creation of a Muslim Palestinian State between Israel and Jordan would be a disaster and a source of continual friction. In all likelihood it would be used as a Cuba-style stepping stone by the Soviet Union, to the detriment of both Israelis and Arabs.28

For some dispensationalists, the mountains mentioned in Ezekiel and Jeremiah were seen as synonymous with the West Bank. The PLO was regarded as setting itself against God by aspiring to a state in the same region. To oppose Jewish settlement in the West Bank was to oppose the will of God.29 In the United States, nearly four thousand evangelicals gathered in Dallas ‘to pray for Jerusalem during the Gulf War.’30 The Oslo Accords and the general reconciliation with Palestinian nationalism—which meant returning parts of the Land of Israel—were opposed by dispensationalists in Israel. The response of the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, shortly after the Arafat-Rabin handshake, that it had been a great day for Zionism, was found to be ‘puzzling.’31 In the 1996 election when Netanyahu defeated Peres by the narrowest of margins, the Embassy published a breakdown of the Christian vote by the Mechric Institute. It showed that most Christians—Maronites, Catholics, Assyrians, Copts, Armenians, Evangelicals—strongly favoured Netanyahu because of his perceived anti-Islamic stand. The Embassy



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estimated that 30,000 Christians voted for Netanyahu—the approximate size of his majority over Peres.32 Likud’s drift away from its traditional ideological stand, however, distanced dispensationalists in Israel. The Hebron Agreement in early 1997 brought the strongest disagreement from the International Christian Embassy. ‘Our support for Israel and the Jewish people is based not on Likud policy or Labour policy—but on our understanding of God’s Word.’33 ‘The Embassy “doesn’t see a border” between Israel and the Territories and supports educational and defense projects for both Jews and Arabs on the West Bank.’34 For all its reservations about Likud’s policies, the ICEJ would have preferred Netanyahu over Barak.35 When Netanyahu addressed the Embassy’s traditional Succot celebration in 1998, he told his audience that ‘we shall keep the land of Israel and we shall protect the State of Israel.’36 Following Barak’s victory, Netanyahu’s approach was portrayed by the Embassy as ‘a stand on God’s word as the foundation for Israel’s modern existence.’37 Although it had strongly opposed Labour policy, the ICEJ had maintained good relations with the Rabin government, which understood—as Likud had done—the intense commitment of dispensationalists. The ideological difference between the Embassy and a seemingly post-ideological Israel was effectively downgraded. (‘Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists: Symbiotic Relationship’, Israel Studies 5, no. 1, Spring 2000)

NOTES 1.  Jewish Tribune, 23 January 1998. 2. Colin Shindler, ‘No Pasaran: The Jews Who Fought in Spain’, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1986. 3. Julian Barnes, ‘Even Worse Than We Thought’, New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015. 4.  Jan Cienski, ‘Migrants Carry “Parasites and Protozoa”, Warns Polish Opposition Leader’, Politico, 14 October 2015. 5.  Ha’aretz, 3 February 2016. 6.  Peter Beinart, ‘Secularism on the Ascent’, Ha’aretz, 6 February 2016. 7.  Jerusalem Post, 10 August 1981. 8.  Roanoke Times and World News, 14 September 1979. 9.  Merrill Simon, Jerry Falwell and the Jews (New York: Jonathan David, 1984).

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10.  Michael Lind, New York Review of Books, 2 February 1995. 11.  Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Review of Books, 20 April 1995. 12. Ibid. 13.  Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Milton Keynes: Word, 1992). 14.  Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom (Milton Keynes: Word, 1993), p. 253. 15.  Pat Robertson, The Collected Works of Pat Robertson (Milton Keynes: Word, 1994), pp. 256–57, quoted in Lind, New York Review of Books. 16.  Jerusalem Post, 3 April 1987. 17.  Midge Decter, ‘The ADL and the Religious Right’, Commentary 98, no. 3, 1994, pp. 45–47. 18.  Ha’aretz, 12 June 1995. 19.  MetroWest Jewish News, 23 June 1995. 20.  Marshall J. Breger, ‘Talking to the Religious Right’, National Jewish Coalition Bulletin, May–June 1994. 21.  Earl Raab, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 15 September 1995. 22.  Jerusalem Post, 4 May 1995. 23.  Jerusalem Post, 30 December 1996. 24.  Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 23 January 1998. 25.  Donald Wagner, ‘Reagan and Begin, Bibi and Jerry: The Theo-political Alliance of the Likud Party with the American Christian Right’, Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 4, 1998, pp. 33–51. 26.  Jerusalem Post, 24 July 1981. 27. Ibid. 28.  Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Christian Zionism and Its Biblical Basis (Jerusalem: International Christian Embassy Jerusalem [ICEJ], 1986). 29. Ibid. 30.  See Norma Archbold, The Mountains of Israel: The Bible and the West Bank. (Phoebe’s Song Publication, 1993). 31.  David R. Parsons, ‘Jerusalem: Thy Years Are Determined’, in Zionism and the Question of Jerusalem (a Special Edition of the ICEJ publication, Christian Zionism) (Jerusalem: ICEJ, 1996), p. 15. 32.  Judea Electronic Magazine, 31 May 1996, www.virtual.co.il/clients/judea/index1.html. 33. Kathy Kern, Blessing Israel? Christian Embassy Responds, Christian Peacemakers Team, quoted from www. virginiawater.co.uk, in Stephen Sizer, The Promised Land: A Critical Investigation of Evangelical and Christian Zionism in Britain and the USA since 1800 (London: Middlesex University, 2002), chap. 7. 34.  Interview with David Parsons. 35.  Christian Science Monitor, 24 April 1998. 36.  IMRA (Independent Media Review and Analysis), 5 October 1998. 37. ICEJ, A Word from Jerusalem, July–August 1999.

10 The Struggle for Soviet Jewry

THE GENESIS OF THE JEWISH PROBLEM

The international campaign after 1967 to help Soviet Jews to emigrate to

Israel coincided with the fragmentation of an almost wall-to-wall Jewish solidarity with the USSR. The romance of the October Revolution in 1917 and the establishment of a workers’ state attracted multitudes who wished to create a better world. The Revolution, led by Lenin and Trotsky, however, took place at the same time as the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine. Both events appealed to Jewish sensibilities and were rooted in Jewish tradition. One was universalist, trumpeting the dawn of humanity; the other projected a vision of a state of the Jews after two millennia of exile. Many enthusiastically joined their local Communist Party. After all, Lenin had vehemently condemned antiSemitism, and Jews, albeit assimilated ones, occupied the higher echelons of the Soviet Communist Party—Trotsky himself, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Radek and many others. Lenin may have known many assimilated and acculturated Jews within his own circles; however, he was totally ignorant of the daily tribulations of the millions-strong Jewish masses in the tsarist empire. A minor Russian nobleman who rarely worked for a living, Lenin had no realistic insight into the Jewish problem and only projected theoretical solutions. His polemic against Jewish nationalism in several issues of Iskra in 1903 was directed against the Bund rather than the Zionists. Lenin’s arguments were purely 177

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ideological, but they were also integral to his desire to outmanoeuvre his opponents and thereby take over the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In order to counteract the Bund’s claim to represent Jewish workers, Lenin found it easy to locate Jews who would support him. However, for such Jews, their Jewishness was not central to their identity but more incidental, often accidental. Each was suddenly called upon to speak ‘as a Jew’. The solution to the Jewish problem in Leninist eyes was assimilation. In 1913 under Lenin’s guidance, Stalin attempted a definition of a nation: ‘A nation is a historically evolved stable community, based on language, territory, economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture. A nation is not a racial or tribal, but historically constituted community of people’. Jews, in Leninist eyes, did not fit the formula. Anomalies such as the lack of a common language amongst the Chinese and the Indians were never resolved. Neither was the fact that the Pakistanis formed their nation on the basis of a common religion. A ripple of sympathy for the Soviet experiment went out from the Jewish Diaspora. By the mid-1950s, some Jews looked back to the Spanish Civil War, the fight of the Red Army against Nazism and more recently the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States to confirm their belief in the USSR. However, others were seriously disturbed by Soviet actions. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the overt anti-Semitism arising from the Slansky trial in Prague and the anti-Jewish paranoia during the Doctors’ Plot suggested that the Soviet regime was not progressive, but primitive, not modern, but medieval, not internationalist, but nationalist. The revelation of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 together with the Soviet invasion of Hungary broke the spell. Many Jews left their local party. The shades had dropped from their eyes. Many turned to Zionism. Yet an ideological framework still mattered for some, and they moved from Left to Right—from Stalin to Thatcher and Reagan. It was, however, the destruction of six million Jews in the Shoah and the establishment of a Hebrew republic in the Middle East that sensitised even the most assimilated Jew to his Jewishness. The drip-drip of awareness of the Soviet failure to deal with the Jewish problem caused tremendous unease among the Jewish intelligentsia beyond the borders of the state.



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Moshe Sneh encapsulated this sense of betrayal when, as a leader of Maki, the Communist Party of Israel, he wrote: The planned and systematic slaughter of the majority of European Jews naturally increased self-awareness and the solidarity of Jews wherever they may be. Every Jew who remained alive knows and feels that he is alive only by chance—either because he was outside the area of the rule of the Third German Reich or because there was not enough time to put him into the gas chamber and furnace. Every Jew knows and feels that he was condemned to death only because of his Jewishness and that only by accident the death sentence was not carried out. Every Jew proudly bears in his heart the yellow patch with the Star of David that our brothers were forced to carry on their backs as a sign of disgrace while being still alive and as a shipping tag to the death camp. To come to these people now and advise them ‘assimilate please, forget that you were Jews, free yourselves from your Jewishness so that you will be free’—can anything more cynical and cruel be imagined? At any rate it is impossible to give our grieving people such advice in the name of Communism: Communism came to liberate man from alienation, not to impose it upon him and order him not to be himself.1

HOW THE SOVIET JEWRY CAMPAIGN STARTED While Khrushchev had proclaimed a thaw in the aftermath of Stalin’s demise and the execution of Beria, the Stalinist hangover still pervaded Soviet Jewry. After all, the new leaders of the Soviet Union had been loyal members of Stalin’s team and increasingly managed the USSR in his last years. In the 1950s, Jews were restricted in their cultural desires and religious practices. Emigration to Israel was virtually impossible and contacts with other Diaspora communities non-existent. In this post-Stalinist period, Jews in the USSR began to reflect on the Soviet experience, its flaws and repressive nature, the Gulag, the stifling conformity and lack of creative expression—and began to turn their heads instead towards Israel. It was at this time a move began to save Soviet Jewry.

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In August 1952, the cream of Yiddish writers—Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Dovid Hofshteyn—were executed along with old-guard Bolsheviks such as Solomon Lozovsky. Out of the fifteen defendants, only Professor Lina Shtern was spared. The judge who had been minded to abandon the proceedings because of inadequate evidence was informed by Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s heir apparent, that ‘the sentence has been approved by the people. . . . Carry out the Politbureau’s ruling!’ In November 1952, the ashes of eleven of the defendants of the Slansky trial were scattered upon the icy streets of Prague. A majority were leading Jewish communists—vehemently anti-Zionist in their views—who had been accused of being espionage agents for Israel. The party paper, Rude Pravo, proclaimed before their execution that ‘those 14 creatures on trial are not human beings.’ On 1 December 1952, Stalin told the members of the party central committee that the Jews were ‘a spying nation’ and that ever since 1945 he had been driven to open Soviet eyes to the new enemy of the proletariat—the Jews and the United States. All this was to prepare the ground for the Doctors’ Plot in which the Kremlin physicians—mainly Jewish—would be accused of attempting to poison the leadership of the USSR. The blueprint was to try them and find them guilty. An angry, patriotic gathering, it was later rumoured, would push aside the guards, ‘understandably’ take matters into their hands—and string up the doctors on the nearest lampposts. Only Stalin’s unexpected demise saved them. It was in this menacing atmosphere that the international campaign to save Soviet Jewry truly began. An operation named Nativ, responsible solely to Ben-Gurion, was established. An office Lishkat Hakesher— later known as ‘the office with no name’—was set up in Tel Aviv on the initiative of Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad and Shaul Avigur, the founder of Shai, the intelligence wing of the Haganah. Avigur supervised attempts to establish contact with Soviet Jews and to rekindle once more their interest in Jewishness and Judaism. Families of Russian speakers were sent to the Moscow Embassy and these often included the children of the elite such as Golda Meir’s daughter and Moshe Sharett’s son. The early documented material on Nativ still remains classified but one of its first recruits was Nehemiah Levanon, later the head of the operation. With the fall of the USSR, Levanon was able to publish his account of Nativ’s activities in 1995.



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The Soviet Union was a closed society and its leaders wanted it to remain so. Lenin had embraced assimilation as the solution to the Jewish problem. Thousands of Zionists had been arrested in 1924 and very few subsequently allowed to emigrate—only 26 were allowed to leave in 1953. By the 1950s, Soviet Jews therefore knew little about their history and heritage. The central task of the Nativ emissaries was to distribute informative Russian language material about Jews and Israel to Soviet Jews. They visited the diminishing number of synagogues and clandestinely passed books and pamphlets to those who wished to understand their Jewish identity. If detected, such diplomats faced intimidation, threats and deportation. Eliahu Hazan had maintained contact with the Podolsky family, who had been sentenced to long years in strict-regime labour camps. In 1957, Hazan was picked up in Odessa and stopped from contacting his embassy despite his diplomatic immunity. His KGB interrogators attempted to turn him into working for them. He was told: You will happily disappear and your clothes will be found on a beach. It happens sometimes that people go swimming in the sea and do not return. No law will help you. You are in our hands and you have no choice but to submit if you wish to see your wife and daughter again.

Hazan was eventually released and permitted to return to Moscow. Levanon himself was expelled from the USSR in 1955. At the same time, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, together with Avigur and Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Jewish Congress, decided to launch a campaign among Diaspora Jews for their Soviet brethren. In the United States, such efforts were directed at the main political parties, coloured by cold-war animosity. In Europe, the approach was different. Intellectuals, writers and academics were asked to support the cause of human rights for Soviet Jews—emigration to Israel was hardly mentioned. Israel’s government did not wish to be seen to be involved and did not want to damage its already shaky diplomatic relations with the Kremlin. Thus, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the poet Pablo Neruda voiced their concern. In the UK, the writer Emanuel Litvinoff was a prime mover and he was able to convince Bertrand Russell to speak out for Soviet Jewry. Litvinoff, an East End Jew, had lived through the struggle against home-grown fascism, the Shoah and the rise of Israel—and was deeply

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affected. The following lines are from a scathing poem he had written called, ‘To T. S. Eliot’: I am not one accepted in your parish Bleistein is my relative and I share the protozoic slime of Shylock, a page in Stürmer, and, underneath the cities, a billet somewhat lower than the rats.

In 1956 Litvinoff visited Moscow with his first wife and was appalled to discover the fate of Soviet Jews. He began a single-handed campaign for Soviet Jews which lasted more than 30 years and laid the foundations for others to become involved. Litvinoff operated during a climate of sympathy—particularly from ex-communists who had left the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Many Jews had also shaken off the hypnotic embrace of Communism following the Nazi-Soviet pact and the persecutions during Stalin’s last years. Jewish communal bodies both here in the UK and in the United States, however, were reticent about public involvement. Yet there was continual pressure from the post-war generation, whose outlook had been forged by the revelations of the Shoah. There were also many survivors living in the UK; such memories could not be eradicated. In May 1966, a march took place from Hyde Park Corner to the Soviet Embassy in Kensington. This was one of the first actions of the Universities’ Committee for Soviet Jewry, led by Gordon Hausmann, Mike Hunter, Allan Segal and, later, Malcolm Lewis and Jonathan Lewis. In addition to these Jewish students, there were also adherents of the New Left in the 1960s, who brought expertise from protests against the war in Vietnam and against apartheid in South Africa. This march significantly took place without the knowledge of the Board of Deputies and other communal organisations. Annual gatherings outside the Soviet Embassy followed on Simhat Torah—to parallel Soviet Jewish gatherings outside the main synagogue in Moscow’s Arkhipova Street. The Six-Day War truly ignited an emigration movement in the USSR—and the Kremlin was unable to stem the demand to leave. (‘The Origin of the Soviet Jewry Campaign in the UK’, Jewish Chronicle, 27 November 2015)



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It was however in the United States that the campaign truly began and it led the way for other Diaspora communities to emulate. However, more often than not, it was outsiders and the post-Holocaust generation that indicated the way forward and not the established Jewish organisations. By 1967 grassroots activism and high-level diplomacy went hand-in-hand. President Eisenhower was in fact approached by the American Jewish leadership in February 1953 to raise the issue of emigration with the Kremlin. He adamantly refused to do so because the US needed the Arab world to act as a bulwark against communist encroachment in the Middle East. While the Israelis really wanted aliyah, they concurred with US Jewry to raise the issue initially as a broad human rights one. More than 160,000 Jews had entered the US from the DP camps after 1945. There was also a growing belief, particularly among the younger generation, that Jewish leaders hadn’t done enough to stop the murder of the six million in Europe and that Soviet Jewry should not be left to its fate. And [the author Pauline] Peretz demonstrates that there was still deep reluctance to establish the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry in 1963. At the same time, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) was founded by Jacob Birnbaum and Glenn Richter. Birnbaum, originally from Germany but who grew up in Britain, was strongly opposed to the conservatism of the mainstream organisations. He argued that saving Soviet Jewry was ‘a struggle and not a conference.’ Many members of the SSSJ were survivors’ children, Orthodox and intent on aliyah, but were highly influenced by the American civil-rights movement. Their symbol of the shofar was seen as the equivalent of the clenched fist of the Black Panthers. Heightened awareness after the Six-Day War and the first Leningrad trial in 1970 further catalysed American Jewry to take action. In 1971, the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry was established to further oppose ‘the Jewish establishment.’ At that time, Nixon and Kissinger did not wish to raise the emigration issue with Brezhnev because they believed it would inhibit efforts to secure a détente between the superpowers—to the extent that they refused even to meet community leaders. The linking of free emigration to favourable trade terms divided these rival organisations even further. Yet American Jews had the bit between their teeth—and Nativ lost influence to play a secondary role during the 1970s. (Review of Pauline Peretz’s Let My People Go, in the Jewish Chronicle, 4 December 2015)

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THE CHANGE IN ISRAELI POLICY AND JEWISH ACTIVISM Throughout the early part of the 1960s the campaign for Soviet Jewry had been relatively low-key amongst Jewish communities. Israel’s victory in six days in June 1967 however profoundly changed attitudes. Within the Soviet Union itself, the victory occurred when the vision of Communism had been reduced to hollow slogans and emptied of any real content in its task to build a new world. Israel came to be viewed as another possibility to maintain the ideal of constructing an open society. It would surpass the failed Soviet experiment. For the early activists and refuseniks, this took precedence over a better life in a new land. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 enhanced the sense of entrapment within the USSR and indifference to Soviet ideals. Individual appeals to emigrate led to collective letters. This, in itself, was dangerous, since it implied organised groups, individuals working together. They could be depicted as subterranean, conspiratorial and antiSoviet. Yet there was no mass repression on the scale of Stalinist purges. While Brezhnev and Kosygin had reversed Khrushchev’s mild thaw, they had not brought back ‘the good old days’. This persuaded the Israeli government to openly call for immigration to Israel rather than manoeuvre Diaspora communities to demand equal rights for Soviet Jews—freedom of religion and culture. In November 1969, Golda Meir read passages from a letter, signed by the heads of eighteen Georgian Jewish families which had been sent three months before. Its emotive idealism projected the legacy of both the past and the present. They say there is a total of twelve million Jews in the world. But whoever thinks there are only twelve million of us is mistaken. For with those who pray for Israel are hundreds of millions who did not live to this day, who were tortured to death, who are no longer here. They walk shoulder to shoulder with us, unconquered and immortal, those who handed down to us the traditions of struggle and faith. This is why we want to go to Israel.

The change in approach by the Israeli government was also in response to greater publicity about the Jewish question in the USSR in the Western press, the closer contact between Soviet Jews and their relatives in Israel, the recommencing of emigration from the USSR in the summer of 1968



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and the growing pressure from the Israeli Right on the government to be more active. In the Diaspora, books such as Elie Wiesel’s The Jews of Silence implicitly connected the question of Soviet Jewry with the Shoah. It asked whether Diaspora Jews would be bystanders. There had also been changes in government. The new prime minister, Golda Meir, had been the first Israeli ambassador to Moscow. She had witnessed the mass demonstrations of Soviet Jews when she had attended synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in September 1948. Nehemiah Levanon had taken over from Shaul Avigur as the head of Nativ. All these factors effectively propelled Golda Meir to announce a change of policy at the end of 1969. We will wait for months and years. We will wait all our lives if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes. We believe: our prayers have reached God. We know: our appeals will reach people. For we are asking: let us go to the land of our forefathers.

When Golda Meir sat down after reading the collective letter of the heads of eighteen Soviet Georgian families to the assembled Knesset members, there was literally not a dry eye in the House. The majestic use of biblical phraseology; the eloquent reminder of the tragic past— the Inquisition, Dreyfus, Beilis, the camps—coerced all who read or heard it to take notice. The imagery of the letter symbolised Soviet Jews as the representatives of those who had survived the long march through the centuries of persecution. ‘The prophecy has come true, Israel has risen from the ashes: we have not forgotten Jerusalem, and it needs our hands.’ The effect of the letter was electrifying throughout Israel and the Diaspora. Its eighteen signatories were designated as leaders of the Jewish movement. Without a doubt, its publication was a vital benchmark in the development of the Jewish national movement in the USSR. For the first time, the Government of Israel publicly acknowledged the existence of an emigration movement and pledged its support. In this country, it catalysed an understanding of the situation and history of Soviet Jewry which has led to the involvement of thousands of people during the past decade. And yet, it was not that simple. The background to the letter of the eighteen in Georgia and its eventual release by Golda Meir in Israel was far more complex, and indeed controversial, than is generally realised.

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After the Six-Day War, a number of brave individuals sent the first open letters to Soviet leaders requesting exit visas. Their approach was usually humanitarian, and the basis for emigration was one of family reunification. In August 1968, the Kremlin began once again to permit Jews to leave for Israel after a hiatus of over a year, due to Soviet anger at the outcome of the Six-Day War. In November 1968, well-known refuseniks from Riga were issued with emigration permits. The movement leaders understood that an increase in activity would not only involve more Jews, but would also force the Kremlin to issue exit visas to the ‘trouble­makers,’ as had been the case in Riga. At the beginning of 1969, two Moscow activists, Vitaly Svechinsky and Tina Brodetskaya, put forward the concept of a collective letter to world Jewry. A rough draft was prepared and a number of refuseniks offered to sign. Yet the leadership of the Moscow movement reacted cautiously at such a major step. To sign an appeal to foreign Jews was dangerous enough, but to do it collectively was to provide written proof that the Jews were organised and working together. Such an approach could then be interpreted as a ‘Zionist conspiracy,’ and even as an ‘anti-Soviet organisation.’ By the summer of 1969, such reservations had evaporated and the Moscow leadership called a meeting of activists from other cities. Congregating in a forest outside Moscow in mid-August, the direction of the movement was debated, as was the provision of educational material; but most important was the timing of the release of the first collective letter. It was agreed that Svechinsky would release the letter of the Moscow ten to Western journalists in September. The Georgian representative at the meeting was Gershon Tsitsuashvili, who had been involved in clandestine Jewish activities since the early 1960s. Tsitsuashvili had studied oriental languages, including Hebrew, at the University of Tbilisi. As in Riga, Jews in Georgia were acutely conscious of their Jewish heritage, and even more so following the Six-Day War. And yet, the first official collective approach of Soviet Jews to their brothers in the West did not come from the mainstream movement. Unknown to Tsitsuashvili, a group of Georgian Jews had reached a similar conclusion about the need for a collective letter. In February 1969, Albert Mikhailashvili went to Moscow with the names of eighty-eight families who wished to leave. In Moscow, as in



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Georgia, each public body proved as intransigent as the one before. In June, Mikhailashvili, Shabata Elashvili, Khaim Mikhelashvili and Khaim Tetruashvili each wrote to Golda Meir in Israel. None received a reply. The next step was logically to write a collective letter. In July, Mikhailashvili, Elashvili and Ben-Zion Yakobishvili organised the drafting of the letter and the collection of the signatures of eighteen heads of families, representing over a hundred people in all. The letter was dated 6 August 1969, and was addressed to Golda Meir, with instructions for the letter to be passed on to Israel’s representative at the UN, Yosef Tekoah. Shabata Elashvili and Ben-Zion Yakobishvili requested that ‘the letter be published in the press and broadcast in the Russian language over the Voice of Israel. We will listen to broadcasts on the 2nd, 9th, 16th and 23rd of Elul and on the first day of Tishri.’ To [the Israeli representative to the UN, Yosef] Tekoah, they wrote: ‘We request you to take steps to distribute the enclosed letter to the members of the United Nations and also to have it published in the press with the complete list of signatories, names and surnames and, if necessary, addresses.’ On 8 August, Shabata Elashvili went to Moscow and handed the letter to the Dutch Embassy, which looked after Israel’s diplomatic interests in the USSR. The eighteen then waited. Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) approached in anticipation and departed in depression. And when, after two months, there was still silence, they began to believe that their appeal was not important enough for Israel to sit up and take note. Then, in November, the letter was broadcast over the Voice of Israel in Russian. The eighteen could not believe it. The impact on Georgian Jews was devastating and many came, knocking on the doors of the signatories, to ask them how they, too, could emigrate to Israel. All this went on oblivious of the fact that the mainstream movement was meeting in Moscow to discuss the possibility of collective appeals. The letter of the eighteen posed a problem for the Israeli Government. It had pursued a policy of quiet diplomacy in attempting to help Soviet Jews since the establishment of the State. Israeli tourists and diplomats who visited the USSR would often come across Soviet Jews during the course of their travels. Contact with a Jewish world closed to them through the most innocuous of articles, such as a Jerusalem postcard, evoked a new awareness.

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However, the trauma of the Black Years, when Stalin imprisoned or murdered the cream of Jewish leadership, made successive governments of Israel excessively cautious and bureaucratic in their dealings with the Kremlin. Moreover, they had to take into consideration the interests of the State vis-à-vis Moscow. When the first activists arrived from Riga in 1969, they began to shout and protest about their relatives and friends left behind in the Soviet Union. If they were ‘troublemakers’ in the USSR, why should they cease their outrageous, if not courageous, activities in Israel? A clash between the activists and the Government was inevitable. Indeed, while Golda Meir was reading the letter of the eighteen in the Knesset, a few hundred yards away students were demonstrating against former government policy. Neither image in this conflict was a simple or accurate one. After the rupture of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1967, the Israeli Government had little to lose in openly backing a Jewish repatriation movement which had simultaneously come into the open. Moreover, the first activists to be allowed out were passionately anti-communist and therefore, not unexpectedly, worshippers at the altar of Jabotinsky. They saw events and institutions in polarised terms. The fact that members of the Israeli Cabinet called themselves socialists, or that the Histadrut celebrated May Day, was incomprehensible and pure anathema to them. It was not surprising that, after a comparatively short time, the (right-wing) opposition parties began to speak out defiantly in support of Soviet Jews. A black image of the Government, coupled with it [a] shining white one of the Opposition, served their political interests well. All these considerations prompted the Government of Israel to change its position on Soviet Jews after decades of unseen work. More and more Soviet Jews were coming out and visiting Jewish communities in the Diaspora. There they preached the evangelical message of Soviet Zionism to growing audiences. To have kept quiet would have been to deny the existence of a modern-day Zionist movement—something which contradicted the raison d’être of Israel and which made nonsense of aliyah campaigns in the West. By the summer of 1969, the Riga activists had forced the issue both in the press and on the floor of the Knesset. The Prime Minister, Golda Meir, met a delegation of Soviet Jews. This may have been the turningpoint in moving to a more open position.



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A decision was taken to ‘go public.’ The letter of the eighteen and many others were presented by Golda in the Knesset, and by Tekoah at the UN, despite the fact that they had been circulating for weeks before among Soviet Jews in Israel. The eighteen Georgian families found themselves harassed. The Soviet press labelled the letter a ‘forgery’ and tried to cajole the eighteen into writing another letter denouncing the first one. Even the threat of trial and imprisonment could not persuade them to renounce their ideals. Albert Mikhailashvili found himself out of work and forced to live in a rat-infested cellar with the other nine members of his family. Their famous first letter was followed by a second and a third, equally as eloquent and as defiant as the first. By 1971, all had been permitted to leave for Israel, including one who, dying from cancer, was carried by stretcher on to the soil of Israel. In Georgia itself, Jews applied to leave in droves. Activists would enter a town and brazenly set up a stand to inform Jews how to leave. Villages were emptied when whole communities left. Today the letter of the eighteen has become folklore—even streets in Israel have been named after the signatories. (‘How Georgia’s Jews Helped to Open the Gates’, Jewish Chronicle, 20 November 1981)

THE FIRST TRIALS OF SOVIET JEWS These changes in Israel, the Diaspora and the Soviet Union itself brought a greater activism amongst Soviet Jews—there were mass sit-ins at emigration offices and defiant demonstrations in public places. This also brought about a response of greater repression by the Soviet authorities. The first collective trial of Soviet Jews, arraigned for their desire to go to Israel, was staged in the town of Riazan, some 300 km, south of Moscow, in February 1970. Details only reached the west in mid-1971 and even then were very fragmentary. The defendants were six young Jewish students from the Riazan Institute of Radio Technology who had become interested in the idea of emigration to Israel soon after the Six-Day War. From working for human rights generally, they had turned to an educational programme,

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aimed at young Jews. This consisted of distributing such material as tape recordings of Leon Uris’s Exodus and the Churchills’s Six-Day War as well as volumes of Dubnov’s History of the Jewish People. Appropriately the room at the Institute of Shimon Grillius, one of the main defendants at the Riazan trial, was affectionately dubbed ‘the Evreiskaya Synagoga’ because of his dedication to the idea of aliyah. His work also earned him the attention of the local KGB and on 21 August 1969, four KGB officers, armed with a search warrant, presented themselves at his home in Klaipeda in Lithuania. They confiscated a number of documents including a seven-page article he had written on the Jewish problem in the USSR, tape recordings of Kol Yisrael (Voice of Israel radio) from the Six-Day War, articles by Vladimir Jabotinsky and a copy of Rumanian Foreign Minister Manescu’s speech to the UN in 1967. All these items were referred to in the official record of the search of the Grillius home under articles of the Lithuanian Criminal Code dealing with ‘anti-Soviet activities.’ The KGB men arrested Grillius and returned with him to Riazan. Three days previously, another three Jews, the brothers, Yuri and Valery Vudka and Oleg Frolov had been detained on similar charges. All these arrests ‘happened’ to coincide with the arrival of affidavits from relatives in Israel. The timing was clearly designed to act as a warning to any Jew in the region who was considering emigration to Israel. Grillius’s parents in Riazan, for example, received their permit on 23 August, two days after the arrest of their son. Again the psychological threat of a family break-up was clearly used as a weapon against potential emigrants. Grillius was held in the KGB prison in Riazan for nearly six months. During that time numerous Jewish students were expelled from colleges and universities and meetings were held by party representatives to explain that an ‘anti-Soviet organisation of Zionists’ had been discovered. In the course of their trial, the defendants showed some of the injustices done to the Jews in the USSR. Yuri Vudka claimed that they did not have any facilities for propagating a national life: they had no schools, no books, no theatres, no newspapers of their own—not even the possibility of teaching their children the aleph bet [Hebrew alphabet]. In Vilnius for example, where the Jews far outnumbered the Poles, there was a fine Polish language newspaper, but the Jews had nothing. The judge, Matveyev, accused Yuri Vudka of being a nationalist. To which Vudka replied defiantly: ‘If a nationalist is someone



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who demands for his people textbooks, culture and a homeland, then I am the first nationalist.’ Shimon Grillius wanted to know why his father in a capitalist Lithuania, had the possibility of going to a Jewish school, reading Jewish books and singing Jewish songs while he, in a socialist country, was denied all of these. One of the more extraordinary incidents of the trial was an accusation by the prosecutor that Bertrand Russell was an anti-Soviet figure. Grillius had addressed a letter to the British philosopher (who died a week or so before the trial) asking for his help to go to Israel. The letter which never crossed the borders of the Soviet Union, was also produced as evidence of ‘anti-Soviet activity.’ Since then nine of Russell’s colleagues including David Dillinger, Lawrence Daly and Laurent Schwartz have written to Leonid Brezhnev, demanding an explanation. So far, Brezhnev has not replied. The accused were all found guilty and extremely harsh sentences meted out. Yuri Vudka received the maximum, seven years ‘strict regime.’ Grillius and Frolov were given five years and Yuri Vudka’s brother, Valery, three years. The other two defendants, Martimonov and Zaslavsky were placed on probation. In a final speech, Grillius reaffirmed his intention to emigrate to Israel, with a concluding [traditional greeting] ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ in Hebrew. He repeated the phrase in Russian—‘your language,’ he told the court, which earned him a sharp dig in the back from his guard. He and the others sentenced with him are in [the strict-regime labour camp] Potma. Another trial which was unknown until quite recently was that of the two teachers from Bendery, Yaakov Suslensky and Yosef Meshener. Like the Riazan defendants, Suslensky and Meshener had initially concerned themselves with violations of human rights, but had gradually become more involved with the idea of emigrating to Israel. Suslensky, as a teacher of English, had belonged to the English section of the international friendship club in Bendery. He then had the bright idea of suggesting the opening of a Hebrew section, a suggestion immediately rejected by the club’s officials. Suslensky was particularly incensed by the lack of concern shown by the Soviet leadership about the brutal hanging of the Iraqi Jews in Baghdad at the beginning of 1969. In an open letter to the central Committee of the Communist party, he and Meshener complained bitterly about the Soviet Union’s attitude not only to Iraqi Jewry, but also towards its own Jewish population. These

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activities brought them to a Kishinev courtroom on a charge of antiSoviet propaganda in October 1970. The prosecutor demanded three years for Meshener and five for Suslensky. To everyone’s surprise, the judge handed out sentences of six and seven years respectively—and those sentences are now being served in Potma. (‘The Prisoners of Potma’, Jerusalem Post, 3 November 1972)

However, the incident which really ignited awareness amongst Jewish communities in the West and indeed amongst the wider global public was the attempt by Soviet Jews to take a small aircraft and fly it out of the USSR to Scandinavia en route to a new life in Israel. In hindsight, it was an amateurish and fatalistic act by its participants, who saw no way out of their enforced sojourn in the Soviet Union. The Soviets sentenced two of the participants to death on Christmas Eve 1970. This sparked an international furore of condemnation. Spain’s General Franco had similarly sentenced Basque nationalists to death—and then reprieved them, albeit in response to quiet Israeli requests. The Soviet Union in the public arena was thereby compared to the more lenient fascist Spain. Yet the discussions amongst the refuseniks about the plan to take an aircraft were tense, antagonistic and divisive. At the beginning of April 1970, a showdown occurred at a meeting of the Leningrad group (of Jewish activists). Angry exchanges took place and [Hillel] Butman was forced to give way to the majority. In addition, the majority was determined to seek the advice of Israel. A coded message was sent to Asher Blank, who had recently emigrated to Israel from Leningrad through a visiting tourist. The tourist was stopped at the customs. The letter was taken away, photographed, then returned. The letter to Blank in Jerusalem posed three questions: 1. Should the taking of a plane be carried out? 2. If they succeeded in taking the plane, should they hold a press conference in Sweden? 3. Should there be a demonstration about the general situation of the Jewish refuseniks? A few days after receiving the letter, Asher Blank telephoned Vladimir Mogilever in Leningrad and told him: ‘The professor said that you must not take the medicine. It is very dangerous particularly to the



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health.’ Butman, in acknowledgement, commented: ‘We understood the answers and will do what the professor said.’ [Mark] Dymshits was very angry at being thwarted. Butman met him a number of times in May 1970, to convince him to drop the idea and to come out into the open as an (open) ‘aleph’ activist. Dymshits continually stalled. Effectively, he played for time to preserve his anonymity so that he could work on the second plan to take an aircraft. Moreover, he was successful in convincing Butman and the Leningrad group that he had given up the aeroplane plan. At the very same time, however, together with (Edward) Kuznetsov and Sylva (Zalmanson), they were surveilling Leningrad’s Smolny airport to find ways of breaking in at night. A third plan to take an aircraft was discussed by Dymshits and Kuznetsov on 5 June. Dymshits accepted the impossibility of seizing a twelve-seater aircraft at Leningrad. Instead, he accepted that the plane should be filled with twelve trusted activists who would take over the flight when it landed at Priozersk, near the Finnish border. The two men, together with a friend from Kuznetsov’s camp days, the non-Jew, Yuri Fedorov, flew the route on 8 June and decided to put the plan into action one week hence, on 15 June 1970. The ‘trusted activists’ included members of the Zalmanson family, Iosif Mendelevich and his brother-in-law, Leib Knokh. Some, like Anatoly Altman, who helped Mendelevich in the production of the second issue of (the underground Jewish journal) Iton joined only on 9 June. The plan was vague, the preparations were rushed and the security was lax. The women would go to Priozersk with (Boris) Penson and Knokh and would be picked up by the others in the plane. The two pilots would be pulled out of the plane and tied up in their sleeping bags. In small groups, the Riga participants left for Leningrad at staggered, unorganised intervals. All understood that the chances of success were practically nil. Even so, they felt that they had broken through that impenetrable barrier of frustration. They were translating words into action. Everyone tried to put on a brave face, to think of the bright future in Israel. Yet at the back of it, they knew with certainty that the KGB was casting its long shadow over them. Before leaving, Mendelevich wrote a final testament addressed to world Jewry which clearly outlined the reasons for their action. It was a determined, defiant appeal. Above all, it symbolised Mendelevich’s belief that his place on the morning of 15 June was on the tarmac of Smolny airport and not at the Iton meeting in Leningrad.

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The KGB, however, knew everything. They had even informed the Smolny airport staff that the 8.35 morning flight to Priozersk was cancelled. The second pilot was asked not to report for work that day. Just before 8.30 a.m. the pilot started the aircraft engines and gently taxied the plane along the runway. The twelve walked out on to the tarmac and lined up outside the plane. Suddenly, a phalanx of KGB men rushed at them. A fight ensued—not because of the Jews’ resistance, but because of a deep seated rivalry between the Moscow and Leningrad sections of the KGB. Moscow, which had apparently been the centre of the operation, had not co-ordinated its actions with Leningrad. As there had been so many changes in plan and personnel, the Moscow KGB decided to take no chances and to arrest everyone in sight. Naturally enough, the Leningrad KGB were not amused when they found themselves being apprehended as ‘Zionist provocateurs.’ Tempers shortened, battle commenced and medical attention was promptly required. The twelve were escorted to the airport building and the interrogations began immediately. Within thirty minutes of the arrests, the KGB machine moved into top gear to carry out its long-planned campaign to eliminate the Jewish movement in the USSR. Members of the Leningrad group who had opposed the attempt were arrested. Searches took place in cities as far apart as Sukhumi in Georgia and Kharkov in the Ukraine. In the months that followed, arrests of leading activists in Kishinev, Riga and Leningrad were made. One of these included Victor Boguslavsky, who earned his imprisonment by writing a defiant letter, entitled ‘Free my comrades,’ which effectively alerted the West. Three hours after the arrests at Smolny, Lev Eliashevich handed an envelope to Ezra Ruzinek in Riga as he had been requested to do by his friend, Iosif Mendelevich. The envelope contained two letters. One was the testament and the other contained specific details of their plans and who knew of them. Ruzinek destroyed the note, but returned the testament to Eliashevich after photographing the document. On 16 June, Eliashevich was interrogated by the KGB and asked about the letters given to him by Mendelevich. The following day, the KGB organised a confrontation between Eliashevich and Mendelevich, who had been brought from Leningrad. Mendelevich asked Eliashevich to hand over the testament, presumably in the belief that its sincerity and its statement that the act held danger only for themselves and for no one else would counteract the KGB charge of treason and criminal-



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ity. Ruzinek kept in touch with Eliashevich throughout this period and advised him on his every move. Eliashevich returned the testament to the KGB who warned him that if he so much as breathed a word about its existence then he, too, would be placed on trial. Ruzinek still had the negative of the testament and could have sent it abroad. The image in the West of the aeroplane affair was one of black and white. Jewish opinion postulated that Jews would not have participated in a plan to take an aircraft and termed the act a ‘KGB provocation.’ It was hoped that the propaganda value would secure the release of the arrested Jews. Moreover, to defend ‘hijackers’ in view of the recent spate of Palestinian adventures would prove difficult for World Jewry to support and for world public opinion to digest. So the central complex details of the aeroplane affair were ignored. Such an approach, whether deliberate or through lack of information, was noted by pragmatic Riga activists such as Ezra Ruzinek. The flaw in such a polarised approach was that all the eggs were put in one basket. In not differentiating between those who participated in the attempt and the mainstream movement, the KGB’s task was made easier in convicting activists such as Butman, who was not involved. Even the very nature of the actual attempt in all its amateurism was ignored. The release of the testament would have clarified the nature of the attempt. Ruzinek, weighing up all these factors, decided to withhold it in view of the considerable danger to Eliashevich and the growing protest abroad. When more people were arrested in Riga in early August, younger activists argued that the publication of the testament would in fact protect both these prisoners and the participants in the actual affair—against any KGB distortion of their motives and intentions. It was suggested that the black and white approach appealed to the lowest common denominator in thinking and did not credit Jews and intellectuals abroad with any common sense. They also felt that withholding the whole truth, even though it was for a just cause, somehow debased the moral raison d’être of the Jewish movement. On 15 December 1970, the trial opened in Leningrad. All eleven defendants were charged with treason, which carried the death penalty. The prosecution decided to link the aeroplane affair with the preparation and distribution of Iton and other material. In this way, they hoped to connect the attempt to take the aircraft to the mainstream movement.

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The defendants were shocked by the charge of treason; they had thought that they would be tried under ‘illegal departure abroad,’ which carried a three-year sentence. The testament, which testified that they wished to leave for basically personal reasons and not political ones and that the attempt would have presented no danger except for themselves, was thus an embarrassment to the prosecution. Although its existence was not denied in court, it could not be produced because it would have destroyed distortions and refuted important arguments in the prosecution’s case. The prosecutor simply dismissed the testament as a ‘slanderous anti-Soviet document’ without referring to its contents. The defence challenged the official version of the case. For example, how legally could the defendants have hijacked a cancelled flight? Were they stealing a plane to keep it or borrowing it to return it later? Quite obviously, the authorities paid little attention to the legal subtleties. Their main concern was the impression that the trial would make inside the USSR and particularly on its Jewish population. For outside consumption they paradoxically tried to dilute the Jewish aspect of the case and to concentrate instead on its ‘criminal’ nature. Death sentences were passed on Kuznetsov and Dymshits. Mendelevich, Fedorov and Muzhenko received fifteen years. Knokh thirteen, and Altman twelve. Sylva Zalmanson was sentenced to ten years in the camps, as was Boris Penson. Her brother, Israel, got eight years. Only Mendel Bodnya escaped with the relatively light sentence of four years. On hearing the death sentences, those in the audience who had been selected to attend by the KGB began to clap. Stunned relatives, angered by these sounds, shouted at them. ‘Why applaud death?’ The answer came back: ‘Serves them right.’ The relatives of the accused then began to shout their pleas of reassurance to the accused. Penson’s mother called out ‘Children, we will be waiting for you—we shall all be in Israel.’ Mendelevich’s father shouted, ‘Israel is with you! Our people are with you!’ This soon developed into a cacophony of impassioned cries and defiant slogans ‘Am Yisrael chai—the Jewish people lives!—and together we shall build our homeland.’ Then someone began to recite the (daily prayer, the) Shema. Other relatives joined in, then the prisoners, too. The demonstration lasted seven minutes. Room number 58 of the Leningrad city court was emptied. The first Leningrad trial was over. (‘Ten Years after the Leningrad Trial: Part 2 the Plot Is Foiled’, Jewish Chronicle, 12 December 1980)

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Protest by Soviet Jews, demanding to leave for Israel, outside the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Moscow, 1 October 1973. UPI

THE VILLAGE OF ILYINKA The growing movement for emigration from the USSR brought further trials and oppression throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The activists in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga spread their message of emigration to Israel far and wide in the USSR. It reached many different types of Soviet Jews—Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Georgian and Bukharan Jews in the multinational Soviet Union. The dream of emigrating to Israel produced responses from the strangest quarters. Each of these (many Soviet) communities has its own diverse culture cemented through the long centuries of persecution. For example, the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus speak [Judeo-]Tat, a Jewish-Persian dialect while the Krimchaks of the Crimea began to develop a religious

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literature in a Turkish dialect in a Hebrew script before they were massacred to a man by the Nazis. In all the communities, the dreams of geulah (redemption) never died throughout the long years of Stalinist oppression. After the SixDay War, the Jewish emigration movement spread from Riga and Georgia until it reached even these far-flung areas. Moscow became the natural centre of this movement and Jews travelled to the capital to seek the help and advice of the refuseniks. The Moscow leadership thus became used to discovering other lifestyles which existed side by side with their own. The strangest episode in the Jewish experience came when an old man turned up on the doorstep of the Slepaks’ apartment in Gorky Street. He said that he was Grigory Yefimovich Varnavisky, aged 81, from the village of Ilyinka in the Voronezh region in Southern Russia. Though looking like a typical Russian peasant, he demonstrated to Vladimir Slepak that he could read Hebrew prayers. He said that the local Russians referred to the inhabitants of Ilyinka as ‘geri’ which is similar to the Hebrew gerim (converts). The 650 inhabitants all had Russian surnames but biblical first names such as Sarah and David. Varnavisky said that the village had been founded with others in the anti-Semitic atmosphere that had grown up in rural Russia during the blood libel case of Mendel Beilis in 1913. Local anti-Semites had threatened to murder all the Jews in the village of Tishana. The warning was heeded and Jewish homesteads were established in isolated areas of Voronezh. Throughout the years, the other villages became assimilated through intermarriage with Russian settlers. Only isolated Ilyinka, without any roads or any real contact with the outside world, survived as a Jewish collective farm. The inhabitants did their best to preserve Jewish tradition under Stalin. During the Great Purge, their shochet (ritual slaughterer) was arrested. He never returned and for years afterwards, they refused to eat meat. Now they compromise and eat meat only from cattle which they have raised themselves. Despite the momentous events and pressures of the twentieth century, the villagers are totally traditional. The dietary laws, the Sabbath, circumcision, the covering of the head by men and married women and daily prayer in the Ashkenazi tradition are all observed in Ilyinka.



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Varnavisky pointed out that every boy in the village was circumcised, even though it sometime meant taking the children to communities hundreds of miles away. In the 1970s, along with the rest of Soviet Jewry, the villagers began to dream of emigrating to Israel. In 1974, relatives in Israel sent the first invitations to the village and within a few months, a number of families were permitted to emigrate. At the same time, the authorities began to adopt a tough line. The villagers were harassed for refusing to work on Saturday and were told ‘You are Russians, not Jews.’ One of the early applicants for emigration to Israel was Shmuel Matveyev, who was called into the local KGB headquarters and intimidated. His sister’s letters from Israel were never delivered. Matveyev went on strike as a protest and the authorities retaliated by conscripting his son into the army. During Pesach (Passover) 1975 he was arrested and imprisoned for a month. He drank only water for three days and refused to eat the bread which the warders offered. In June 1976, the local newspaper attacked him, declaring ‘Who wants this man to leave Russia? Only the Zionists from Tel Aviv and the United States.’ The Matveyevs were finally given permission to go but were allowed only ten days to finalise their departure. The authorities have refused to deliver invitations from Israel to the village. Matveyev was shown some 120 undelivered invitations on the desk of the collective farm chairman. Relatives who attempted to deliver invitations were stopped by militiamen outside the village. There is no passage out of the village, since the chairman alone has the authority to issue passports. On hearing this amazing saga of the Jews of Ilyinka, Slepak and two other refuseniks travelled the long distance from Moscow to the village. But they were turned back at its outskirts. The militia, however, confirmed to Slepak that the villagers had ‘a different Easter’ and baked matzot and worshipped on Saturdays instead of Sundays. Despite the hostility of the local authorities, a few villagers have succeeded in emigrating to Israel. There, they have pointed out that for the ‘geri’ of Ilyinka, Israel is the bright light at the end of the dark tunnel and if given the freedom to leave, nine out of every ten Jews in the village would emigrate. (‘The Lost Jews of Ilyinka’, Jewish Observer, 22 September 1977)

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NOTE 1.  Moshe Sneh, Communism, Democracy and the Jewish People: Theses for the Sixteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Israel, Tel Aviv, October 1968.

11 Human Rights and the USSR

MARXIST-LENINIST ZIONISTS

During the long period of isolation from the Jewish world, there were

some Soviet Jews whose acculturation led them to convert to Christianity. They sought out Russian orthodoxy as a means of preserving a different identity from the amorphous Soviet one. They regarded themselves as Christian by religion, but Jewish by nationality—and desired to leave for Israel. Another reflection of the Soviet experience was the belief that Communism in a broader sense was still the way forward. During the 1970s, there was a group of Jewish military men in Minsk, led by Colonel Yefim Davidovich, who publicly espoused the spirit of Soviet internationalism and thereby argued that they should be allowed to go and build socialism in Israel. One of the oddest cases of Jews trying to settle in Israel is that of Naum Alshansky of Minsk. Together with his wife, Clara, Naum recently wrote to Meir Vilner, the leader of Israel’s Moscow-oriented Communist party, Rakah. They firmly declared themselves to be Marxist-Leninists and requested membership of Rakah so that they could continue their work in the international Communist movement upon reaching Israel. Naum Alshansky who now works repairing telephones, joined the Soviet Communist party in 1943 when fighting as a soldier in the Red Army and is still a Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves. Now 56, he was expelled from the party last September soon after applying to go to 201

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Israel. His wife, Clara, is a doctor and was secretary of the Communist party organisation in the clinic where she worked before she too was expelled from the party. Alshansky has expressed an unusual viewpoint in numerous other letters which he has signed. He recently replied to charges made by Boris Shumilin, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, in an interview to the Novosti press agency three months ago. Shumilin had stated that many of those who wished to emigrate to Israel were being guided ‘by mercenary private property interests.’ Alshansky commented: ‘It is not to get rich that I wish to go to Israel but to fight against social injustice, for progress and a stable peace in the Middle East’—a sentiment often expressed by young radical Zionists in the west today and which recalls the ideals of the second aliyah which also came mainly from Russia. Alshansky’s case has aroused interest in leftist circles in London who are not normally sympathetic to Israel or Zionism. For the Soviet authorities, it must create numerous ideological headaches. (‘The Marxist-Leninist Who Wishes to Emigrate to Israel’, Jewish Observer, 30 June 1972)

Many Soviet refuseniks such as Anatoly Shcharansky (Natan Sharansky) had come of political age through sympathy for the broad democratic and human rights movement in the Soviet Union which they hoped would internally reform the USSR. Khrushchev’s political and cultural thaw after Stalin’s death brought back tens of thousands of ‘zeks’ who had spent decades in the Gulag. They influenced those around them and in particular the succeeding generation. In addition, sons fell out with their blinkered Bolshevik fathers—Vladimir Slepak’s father justified the Doctors’ Plot and held the Jews responsible. Others had long memories. Isaac Rubin, a well-known economist, the uncle of the refusenik, Vitaly Rubin, had been sentenced in 1931 in the trial of the Mensheviks. A book entitled Rubinism or Communism? was published. In a letter to a friend in London, Vitaly Rubin described what happened to his uncle: When, during interrogation, various forms of physical coercion proved unsuccessful, my uncle was brought in the night, to a cellar of the Suzhdal prison, where another prisoner was being kept. His captors told him



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that if he didn’t confess. the prisoner would be executed immediately: if he did confess, however, the life of the prisoner would be spared. When he refused, the prisoner was murdered before his eyes. The same scene was repeated the following night and they murdered the second prisoner—he called out to my uncle before his death, ‘Don’t confess.’ When they prepared to kill the third prisoner, Isaac Rubin confessed.1

The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in the USSR in the early 1960s was unprecedented. However, with Khrushchev’s ousting, a harder line was initiated by Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny. These Soviet leaders however found it exceedingly difficult to return the genie to its lamp. The 1960s were marked by the trials of Daniel and Sinyavsky (1966) and of Galanskov and Ginsburg (1968) as well as open demonstrations in Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Having tasted the possibility of free expression under Khrushchev, the Soviet intelligentsia under Brezhnev was in no mood to return to their previously compliant existence—and this included many Jews, both Russified and assimilated as well as those whose Jewishness was central to their Jewish identity. The close association between Soviet Jews and liberal dissidents was perhaps best symbolised in the choice of pseudonym by the non-Jewish writer, Andrei Sinyavsky—‘Abram Tertz’. The Six-Day War in Israel in June 1967 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 sparked off both the movement for emigration and the broad human rights movement. The confluence of these two events at such a point in Soviet history meant that while the emigration movement and the human rights movement had different goals, there was also a considerable overlap. After all, was emigration to Israel not a human right? The KGB also assisted in this respect. It often issued exit visas to Jews who had no intention of going to Israel but regarded themselves as first and foremost Russian dissidents. This was a subtle means of exiling them from the Soviet Union.

THE USE AND ABUSE OF PSYCHIATRY The KGB, however, used the same methods to tar dissidents and refuseniks. One of which was to incarcerate unrepentant figures in psychiatric

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hospitals. This practice sparked a cacophony of condemnation by psychiatrists in the West and collectively through their professional associations. The blatant abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union already has a long history. Special psychiatric hospitals—as prisons for ‘political criminals’—were first established in the late 1930s by Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Prosecutor-General and ringmaster of the Stalinist show trials as a way of dealing with some of the victims provided by Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, the secret police. These hospitals were entirely a Soviet invention: the incarceration of innocent people in insane asylums was a rarity in tsarist days. The death of Stalin gave rise to a glimmer of hope that the situation would be rectified. In the mid-1950s, a commission, set up by the Central Committee of the Communist party to investigate the position of psychiatric institutions in the Soviet Union, reported that hundreds of normal, healthy people were inmates of such institutions. Hospitals in Kazan and Leningrad were filled with victims of the Stalinist purges plus a few genuinely mentally-ill people dubbed ‘political prisoners’ to create a semblance of credibility. The commission which included several well-known professors of psychiatry and leading communists, concluded that a fundamental reappraisal of the method of psychiatric diagnosis was urgently needed. It also recommended that the existing psychiatric hospitals be converted into first-class medical institutions under the supervision of the Soviet Ministry of Health. The findings of the commission were not even considered by the Central Committee. It is believed that the report was sat upon by the Stalinist members of this committee and then quietly put into the archives. Although repairing many of the effects of Stalin’s misrule, Nikita Khrushchev clearly accepted the use of mental hospitals to deal with people who were a nuisance to him. A crime is a deviation from generally accepted standards of behaviour, frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be any diseases, mental disorders, among certain men in a communist society? Evidently there can be. If that is so, then, there can be delinquencies, characteristic of people of an abnormal mind. (Pravda, 24 May 1959)

One of the most notorious places for such abuses is the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. Yaakov Khansis, ‘a Prisoner of Zion’



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spent some time there at the beginning of 1972 and emerged a completely shattered man. (Last month Khansis was transferred from a prison camp in Kirov to the psychiatric section of a prison hospital in the same city) The Serbsky Director, Professor Daniil Lunts, has worked at the Institute since the early 1950s. The institution is attached to the Ministry of Health, but Lunts has often been seen at work in the uniform of a colonel of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Professor Norman Hirt, a well-known Canadian psychiatrist, made the following observations about Lunts2: He is said to have told patients that ‘when I say a man is schizophrenic, he is schizophrenic. Just as if I say an ashtray is schizophrenic.’ And this man is responsible for perfecting a system whereby virtually every Soviet citizen who has ever undergone any psychiatric examination may find himself pronounced neurotic or psychotic on the flimsiest grounds. So pervasive is the power of the KGB that it may at any time decide to arrest a political dissident, merely on the basis of former illnesses and confine him within the notorious special psychiatric clinic, or, after a bogus trial, to an indefinite term in one of the notorious special psychiatric hospitals. It is Dr Lunts who has built up the techniques of mock ‘medical investigations’ and who is most frequently responsible for the forced medical ‘treatment’ of people against the wishes of their relatives, despite contrary evidence adduced by lawyers and acquaintances and even regardless of other medical judgment.

The sad case of Yan Krilsky, at present in a special psychiatric hospital in Sychyovka in the Smolensky region, is even more revealing. Krilsky grew up in the Perlovka suburb of Moscow in an anti-Semitic atmosphere. He was the only Jew in his class at school and was always being beaten up by the other pupils to the cries of ‘Zhid.’ Constant attacks and harassment led to a growing awareness of his Jewishness and eventually to a desire to emigrate to Israel. Krilsky’s first brush with the authorities came at a football match when he criticised the performance of a team which was being cheered by some policemen. When they shouted ‘You bloody Jew!’ to Krilsky, he answered back and was jailed for fifteen days for hooliganism. Since then Yan Krilsky’s quick temper [has] erupted more than once and caused him trouble with the authorities. In October 1971, Krilsky was attacked by a drunkard, Bykov, on his way to the cinema with a Russian girl. Bykov came up and asked for a light. Krilsky politely refused as he didn’t smoke. Bykov suddenly assailed the girl, shouting, ‘Why do you go out with a yid?’ A fight ensued and when the militia

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arrived, both men were taken to the nearest police station where witnesses testified that Bykov had been the culprit. Nothing more was heard about the incident until Krilsky’s father, Julius, submitted documents for emigration to Israel in January 1972. In mid-January Yan Krilsky was dragged from his bed by a number of KGB men. Two months later, a Moscow judge accused Krilsky of ‘hooliganism’ and rejected Bykov’s written confession that he had, in fact, been responsible for the incident. A commission of experts, called in to diagnose Krilsky’s condition cited one symptom of his illness as being ‘militant Zionism.’ The judge committed Yan to a mental hospital. Yan was then transferred to the special psychiatric hospital in Sychyovka. The Chronicle of Current Events, the journal of the Soviet Human Rights movement, has committed on this institution: ‘People who land in this colony are reduced to a condition of complete mental collapse.’ On arrival Krilsky was kept in a room where eighteen other people—many of them dangerous criminals—lived and were not allowed to leave the building for six months. At the end of last year, he was transferred to a special ward and strapped to his bed. This was supposed to be a punishment for this alleged incitement of other prisoners against the hospital orderlies. In other cases where such punishment has been meted out, prisoners are not allowed to go to the toilet and bedpans are not provided. It has also been reported that Krilsky has been injected with sulphazine, a substance not used in normal medical practice, which consists of a 1 per cent solution of purified sulphur in a peach-oil base. The drug induces fever, headaches, rheumatism of the joints, and pains in the buttocks where the injection is usually administered. Two months ago, Krilsky’s father came to London and consulted leading psychiatrists about his son. A specialist in psychological medicine, Dr Harold Merskey of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, observed afterwards: Assuming that Mr Krilsky’s account is correct—and it does appear to me to be truthful—one can say that perhaps his son has a hot-blooded temperament, but there is no evidence of schizophrenia, none to justify compulsory confinement in a mental hospital which he is now reported to be having.

When Krilsky’s case was published in the British press, many concerned people sent protest telegrams to the hospital in Sychkovka. Within a few days, Krilsky’s mother was called to the hospital and told that if any more cables arrived from Britain, her son would be charged



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with anti-Soviet activities. The cables continued to come in increasing numbers. Krilsky was later unstrapped from the bed and the conditions under which he was held improved. The hospital regime is that of a prison: in theory, one hour’s exercise a day, visitors once a month, one parcel a month. Krilsky’s reality is something different. Even if the prisoner is relatively sane when he enters such an institution, the beatings and the medical punishments do not guarantee that his mind will be normal when he leaves or rather if he leaves. Other drugs, used at Sychkovka, include aminazine and reserpine. The former causes complete lack of muscular control, destruction of the memory system and the complete exhaustive collapse of the victim, who sleeps for days on end. Reserpine destroys the protein structure of the brain. The use of wet canvas has been reported in the Serbsky Institute. Long strips of the material are wrapped around the victim from head to toe. As the canvas dries, it contracts and causes considerable pain. Psychiatrists all over the world have gradually begun to understand the methods of Professor Lunts and other KGB officials posing as professional men. Initially psychiatrists were reluctant to criticise colleagues in another country and official discussion of the problem was politely ignored at the World Psychiatric Association’s congress in Mexico in 1971. Since then there has been a growing awareness and horror at the malpractice of certain Soviet psychiatrists, more fundamentally, the abuse of the moral basis of the profession. Last January a group of 28 psychiatrists in Geneva sent an open letter to Soviet Health Minister Petrovsky, calling for ‘a broadly based enquiry to be initiated into the issue of normal people who have been interned in such institutions.’ Yet there are still those who remain unconvinced at the sufferings of a man like Yan Krilsky and abide comfortably in the respectability of their work, they should read Alexander Solzhenitsyn: It is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder. It is a variation of the gas chamber, but even more cruel: the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten, and all those involved in them will be condemned for all time, during their life and after their death.

(‘Political Psychiatry in the USSR’, Jerusalem Post, 22 June 1973)

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SOLZHENITSYN AND SAKHAROV ON THE JEWISH QUESTION Clearly the human rights movement was a direct threat to the Kremlin— whereas the emigration movement which fought for the right to leave was a lesser one. Moreover, it was certainly more difficult to label the desire to leave the USSR as a politically anti-Soviet act even though emotionally it meant a turning of the back on all things Soviet and the glorious experiment that was Communism. Yet it was exceedingly difficult for Soviet Jews who had lived all their lives in the USSR to close their eyes. They had Russian friends and colleagues—and there were many non-Jews who supported them in their aspirations to leave and settle in Israel. Solzhenitsyn was inward looking, a Slavophile and disparaging of foreign influence—which implicitly meant Jews and their historical connection with Bolshevism. In addition, his work on the Gulag emphasised the role of numerous acculturated Jews in establishing the camp network. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s riposte to the Writers’ Union on his expulsion in September 1969 could not help but impress many Jews who wished to leave for Israel. Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside. It is no longer that stifled, that sombre, irrevocable time when you expelled Akhmatova in the same servile manner. It is not even that timid frosty period when you expelled Pasternak, whining abuse at him. Was this shame not enough for you? Do you want to make it greater? But the time is near when each one of you will seek to erase his signature from today’s resolution.

Many individual Soviet Jews were grateful for Solzhenitsyn’s writings in the early 1970s and especially his epic The Gulag Archipelago. The expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the USSR in 1974 was met with both disbelief and anger. Although very much a Russian nationalist, Solzhenitsyn had numerous Jewish friends, one of whom is Lev Kopelev, the writer whose acquaintance he first made in the labour camps during Stalin’s last years. In The First Circle, the main characters, Gleb Nezhin, the critical



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cynical Russian, and Lev Rubin, the orthodox Jewish communist in the prison at Mavrino, are in fact based on the experiences of Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev in their camp in the late forties. Solzhenitsyn’s zeal for the truth sometimes irritated his friends as well as infuriating his enemies. In a Jewish context, his characterisation of unpleasant Jewish characters in addition to those positive Jewish heroes in his books Cancer Ward and The First Circle led to an unjustified accusation of anti-Semitism, instead of an admission that there is good and bad in all people. One such accusation was voiced by Mikhail Grobman, an immigrant from Russia, in an article in the Jerusalem Post in November 1972. The article aroused a great deal of criticism, among others, from four Soviet Jewish activists: Professor David Azbel, cyberneticist Mikhail Agursky, sinologist Vitaly Rubin and Natan Feingold, an artist who is now in Israel. They expressed their ‘sharpest protest against the slanderous and definitely untrue accusation of anti-Semitism against Solzhenitsyn, which compels us to dissociate ourselves utterly from such opinions.’ In the USSR, Solzhenitsyn certainly supported the right to existence of the State of Israel and condemned the massacre of Israel’s athletes at Munich. At the time of the Six-Day War when many people in Eastern Europe sympathised with Israel, and the establishment position was violently against the Jewish State, Solzhenitsyn was the target of another discriminatory campaign. During an ideological lecture at a Moscow publishing house, the speaker continually criticised Solzhenitsyn, referring to him as ‘Solzhenitser.’ When a member of the audience passed a note to him informing him that the name was in fact ‘Solzhenitsyn,’ the speaker came over and said, ‘No, it’s not a mistake. The person known to you as Solzhenitsyn is really Solzhenitser and he is a Jew.’ This inaccurate statement was repeated more than once in the USSR at that time. Even his patronymic Isaievich, which sounds Jewish was used to ‘turn him into a Jew.’ The fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a sad one for him personally. Yet it is ironic that while he wanted to remain and was forced to leave, Soviet Jews, the Slepaks, the Polskys, the Leviches and many others— are forced to remain while all they want is the possibility to leave. It is more than gratifying that Solzhenitsyn did not have to suffer the rigours and indignity of the Soviet system of strict regime labour camps. However, he was saved from trial and imprisonment only by his international prestige.

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For lesser beings, there is no protection. Alexander Feldman, a 27 year-old Jewish labourer from Kiev, was given three and a half years for allegedly assaulting a girl carrying a cake—a crime that only existed in the imagination of the KGB. (‘The Expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’, Jerusalem Post, 19 February 1974)

The approach—to work solely towards the aim of emigration to Israel— was credited to David Khavkin, who was the leader of the Moscow movement in the pre–Six-Day War period. Khavkin met human rights activists many times in the mid-1960s and they tried to change his point of view. His approach—and that of Nativ in Israel of separation between the movements—prevailed. However this link to Soviet dissidents could not be totally broken. More importantly, their support for refuseniks posed difficult questions when such dissidents were arrested and placed on trial. The official Israeli policy was to maintain a considerable distance from any notion that might be interpreted as anti-Soviet. Human rights activism, it was argued, would endanger emigration activists. Although the USSR had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel straight after the Six-Day War, there were undoubtedly contacts with the Soviets through third parties—and almost certainly through back channels as well. Any attempt at reforming the Soviet system would further damage such contacts. In the summer of 1975, the Helsinki Accord was signed by the superpowers. This publicly committed the Kremlin to the advance of human rights in the USSR, and thus catalysed the transference of the human rights issue to the public arena. Yet while there were internal differences of opinion within the refusenik movement, prominent activists such as Rubin, Slepak and Shcharansky did not shy away from the human rights activists—and certainly cooperated with them in monitoring the Helsinki agreement beyond purely Jewish concerns. Moreover, when human rights activists such as Vladimir Bukovsky and Yuri Orlov stood trial, their support for the refuseniks was reciprocated by collective letters from Soviet Jews. Such letters were not authorised for publication by Nativ. It was argued that while there was considerable private sympathy for such dissidents, others would inevitably publish these letters from Soviet Jews.



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Andrei Sakharov, the eminent Soviet scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was the iconic figure to whom many refuseniks looked and felt an obligation to help. Andrei Sakharov died on 15 December 1989. The abundance of tributes accorded to him tended to concentrate on his more recent role as an opponent of the gradualist policies of the Gorbachev regime. Yet perhaps more than anyone else, he was responsible for the historic changes that have taken place in the Soviet Union and, by extension, throughout the world. Twenty years ago, he was the original heretic: the unassuming, seemingly naïve intellectual who flew in the face of communist orthodoxy; a man who did not take account of reality, who always spoke out and who always lost. And yet, he survived two decades of hard struggle and seven lost years in exile in Gorky to receive the public acclaim of tens of thousands of supporters and admirers. Perhaps he too was amazed at the widespread influence of his views—views which officially evolved into contemporary glasnost and perestroika. Sakharov’s refusal to give up during the Brezhnev years endeared him to the small band of dissidents who fought on a wide-ranging agenda of grievances. As Anatoly Shcharansky (Natan Sharansky) has pointed out: ‘There were other celebrated dissidents, but he was the undisputed leader—the symbol of the struggle, the magnet for fighters against injustice, the people’s hero.’ Sakharov would have been very embarrassed by such an accolade. He epitomized the midrashic example of office seeking out ‘those who wish to run away from it.’ His recent Memoirs show his close affiliation with Jews and his understanding of their often untenable position in Soviet society. From early childhood, throughout his illustrious academic career, to his elevation as the moral conscience of the Russian intelligentsia, Sakharov had many Jewish friends and acquaintances. Yet the raison d’être for his human rights work was framed within a universalism which espoused many causes. Indeed, while he defended Israel and the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate there, he was acutely aware of the Palestinian national problem and the need for direct negotiations. Ironically, even though he brought about profound political changes, he was in reality a fundamentally apolitical person. For Sakharov, idealism could be defined only in terms of reality and a sense of striving to repair the world. In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, he pointed out that

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We should minimize our sacred endeavours in this world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.

His life-long abhorrence of anti-Semitism was accentuated through his second marriage, to Yelena Bonner, who was half-Jewish. She too was unable to compromise over issues of human rights and thus complemented and fortified her husband in his work. The KGB portrayed her as a scheming Jewess, an outsider who had polluted Sakharov with alien ideas. Even Solzhenitsyn, whose Russian nationalism was opposed by Sakharov, was not averse to such attitudes—‘in deference to those close to him, to ideas not his own’ (The Oak and the Calf). Solzhenitsyn attacked Sakharov for concentrating on the issue of Jewish emigration and not on ‘Russian’ problems. The implication was that Yelena Bonner’s influence was at work here. In Memoirs, Sakharov comments: ‘There is something demonic in this, something reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ Conversely, in the early days of the struggle for emigration, official bodies in Israel and in the Diaspora felt constrained to downplay Sakharov’s close ties with many of the refuseniks. Official policy did not wish to project the Jewish movement as seeking to change the social system in the USSR, only as promoting the less dangerous position of opting out through emigration. Activists such as Shcharansky, Slepak and Ida Nudel did not accept this approach, refusing to abandon Sakharov and others who had shown their goodwill for the Jewish cause. Indeed, many were involved in the general realm of human rights activities, as Jews, within the Helsinki Agreement Monitoring Committee. In September 1973 there was a considerable danger that Sakharov would be charged and tried by the Soviet authorities. Thirty-five of the leading Jewish activists sent a letter of solidarity to Sakharov at this crucial juncture. It was eventually published in London by those who felt that even though such a letter would not help the signatories in realizing their emigration prospects, it was a Jewish duty both to sign such a letter and to publish it. The letter stated: Thank you for your great heart, for your clear understanding of reality, for your honesty. Can one be grateful for honesty? Yes, for in the world we live in, honesty requires in many courage which is not granted to all. Your courage is so immense in its radiance that it chases away some of the dark-



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ness around us and gives hope that reason will score its victory over folly, justice will triumph over lawlessness, good will overcome evil.

Andrei Dmitrievich is no more. Zikhrono livracha, may his memory be for a blessing. (‘Yahrzeit for Sakharov’, Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1990)

SPEAKING TO SHCHARANSKY The Helsinki Accord was the common meeting point between Soviet human rights activists and the Jewish emigration movement. The Jews demanded the specific human right to emigrate, whereas the dissidents included that within a general demand for human rights in the USSR. The coalescence of aims persuaded Anatoly Shcharansky and Vitaly Rubin to join Yuri Orlov in founding the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Committee. Unlike other national groups (such as the Ukrainians) and religious groups (such as the Christians), they did not form a specifically Jewish Helsinki group. They did, however, represent the interests of the Jewish movement on the Moscow committee. Shcharansky’s involvement with the Orlov group went beyond the Jewish connection in at least two documents, on the Ukrainian refugees, and on the situation of the Meshketians. Yet Shcharansky’s work for the Helsinki group played a minor part of the prosecution’s case during his trial. The Kremlin tried Shcharansky for his devotion to the Jewish cause. In January 1977, fifteen Jewish activists, appealed to Jewish communities in the West to protect Orlov and Ginsburg. In April 1977, 500 Soviet Pentecostalists, led by Bishop Nikolai Goretai, appealed to the Christians of the world to aid Shcharansky and quoted the New Testament in his defence. Shcharansky was sentenced to thirteen years in a strict-regime labour camp in 1977 but was included in an exchange of Western and Soviet spies on Berlin’s Glienicke bridge in February 1986. JEWISH QUARTERLY: It is now ten years since the formation of the Moscow-based committee to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accord. Why did Orlov, Amalrik and yourself decide to initiate it?

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ANATOLY SHCHARANSKY: We felt that the Helsinki Agreement between the Soviet Union and the European nations had historic dimensions. For the first time there was a clear linkage between international problems and the situation of human rights in the Soviet Union. It soon became clear that the Soviet Union was trying to evade the issue. We hoped that independent public opinion—as separate from the state—in all countries would discuss the issue, find a common language and a general approach to the problem of human rights violations. We hoped that it would unite both Left and Right and place real pressure on governments. Our idea was also prompted by the fact that the French and Italian Communist Parties—the Eurocommunists—and other left-wing groups were beginning to speak about human rights in the Soviet Union. The Moscow refuseniks sent a letter to the leaders of both Communist Parties proposing a meeting. I believed initially that we should send an appeal to public opinion in all countries and proceed from there. Yuri Orlov thought instead that we should first start checking human rights in the Soviet Union and propose to people in other lands that they do the same in their own countries. Of course, it immediately became more dangerous for us in that we became certain targets for attack. But once started, it seemed to be so much the right approach that there was no way out. JQ: In the New York Review of Books, you said that the group was composed of Zionists and Monarchists, Russians and Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Eurocommunists, those who wanted to leave, those who wanted religious freedom—‘all were united by the Helsinki Group.’ Didn’t this represent a change in the direction of the Jewish movement in that you openly cooperated with people who challenged the Soviet interpretation of human rights as it generally affected the people of the USSR rather than simply demand the specific human right for Jews to leave the country? AS: No, it did not mean a change since the Jewish movement was not an organisation. We did not make organisational decisions or put forward resolutions for adoption. Slepak, Rubin and myself believed that it was not only useful for the Jewish movement to be represented in the Helsinki Group, but also necessary. Jewish problems received wide publicity because they were represented in the Group documents. On the other hand, from the moment that I applied for an exit visa, I felt that I had no moral right to decide for these people in which manner they should live. If Dr Sakharov or Yuri Orlov or any of the other dissidents were writing theoretical articles on how the country should be changed,



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I believed that it was not my business to participate since I decided not to live there. But I viewed it as my moral obligation to support such people whose human rights were being undermined on an individual basis. The moment I became a free man, a Zionist, ceasing a life of double thinking, saying one thing and doing something else, I believed that my freedom should be manifested in speaking about human rights violations. Not everyone in the Jewish movement shared this position. JQ: But didn’t you place yourself, Slepak and Rubin and by association the Jewish movement, in a more vulnerable position? AS: If you look at my own criminal case, they did not concentrate on the activities of the Helsinki Group. Indeed, the Group’s documents played a modest part in the entire case. All my Helsinki activity was under Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code—anti-Soviet agitation; but my Zionist work was under the far more serious Article 64—high treason. The KGB was more interested in the ‘dreadful damage’ done to the USSR through the Jackson Amendment and our meetings with US Senators. They viewed our Zionist activities as some sort of awful Jewish plot conducted by World Jewry against the Soviet Union. It is quite enough for them to hate us for being ourselves. The mere act of applying to leave is an irritation and totally contrary to their way of thinking. No doubt, their personal antagonism towards me increased when I became a member of the Helsinki Group, but there were sufficient reasons already. JQ: Following the suppression of the Helsinki Group—the incarceration of Orlov and Ginsburg—there were arrests of prominent Jewish activists who identified with the Group, yourself, Slepak and Nudel. Although it may have been the morally correct and indeed principled Jewish approach, looking back after ten years, do you still think that it was tactically the correct decision to join the Helsinki Group? AS: I always believed that moral tactics were the best tactics. Some who try to pacify the KGB may gain in an individual capacity but we as a movement will definitely lose. JQ: In view of all these arrests, do you think that President Carter’s initially determined approach on the question of human rights in the USSR advanced the cause or retarded it? AS: President Carter raised the issue at this level for the very first time and naturally it was a source of inspiration and encouragement for many

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human rights and Jewish activists. You remember the telegram of support that Carter sent to Slepak. Although Carter was initially strong on the issue, he later weakened in terms of his actions. The KGB understood this weakness and began to exert pressure. JQ: The Moscow Helsinki Group no longer exists and therefore Soviet citizens are unable to publicize violations of human rights in the USSR. Is there not a case for the West cancelling the Agreement instead of participating in periodic review meetings? AS: I don’t know whether it is wise to physically cancel the Agreement, but I think that it is quite natural to demand that no progress on the other baskets will take place until there is progress on the third basket, on human rights. They must insist on real linkage between the baskets especially when there are new arrests and greater oppression. The biggest disappointment in the camps came after the review meeting in Madrid when the final statement said absolutely nothing. The situation in the camps was becoming worse and worse and emigration was very low. If this was this so-called progress, then it was a deception of public opinion. JQ: You have often declared your support for the Jackson Amendment which links economic benefit for the USSR through most-favoured nation status with the right to leave the country. In view of the new Soviet leadership’s concern with economic problems, is there not some merit in Senator Bob Dole’s suggestion to lift the Amendment for a year to see what happens? AS: The Jackson Amendment itself provides the opportunity. If the President of the United States sees that there has been progress, he can lift it for a year and then Congress can give him the authority to prolong it. To believe that the Soviets would simply appreciate this gesture of goodwill and will respond responsibly by opening the gates is naive. Free emigration challenges the very principle of the system where an individual is a small cog in a big machine. An individual has no right to decide what to write, what to read, where to live. If hundreds of thousands of people decide to leave, then this poses a fundamental danger for the Soviets. They will only open the gates if the threat to the regime is greater by keeping the status quo. Gorbachev perceives the problem as being due to the scientific and technological gap between the superpowers. He is very concerned about this and if the West remains firm, there is the chance for success.



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JQ: You attach great importance to linkage, linking Israeli and western contacts with the Soviets to the Jewish question. Can’t the Soviets reverse the game and thereby charge high political and economic prices for concessions? Doesn’t it all become a market place in which you or Slepak are purchased at a higher cost than lesser known people? AS: Even if the West doesn’t attempt linkage, the Soviets will always try to obtain a high price. They increase the cost for every prisoner of Zion, every dissident, for allowing Yelena Bonner to seek medical treatment in the West. The Soviet Union definitely wanted to profit by releasing me and I was concerned from the outset about this. In my case, they did not succeed, yet in others they did. The only way out of this dilemma is to continue speaking about the situation of specific individuals but also to stress that there are 400,000 who have requested invitations from Israel. The magnitude of the problem can then be perceived and it becomes more difficult for the Soviet Union to make an empty gesture. Moreover, it is not a question of to trade with the Soviet Union or not to trade. It exists; the question is the price. JQ: Jews in the Diaspora look upon the Jewish movement in the USSR as primarily a Zionist movement. Isn’t this wrong? In view of the neshira (drop out), shouldn’t we describe it as a general Jewish emigration movement with a Zionist leadership which wishes to repatriate to Israel? AS: The people who took the biggest risks and went to prison were mainly Zionists. These people were inspired by the Six-Day War, but as always happens, the people en masse were cautiously pragmatic. When the mass aliyah began, they saw that it was not so dangerous and they began to apply. But even if this group of Zionists in the Soviet Union is not very large, it definitely means a lot for Jewish life in the USSR. During the years when I was in prison, the problems of neshira had become much more serious. It is not simply that all those who do not go to Israel are assimilated Jews. On the contrary, many of the Zionists were originally assimilated Jews. I was an assimilated Jew. Slepak, Voronel, Lerner, Lunts, Rubin and others were 100 per cent assimilated. Our Jewishness preceded our acquaintance with the Jewish language, Jewish history and Jewish knowledge in general. Now we are witnessing many Jews who are not assimilated, going to the United States. For example, nearly all Jews who leave Odessa do not go to Israel. JQ: Do you think that there will be another Zionist wave after the wave of the early seventies?

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AS: I think that it is possible, but a lot depends on the Zionist spirit all over the world. If the Zionist spirit is low in Israel—not to speak about England—then why should aliyah from the Soviet Union increase? The small group of Jewish activists in the USSR is also important because they are regarded as examples of true Zionists all over the world. JQ: How central are good relations between the superpowers to the issue of Jewish emigration? AS: It depends under what conditions such a relationship is forged. When you are under pressure and the KGB threatens you with death, you begin to think, ‘my God, they are the same people as I, why shouldn’t I reach an agreement with them.’ Similarly, if you say ‘let’s have good trade, good relations’ without understanding the reality of the Soviet system, in the psychological belief that everything will be all right in the end, then we will never save our Jewish brothers and we will never have real peace. Some politicians do not understand the nature of the Soviet Union—how much it is a country of the Gulag, how many people are behind barbed wire. The Soviet Union will have to accept that their society must become more open. And one of the most important conditions is to let people go. JQ: E. P. Thompson once commented that whilst he supported the right of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union, he thought that if Jews stayed, this would help to move the country towards democracy. What do you think about that? AS: Jews contributed greatly in an attempt to make Russia the new utopia and to establish socialism. Eventually, it became so far removed from their ideals that many reached the conclusion that it is better to implement your ideals amongst your own people. With all my good feelings towards many Russians such as Sakharov, there is a difference in mentality and in the system of values. Moreover, we cannot simply and mechanically make those people live in accordance with our way of thinking. They will do something totally different. The outcome has been that the Russian people have forsaken their ideals and built such a terrible system. JQ: In permitting people to leave, the Kremlin abrogated control over a part of their people. Moreover, thousands of letters pour into the USSR each day from their friends and relatives abroad with information about the West. Can the Jewish movement for emigration therefore be described as a democratizing movement?



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AS: Yes, by the very act of leaving and in indeed supporting those who wish to leave, we are changing the system. The very existence of the struggle for free emigration is an example of a fundamental change in the society. The more people are independent of the government, the more open becomes the society. This is yet another reason why it is difficult to force the Soviets to open the gates once more. (‘An Interview with Anatoly Shcharansky’, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1986)

NOTES 1.  Vitaly Rubin, letter to Michael Sherbourne in Colin Shindler, Exit Visa: Détente, Human Rights and the Jewish Emigration Movement in the USSR (London: Bachman and Turner, 1978), pp. 185–86. 2.  The Economist, 8 May 1972.

12 The Life and Death of Yitzhak Rabin

RABIN’S RESURRECTION

‘Nasser is Waiting for Rabin’ was a popular song in Israel on the eve of

the Six-Day War in 1967. It was adapted as a campaign slogan—‘Israel is Waiting for Rabin’—during the 1992 election. In a country that specialises in resurrection, the second coming of Yitzhak Rabin, as leader of the Israeli Labour Party in 1992 after a fifteen-year intermission was not totally unexpected, given the repeated failure of his great rival, Shimon Peres, to find success at the ballot box. Peres had presided over four election defeats and had been unable to arrest the drift to the Right. Rabin’s wider appeal was as a problem solver as well as being Israel’s ‘Mr Security’. His military background in the Palmach and the Israel Defence Forces, combined with diplomatic and political experience, made him a credible candidate. He was viewed as an honest soldier and trustworthy politician—someone who was neither the debonair Peres nor the colourless Shamir. His first tenure as prime minister had been beset by inherited problems. By 1977, an indolent and fractious Labour Party could no longer be saved. With Likud victories at the polls and Peres leading a politically impotent Labour Party, Rabin finally returned as minister of defence in 1984 to serve in a succession of coalition governments. He attempted to suppress the non-lethal First Intifada after 1987 with repressive ‘Iron Fist’ measures. When he understood that they did not work, he began to take note that the PLO seemed to be embarking on a 220



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new path in the wake of King Hussein’s desire to wash his hands of any future responsibility for the West Bank. He then began to examine the political possibilities that this new situation has thrown up. In addition, a new system was in place whereby ordinary party members were given the opportunity to choose the candidate who would lead Labour into the 1992 campaign. This worked in Rabin’s favour. It also reflected recent opinion polls that Rabin was the only person capable of defeating Yitzhak Shamir. The Madrid Peace Conference last November (1991) aroused expectations in Israel that an agreement on autonomy for the Palestinians was now a distinct possibility. The name of the game for both Shamir and Rabin is thus to capture the middle ground, to be the candidate of consensus, to be strong on national security but grudgingly pragmatic on securing a final agreement with the Palestinians. Rabin may better fit such a public perception and provide Labour with its best possibility of forming an administration since its disastrous defeat at the hands of Menahem Begin in 1977. As minister of defence in the National Unity government of 1988–1990, Rabin was responsible for containing the Intifada while resisting the demands of the far Right to ruthlessly crush the Palestinian uprising by brute force. His military persona as the upholder of national security is an asset in a country where defence is a sacred cow. Another advantage over Shamir is that Rabin does not manifest any ideological infatuation with the territories conquered in 1967. Rabin has long favoured the Jordanian option. In his autobiography in 1979, he writes that ‘a Jordanian-Palestinian state would include considerable portions of Gaza Strip . . . and allow for the expression of the unique identity of the Palestinians in whatever form they choose to exercise their right to self-determination.’ He has said that he would implement autonomy for the Palestinians within six to nine months of taking office. Unlike Peres, he has never flirted with the idea of negotiating with the PLO or an independent Palestinian state. Regarded as unapproachable and hardline in the past, his own outlook may now be close to that of the Palestinian negotiators who met the Israelis in Washington on Monday. Following the Gulf War, there was clearly a movement of power, away from the PLO outside to their representatives in the conquered territories. Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi essentially accepted the idea of autonomy—an idea previously anathema to Arafat and treasonous to

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rejectionists as Habash. Yet autonomy offers something to both sides. To Israel, continued security control through a military presence. To the Palestinians, hope for the future realisation of national aspirations. But what does autonomy mean in reality? For Shamir and the Likud, it is a formalisation of those areas of authority that the Palestinians have already—health, education, municipalities. Likud offers a personal autonomy—not a territorial autonomy—while proclaiming Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinians, instead, talk about limited self-rule—a transitional stage to a state. The meeting of these two approaches [is] what the current negotiations are about. It is about the sort of institutions that Israel will allow the Palestinians to establish, and Rabin may be the man to strike a balance acceptable to most Israelis. Even the right-wing war of delegitimisation of Palestinian nationalism has receded. Rabin will have not missed the irony of Shamir calmly listening to the delivery of the leader of the Palestinian delegation at Madrid, Dr Haidar Abed-Shafi, who was one of the original founders of the PLO in 1964. Institutions, however, are the bedrock of all states. In every national struggle since the Second World War, when self-governing institutions were established, they ultimately led to independence. This is why Arik Sharon, the far Right and the settlers all opposed Shamir so strongly, and why they are now so deeply troubled by Rabin’s election as Labour Party leader. The peace camp in Israel is ambivalent about Rabin’s new status. They will remember his policy of ‘force, might and beatings’ against the Shabab youth of the Intifada, his blunt hawkishness and brusque manner and continued opposition to their efforts towards peace and reconciliation—a belief that he is simply a Likudnik in Labour clothing. Indeed, it was under Rabin’s premiership from 1974 until 1977 that the Labour government pusillanimously retreated before the advance of Gush Emunim, the religious pioneers’ movement and laid the ground for settlements in the very heartland of Arab-populated areas. For many, Rabin’s return is a total eclipse of the conscience. Such resentment may lead to a defection of some Labour Party doves to the recently established peace list of three small parties on the Left, especially as Rabin’s victory over the more liberal Peres was much narrower than anticipated. Alternatively, many doves may now conclude that the peace camp can advance no further and, despite their disdain, Rabin offers the only way forward to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.



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Israelis may also believe that Rabin would be far better placed to deal with the Americans, who have refused to grant the $10 billion in loan guarantees for absorbing the new Soviet immigrants unless there is a cessation of settlement activity. This is an assurance that Shamir has categorically refused to give. Since 1989, nearly 400,000 Soviet Jews have settled in Israel. The prediction is that one million will have arrived by 1995. Michael Bruno, the former governor of the Bank of Israel, has estimated that it will cost in total upwards of $30 billion. Yitzhak Moda’i, the Israeli finance minister has repeated that, unless Israel receives the loan guarantees, the Jewish state will be plunged in social and economic chaos. Unemployment is at its highest since the great slump of the mid-sixties. Modai’i recently ordered a former director-general of the finance ministry to compile a report on the economic prospects if the loans were not forthcoming. The 150-page report predicted an unprecedented rate of unemployment of 16.9 per cent by 1995; 360,000 people unemployed; an annual drop in the standard of living of 0.5 per cent, tax rises to intolerable levels and an exodus of highly qualified Soviet immigrants and the brightest and best young Israelis. Following the New Hampshire primary, President Bush’s reticence was reinforced by the ‘America First!’ isolationist campaign of Pat Buchanan who has prominently opposed the loan guarantees to Israel. Bush has also dropped some broad hints that he would be far happier working with a flexible Labour than with the immovable Likud. Last week, the White House warmed to Rabin’s musings aloud on the killing of Sheikh Musawi and the military drive against Hezbollah. Would Musawi’s demise bring peace nearer? Were the inhabitants of northern Israel now in a better situation than before? Such comments coming from Peres would have been glossed over, but Rabin’s background lent them credence. Likud now realises that it has a tough nut to crack in dealing with Rabin. The vagaries of the unpredictable nature of Israeli politics leave the outcome on 23 June, election day, still hanging in the air, but the chances of an outright Labour victory or Labour-led coalitions with Likud, or even with the peace list, have dramatically improved with the return of Yitzhak Rabin. (‘Balancing Act’, New Statesman, 28 February 1992)

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RABIN’S ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT Despite the public perception of Shamir as jaded and tired, Labour under Rabin only just scraped in to win the 1992 election. A movement of just one hundred votes would have lost the Arab Democratic Party one of its seats. This, in turn, would have left the Likud and Labour Blocs tied at sixty seats each. While the Arab parties never formally joined the Rabin government, the loss of that one vital seat would probably have led to another deadlocked ‘national unity’ government. Rabin constructed his government with a determination not to be politically hamstrung as was the case in his first administration. This led to some radical moves. [Rabin] appointed, as his education minister, Shulamit Aloni, the strongly secular leader of Meretz, the peace camp. This so outraged Tsomet (on the far Right), United Torah Judaism (ultra-orthodox) and the National Religious Party (representing the settlers), that they refused to take up portfolios in the new administration. This was greeted with undisguised relief by the Israeli Left. Rabin’s electoral success reflected a widespread mood that the tired Likud party under Shamir was not up to dealing with new opportunities for peace. As Moshe Arens, the recently retired Likud defence minister, remarked in the Israeli press last week, Shamir was never serious about negotiations with the Palestinians. Shamir, himself, said that he could have dragged out the meetings for ten years. In moving swiftly, Rabin believes he will wrong-foot the still-stunned Right before they have an opportunity to reorganise. As opinion polls have consistently shown, only a minority of Israelis believe in the hallowed project of constructing ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria.’ The vast majority of settlers came for economic reasons, and only a tiny fraction—fewer than 20,000—for ideological and religious ones. Even Moshe Arens, who is on the right of Likud, has observed that Israelis are not really interested in retaining the Territories, and even proposed the return of Gaza. If such a heresy can come from one of Likud’s elder statesmen, what about the factions within the party—such as the Mizrahim—who were never enamoured with colonising Judea and Samaria? This shift in opinion was also underlined by the remarkable fact that Labour polled more votes in the Territories than did Tehiya, the far Right party of the settlers. Rabin’s reputation as the bone-breaker of Palestinian youth in the Intifada still inhibits most Palestinians and many on the Israeli Left from



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fully welcoming these developments. Yet it may be Rabin’s deep desire to succeed where his more dovish rival, Shimon Peres, whom he ousted, failed, that will propel Rabin into an agreement with the Palestinians and his place in the history books. (‘Rabin’s Bid for Posterity’, New Statesman, editorial, 17 July 1992)

INCITEMENT BY THE RIGHT The Rabin who had struggled and failed during his first tenure as prime minister in the mid-1970s was determined not to make the same mistakes again. His rhetoric towards the religious settlers sharpened, calling them ‘a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy’. Moreover, his opponents found him a difficult target to criticise and demonise. Unlike Menahem Begin, Rabin was neither fatalistic nor impenetrably ideological. He did not see Arafat as a new Hitler and did not believe that Israel would always be in a state of war with its neighbours. As someone close to Ahdut Ha’avodah under the leadership of Yitzhak Tabenkin, he originally adhered to the party line about building a new socialist society in the Middle East. However like others after 1967, he did not agree with Tabenkin’s desire to construct a matrix of kibbutzim on the conquered West Bank. He tended to follow the plan of his friend, Yigal Allon, in partitioning the West Bank between Israel and Jordan. The River Jordan would become a security border with a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital while Gush Etzion and the Jordan Valley would be retained as security zones. During the First Intifada in the late 1980s, Jordan withdrew its jurisdiction over the West Bank. This precipitated Arafat’s implicit acceptance of a two-state solution on the basis of UN Resolution 181 of 1947. Rabin consequently moved towards a position of recognising Palestinian nationalism per se. It was a gradual journey towards the Oslo Accords almost in parallel with parts of the Palestinian national movement. Shlomo Avineri who was secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry during the first Rabin administration in the 1970s argued that Rabin was hawkish in strategy to achieve an agreement, but dovish in negotiations once the agreement had been reached. This imagery did not endear him to the Israeli peace camp. On the other hand, the idealism and liberal-

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ism of the peace camp did not accord with Rabin’s hard-headed understanding of the political reality. And yet, at the end of the day, it was Rabin who gingerly clasped Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn in September 1993. The Oslo Accords was a psychological loadstone around the necks of the ideological Right and the messianic religious Right. They were assisted by the insecurity brought about by the suicide bombers of resurgent Palestinian Islamism. The Likud now began to coordinate and cooperate with the far Right. Such a coalition of opposition forces was implicitly aided by Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the Palestinian side. Under Rabin’s premiership, Hamas began its bombing campaign to wreck the peace process. While Oslo was certainly the underlying cause, the indiscriminate killing of thirty Muslim worshippers in a Hebron mosque in 1994 by the Americanborn settler, Baruch Goldstein, provided the motivation to send suicide bombers into Israel’s cities. With settler rejectionists feeding Islamist rejectionists, the first bus bombings took place in Tel Aviv and Beit Lid in 1994 and 1995. Rabin’s title of ‘Mr Security’ looked hollow. The opinion polls showed a sudden, but dramatic drop in Rabin’s support in favour of the new Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. While Rabin’s standing in the polls gradually recovered, the next bombing ensured that they once more plummeted. With each atrocity, the rate of recovery was slower. The apprehension over the Oslo Accords led the Right to promote the idea that the existence of the state was in danger—and thereby previous restrictions about language and behaviour no longer applied. Rabin became the subject of a poster campaign. If the Kahanists depicted Rabin in a Gestapo uniform or dressed with a keffiyeh, the Likud leadership looked the other way. Rabin’s wife was compared to Clara Petrucci, Mussolini’s mistress, who had met the same fate as the Italian dictator. The ‘fascist’ label was applied to Rabin himself, and he was depicted as the Israeli equivalent of Marshal Petain who had presided over the French capitulation to the Nazis. Netanyahu himself equated Rabin with the Romanian Stalinist, Ceauşescu1 and accused him of ‘direct responsibility for stirring up Arab terror’ and for the horror of the bus bombings of Hamas in central Tel Aviv. Netanyahu told him: ‘You are guilty. This blood is on your head’.2



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Ehud Olmert, the Likud mayor of Jerusalem announced that he would bring 500,000 protestors to block the roads so that Arafat would be unable to pray on the Temple Mount. The use of incendiary language—not exactly unknown in Israeli political discourse—began to reach new heights. At a demonstration just a few weeks before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, journalists noted that Netanyahu and his allies used the following amongst other terms of critical abuse: ‘wicked’, ‘insane’, ‘diseased’, ‘treacherous’, ‘reckless’, ‘obsequious’, ‘mentally deranged’, ‘assimilated’, ‘destroying the dream of the Jewish people’, ‘possessed with making concessions’, ‘disconnected from Jewish values and tradition’, ‘a two-time collaborator—once with a terrorist organisation and once against Jews’, ‘leading Israel to suicide’, ‘shrinking Israel into Auschwitz borders’.3 The mainstream Right now led by Netanyahu believed that they could benefit politically from the rising paranoia and therefore did not distance the Likud from it. Netanyahu was happy to attend demonstrations while Sharon, one month before the killing told the daily Ha’aretz that Rabin’s Labour administration was ‘a sick government’. Benny Elon, a member of Moledet, a party which advocated ‘transfer’, warned that Rabin was precipitating civil war and that ‘if he is not careful, he is liable to be killed’. Labour responded by attacking its central parliamentary opponent, the Likud, rather than clamping down on the far Right and the radical settlers. Uzi Landau, later Sharon’s main opponent in the Likud in opposing the disengagement from Gaza, responded by informing the daily Yediot Aharanot that Labour was spreading ‘a blood libel against the Likud’. Rabin himself refused to take any extra precautions such as wearing a bullet-proof vest. His security minders seemed to be lax in the manner in which they went about their work.

THE KILLING AND ITS JUSTIFICATION The increasingly bitter attacks of the far Right persuaded the mainstream peace camp to stage a rally in support of Rabin and his policies in November 1995. Rabin was last viewed publicly at the rally singing Shir Hashalom (the song of peace) from a crumpled song sheet. It was not by chance that

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Rabin was murdered at the end of a peace rally—‘a demonstration of gratitude’ as the writer, David Grossman termed it. On 4 November 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard. The shots ruptured his spleen, severed major arteries in his chest and shattered his spinal cord. An hour and a half later, the Israeli Prime Minister died on the operating table. The object of the act was to politically wreck the Oslo Accords and reverse the rapprochement with the historic enemy, the Palestinians. A few months later, in the wake of a bombing campaign by Islamists, bent on martyrdom and opposed to Arafat, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed a slender victory over Rabin’s illfated successor, Shimon Peres. Land was now placed before peace and when Netanyahu visited London at the end of 1997, several hundred Jews, claiming to speak for a probable majority of the British community, accused him in an open letter of ‘emptying the peace process of all content.’ It would seem therefore that, so far, Yigal Amir has been more than successful in his strategy. Amir was a braggart who boasted to several student acquaintances that he intended to kill Rabin. In 1995, he had tried on four separate occasions to get within firing range of the Prime Minister, each time he either received a ‘sign’ that the time had not come or he simply bottled out. Amir was neither an habitual loner nor a deranged fanatic. He was a far Right activist who was known to the Shabak (General Security Services). What then pushed Amir to cross the threshold to murder? [The authors of this book] Karpin and Friedman argue convincingly that he was the instrument of a rising tide of unprincipled incitement by the mainstream opponents of the Oslo Accords which included Netanyahu himself. Indeed some right-wing leaders such as Benny Begin and Dan Meridor condemned Netanyahu for his opportunism and refused to mount this bandwagon. Amir, the authors claim, stood in the centre of three concentric circles. The innermost consisted of nine students none of whom were known to the Shabak. The second circle consisted of hundreds of religious nationalists and sections of the ultra-orthodox who had declared their willingness to commit acts of violence against left-wing politicians. The outermost circle embraced a wide network of right-wing activists, which in turn drew upon tens of thousands of sympathisers.



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The authors suggest that ‘together they created an atmosphere which legitimised the act secretly planned by Yigal Amir.’ Full-time activists and settlers operated a network which was targeted on breaking Rabin mentally. Their operations were approved by representatives of four political parties, including Netanyahu on behalf of the Likud, and whose costs were defrayed by funds originally allocated to the parties by the national treasury. Thus the epithets flew in a rising tide of paranoia: traitor, Nazi, dog, anti-Semite, collaborator, schizoid, alcoholic. The ultra-orthodox Hashavuah succinctly commented: ‘The day will come when the Israeli public will bring Rabin and Peres into court, with the alternatives being the gallows or the insane asylum.’ In a private poll carried out for him a few weeks before his death, Rabin was informed that an estimated 800 Israelis were willing to commit murder to halt the peace process and some 6,000 were prepared take up arms against the army and the police. Yet Rabin was anxious to avoid overt confrontation which might spark off a wider conflict amongst the Jews. He overruled two Chiefsof-Staff Ehud Barak, now the Labour Party candidate for prime minister and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a leading member of the recently established Centre party who wanted to evacuate some settlements. Did Amir receive rabbinical authorisation to commit the murder? While Amir provided any information that his interrogators required, he refused to clarify this point, although initially he stated that he had secured rabbinical approval. Significantly, in a letter to a hostile rabbi from prison, Amir’s brother wrote: Your eminence attacks my brother and calls him wicked. Does your eminence know why he did what he did? My brother did it for the sake of the Lord, in the purest possible way. He received a halakhic (Jewish law) ruling from a rabbi, and he acted according to halakhah, and with sanctity, knowing that he was probably going to die for it.

Although some eminent settler rabbis were called in, the police were clearly out of their depth in dealing with such venerable personalities and their Talmudic interpretations. This line of investigation was soon dropped. (Review of Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, Guardian, 17 April 1999)

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 came after a long period of incitement by the far Right. Many Israelis were shocked that it was a Jew who had murdered Rabin. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive



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Yigal Amir was not considered insane or unbalanced before the killing. He was merely another right-wing activist who supported the settlers. Yet he operated amidst a rising tide of ever more bizarre accusations. The language of the anti-Oslo campaign evolved from harsh criticism to chants of ‘death to Rabin’ amidst a sprinkling of rabbinical rulings, threats and curses. A majority of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora did not warm to this sense of impending doom with accompanying death threats. The atmosphere collided with a different image of themselves. They always regarded themselves as history’s victims. They were the oppressed, the downtrodden and the powerless. Others may embrace violence, but the Jews of Israel were the citizens of a civilised and democratic society. They would never turn upon their own. Yigal Amir shattered this self-delusion in the name of halting the historic reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. So who, then, was responsible for the murder of Yitzhak Rabin? Yigal Amir, certainly. The General Security Services for their complacency, undoubtedly. But who else beyond the immediate participants of that black deed? At which point does the delineation between certain blame and political accusation become blurred? Indeed, the Brooklyn-based Jewish Press told its 350,000 ultra-orthodox readers in a half page headline: Labour Party Uses Rabin Murder to Stifle Dissent: Trying to Delegitimize Likud Party and All Religious People. This smokescreen approach to deliberately promote a state of ideological siege should not divert a reasoned analysis. As Moses and Aaron asked: ‘Should you be angry at the entire congregation because one man has sinned?’ [Numbers 16:22] The answer is ‘No.’ Indeed, the discrimination against Amir’s university—‘Bar-Ilan-Teheran’—was lamentable. But where is the line drawn? Is there not a difference between responsibility for the actual murder and moral accountability for having created the conditions which allowed it to happen? Did Yigal Amir kill Rabin because he was deranged as Rabbi Alan Kimche (of London’s Ner Yisrael synagogue) implies? Was the smiling Amir a natural born killer? The writer Amos Elon was more incisive in his commentary: He was sociable, good-looking and well-liked, the son of orthodox immigrants from Yemen who live comfortably in a lower middle class suburb

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outside Tel Aviv. His mother runs a popular nursery school. Amir was the proverbial nice boy next door. He was a locally born and bred killer, not a weird American cowboy, like Baruch Goldstein.

Such historical conditioning does not hold out much hope for Jonathan Sacks’s well-intentioned appeal to those religious voices which uttered ‘the rhetoric of hate.’ What is left unsaid is that an integration of a selective reading of the texts and the political heritage of the Right has produced a righteousness that admits no culpability except in the broadest, most general sense. Indeed, the non-Zionist ultra-orthodox are now in a great rush to crudely distance themselves from the religious Zionists—even to the point of rubbishing Amir’s yeshiva as an institution of superficial learning. Too many religious leaders have suggested a symmetry of blame between the Right and the Left. In an article in the New York Times, the writer, Thomas L. Friedman, effectively dismissed calls for reconciliation and stated that ‘this is a time for taking sides.’ This provoked an aggressive response in the name of orthodoxy and Jewish unity from the Bostoner Rebbe amidst a diatribe against Shulamit Aloni and Peace Now. The contrast between the tone of the letter and its innate plea for unity symbolised the reality of the dysfunctional attitude of part of ultra-orthodoxy. While some unequivocally condemned Amir’s interpretation of halakhah, others used Judaism to practise denial. Rabin’s death, it was suggested, was foretold and is embedded in a code in Genesis. A letter writer to the (London based) Jewish Tribune suggested that God’s motive for allowing the assassination to take place could be interpreted as—measure for measure—a matter of divine providence because nearly fifty years ago Yitzhak Rabin was the officer in charge who carried out Ben-Gurion’s order to fire on the Irgun arms ship, the Altalena, causing the deaths of several Jews on board. This method of defence against criticism indicates that the dangerous cocktail of mystical obscurantism and ideological extremism is still a potent weapon to be utilised when necessary. This inability to take history in its entirety into account—and to understand its significance for today—will continue to prevent civilised debate from taking place. When the Hadrianic persecution is used as a central source to analyse present-day problems, then the methods of those barbaric times become understandable and for some, acceptable. Rabbi David Hartman has spoken about ‘a deep disease in orthodoxy that wasn’t there in the past.’ The soul-searching after Rabin’s murder could become a catalyst for the healing of rifts, but in the presence of denial and



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a shallow remorse, this tragedy is more likely to become the precursor of new assaults against those who carry the peace process forward. As Yossi Sarid pointed out, ‘Amir acted alone, but many sent him.’ (‘Yitzhak Rabin: Denial and Responsibility’, Judaism Today, Winter 1995–1996)

THE AFTERMATH Following Rabin’s killing, the new prime minister, Shimon Peres, was thirty percentage points ahead in the polls. In all likelihood, many floating voters in Israel were revolted by the radicalism of the far Right and the opportunism of the Likud. But Hamas’s actions at the beginning of 1996—the first systematic campaign of suicide bombing in Israel’s cities—unnerved and angered many. Moreover, it persuaded the floating voters to move back to the Likud of Benjamin Netanyahu—someone whom many Israelis believed was directly complicit in the evolution of this tragedy, someone who did nothing to damp down the incitement of the far Right. At Rabin’s funeral, his widow was noticeably reluctant to shake Netanyahu’s hand. The Daily Telegraph at the time remarked that on the day of the funeral, Netanyahu was ‘pale, sweaty and obviously shocked’. But he also seemed uneasy. The Telegraph asked, ‘Did he feel some personal responsibility for the assassination?’ Despite a sense of disdain for Netanyahu, the bombings of the Islamists took precedence in Israeli emotions and concerns. The bombers killed eighty-seven Israeli civilians and injured over two hundred in successive days in the heart of the country at the beginning of 1996. The reaction of the Israeli electorate a few months later was to give Netanyahu a sliver of a majority and to place the opponents of Oslo in power. The strength of Oslo was that it was based on a constructive ambiguity whereby Rabin and Arafat could ‘do business’ and make progress. Thus, although Oslo did not specifically announce that a Palestinian state would arise, this was the clear context of the Rabin-Arafat dialogue. Rabin had always been a promoter of the Jordanian option in the past, but in the last two years of his life, his stock answer tended to be: ‘I am against a Palestinian state at this stage.’

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The constructive ambiguity of Oslo became specific certainty with Netanyahu consistently pointing out Palestinian violations of agreements. Arafat, in turn, retaliated by listing Israeli violations. Arafat’s incompetence in governance plus the increasing strength of the Islamists were further ingredients added into this witch’s brew. If Oslo had provided a win-win scenario, the situation after Rabin’s death meant a return to the ‘them and us’ syndrome. If Oslo symbolised a coming together of the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps against their rejectionists, the post-Rabin state of affairs resurrected the megaphone of war and a return to ‘Israel versus Palestine.’ Rabin clearly did not believe that Israel would always be in a permanent state of war with its neighbours. A military action was conducted to achieve a specific outcome and not out of a sense of revenge and retribution. Yoram Peri, a close aide to Rabin, recalled that there was more to Rabin than the persona of a hawkish general. Rabin wrote that ‘there is neither moral right nor practical benefit in the illusion of the efficacy of force to attain fundamental political objectives or conclusive political solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.’ Effectively, he argued against Clausewitz’s dictum of war as politics by other means. In 1986, at a conference at Be’er Sheva University, he argued that democracies— unless they are mobilised to fight totalitarian dictatorships such as the struggle against Nazism—cannot follow Clausewitz. In a democracy, public opinion has to be courted and seduced. He argued that ‘wars of choice’ cannot be waged with smoothness by democratic regimes. Suppose fate had not taken its course on 4 November 1995 and Rabin had stood in the 1996 election against Netanyahu, would he have won? Would the reaction to the series of suicide bombings have swept Rabin away as it did Peres? Would Rabin’s prestige have nullified the desire for security? All answers now reside within the realm of speculation. Rabin would probably have done better than Peres, but the opinion polls showed Rabin trailing Netanyahu before his death. If Netanyahu’s tenure, 1996–1999, had been averted, there is every likelihood that the peace process would not have faltered so badly under a second term Rabin administration. Despite a growing call to reduce the pace of the peace process, the Rabin-Peres team would have provided the stability and rationality in policies that were subsequently missing. Perhaps there would have been an earlier evacuation of the Gaza settlements—and possibly of West Bank ones as well. The joker in the pack



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amidst such speculation is the global rise of Islamism. Was it a foregone conclusion that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have wrecked any Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation regardless of who was Prime Minister of Israel? Could Rabin have succeeded in persuading Arafat to take action against them where others had failed? After all, Arafat had moved against the Islamists following the bombings of Beit Lid. Yet Arafat also demonstrated his tendency to equivocate in complex situations. Arafat found himself in a contradictory situation. On one level, he had made peace with Israel and wished to reassure them in terms of security. On another level, he was determined to keep the Palestinian people mobilised for the difficult negotiations that lay ahead. Moreover, Arafat throughout his chairmanship of the PLO had striven for unity, it was better to keep disparate groups within the tent than outside—and outside his control. So would Arafat have taken action if Rabin had lived? Probably not, but history under Rabin’s responsible stewardship may still have taken a less bloody path. The fifth anniversary of Rabin’s murder in November 2000 occurred when the peace process had all but collapsed, the al-Aqsa Intifada had commenced and the fire was raging ferociously. On that anniversary, the Rabin Center for Peace noticed that two passages had been omitted from the official version of Rabin’s last speech at the Peace Now rally. This speech was distributed widely and particularly in educational institutions. The first removed passage read: There are enemies of peace who are trying to hurt us with the aim of torpedoing the peace. I want to say plainly: We have found a partner for peace among the Palestinians—the PLO who was once an enemy and has ceased terror.

The second removed passage read: ‘It will also be possible to achieve peace with Syria.’ Such a tampering with history reflected the new reality of the Intifada and the embittered gulf that had opened up between both peoples. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement commented that ‘Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption.’ It is an apt comment to conclude on the tenth anniversary of [the death of] Yitzhak Rabin. (‘Rabin: What Might Have Been’, Manna, Winter 2005)

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NOTES 1.  Ha’aretz, 19 October 1995. 2.  Amos Elon, ‘Israel’s Demons’, New York Review of Books, 21 December 1995. 3.  Ha’aretz, 6 October 1995, cited in Yaacov Bar Siman-Tov, ‘Peace Making with the Palestinians: Change and Legitimacy’, in From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel’s Troubled Agenda, ed. Efraim Karsh (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 176–77.

13 The Mystery of Ariel Sharon

MR ‘INCONSISTENCY’

In 1985 the Israeli journalist, Uzi Benziman, wrote a biography of Ariel

Sharon. The Hebrew version was entitled He Doesn’t Stop at Red Lights. The English-language edition was, however, published as Sharon: An Israeli Caesar—clearly for a more sensitive readership. Yet when Sharon finally passed away in January 2014, there was confusion amongst obituary writers as to how to depict him. Was he hero or zero? There were both adulatory tributes and acid condemnations. Tony Blair who represented the Quartet at the memorial ceremony, described him as ‘tough but shy, indomitable, yet a servant to his people, a warrior to create his country, yet wise enough to know that war alone could not secure its future. . . . He was a giant of this land’. On the other hand, the Israeli academic Amit Schejter, told readers of Ha’aretz that Sharon’s demise did not bring closure for him. A participant in Israel’s controversial invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he wrote: ‘For me, Sharon will always be the man who saw my peers and myself as nothing more than pawns in his megalomaniac campaigns’.1 If Sharon was hated by the Left, he was undoubtedly feared by the Right. Following his condemnation by the Kahan Commission about the killings of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla camps, Sharon’s star began to fade. Yet no one seemed able to push him out of the political arena. He held numerous posts in successive Shamir governments. He 237

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maintained his political base amongst the grassroots in the Likud and the West Bank settlers. In the higher echelons of the party, the spectre of the imperturbable Sharon loomed large. In 1996 Netanyahu desperately wanted to keep him out of his first cabinet, but eventually succumbed. The cabinet was actually expanded to accommodate the Ministry of National Infrastructure which had been specially created for Sharon. Despite ostensibly being in the same government and party, Sharon knew no barriers. As ‘the real voice of the Likud’, Sharon continually provoked the inexperienced Netanyahu. Yet remarkably Sharon’s reputation as a problem solver soared in the mid-1990s. It persuaded even seasoned US diplomats such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk to consult him. Did Sharon mellow? Or did he understand the political constellation in Israel and indeed internationally much more concisely than did his critics? As he reached seventy, he was elevated to foreign minister and proceeded to wear the mantle of a trusted elder statesman. At the Wye Plantation negotiations in 1998, President Clinton arranged a dinner that brought Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon together for the first time. Sharon had previously tried to kill the Palestinian leader on several occasions. Over dinner they talked about farming. A few years later, the coin flipped once more—and Sharon ordered his forces to surround and entrap Arafat in the Muqata. There was even talk about killing Arafat. While Palestinians hated Sharon as the devil incarnate, many Israelis now saw him reborn as a respected man of conviction. Moreover, he confronted the powerful settler lobby—his ally for thirty years—and Israel withdrew from territory which had been conquered in 1967. After Sharon’s death, few commentators seemed to be able to lift this veil of confusion, to resolve the conflict of imagery and to provide insights into this complex character. Did Ariel Sharon therefore have a clear-cut ideology? How can all the inconsistencies in his political outlook be reconciled? It can be argued that Sharon belonged to the flexible Ben-Gurion school of perception of current reality. In addition, Sharon was noted for his enthusiasm for being economical with factual truth. The combination of these two central factors define Sharon’s political odyssey. The late, David Landau, the London-born former editor of Ha’aretz, attempted to resolve the conundrum that is Sharon’s career in a biography published in 2014.



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Who Was Ariel Sharon? Unlike other Israeli leaders, there is no thread of political behaviour that truly defines him ideologically. Unlike Menahem Begin or Yitzhak Tabenkin or Zvi Yehuda Kook, there is no framework that characterizes—even in a general sense—the direction of Arik Sharon’s political activity. This ‘inconsistency,’ as Landau labels it, is overlaid by an obscuring image of courage and bravado in times of war. There was also Sharon’s reputation for insubordination, recklessness, manipulation, deviousness, and disobedience stretching over decades. For example, Sharon, in later years, invoked ‘the saison’2 as a means of berating those within the Likud, including Menahem Begin (the former head of the Irgun) whom he accused of betraying him. Yet those who were there at the time in the 1940s suggest that Sharon actually participated in it— and had no qualms about roughing up members of the Irgun. As Sharon became involved in Haganah intelligence, he seems to have been very much at home in persecuting the adherents of the Irgun at the behest of the leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion. Sharon’s expertise at being economical with the truth placed him in ‘elegant exile’ at the Royal Military Academy at Camberley in the United Kingdom for a year. When Yitzhak Rabin took over as the head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the beginning of 1964, he brought his talented colleague, Arik Sharon, in from the cold—and bluntly told him: ‘Your trouble is, though, that people tend to believe you’re not a decent human being. I don’t know you well enough to say, I want to promote you, but I’ve got to be sure that your accusers aren’t right.’ While a fraught yet mutually respectful relationship between the two men lasted throughout their lives, Sharon was a devout believer that all was fair in politics and war. On 5 October 1995, Sharon participated in the demonstration in which Rabin had been depicted as a member of the Gestapo. Introducing the term ‘collaborators’ into the charged political lexicon of the Oslo debate—Sharon compared Rabin to Marshal Petain, the leader of Vichy France.3 Moreover, at that time, he regarded any potential threats to assassinate Rabin as ‘deliberate provocations’ to intimidate the prime minister’s opponents—similar, he pointed out, to those fabrications that Stalin conjured up in order to crush his enemies. David Landau underlines these flaws as conducive for political success. He describes the Sharon of the late 1970s in Begin’s first government. Happily, for Sharon (and

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for the settlers) inconsistency and disingenuousness were the very attributes with which Sharon’s personality was bountifully endowed. This fortunate confluence enabled Sharon to achieve an ever-higher profile within the government. Yet when Sharon died in January 2014, he was revered as almost a founding father of the state and the Lord Protector by the nation. So who was Ariel Sharon? Was he a conniving backstabber roaming the political bear pit or the courageous soldier who time and again saved his people from destruction? Or were both true? Did Sharon undergo a miraculous transformation as prime minister and become a truth-telling soothsayer? Or was this merely a front designed to appeal to the gullibility of the electorate? As Amram Mitzna, his Labour opponent in the 2003 election commented: ‘It’s the same Sharon, the Sharon who misled the government and the nation in the Lebanon war. He hasn’t changed, even if he looks like a dear old granddad.’ These are some of the questions that David Landau raises in an attempt to unravel the enigma that was Ariel Sharon. From Russia with Love Sharon’s grandfather, Mordechai Scheinerman, left Brest-Litovsk and settled in Rehovot in 1910. Two years later he returned, but fled to Tbilisi in Georgia when World War I broke out. When Trotsky’s Red Army invaded in March 1921 and overthrew the Menshevik government, Scheinerman fled with his family once more to Palestine. They arrived in February 1922 and lived in a tent in Kfar Malal. His parents were ostensibly members of the Labour movement, but they were also rigid individualists who made their own decisions. This did not go down well with those who espoused the collectivist mindset of the Zionist experiment. This led to a reputation that painted them as argumentative, stubborn, and disputatious. Yet they were far from being self-indulgent boors. Sharon’s home was a stereotypical, cultured, Russian home. His parents and grandparents taught him Russian literature. He was brought up to be a ben tarbut (a man of culture) as well as a ben kfar (a man of the soil). This stood him in good stead when he negotiated with Putin’s Russia over sixty years later. In 1948, Sharon was a member of the Alexandroni Brigade and was wounded at Latrun. He was also present at Ramle and Lydda. There he discovered the mutilated bodies of Israeli soldiers—ears, noses, genitals cut off. This experience may have encouraged his belief in a harsh military response and a likely lifelong scepticism about the possibilities of peace with the Palestinians.



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Sharon ascended the military’s ladder of promotion swiftly. He was appointed commander of the reconnaissance company of the Golani Brigade and then placed by Yitzhak Rabin in a battalion commander’s course. He first encountered Moshe Dayan when he was appointed intelligence officer of Central Command. He remained on good terms with both Dayan and Rabin throughout his life even though their political paths diverged considerably. Sharon’s enthusiasm for the ‘shoot to kill’ approach toward infiltrators in the early 1950s led the head of the IDF, Mordecai Makleff, to create a special reprisal force, Unit 101, at the urging of Ben-Gurion. Yet Sharon was no poster boy for the IDF’s image of gracious nobility in a time of war. The idea of ‘a purity of arms’ was not taken seriously. Sharon’s men chased the Bedouin Azazme tribe across the border into Sinai. Sharon instigated an attack on the al-Burej camp in Gaza in which fifteen civilians were killed. When Makleff demanded an explanation, Sharon said that the women killed were ‘prostitutes serving the armed infiltrators who kill our innocent civilians.’ Twenty-five members of Unit 101 and 100 paratroopers led the well-known attack on Qibya. Sharon reported that twelve Jordanian national guardsmen and two legionnaires had been killed. He said that he did not realize that civilians were still inside the houses—sixty-nine were killed. This was the first time that Israel was condemned by Diaspora leaders amidst an international furore. Landau dwells on the Qibya incident for a few short paragraphs, relying on a couple of references from Benny Morris’s research.4 Yet Morris’s extensive research has uncovered a much darker side of Sharon’s character. Following the raid, an aghast Moshe Sharett extracted a copy of the operational order from the then acting Minister of Defense, Pinhas Lavon. Sharett was given a version from which a sentence had been deleted. Upon discovering this, Sharett committed to the intimacy of his diary the following words: ‘the forgery of the Qibya order: To kill and destroy—all know that he deceives the prime minister.’ Morris surmises that Sharon had been instructed to kill as many Arabs as possible.5 The raid took place on the night of 14–15 October 1953. The initial Arab Legion report on 16 October stated that forty-two bodies had been recovered of whom thirty-eight were women and children. Nearly all had gunshot or grenade wounds. Morris argues that this would have been standard operating procedure for ‘combat in a built-up area.’ According to Morris, this called for ‘throwing grenades through the windows, knocking down the front door, and indiscriminately spraying each room with light-weapons fire.’6

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Sharett noted in his diary that he ‘walked back and forth in my room perplexed and completely depressed, feeling helpless.’7 Israeli diplomats abroad faced the full fury of hitherto friendly nations. It was one thing for the undisciplined, dissident Irgun to carry out the killings at Dir Yassin, but something else for a sovereign state to be implicated in this kind of behaviour. Yet Ben-Gurion had always argued that reprisal raids were imperative. Ben-Gurion propagated a cover-up in a radio broadcast, suggesting that it was Jewish refugees from Arab countries and survivors of Nazi concentration camps who had decided to take matters in their hands. As he put it: ‘we have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.’8 Suspecting that the soldiers of Unit 101 were former Irgun members who were prone to such actions, Sharon was invited to meet BenGurion. According to Sharon’s autobiography, Ben-Gurion told him: ‘It doesn’t make any real difference what will be said about Qibya around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’9 Landau telescopes the Qibya incident. Yet in one sense this episode says a lot about the evolution of the ambivalence toward Sharon. The Israeli public, tired of murders of civilians by Arab infiltrators and resentful of the wave of international condemnation, closed ranks and buried the issue. The Drift to the Right Yet Ben-Gurion, like Begin later on, demonstrated a special affection for Sharon—the sparkling antithesis of the Diaspora Jew. Even so, on his return from Camberley, Ben-Gurion—with a characteristic lack of diplomatic finesse—asked him in November 1958: ‘Have you weaned yourself of [sic] your off-putting proclivities for not telling the truth.’ A sheepish Sharon assured Ben-Gurion that he had been cured of his addiction. Sharon also had a good relationship with Moshe Dayan, who similarly admired his courage and assertiveness. Yet even he was tested, and accused Sharon of carrying out ‘unapproved operations.’ One episode in the campaign against infiltrators led to the deaths of Egyptian soldiers— but this happened during the middle of the clandestine negotiations at Sèvres with Britain and France—and Dayan was furious. Sharon also found himself at odds with his military colleagues because he found it so difficult to follow orders about which he had



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reservations. Motta Gur became a lifelong enemy on both political and personal levels. He accused Sharon of cowardice in not leading his men into the Mitle Pass during the Suez Campaign—he said that Sharon believed that he was ‘too important’ to lead. Gur also accused him of being an ‘inveterate liar.’ Sharon found himself in the cold and increasingly isolated within the military until Rabin’s attempt at rehabilitation in 1964. Yet he was never one to take accusations and insults lying down. He had a supreme belief in his abilities and an infinite resilience to counter criticism from any quarter. This ability to never allow himself to be diverted from a goal propelled him into the orbit of Menahem Begin. Landau’s account of Sharon’s 1969 meeting with Herut’s Menahem Begin and the Liberals’ Yosef Sapir—both ministers without portfolio in Levi Eshkol’s coalition government—poses the question: was this a manoeuvre against those in the Labour party so that he could remain in the army? Or was it the first tentative dipping of his toe into the political waters? Landau doesn’t choose one explanation over the other. In an interview some years later, Sharon attempted to separate his attempt to enter the political arena from Haim Bar-Lev’s refusal to renew his contract. Sharon cast his effective dismissal from the IDF within the framework of his opposition to the Bar-Lev line—as ‘a static defense system.’ In 1969, the press immediately reported that Sharon had been offered a prime position on the Gahal electoral list. Yet he had already had second thoughts about it. Landau relates that Labour’s Pinhas Sapir was very wary about Sharon’s defection to the Gahal. Strings were presumably pulled and Sharon remained in the army for a few more years. This important episode in Sharon’s life, however, demonstrates Sharon’s ideological drift away from the Labour movement. His idols in the 1950s were David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan—both of whom left Mapai in 1965 to establish Rafi, the party of the political princes, due to the Lavon affair. When Dayan, Herzog, Kollek, Peres, and the others realized that the prospect for their collective political futures had been severely stunted by Rafi’s failure in the 1965 election, they joined the newly established Labour party in 1968 along with 60 percent of the Rafi membership. ‘The old man,’ Ben-Gurion, stayed out and instead formed the State List that won only four seats in the 1969 election. BenGurion dropped out of politics in 1970, but his State List went on to become one of the founding components of the Likud in 1973. Sharon’s political odyssey should therefore be understood in this context—as part of those in the Labour party who gradually drifted to the Right, led by

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Ben-Gurion in his dotage. Unfortunately, Landau does not present this possibility. Jabotinsky’s romanticism and Begin’s fatalism were not the inspirations for Sharon’s actions in the political arena. Instead, it was Ben-Gurion’s flexibility and perception of political and military reality that were his guidelines. Indeed, Ben-Gurion’s example would certainly help explain Sharon’s decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza in the summer of 2005—and in part his ‘inconsistency.’ While Sharon was feared and often despised in the upper echelons of both the political and the military elite, his courage on the battlefield and his innovative strategies won him admirers. When Dayan wanted to abandon the Suez Canal in 1973, Sharon crossed it and came within striking distance of Cairo. Colonel Amnon Reshef, whose fourteenth armoured division bore the brunt of the Egyptian assault on Sinai, commented: Sharon radiated presence, charisma, leadership. Men followed him willingly. They heard his voice on the radio, his assurance, his encouragement, his motivation. They saw him, he was with us. He was always there.

Reshef significantly resigned from the army and refused to participate in the Lebanon war in 1982. He opposed Sharon politically, but the battlefield was a different matter. The bandaged hero of the Yom Kippur War made Sharon an iconic figure—the saviour who had plucked Israel from the jaws of destruction. Yet the fiercely independent Sharon later told Ma’ariv that he very much regretted obeying the High Command’s orders during an episode in the Yom Kippur War. He was publicly criticized for this admission. In his testimony to the Agranat Commission in 1974, he told the judges that he hitherto believed that a great number of deaths would be caused if he obeyed the order, but he also had no one with whom to discuss it. He carried out the order—with negative results. This section of the Agranat Commission was kept secret until 2008. ‘The war of the generals’ became public knowledge in an article in the New York Times when Sharon criticized the slowness and indolence of his military colleagues during the Yom Kippur War and seemingly claimed credit for the IDF’s advance into Egypt proper. The Chief of Staff of the IDF, David Elazar, was not amused. He bitterly complained about ‘biased and one-sided descriptions.’ Bar-Lev pointed out that the plan to cross over the Suez Canal ‘did not belong to any one individual.’ All this came to the fore in the run-up to the postponed election of 1973. Sharon had created the Likud earlier in the year from Herut, the Liber-



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Haim Bar-Lev was recalled from retirement to head the IDF’s Southern Command during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Bar-Lev and Sharon reversed the Egyptian advances during the early part of the war. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

als, the State List, the Free Centre and assorted Labour defectors. While Gahal attained twenty-six seats in 1969, the new Likud with Begin at its core achieved thirty-nine mandates in 1973. An earlier prediction before the onset of the war had indicated that the Likud would do no better than its component parts. The war had moved the political fulcrum toward

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the Right. The religious, the Mizrahim, and the alienated underclass all switched their allegiance to Menahem Begin, who had enlisted the support of hallowed military figures such as Ezer Weizmann—and now Ariel Sharon. While the Left disintegrated, the Right coalesced. Even so, Labour still maintained a sweeping lead in the election despite the debacle of the Yom Kippur War. The writing, however, was on the wall. The old Mapai leadership, led by Golda Meir, soon stepped down and was replaced by the next generation—not from Mapai, but from their rivals within the Labour party in Ahdut Ha’avodah and Rafi. Elected as a Likud Member of Knesset (MK), Sharon embraced the cause of the West Bank settlers and made his first foray into Samaria, in 1974, in the company of Gush Emunim’s mentor, Zvi Yehuda Kook. Begin had transformed the Irgun into Herut, then into Gahal, and finally into the Likud—and now he was on the cusp of attaining power. Landau, however, does not delve too deeply into Begin’s ideology. Begin was always willing to give up Sinai since he regarded it as not being part of the Land of Israel. This was matched by his determination to hold on to the West Bank, which for Begin, as Judea and Samaria, was indeed part and parcel of Eretz Israel. This differentiation allowed him to suggest flexibility in making territorial concessions in Sinai and at the same time create the illusion that he would be willing to give up the West Bank as well at some point in the future. It was perceived by the far Right, and by his long-time colleagues within Herut, that their revered leader, now that he was in power, would actually compromise core beliefs—and led to the incorrect perception that this meant returning the West Bank to Arab rule. With Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, and the subsequent Camp David agreement, the far Right began to move out of the shelter of Begin’s umbrella that covered the broad Right. Any territorial concessions were seen as diluting fundamental ideological principles—and this included abandoning the Sinai settlement of Yamit. In Begin’s first government, Sharon was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the ministerial settlement committee. He was in charge of Begin’s settlement drive in areas of the West Bank that were populated by Palestinians. Sharon started the ‘We’re on the Map’ programme to demonstrate to Israelis what was happening on the West Bank. These were free trips, wholesome days out for the whole family—and funded by donors abroad.10 According to Sharon, twenty-two kibbutzim and moshavim and thirty-four hilltop villages were founded between 1977 and 1981, during Begin’s first government.



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Sharon essentially believed that the civil war of 1948 between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs had in fact never ended—and there could only be one victor. This informed his attempt to colonize the West Bank. He wanted to prevent the establishment of a state of Palestine, side by side with Israel, and to break up a territorial contiguity on the West Bank through the development of roads from Israel to the settlements. It also informed his push for a Greater Jerusalem by encircling Arab areas with new Jewish neighbourhoods. He also wanted to settle on the Samarian hills to protect the populated coastal plain and to prevent any attacks on Ben-Gurion airport. Yet Begin found an easy ally in Sharon in confronting his old comrades on the Right. Sharon’s willingness to change his views in accordance with his perception of the reality, his overt opportunism, and his lack of an ideological rigidity rooted in the Irgun allowed him to advise Begin to give up the Sinai settlements. Yet once Begin was safely interred in his grave, and when Sharon was cultivating the Right during the 1990s in order to oppose Netanyahu, he publicly regretted evacuating the Sinai settlements.11 Moreover Begin’s idea of autonomy for the Palestinians, he argued, was no more than a subterfuge in order to sign the peace treaty with Egypt. Rabin’s concept of autonomy was not the same as that of Begin. To stop a Palestinian state, he remarked, Palestinian autonomy had to be reduced to enclaves, encompassing some 30 percent of the West Bank.12 Passed over as IDF Chief of Staff, he wished to become Defense Minister. When Weizmann resigned as a result of Begin’s refusal to budge from any compromise over the West Bank, both Shamir and Arens refused to replace him because they did not want the ideological burden of supervising the evacuation of the settlements. Even so, despite Sharon’s eager anticipation, Begin kept Sharon waiting and took over the Defense Ministry himself. Sharon considered this an insult and there was a fierce argument between them.13 Sharon’s road to the Defense Ministry began with his support for Begin’s proposal to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The plan was opposed by Weizmann, Yadin, the Mossad, and Military Intelligence. Iraq would not have a bomb for many years. Moreover, work had been suspended because of the war between Iraq and Iran. It was conversely argued that at such a time there would therefore be no radioactive fallout if the reactor was bombed. The 1981 election that followed a few days later produced another victory for a re-energized Begin. The ‘earthquake’ of 1977 was therefore no flash in the pan. Despite all warnings to the contrary, including

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from Dayan, Begin appointed Sharon as Defense Minister. Landau argues that Begin feared that blood would be shed in evacuating the Sinai settlements and that he could only depend on Sharon to prevent it. Yamit was indeed evacuated without bloodshed—in part due to Sharon. However, it opened the way for Sharon to plan, implement, and execute Operation Peace for Galilee—the Lebanon war of 1982. As Ehud Ya’ari and Ze’ev Schiff’s powerful 1984 book on the war detailed, Sharon emerged from the episode with an enhanced reputation for duplicity and insubordination. Landau records this sorry story in two chapters, aptly titled ‘His Will Be Done’ and ‘Through the Mire.’ Sharon was represented during the Kahan Commission hearings by his lawyer, Dov Weisglass. Sharon was informed by the Commission that he bore ‘personal responsibility’ for the killings in the Sabra and Shatilla camps and by extension the invasion itself. It also added: ‘In our opinion, it is fitting that the Defense Minister draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office.’14 It effectively advised Begin to dismiss him. Begin resisted all such calls and allowed Sharon to stay on as a minister without portfolio. An unbowed Sharon disputed the cabinet’s decision to accept the findings of the Kahan Commission Report. Sharon accused Begin of ‘handing him over,’ recalling the saison, when the Haganah had handed over members of the Irgun to the British. According to Sharon himself, this sharp retort was a factor in Begin’s disappearance from public life, and his depression and isolation after 1983. The Twilight Years Sharon was down but he was not out. He never uttered the slightest scintilla of an apology, following the findings of the Kahan Commission. An unrepentant Sharon characterized the Lebanon war as one of a clear choice like those of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973—the only war of no choice, he suggested, was that of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He now wanted to become chairman of the Jewish Agency—a prospect that horrified Diaspora philanthropists—and in a secret vote he was defeated. This post was regarded as a Herut fiefdom and Sharon would also have become a minister once more. Even though Sharon, during the post-Begin era, was characterized in Israel as ‘an obtuse and foulmouthed extremist,’ Landau suggests that such an image also reinforced his position within the Likud. He put extraordinary energy into cultivat-



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ing ordinary Likud members by speaking at an inordinate number of branch meetings. Indeed, if Sharon had gained another fifty-four votes, he would have become the Likud candidate during the 1984 election instead of Yitzhak Shamir. During the mid-1980s, the journalist Uzi Benziman published a biography of Sharon, whose translated Hebrew title was He Does Not Stop at Red Lights. As Landau illustrates, Sharon privately reflected on his tarnished public image—and he believed that he had been treated unfairly. His goal was a vindication of his conduct in 1982, followed by a subsequent political rehabilitation. Sharon therefore resented the fact that Yitzhak Rabin had been appointed Defense Minister in his stead after Likud’s slim victory in the 1988 election. Landau records a remarkable exchange between Sharon and his long-time colleague and opponent, Yitzhak Rabin, during the First Intifada: Sharon: You are not fit to serve as Defense Minister because of your failure in handling the terror in the territories and your failure to defend Jewish lives. Rabin: You had better be careful with what you say. To date, only one Defense Minister has ever been removed from office by a commission of inquiry. The Lebanon war and its failure strongly point to your need to be careful about what you say. Sharon: I don’t want to relate to the style of Rabin’s remarks. This happens to him sometimes. Mainly when he’s not sober enough. When he loses control of himself. Rabin: Your words barely reach the tip of my ankle.

Sharon could certainly intimidate if he did not get his own way. This characterized the public and international perception of him until 1998, when he became Foreign Minister in Netanyahu’s government. By the 1990s, Sharon was regarded as the standard bearer of the Right— someone who would never compromise. Any hint of change even by the tight-lipped Shamir, a stonewaller par excellence, was attacked by Sharon. The First Intifada, however, was taking its toll. An increasing number of Israelis viewed the Palestinians as fighting for their cause by non-lethal methods—and that the IDF’s heavy-handed methods were no substitute for political dialogue and eventual negotiations. Groups such as Yesh Gvul assisted those Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the West Bank. Some were quietly transferred by sympathetic officers to other duties; others were sentenced to periods of imprisonment. Sharon’s loyalties lay with those Israeli soldiers who had been unable to cope with the Palestinian uprising. Landau records that by early 1991,

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154 officers and men had been court-martialled and hundreds more faced disciplinary action. Sharon was among the fifty MKs who promoted a private members’ bill to provide pardons to all IDF soldiers— but not to officers—who carried out illegal actions during the first three months of the First Intifada. Sharon spent a considerable amount of time galvanizing the Likud central committee behind his stand. He consequently chose a meeting of the Likud central committee to publicly resign from the government over the looming question of a Palestinian state in February 1990. Such theatre was designed to publicly humiliate the taciturn Shamir in the bosom of his party. It subsequently became known as ‘the night of the microphones.’ The National Unity government of the Likud and Labour parties collapsed and its replacement by a Peres-led government seemed a foregone conclusion. Inter-haredi rivalry and a volte-face by the members of the Shas party stopped Peres’s plans in its tracks. Instructed by the mitnaged Rabbi Eliezer Menahem Schach of Degel Ha-Torah to reverse their decision, Peres’s projected majority all but disappeared. However, Landau does not mention that it was on the instructions of the Hasidic Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson in Brooklyn that members of Agudat Yisrael absented themselves from the Knesset vote. Landau points out that Sharon provided bodyguards for one of these MKs. Unexpectedly back in power, Sharon was appointed Housing Minister and proceeded to invigorate the settlement drive in the West Bank. With the outbreak of the US-led Operation Desert Storm, Sharon strongly opposed Shamir’s policy of self-restraint against Saddam Hussein. The Americans had worked long and hard to create a coalition of Western and Arab armies—even the Syrians participated. Saddam Hussein wanted an Israeli intervention in order to wreck this coalition and secure the defection of the Arab states. He was prepared to provoke the Israelis by firing missiles at them. Some thirty-nine scud missiles therefore hit Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other cities during the brief 1990–1991 Gulf War. Sharon wanted the IDF to land commandos in western Iraq to seek and destroy the scud launchers. Sharon advocated just simply informing the Americans of Israeli decisions—without asking their consent. Sharon’s standing in the United States had reached a new low. The US Secretary of State, James Baker, categorically refused to meet Sharon in Washington. He resented Sharon’s disregard for US policy, and in particular, the establishment of new settlements each time Baker visited Jerusalem. Instead, meetings with other White House officials were held



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at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The Americans perceived Sharon in the context of the Lebanon war and his unruly behaviour generally within the Israeli political arena. Even the Jonathan Pollard affair was placed at Sharon’s feet, because Pollard’s handler, Rafi Eitan, was an old friend of Sharon. The arrival of huge numbers of Soviet Jews in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR brought out Sharon ‘the Bulldozer’—as he circumvented rules and regulations and ran roughshod over budgetary requirements. This brought him into continuous conflict with the State Comptroller, Miriam Ben-Porat, whose annual reports illustrated cronyism and preferential treatment. The Comptroller’s 1992 report stated that Sharon’s ministry had awarded construction contracts to some companies with negligible paid-up capital and others who were simply unable to honour such contracts from the outset. The inference was that Sharon had farmed out contracts to political allies. In addition, as Landau remarks, his stewardship of the Housing Ministry has been ‘a woeful mess.’ Sharon’s response was that everything he had done was in the public interest and that he was the victim of petty regulations, administered by small-minded bureaucrats. From Mr Hyde to Dr Jekyll The election of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords were a fundamental challenge to Sharon’s understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He regarded Oslo as a historic mistake and continued to believe that Arafat was ‘a base murderer, an unreformed terrorist, an inveterate liar, implacably committed to Israel’s destruction.’ In 1994, following the killing of Palestinian worshippers by Baruch Goldstein, Sharon opposed the mooted evacuation of settlers from Hebron by Rabin’s government. He called for passive resistance with himself at the head.15 He also stood by the settlers, urging them to seize the hilltops to create contiguity between the settlements. By 1995, Sharon was knee-deep in the protests of the far Right against Rabin’s policies. The government, he argued in an article in June 1995, was being transformed into a mosser—an informer, a chilling term that resonated historically with many religious Jews. Indeed, there were discussions and deliberations by West Bank rabbis at the time as to whether Rabin deserved this appellation. Sharon had always kept a private channel open to Rabin and the two men continued to constructively discuss the political situation despite the public megaphone war.

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Despite his involvement in the far Right’s incitement against Rabin, he was clearly shocked at the assassination of the Prime Minister. Landau reveals that Sharon later told Rabin’s daughter, Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, privately that ‘there were things said that shouldn’t have been said.’ Following the Islamist bus bombings in 1996, the Israeli electorate shifted dramatically to the Right. Sharon entertained the possibility that he would once more become Defense Minister, a post, according to a senior figure in the Likud, that Netanyahu had promised to him. Sharon had campaigned strongly, particularly amongst the haredim, to ensure the election of Netanyahu. Yet Netanyahu desperately wanted to keep Sharon out of government, given the experience of both Begin and Shamir. Moreover, in the past, Sharon had ridiculed Netanyahu. Referring to Netanyahu’s public explanation of his extra-marital affairs, Sharon offered his advice that ‘there are leaders who solve problems and others who get caught with their pants down.’16 Netanyahu, in frustration, spoke of Sharon’s incessant and tireless subversion. With support from both David Levy and the haredi parties, Sharon battered on Netanyahu’s door. When the pressure proved too great, Netanyahu solved the problem by expanding the cabinet to create the Ministry of National Infrastructure for Sharon. While continuing to refer to Netanyahu as ‘the male model,’ Sharon seemed to be strangely oozing an uncharacteristic quality—a loyalty to his leader. It was as if he had turned over a new political leaf at a time when he was approaching the age of seventy. In hindsight, it was the beginning of the road to the role of a twenty-first-century elder statesman. Why did this take place? Why did he change from duplicitous bastard to cuddly grandfather of the nation, in the minds of Israelis? Landau devotes little space to this volte-face—and to be fair, it is still difficult even now to fathom why Sharon should change the habits of a lifetime. Perhaps as Landau implies, it was Father Time whispering in his ear that the grim reaper was growing enthusiastic to pay a visit. Moreover, the unsure and indecisive Netanyahu was making mistakes, and might not last, even though he was several decades younger. Both Netanyahu and Sharon now began to distance themselves from the ideological rigidity of both Begin and Shamir. Both understood that the reality of Oslo had to be absorbed into the political psyche of the present, while publicly maintaining the past glory of a Greater Israel to the Likud faithful. Netanyahu discovered, as his Likud predecessors had done before him, that prime ministers had to take responsibility for political decisions that might be construed as compromise by those further



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to his Right. Sharon was not hemmed in by the dead weight of ‘the fighting family’ syndrome, but as an adherent of Ben-Gurion and Dayan, he could change political direction if it concurred with his understanding of the reality. However, at the core of these changes was an undimmed belief in his ability to lead. Sharon therefore supported Netanyahu during the debacle of the Mash‘al poisoning affair.17 He dined with King Hussein and now had good standing in Jordan. No longer did he argue that ‘Jordan is Palestine’ and there were even hints in the Israeli press that he entertained the possibility of a Palestinian state. He met Mahmoud Abbas at his ranch in July 1997 and the following month conferred with Dennis Ross—even the Americans had revised their attitude and had now come to seek his views. Sharon’s rehabilitation was complete when David Levy resigned as Foreign Minister at the beginning of 1998. Netanyahu’s prevarication at appointing Sharon over a period of several months as Levy’s successor did not result in rage from Sharon, but a ratcheting up of statements of public adoration for his leader. The schmooze succeeded and Sharon joined Netanyahu, Clinton, and Arafat— the man he attempted to kill in Beirut in 1982—for discussions at the Wye Plantation talks. Ever wary of the reaction back home, Sharon shook the hands of the Palestinian delegates—with the exception of Arafat. At Wye, Sharon agreed with the Israeli decision to give back 13 percent of West Bank territory. Back in Israel, Sharon encouraged the settlers to grab ‘hilltop after hilltop’ and to establish new settlements. Janus-like, he looked in both directions with equal conviction and certainty. Leading from the Front Netanyahu lost disastrously at the polls in 1999—and Sharon became the caretaker leader of the Likud—but he was yesterday’s man and far from challenging Ehud Barak’s power. Taking charge of the rump of nineteen seats for the Likud, Sharon pressed throughout Barak’s tenure for a national-unity government. Landau records that all the opinion polls indicated that only Netanyahu—and not Sharon—was capable of defeating Barak. During the Camp David summit during the summer of 2000, Barak’s coalition disintegrated. In particular, Sharon attacked Barak for his willingness to divide Jerusalem—thereby attracting the national religious, the haredim, the far Right and many Russians to the Likud standard. Sharon argued that the holiness of Jerusalem was ‘many times more meaningful for the Jewish people than it is for the Christians and Muslims.’ Sharon had dinner with Barak at Kochav Yair on 25

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September 2000, and then went on a walkabout on the Temple Mount three days later. Jibril Rajoub, the PA’s head of preventive security, had previously advised the Israelis that there would not be any violence as long as Sharon did not enter a mosque. Yet Sharon, when he was a government minister ten years before, had prevented members of the Temple Mount Faithful group from entering the area. Now he insisted on his national right as a Jew to visit the Temple Mount. He had never visited the site either as Defense Minister or as Foreign Minister. This was a location that united nationalist and Islamist, Palestinian and Israeli Arab. There was also resentment about the fact that unless Muslims from Gaza worked in Israel, they were denied travel permission and therefore unable to worship in the al-Aqsa mosque. Sharon’s very presence, given his history, would be seen by the Palestinians as a provocation and a challenge. There was also concerted Palestinian frustration that Arafat’s empty intention to declare a state on 13 September had come and gone. On the other hand, there seemed to be little Palestinian awareness and sensitivity to any Jewish emotional attachment to the Temple Mount. Following Sharon’s walk, there were violent attacks on Israelis in the vicinity of the Temple Mount. The subsequent killings of Palestinians led to the use of live ammunition by Palestinians on the West Bank. The al-Aqsa Intifada had been ignited, which would claim thousands of lives. In a letter to the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, on 2 October 2000, Sharon criticized her for having insinuated that his visit to the Temple Mount ‘caused tension’ and that it ignited further disturbances. He argued that all this was part of a premeditated campaign initiated by the PA and pointed to an attack in Gaza some ten days previously. Yet, internationally, there was a widespread belief that Sharon’s visit had indeed provided a trigger for an outbreak of violence. The day before Sharon’s walkabout, Netanyahu was finally cleared of charges of bribery—and this cleared the path for him to return to public life. Barak’s disintegrating coalition persuaded him to resign as prime minister and to seek re-election for this office—but only sitting MKs were eligible to run as candidates and Netanyahu was not an MK at the time. The Likud Central Committee side-lined Sharon and publicly embraced the resurgent Netanyahu. Even though a bill was passed that permitted him to run, Netanyahu inexplicably decided to stay out of the race and not to challenge the candidacy of the marginalized, humiliated, and embittered Sharon. It is an enigma that still remains to be unravelled. Against all the odds, Sharon became Prime Minister at the age of seventy-two.



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Sharon’s tenure in office was marked by his crushing of the Second Intifada and his no-holds-barred attitude to the rise of Palestinian Islamism and its coterie of suicide bombers. Following the death of his wife and the continuing hostility of the Likud central committee, Sharon surrounded himself with family and long-term loyalists as his closest advisers. At the beginning of the Intifada, Sharon, it seems, believed that he could still work with Arafat despite his antipathy for the rais (leader). Sharon’s son Omri, lawyer Weisglass, and the secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry, Eytan Bentsur, flew to Vienna to meet Muhammad Rashid, Arafat’s financial advisor at the home of Sharon’s long-time associate, the businessman Martin Schlaff. Sharon spoke to Arafat by telephone and Omri and Yossi Ginossar went to meet him to negotiate a ceasefire. Yet Arafat backed away from a proposed draft agreement. In his interview with Shaul Mofaz, Landau quotes the then IDF Chief of Staff as saying that Arafat instead gave the green light to the Islamists to carry out suicide bombings within the Green Line. The attack on the Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel, the refusal to arrest the assassins of Rehavam Ze’evi, and his financing of the arms ship, the Karine-A, convinced Sharon that Arafat had to be eliminated from the political equation. A neo-conservative in the White House made common cause with Sharon. President Bush was prepared to ditch Arafat in a remarkable speech in the Rose Garden. The bulk of Bush’s delivery laid the blame for the violence of the Intifada at the feet of Arafat and proceeded to demolish his international standing—without even naming him. Arafat had survived nine Israeli Prime Ministers and seven US Presidents, but he was now confronted by both Bush and Sharon. The Bush speech symbolically relegated both the Oslo Accords and Arafat, the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize winner, to history. It also stood in stark contrast to the approaches of both Peres and Powell who believed that only Arafat could negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians—and deliver. While Sharon probably never believed in the US President’s advocacy of reform and democratization, Bush’s pronouncements represented a tremendous victory for Sharon in delegitimizing Arafat and neutralizing his involvement. In parallel with his military assault on Arafat, he now began to follow his own political path that began to verge on the heretical for the Likud faithful. At Latrun on 23 September 2001, Sharon declared his support for a Palestinian state—not a territorially contiguous one, but an archipelago of Palestinian population centres. In June 2002, the Israeli cabinet decided to build the separation fence to keep out the suicide

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bombers. The Palestinians bitterly complained—not least those who were trapped in no man’s land. However, many Jewish settlers to the East were also left outside what many believed would emerge as the eventual borders of Israel. The fence would encompass 7.8 percent of the West Bank, 76 percent of the Jewish settlers, and 0.7 percent of Palestinians. While Sharon was being lauded for his assertive leadership, he was also under pressure to launch a political initiative. Twenty-seven pilots and thirteen Sayeret Matkal reservists had protested at his tactics, but tellingly, four former heads of the Shin Bet criticized Sharon’s view of first crushing terror, then moving on to negotiations. In part, as Landau remarks, Sharon’s plan to disengage from Gaza— and probably later from areas of the West Bank—was to pre-empt other plans such as Yossi Beilin’s Geneva Initiative and the ‘People’s Choice’ of Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh that 250,000 people signed. Weisglass’s famous ‘formaldehyde’ comment—a sufficient supply was to be supplied to keep any negotiating process in deep freeze—was designed to push such plans into the political sidings. During the primaries for the Likud leadership in 2003, Netanyahu did remarkably well as many resented Sharon’s ‘moderation.’ The chasm in the Likud between the adherents of Netanyahu and the supporters of Sharon grew daily. The debate over the Road Map in May 2002 indicated that seven Likud ministers were in favour while seven voted against or abstained. He told a gathering of the Likud MKs the following day that the Palestinians were ‘under occupation.’ According to Ephraim Halevy, the head of the Mossad, Sharon even ‘signed off on the partition of Jerusalem.’ In November and December, Ehud Olmert published hitherto unheard-of views on withdrawal in the Hebrew press. On 18 December 2003, Sharon spoke about ‘disengagement’ to the Herzliya Conference—and not waiting for the Palestinians indefinitely. In April 2004, there was an exchange of letters between Bush and Sharon. Bush refused to back the right of return of Palestinian refugees and argued that the large settlement blocs close to the Green Line would remain part of Israel. A side letter between Weisglass and Rice effectively legitimized settlement building within the construction line of the fence. Israel also promised to remove unauthorized outposts ‘within thirty days.’ Sharon, however, was defeated in a vote on disengagement by Likud party members by a large margin. Sharon dismissed members of far Right parties, Avigdor Lieberman and Benny Elon, from his government so that he would then have a majority in the cabinet for his plan. Netanyahu demanded a referendum; otherwise, he would resign from



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government. Yet when he and his supporters realized that they were in the minority, Netanyahu decided to stay in the cabinet on the basis that Arafat was dying and therefore there would now be major changes in the Middle East. Even the invoking of the hallowed Jabotinsky in Likud mythology on the centrality of settlements by Sharon was to no avail. Jabotinsky had stated in 1915: We have never seen a settlement as an end in and of itself. We have seen it as one of the most powerful means of state-oriented Zionism for achieving our sovereignty over the land of Israel. To us, a settlement has been precious as one of our finest cards in the statesmanship game of the future. But should this settlement suddenly become an impediment in the crucial statesmanship game—to this we shall not agree. A settlement is a means and no more than that. The fact that we love its green orchards, its golden fields and its proud labourers is irrelevant. For us, they are the political avant-garde. It happens that for the sake of a common interest the avant-garde suffers severe losses. We send them our blessings and continue on our way.18

The devoutly secular Shinui left the government and was replaced by United Torah Judaism. This facilitated the absence of haredim in anti-disengagement protests. The Likud split into Sharon’s Kadima and a Netanyahu-led Likud rump. Other followers of Ben-Gurion, such as Shimon Peres, similarly abandoned their traditional ideological moorings and joined Sharon on this political voyage. The Gaza settlements were evacuated without violence. At the height of his political success, Sharon, however, was felled in the midst of his triumphs by two strokes in 2006—and remained in a vegetative state until his death in 2014. So which Arik Sharon was the real one? The hero of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 or the Defense Minister during the Lebanon war in 1982? The leader of Unit 101 during the attack on Qibya in 1953 or the advocate of disengagement from Gaza in 2004? The champion of the settlers in 1974 or the builder of the Separation Fence in 2002? It depends on an individual’s outlook—on which episode in this remarkable career matters most. One size definitely does not fit all. David Landau’s biography is well researched and is an intelligent attempt to capture the essence of this driven man. His extensive list of interviews certainly adds to our knowledge. It is an asset to any reader seeking answers to those often unanswerable questions that Sharon’s odyssey has provoked. (Review of David Landau’s Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon in Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 6, nos. 1–2, 2015)

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NOTES 1.  Ha’aretz, 14 January 2014. 2.  The saison (a shortened version of the French phrase, la saison de chasse) refers to the Haganah’s crackdown (1944–1945) on the Irgun’s insurgency against the British Mandate government in Palestine. In English, the saison is sometimes referred to as ‘the hunting season’. 3.  Ha’aretz, 6 October 1995. 4.  Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars: 1949–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 227–62. 5.  Ibid., pp. 245–46. 6.  Ibid., p. 247. 7. Moshe Sharett, Yoman Ishi, 15 October 1953; Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 247. 8. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 256. 9.  Ariel Sharon, Warrior: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 91. 10.  Arye Naor, Begin ba-shilton: Edut ishit (Begin in Power: A Personal Testimony) (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1993), p. 214. 11.  Ma’ariv, 8 July 1994; 7 December 1997. 12.  Yediot Aharanot, 7 August 1992. 13. Naor, Begin ba-shilton, pp. 265–62. 14.  Recommendations and Closing Remarks: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut (Jerusalem, 7 February 1983). 15.  Ha’aretz, 30 October 1994. 16.  Jerusalem Report, 24 February 1994. 17.  In September 1997, Mash‘al was targeted for assassination in Jordan by the Netanyahu government. The Mossad’s attempt to poison Mash‘al in Amman ended in failure. 18.  Di Tribune, 15 October 1915.

14 The Islamist Rejectionists

HAMAS AND PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE

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rise of Palestinian Islamism was undoubtedly one of the factors which contributed to the breakdown of the peace process between Israel and the PLO during the 1990s. Palestinian Islamism differed substantially from Palestinian nationalism. Hamas emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had already developed a strong political and religious base in Gaza over many decades. Hamas was far more illiberal than the nationalist Fatah in the West Bank. The overcrowded and highly impoverished enclave of Gaza contained large numbers of refugees who had fled or been expelled in 1948. Many turned to Islam as a means of understanding their plight. Yassin had built up an impressive network of social services to help the poor and needy, to provide education and health care. By the 1990s, a large percentage of Gaza’s population were children and teenagers who were guided and influenced by Hamas. Israel had originally seen Yassin’s network as a means of being a foil to Arafat’s PLO. The rivalry was encouraged by the Israelis. A watershed occurred in the aftermath of the onset of the First Intifada when Hamas emerged from the Brotherhood primarily to challenge the local control of Fatah. It also became more politically active because the PLO had initiated the first overt moves to establish a state on the West Bank, following King Hussein’s renunciation of any responsibility for the territory. The actual 259

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declaration of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza by Arafat in November 1988 however implied the acceptance of a two-state solution. Moreover, a return to accepting UN Resolution 181 of 1947 provided ‘the conditions of international legitimacy’ for the Palestinian people. In 1974 when mainstream Palestinian nationalism similarly instigated a move in this direction, there was the immediate defection of the Abu Nidal group and strong criticism from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). When this was repeated in 1988 in more favourable circumstances, Arafat once again found that he could not please both the Israelis and his internal opponents. The First Intifada was essentially non-lethal—although stones were thrown, no weapons were utilised and suicide bombers were absent. However, Hamas projected a different approach and began to kidnap Israeli soldiers in February 1989. Hamas then saw itself as part of the revival of Islamism in the Arab world—a process which gathered momentum during the coming decades. The end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1990 allowed the Ayatollahs to fortify their positions as the spreaders of Islamism amidst a public sense that Arab nationalism was faltering. Teheran now turned its attention to the question of Palestine. While Iran naturally bolstered Shi’ite communities throughout the Arab world and supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, it remarkably forged an alliance with Sunni Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinian organisation was now represented in the Iranian capital and attended a gathering to protest the Madrid Conference in October 1991. Hamas looked to Teheran as an example of what Islamism could achieve. It admired its militancy and its refusal to compromise. It also inherited the Iranian tradition of suicide bombing. The liberation of Palestine as a waqf, an Islamic trust, was a political and religious imperative for all Islamists. When al-Qaeda was established in 1988, its aim was not only to liberate Islamic lands from colonialism and to overthrow military dictators, but also to defeat Zionism and return Palestine to Muslim rule. Hamas understood Zionism as emerging from Judaism rather than from nineteenth-century European nationalism. Unlike the PLO, Hamas made little distinction between Jews and Zionists. Early Hamas documents argued that ‘the enemies’ were skilfully amassing wealth and influence to take over the international media and foment revolution. They were also responsible



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for both the French and Bolshevik revolutions. Moreover, Trotsky was a Zionist and such plans were meticulously documented in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On a greeting card to mark the end of Ramadan, Israelis were depicted as Jews with horns—as in medieval Europe.1 Such imagery had been absorbed from the European far Right and built on centuries of anti-Semitic stereotypes. It also indicated how isolated and how far removed Palestinian Islamism was from the mainstream of international intellectual discourse. ‘The eternal Jew’ in Islamist eyes was the same Jew who had opposed the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia. Nothing had changed in the intervening millennium and a half. The Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993 created a wall of Islamist opposition. It highlighted their inability to compromise. The killing of worshippers by the West Bank settler Baruch Goldstein in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in early 1994 persuaded Hamas to introduce

Arafat in discussion with Rabin, Peres and Mubarak at the signing of the Gaza-Jericho Accord, Cairo, 4 May 1994. The Palestinian Islamists strongly opposed any normalisation with Israel and attempted to widen the gap between the two sides. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

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suicide bombing into Israel itself. Shortly after the killings in Hebron, the first Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in Afula and Hadera. Even before his assassination, Rabin was being progressively weakened politically by the bombers—as indicated by numerous opinion polls. More Israelis were being killed after Oslo than before it. Even if Rabin had lived, it is likely that he would have been defeated at the polls by Netanyahu. The election of Netanyahu by a small number of votes in 1996 facilitated the parking of the peace process in the political doldrums. The reaction of many Israelis who had been involved in the peace process was to strive to revive it. It implied creating a dialogue with Palestinian Islamists, who were now a force to be reckoned with. Yet Islamism was not nationalism and Ahmed Yassin was not Yasser Arafat.

NEGOTIATING WITH HAMAS Rabin’s assassination also proved to be a watershed, and many Israelis began to distance themselves from a belief in peace with the Palestinians. This passive wait-and-see attitude was accentuated by Barak’s failure either to achieve peace with Syria or to negotiate successfully with Arafat. It led to his replacement by Arik Sharon as the al-Aqsa Intifada gathered pace. Unlike the First Intifada, this was led by the Islamists, and the deployment of the suicide bomber became an integral weapon of the conflict. In the midst of polarisation, a diminishing remnant of the Israeli peace camp believed that the way forward meant speaking to Hamas. This evolved into frequent calls upon the Likud government to negotiate with Hamas. Sharon however repeated his belief that he would not negotiate while there was still violence. This dictum had already blocked any negotiations with Arafat—and effectively prevented Foreign Minister Peres from locating a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Instead, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt acted as an intermediary if messages needed to be passed between Hamas and the Israelis. Yet even if Israel had signalled its willingness for direct negotiations with the Islamists, would there have been a positive response from Hamas? Could Hamas have initiated a pragmatic approach and overcome theological and ideological obstacles? Was Hamas, the Islamist equivalent of Sinn Fein? Would one final push attain the holy grail of a peace agreement, as had been the case in Ireland in 1998?



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The unwillingness of the Quartet to accept Hamas’s triumph at the Palestinian Legislative Election in 2006 and Mahmoud Abbas’s refusal to replace Fatah with Hamas in the government led to simmering tensions between Islamist and nationalists. It boiled over in the summer of 2007 with Hamas’s takeover of Gaza. It effectively meant the political as well as the geographical separation of Palestinian territory. Gaza was now governed by the Islamists, the West Bank by the nationalists. Shortly after Hamas achieved dominance in Gaza, Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior figure in its political bureau wrote an article in the Guardian. While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is busily courting Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as a ‘partner for peace,’ successive voices continue to speak out against efforts to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government. As Britain’s Commons foreign affairs committee concluded on Monday, this strategy is counterproductive and doomed to fail, for the simple reason that the support of the Palestinian people is unmistakably lacking. Abbas’s party does not democratically represent the Palestinians, yet what is in effect now a dictatorship in the West Bank is being welcomed by Israel and its western allies. The duplicity of this situation is shameful. Israel and its allies were quick to dismiss Hamas and the national unity governments and isolate both, and are now equally as quick to welcome an illegally formed self-proclaimed government for the Palestinians. Is this democracy? The Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom has been continuing for almost a century. During this time, we have faced every form of challenge, from persecution, abuse and humiliation, to military assaults, engineered starvation and social anarchy. All these trials have been deliberately imposed by an occupying power that is breaching international law on a daily basis. Yet despite this, it is the popular Palestinian people’s liberation movement that is being targeted by Israel and its allies for boycott and isolation. Hamas was formed in response to the pressures of the occupation and the need for change in Palestinian society. It was on this basis that it was given a popular mandate by its people in 2006. Hamas represents a guarantee that the Palestinian people’s rights will not be compromised. We have continued to insist that the rights of the Palestinian people be respected by the occupying power. Quite simply, in the present situation, it is not Israel that is threatened with annihilation but the Palestinian people.

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Hamas has proven that it is able to run a government, even under intense financial and political pressure. It has proven capable of fulfilling its commitments, even in the face of intense internal and external provocations. Israel’s deliberate attempts to fracture Palestinian society have resulted in the turmoil we now face. The humanitarian problem in Gaza is immense and Abbas is being used to disenfranchise us further. While Ehud Olmert laments the so-called absence of a partner for peace, the illegal separation wall continues to be built, money is withheld from the Palestinian people, settlements are built apace and the blockade of the West Bank and Gaza continues. If Olmert really considers Abbas a true partner for peace, one must question why he is still refusing to discuss the substantive issues of border, refugees and Jerusalem. Israel’s actions, in defiance of its international obligations, evince not an appetite to peace but an attempt to use Abbas to manipulate the Palestinian population and win more time for its strategy of further illegal expansion, to ensure that no coherent Palestinian state can be established. We welcome the committee’s report, which takes a realistic, objective position. Talking to Hamas is a prerequisite for any sustainable solution. Moreover, Hamas is the people’s choice not only within Palestine but also in the Diaspora, and must be recognised as such. The Palestinians have been denied every form of freedom since the occupation began, and now they are even dispossessed of their democratic rights. But none of this has succeeded in denting Hamas’s unity and democratic commitment to the rights of Palestinian people. Hamas welcomes dialogue. If the international community is serious about peace in the Middle East, there need to be non-partisan efforts to achieve it. It is not sufficient for Israel or its allies to continue to dismiss Hamas as ‘extremist,’ as we are made up of every part of Palestinian society. Those who demand the boycott of Hamas repeat flimsy accusations that cannot withstand non-partisan scrutiny. They do so because they want a Palestinian ‘peace’ partner who will not endanger Israel’s expansionist aspirations. This is not diplomacy; this is bigotry. The Palestinians have been abandoned by the international community. The cruelty of this treatment will go down in history. It is time to create a new history for the region, and to recognise the real representatives of the Palestinian people. (Mousa Abu Marzook, ‘Hamas Is Ready to Talk’, Guardian, 15 August 2007)



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Marzook’s point of reference was recognition of the election results and Hamas’s legitimacy. Hamas wanted dialogue—with the international community, but not seemingly with Israel. Hamas’s actual position was that it would not negotiate directly with Israel, but it would still allow the Palestinian Authority to do so. Even so, any outcome of negotiations had to be subjected to a referendum in which all Palestinian refugees would also be allowed to vote. If Hamas achieved power in the future, it would not feel bound by past agreements. Moreover, Marzook’s solution was not a final agreement, based on a two-state solution, but an open-ended ceasefire. Was this a negotiating stance which could be modified later? Or a hard-and-fast ideological position? Yet figures such as the long-time peace campaigner Uri Avnery clearly felt that if he placed his foot in the door, then this would lead to more reasonable positions in the future. Mousa Abu Marzook’s positive comment that Hamas welcomes dialogue seems to apply only to external political figures and journalists, not the Israeli peace camp (Comment, August 16). This is in contrast to the PLO, which assiduously cultivated first non-Zionist, then Zionist adherents of the Israeli Left. A year ago Gush Shalom predicted an imminent meeting between the broad Israeli peace camp and the Hamas leadership—this has yet to take place. Does non-recognition of Israel extend to non-recognition of the Israeli peace camp? In September 2006 the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, said he would not head a government of national unity if it recognised Israel. In view of the attempt by Hamas to heal the rift with Fatah, is this still the position today? Is non-recognition of Israel more important than Palestinian unity? While Hamas still calls for a five- or ten-year hudna (long-term truce), it has yet to call for a suhl (a genuine peace). This distinction was made in 1993 by Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Yassin, because he did not want to permanently surrender parts of Palestine to the Jews. Just as the vote for Blair in 2005 did not signify support for the Iraq war, the election of Hamas was due to Palestinian anger at the policies of the Sharon government and the incompetence of Arafat’s regime, rather than an endorsement of an Islamist programme. Palestinian opinion polls have consistently shown a desire for a fair settlement based on the right of national self-determination of both peoples. While there is much to criticise in Sharon’s legacy to the Israelis, Hamas seems to be unable to overcome its ideological rigidity. Dr Colin Shindler Guardian, 17 August 2007

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In his letter (August 17), Dr Colin Shindler mentions that Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement in which I am active, predicted that the ‘broad Israeli peace movement’ would conduct talks with Hamas, yet ‘this has yet to take place.’ This could mean either that we broke our promise, or that Hamas refused to talk with us. Not so. After the election victory of Hamas, I met one of their outstanding leaders, Muhammad Abu-Ter, when we were tear-gassed together in a demonstration against the separation wall. He invited me to his home in East Jerusalem, where we met several times publicly. Several of his colleagues took part. Abu-Ter and all the other Hamas leaders who participated in these talks were soon after arrested by the Israeli police and are still in prison. We protested in front of the military court during the proceedings. Since the Gaza Strip is hermetically closed, there is no way we could possibly meet with other Hamas leaders. We believe that it is absolutely essential to talk with Hamas—for the good of Israel, Palestine and peace. Uri Avnery Guardian, 21 August 2007 Uri Avnery (Letters, August 21) doesn’t seem to recognise that there is a profound difference between meeting a Hamas representative in East Jerusalem and meeting its collective leadership in Gaza. Following his initiated meeting with Muhammad Abu-Ter, Avnery’s own spokesman for Gush Shalom, Adam Keller, commented in May 2006 that he expected ‘a large delegation of the Israeli peace movement’ would meet with the Hamas leadership. Avnery courageously met Arafat during the war in Lebanon in 1982. Why was there no meeting with Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in the year before the Hamas takeover in Gaza when access was possible? Wouldn’t such a demonstrative meeting have supported Hamas’s campaign against the sanctions imposed by the Bush administration and the Europeans? There were also opportunities for a publicised meeting outside the Middle East. This too never took place. Avnery’s unconditional approach does not seem to be reciprocated by the Hamas leadership, which maintains the rigidity of its ideological stand. Unlike Avnery, most of the Israeli peace camp has severe reservations about Hamas’s Islamist agenda. In addition, Hamas seemingly sets its face against an open display of embracing broad representative groups such as Peace Now, since this would imply a normalisation of relations with Israelis, even though it might be a step towards peace. The inference is that



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non-recognition of Israel is not a short-term measure to secure an end to the occupation, but something far more fundamental. Dr Colin Shindler Guardian, 22 August 2007

GAZA UNDER HAMAS RULE The Hamas takeover in Gaza in 2007 led to the elimination of opponents and to the imposition of Islamist norms—particularly those involving women, gays and non-Muslims. The very different world outlooks between Islamists and nationalists led to a deepening hostility between Hamas and Fatah in the years after 2007. Even when relations were good between the two different camps, any negotiations between the two sides led to an eventual stalemate. During Israeli conflicts with Gaza, the unspoken hope of Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank nationalists was clearly that the IDF should finish off Hamas militarily and politically so that Fatah could resume its rightful place in government. Moreover, the prospect that Hamas would establish a foothold on the West Bank and then begin to fire missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa unnerved Israel. There was therefore a common cause for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to cooperate in matters of intelligence and military action to suppress Hamas operatives. During the early part of the Gaza war of 2009. Amira Hass, the Israeli journalist known for her incisive commentary on the Palestinian territories and often accused of pro-Palestinian sympathies, wrote that Hamas operatives had begun to execute Fatah members who had expressed ‘happiness’ at the Israeli aerial attack. The Hamas Interior Minister, Said Siyain, later killed in the assault on Gaza had ordered the house arrest of many Fatah members. Hass further named the former Israeli Gaza settlement of Rafiah Yam as Hamas’s killing fields. Virtually nothing else was written about this attempt to liquidate political rivals until the Palestinian Ma’an news agency in Ramallah published a long list of 181 names and locations of ‘patriotic people’ who had been executed, shot in the feet or had their legs broken. This was the latest episode in the relatively unpublicised conflict between the nationalist Fatah and the Islamist Hamas to have taken place—all of which is documented

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in this book. It began essentially with the birth of Hamas at the beginning of 1988, but is actually a much older phenomenon, going right back to the emergence of modern Arab nationalism. Nasser’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s is a more recent example of this. Arab and Palestinian nationalists, influenced by the European Enlightenment, have often ultimately taken a pragmatic decision to make a political compromise with their enemies. The Islamists’ blend of nationalism, religious zeal and acts of terror box them in and they find it almost theologically impossible to make this fateful leap. It is simply a question of spiritual reinvigoration and gathering military strength until the next round. Hamas opposed any rapprochement between Rabin’s Israel and Arafat’s PLO and thereby introduced suicide bombing into Israel proper in April 1994 to undermine the Oslo Accords. Despite Arafat’s attempts to corral Hamas, the bombings undermined the peace camp in Israel, effectively elected Netanyahu and banged a large nail into the coffin of the peace process. Hamas not only did not wish to recognise Israel, it did not wish to recognise Israelis. Unlike the PLO, it did not wish to engage in any dialogue with Israelis opposed to their government’s policies. The First Intifada in the 1980s coincided with the end of the IranIraq war. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual mentor and effective founder of Hamas, embraced Iran despite previous objections, based on the Sunni-Shi’ite schism. Arafat’s determination to allow the PLO to participate in the Jordanian delegation to the Madrid peace conference in 1991 persuaded Hamas to attend a conference in Teheran. This was the beginning of a long alliance whereby the Ayatollahs have provided funding, training and war materiel to the Palestinian Islamists. During the Hamas takeover of Gaza in the summer of 2007, Israeli human rights advocates estimated that at least 330 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting between the nationalists and the Islamists. Fatah buildings including the organisation’s intelligence headquarters, private homes and hospitals were taken over. Clashes and killings continued throughout 2008. Some Palestinian nationalists such as Hanan Ashrawi were also Christian Arabs. Islamist attacks on the Rosary Sisters school and the Latin Church in Gaza City therefore became another bone of contention. This was augmented by the seemingly forced conversion of Professor Sana al-Sayegh to Islam and the killing of Rutin Ayyad, the proprietor of the Holy Bible Association in Gaza. Allied to this were comments



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from the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief that women were especially vulnerable in Gaza under Hamas rule. Israel in the 1980s supported and indeed armed Sheikh Yassin’s followers as a counterbalance to Arafat’s PLO. Following the Camp David summit in 2000 and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Arafat’s encouragement of the fighting effectively opened the door to an Islamist takeover of the uprising and a consequential weakening of his own position. Indeed. Arafat released hundreds of Hamas detainees at the beginning of the Intifada. Despite protestations by the Palestinian Authority at the assault on Gaza in 2009, it has also dawned upon Fatah that their more dangerous enemy may be Hamas rather than the Israelis. (Review of Jonathan Schanzer’s Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine, in Asian Affairs, July 2009)

HEZBOLLAH IN THE NORTH Hamas began to develop a missile capability during the al-Aqsa Intifada. It commenced with what were tantamount to flying pipe bombs which were aimed at towns, villages and kibbutzim on Israel’s southern border. These were often located just a few kilometres away from the border with Gaza. A decade later Hamas had improved the range and the sophistication of its missiles such that they could now reach Tel Aviv. Such expertise was acquired via Hezbollah and Iran. They in turn had used missiles of Chinese and North Korean design to produce bigger and better weaponry. North Korean weapons were also shipped to Syria and made their way to Hezbollah. A hidden Syrian reactor at Dayr as-Zwar near the Iraqi border resembled North Korea’s plutonium facility at Yongbyon. An air strike, presumably by Israel, in September 2007, destroyed this complex. Even during the Syrian civil war several years later, Israel took military action on several occasions to prevent war materiel being transferred to Hezbollah from Syria. Hezbollah had acquired and stationed tens of thousands of missiles on Israel’s northern border during the first few years of the twenty-first century. The Israeli nightmare was a missile war on two fronts from Hez­ bollah in the north and Hamas in the South. If Hamas gained a foothold

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in the West Bank or was able to oust Mahmoud Abbas, then Israel would also face a missile threat from the East as well. During the second Lebanon war with Hezbollah in 2006, it was brought home to the Israelis how unprepared they were for missile warfare. Four thousand short-range katyusha missiles fell on northern Israel and virtually depopulated large areas as Israelis temporarily moved south to be out of range. The North Koreans had built a sophisticated series of tunnels along the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, based on their own experience along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the Korean peninsula. These were interconnected by a system of elevators which allowed missiles and mortars to be brought to the surface while fired by human hand from below. This experience led to the development of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system, which could shoot down incoming missiles. It was first deployed outside Beer Sheva in March 2011 and proved remarkably successful but could not provide 100 per cent protection. Israel went on to develop—in conjunction with the Americans—systems which could stop short-, medium- and long-range missiles from devastating Israel’s population centres. Hezbollah soon became preoccupied with propping up the Assad regime during the civil war and suffered many casualties. It found itself on one side of the Sunni–Shi’ite conflict while Hamas found itself on the other. The common factor during this brutal civil war was an Islamist belief in propagating an anti-Jewish rather than an anti-Zionist narrative. Hezbollah calls itself ‘the party of God’ which exudes a whiff of undiluted certainty that it—and it alone—knows the pathway to heaven. It’s not surprising, therefore, that anti-Judaism is a tenet of Hezbollah truth. Indeed, as Sheikh Na’im Qasim, the organisation’s deputy secretarygeneral said: ‘the history of the Jews has proven that regardless of the Zionist proposal, they are a people who are evil.’ Conspiracy theories abound in Hezbollah’s gallery of demons and infidels. Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah believes that since the Jews were never able to prove the existence of gas chambers, then there is clearly no proof to suggest that they were massacred by the Nazis. Yet Hezbollah, according to Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, only hates Jews as a religious community rather than as ‘a racial group.’ Still, this did not stop Nasrallah from proclaiming that ‘if we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and



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feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.’ Hezbollah emerged out of the impoverished Shi’ite Muslim community of Lebanon. Despite their numbers, the Shi’ites had little power and were looked down upon by the Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians. In the 1950s, urbanization and an exposure to Arab nationalism led some Shi’ites to identify with Nasserism; others became active with the Lebanese Communist Party. Their treatment during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s, when tens of thousands of Shi’ites were evicted from Nab’a and resettled, together with unintended consequences of Israel’s Operation Litani in 1978 radicalized them. But it was the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran that catalysed the move to religious politicization. Many Lebanese Shi’ites had studied at the religious academies in Najaf, Iraq, in the 1960s under Ayatollah Khomeini. The Ba’athists, however, deported many visiting Shi’ites when they came to power. Back in Lebanon these religious elements formed groups such as the Da’wa party and inhabited the power vacuum left by Israel’s expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in the early 1980s. Using Da’wa, they infiltrated more secular groups such as Amal (with whom Hezbollah now has a competitive, sometimes violent relationship). Hezbollah was established as an umbrella organisation of likeminded groups and is now supported politically, financially and militarily by Iran. The previous head of Hezbollah, Abbas al-Musawi, who was liquidated by Israeli forces in 1992, believed that ‘Islamic civilization is desired as an alternative to all civilizations.’ This accounts for the virulence expressed toward the West. Hezbollah repudiates materialism and Western popular culture—deemed ‘Westoxification.’ Muslims, they believe, have become ‘backward because they have become afflicted with the same social malaise as the West—“moral dissolution,” “family disintegration,” and “exploitation of women.”’ Moreover, the Muslim self-image has been distorted by a Western media that is controlled by international Zionism. MGM, Paramount, Columbia, Warner Brothers and United Artists all serve the advancement of the Jews, while the British media is infiltrated by Zionists such as Rupert Murdoch. Martyrdom ranks high in Hezbollah’s value system whether such deaths are premeditated or not, ‘the most preferable death is to be killed for God’s cause.’

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Nasrallah proclaimed that he felt ‘the greatest feeling of joy that a father can know’ on hearing that his son was killed in action in September 1997. He then went on to praise parents who beseeched God to bless their children with ‘the honour of martyrdom.’ The prospect of an elevation to paradise seems to have become an end in itself, ‘greater than victory and liberation’ according to Nasrallah. Hezbollah’s war against Israel is waged mostly from its bases in south Lebanon. But the movement believes that Israel’s very existence warrants the violence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israeli children should not be exempt from attacks because Zionism means not only to dominate the Muslim ‘umma’ but actually aspires to control the entire world. Notwithstanding the apparent cooperation between Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in the Karine A arms ship affair, Hezbollah considers Arafat a traitor for holding talks with Israel. There have even been calls for a Palestinian Khalid Islambuli (the assassin of Sadat). The movement’s pan-Islamic philosophy is symbolized by the emphasis it places on Jerusalem and its identification with ‘our Muslim people in Palestine and the Philippines, Bosnia, Somalia and Chechnya.’ Indeed, Hezbollah rejects the idea of Arab supremacy in Islam, arguing that Arab culture alone leaves Muslims in a state ‘of weakness, passivity and surrender.’ Although the author of the book, a Lebanese academic brought up in Britain, does not exhibit any understanding of the Israeli side of the conflict, her dissection of Hezbollah’s worldview is instructive. She treads carefully and her narrative is ‘parve’ in the extreme. The pan-Islamic world of Hezbollah is unthinking and blinkered. As with al-Qaida, the leaders of Hezbollah are ignorant about the history, culture and society of those they demonize. It is easier and safer to remain behind the shutters. To enter into dialogue would humanize the other. Instead, Hezbollah chooses to hide behind a smokescreen of selfinflicted death and ideological pomposity. At the end of the day, it is not Israel or the West which Hezbollah fears, it is education and the ability to think independently. These are truly deadly weapons in the struggle against medieval terror and self-righteous violence. (Review of Amal Saad-Ghorayeb’s Hezbollah Politics and Religion Jerusalem Post, 8 February 2002)



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NOTE 1.  Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 249.

15 In the Company of Critics

CRITICAL FRIENDS

Throughout its history, Israeli government policies have been criticised

by supporters of the Zionist experiment, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The attack on the village of Qibya in October 1953 by Unit 101, under the command of Major Ariel Sharon, left scores of men, women and children dead. Despite Ben-Gurion’s attempt at a cover-up during a radio broadcast by assigning blame to outraged settlers bent on revenge for Arab killings of civilians,1 there was an outcry of protest from the Jewish Diaspora. Europe threatened sanctions, while the United States withheld the first tranche of a $26 million grant.2 Successive US presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have opposed the settlement drive following the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The White House has since attempted to preserve an increasingly precarious balance between supporting the state against its many opponents while imposing limited penalties on its government. There were often difficult relationships between US presidents and Likud prime ministers. Ronald Reagan used the deceptions swirling around the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to propose a peace plan to an abrasive Menahem Begin. George H. W. Bush strongly opposed the settlement drive on the West Bank and rejected Yitzhak Shamir’s request for loan guarantees in the wake of a large immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled 274



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to create a personal chemistry with Benjamin Netanyahu in often futile attempts to ignite a new peace process. George W. Bush, however, unlike his father, developed a very positive relationship with Ariel Sharon. Yet he too called for an end to the occupation of Palestinian land3 and regarded settlement expansion as an impediment to peace4 while recognising the shifting of a virtual Israeli border to include the swathe of West Bank settlements on Israel’s side of the separation fence. Even so, he espoused territorial contiguity—two states side by side—rather than Sharon’s transportation contiguity, which meant roads leading from Israel to West Bank settlements. This left an archipelago of Palestinian territory defined by population and not by contiguity. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher appeared in public to be zealously proIsrael and an opponent of the Arabist inclinations of the British Foreign Office. Yet like Churchill before her, British national interests always trumped any other considerations. In dealing with the Israelis, she was paradoxically closer to Labour than to the right-wing Likud. Moreover, she was not overly impressed by the fact that her opposite numbers in Israel had been respectively the commander of the Irgun and the head of operations for Lehi. She opposed the settlements on the West Bank and Gaza—and expressed views which were closer to Peace Now than to those of Israel’s government. Mrs Thatcher appealed to many ‘rags to riches’ British Jews—those who had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Many identified with her libertarianism even if they had been socialists in their youth. Though Mrs Thatcher was lauded by Jewish business people, the same could not be said of those Jews whose lives were not wedded to the world of finance and commerce.

MRS THATCHER, BRITISH JEWS AND ISRAEL The Tory objective seems to be and is probably seen by most of them, including Mrs Thatcher, as the utopia of economic neo-liberalism: every man an entrepreneur, the triumph of the unrestricted market and the dismantling of state interference in the economy and the affairs of the private citizen. In short the anarchism of the lower middle classes.5

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Although dissenting from the final, barbed sentence, many British Jews would warm to such a statement. Mrs Thatcher’s exhortations to social individualism produce a resonant acknowledgement amongst the achievers in our community. If somewhat lukewarm in 1979, large sections of Anglo-Jewry appear now—in the absence of a credible alternative—to have learned to love the Lady as she prepares for her second decade in power. For some at least, truly an eshet chayil—a woman of worth. Like many Jews, Mrs Thatcher sees herself as an outsider. ‘Is he one of us?’ is a question open to both Thatcherite and Jewish interpretations. A Cromwellian puritan heading a party of cavaliers: in her own words, ‘I am the rebel head of an establishment government.’ And it is this radical sense of standing outside the accepted political framework that has attracted many Jews to her standard. Whilst some Jews praise conservatism because it eschews traditional immutable values, other Jews cast Thatcherism in a revolutionary mould as a credo of creating change within society. Not surprisingly a number of former socialists are to be located in the ranks of the faithful. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher within her ideological sphere exhibits a profound intellectual curiosity and is drawn to Jews especially as the people of the idea—and yet she is rebuffed and spurned by the world of thinkers. Oxford even voted not to bestow an honorary degree upon her as had been the custom for all other previous holders of her office. Last year, Sir Peter Hall, the Director of the National Theatre estimated that ‘well over 90 per cent of the people in the performing arts, education and the creative world are against her.’ Yet her support for Soviet Jews stems from her fundamentalist detestation of Marxism. Significantly, she is ideologically closer to the orthodox Christianity and Russian nationalism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn than to the liberalism of the Western-orientated Andrei Sakharov. Despite the multitude of ideological differences amongst the dissidents in the pre-perestroika era and the fact that the aim of Soviet Jews was simply to emigrate and not to change the political system of the USSR, Mrs Thatcher’s approach has been a reductionist one in simply merging the lot within the zeal of an anti-communist crusade. Her attitude towards Israel is much more complex. Whilst unable psychologically to embrace Arafat, a man with a terrorist past, or to upset too many of her Jewish supporters by overt condemnation of the Israeli government, Mrs Thatcher adopts a softly-softly approach on the Palestinian problem. Ironically, in Israeli terms, she would be a dove—a wet, closer to the urbane Mr Peres than to the unyielding Mr Shamir. At the beginning of the Intifada, she remarked that ‘the Palestinians have



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a grievance,’ yet the hard words are left to the Foreign Office. Little is mentioned about the embargo of arms for Israel whilst a fifteen billion pound deal is enacted with Saudi Arabia. Many may well believe that Mrs Thatcher is good for the Jews—but is her philosophy rooted in Jewish tradition as she seems to imply? Traditionally, Judaism did not seek to suppress ambition but neither did it give it free rein. It insists that individual effort should benefit the collective rather than atomize it. The classical Jewish understanding of individualism proclaims the interdependence of all members of the community and that the contribution of each and every individual member is an indispensable but manifest part of the whole. Whilst capitalism is certainly sanctioned in Jewish tradition and socialist principles are not an obligation, rabbinical authorities have supported social experiments such as the religious kibbutz movement in Israel as a channel towards the realization of the ideal of justice in society. Many observant Jews believe that the Jewish people should live in accordance with the social laws contained in the Torah and that this should form the basis for the improvement of society. We repudiated both the capitalist system and its corollary, the class struggle, and maintained that reform should not be based on principles of philanthropy but on a fundamental change in the structure of human society.6

Meeting between Margaret Thatcher, the new leader of the opposition, and Golda Meir, former prime minister in Israel, 22 March 1976. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

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As she has promised us, Mrs Thatcher, in determined form, will go on and on. For most Jews, the approving cry will be ‘ad mea v’esreem’ (‘until 120 years of age’). But, for a considerable few, the image of the prophet who, with meddlesome obstinacy, passionately defends the weak and dispossessed will remain the true symbol of Jewish behaviour. (‘A Woman of Worth?’, Jewish Quarterly, Summer 1989)

NYE BEVAN AND ZION At the opposite end of the British political spectrum—albeit in an earlier era—Aneurin Bevan was a passionate supporter of Israel in its halcyon days. The instigator of the National Health Service in post-war Britain, Bevan was lauded by the Left in the 1950s in much the same fashion that Thatcher was idolised by the Right in the 1980s. Yet Bevan strongly opposed Franco-British collusion in the Suez campaign in 1956. As he commented in the debate in the House of Commons in December 1956, What happened? Did Marianne take John Bull to an unknown rendezvous? Did Marianne say to John Bull that there was a forest fire going to start, and did John Bull then say, ‘We ought to put it out,’ but Marianne said, ‘No, let us warm our hands by it. It is a nice fire’? Did Marianne deceive John Bull—or seduce him?

Today Bevan is a distant figure. The current British Left conveniently forget his identification with the rise of Israel. In addition, many Jews mistake him for his virtual namesake, Ernest Bevin—a right-wing trade union leader—who became foreign secretary under Prime Minister Clement Atlee. Unlike Bevan, Bevin was anything but sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Outside of Labour circles, academic specialists and particularly those of his generation who remember him, Nye Bevan’s support for Israel has been forgotten. Unfortunately, he wrote no memoirs and did not keep a diary. There is no mention of the Middle East conflict in his In Place of Fear. Bevan’s ‘disappearance’ has come about through the current passion for trivializing Anglo-Zionist history and because the image of a man of the Left espousing the Zionist cause is a non-starter in the



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breathless contest to promote Israel in the 1980s. Since there is little differentiation between public relations for non-Jews and information for Jews, it is not surprising that little is told about the role of the Labour Left in the 1940s and 1950s. However, it is not simply the image makers and dream merchants within the community who are responsible. Both the hard and soft Left within the Labour Party laud and idolize Nye Bevan. Nye has taken his place in the pantheon of dead socialist heroes and his spirit can thus be invoked when necessary. But on Bevan’s support for Zionism there is complete silence. . . . It is significant to note that Tony Benn who has studied the legacy of Bevanism does not ally himself with either the opportunist Livingstone or the Labour Left in general when it comes to Israel and the Jewish question. Recently interviewed in London Labour Briefing by the wellknown anti-Zionist activist, Tony Greenstein, Benn dissociated himself from the views of the Labour movement campaign for Palestine and commented: ‘I am in favour of a Jewish state and I believe the Jews are entitled to have security in Israel. I don’t believe that a criticism of individual items of policy can be used to see Israel destroyed.’ Tony Benn’s approach, like Bevan’s, was moulded by the terrible events of the twentieth century. For the old Left—as they are now termed—the demand for a Jewish state was a genuine quest to remedy the wrongs done when the floodgates of fascism were opened. For most of the old Left, the Jewish problem and its Zionist solution was as important as overthrowing the Franco regime. Moreover, the commitment of large numbers of Jews to the Communist Party and to the Labour movement in the 1930s brought figures such as Nye Bevan into close proximity with the Jewish problem. It brought an understanding of Jewish history and provided the educational basis for the raison d’être of the Zionist movement. It was justifiably said at the time that the further Left you went in the Labour Party, the more you became committed to Israel. It is fascinating to reflect today on some of the symbols of that commitment; for example, when Michael Foot, at the behest of Beaverbrook, wrote an article about Purim in the Daily Express and merged Hitler with Haman, or when Barbara Castle described the kibbutz as ‘true biblical communism.’ A. J. P. Taylor even considered that the British people had turned against Germany as a result of Nazi treatment of the Jews. Or when Bevan was saved from expulsion from the party through the last minute arrival of Ian Mikado from Israel, where his daughter had moved her wedding forward one day to enable him to return to London for the meeting.

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The Labour Left contained Zionist Jews such as Sydney Silverman and Ian Mikado—MPs whom the media termed ‘extremists’ yet who passionately supported Israel. Indeed, at that time Jewish representation was proportionately greater on the Left than in the party as a whole. Not all look upon Nye, or indeed the Left, with fond memories. In her recent affectionate portrait of Lord Barnett Janner,7 her late husband, Lady Elsie Janner recalls an alleged anti-Semitic remark made by Nye in the Members lobby of the House of Commons. According to Lady Janner, Nye had been drinking and was angry at Barnett Janner’s opposition to the provision of training facilities in the Welsh hills for German armed forces. She stipulates that this occurred after the Board of Deputies of British Jews (or more correctly its Foreign Affairs Committee) had passed a resolution on the issue in March 1960. At this time, Bevan was actually recovering from an operation for cancer. His last words in the chamber of the House were on 1 December 1959, when he raised a question about a British national imprisoned in Egypt. Ironically, at the time of the Board’s resolution, Nye was convalescing at the home of his friend Lewis Cohen in Brighton. Bevan never returned to speak in the House of Commons and died in July 1960. Moreover, Barnett Janner first raised the issue of German troops in Wales in the parliamentary arena on 8 February 1961—seven months after Bevan’s death. In addition, he was supported by left-wingers such as Frank Allaun. Although anti-Semitism is widespread, such an incident seems out of character. Moreover there are numerous personal reminiscences which testify to Bevan’s lack of prejudice where Jews were concerned. Bevan’s respect for a person’s heritage is summed up in a private letter which Jennie Lee, his wife, sent to Michael Foot the day after Nye’s death: Nye was never a hypocrite. No falsity must touch him once he is no longer able to defend his views. He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them. He could kneel reverently in chapel, synagogue, Eastern mosque, Catholic cathedral on occasions when friends called him there, for marriage or dedication or burial services. He knelt reverently in respect to a friend or to a friend’s faith, but he never pretended to be other than he was, a humanist.8

In Michael Foot’s biography, Bevan is referred to as ‘almost a Zionist.’9 Indeed he points out that Nye was so incensed at British policy on the question of a Jewish state, and especially at the insensitive approach



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of Ernest Bevin, that he actually considered resigning from the Atlee government. Hugh Dalton advised Bevan ‘not to be too quick off the mark.’10 This occurred, it should be remembered, when Bevan was striving to make his cherished dream, the National Health Service, a concrete and permanent reality. Harold Wilson recalls that Bevan was a ‘significant Cabinet malcontent’ when it came to the Palestine question.11 Bevan argued that it would not necessarily be to Britain’s advantage to avoid an estrangement with the Arab states over Israel. Indeed at one stage in the drama, Bevan demanded an increase in the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine. Wilson notes that only Bevan and Dalton stood firmly on the side of the Jews during Cabinet discussions during that historic period. The era in which the Bevanites operated was distinctly different from our own. Idealism was more common and Israel was free from the problems which emerged after 1967. Nye and Jennie Lee visited Israel for the first time in January 1954. On their return, Jennie Lee wrote in the Tribune: They gather in their own from every kind of area, none so humble, so diseased, so illiterate, so despised and downtrodden that they are not welcome. This is the kind of passion that socialist workers everywhere who have had their own experience of victimization and of exile through poverty, should particularly understand.12

The Bevanites saw Israel as a dynamic and daring socialist experiment. Bevan himself, in a series of articles in the Daily Herald, wrote about Israel in glowing terms. He commented that there were ‘more social projects . . . and more diverse economic projects in Israel than exist in any other part of the world.’13 Nye Bevan did not accept the struggle for liberation without critical analysis, as do so many today. Before visiting Israel, he spent time in Egypt where he met Neguib. Naturally, Nye supported the dissolution of the monarchy, but coupled this with a declaration that he advocated ‘respect for the independence of Egypt’s neighbours.’ His opinion of the strongman in the new government became more negative with time. By 1956, he opposed the nationalization of the Suez Canal and accused Nasser of ‘stirring the pot of nationalist passions’ to the detriment of bettering the lot of the Egyptian people. Bevan believed that no radical transformation of Egyptian society had taken place and that its structure remained essentially the same as under the monarchy. Bevan wrote: If a social movement elects to take the path of revolution, it must pursue it to the end and the end is a complete transformation of society accompanied

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by a transference of power from the old to the new social forces. Judged by this criterion, the movement first led by General Neguib and then by Nasser has not as yet added up to a social revolution or anything like it.14

The development of the present far Left in the Labour Party was highly influenced by the extra-parliamentary Left. In turn, they owe their pedigree in part, to the evaporation of the Communist Party’s domination of the Marxist Left following the Twentieth Party Congress in the USSR in 1956. Bevan was never a pro-Soviet apologist, nor did he adopt any of the neo-Stalinist techniques which are prevalent today amongst those who fervently proclaim their opposition to Stalinism. Writing while Stalin was still alive and before the human wreckage came back from the camps, he stated: The existence of huge forced labour camps, the ruthless punishment meted out to political offenders, the disappearance without trace of people who offend against the ruling clique, the appalling doctrine of ‘associative crime’—all these are deeply offensive.15

When the Suez crisis erupted, the Labour Party, which opposed the nationalist mood in the country, instantly earned highly negative comment from pro-Israeli circles. Yet again, a simplified version of a complex situation is recalled today. Indeed, although many scholars and former politicians have written about Suez, perhaps a truer picture will emerge with the release of the Cabinet papers for 1956 next year. When Britain attacked Egypt, most of the Jewish community supported the action. However, Britain’s invasion was in no way carried out as an ally of Israel or out of a desire to see her thrive and prosper. It should not be forgotten that despite the co-ordination of the separate campaigns during the Suez crisis, Sir Anthony Eden continued to pursue an Arabist foreign policy and kept Israel at arm’s length. If there was co-operation, it was between France and Israel. The original British plan was to capture Alexandria, topple Nasser in Cairo and then invade the Canal area without reference to Israeli action. In the separate campaign in Sinai, Ben-Gurion required the British RAF to obliterate Egyptian airfields, which could have inflicted terrible damage on Israeli cities. BenGurion saw it as a necessary evil because the French did not have the necessary heavy bombing capacity. Significantly, Eden did not inform Gaitskell about his military intentions because, according to Professor Hugh Thomas,16 he believed the Labour leader would be duty bound to tell his colleagues on the shadow front bench, which included left-wing supporters of Israel.



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Condemnation of Eden’s military adventure did not necessarily mean a blind anti-Israel policy. Gaitskell specified this when he asked Eden in the House how he could justify intervening militarily since the Israelis, having completed their elimination of fedayeen bases, were no longer near the Canal. Michael Foot further comments that ‘Bevan assimilated the new events in his previous thinking; he would not become overnight anti-Israeli, pro-Nasser, pro-Dulles.’17 However, support for Eden’s policy attracted strange bedfellows. When the Conservative MP, Sir Thomas Moore, a one-time admirer of the British Union of Fascists and a member of the Council of Anglo-German Fellowship, supported the British military action, the left-wing Jewish Labour MP, Maurice Orbach derisively exclaimed: ‘Another friend of the Jews! Up the Blackshirts!’ Although Bevan conducted himself brilliantly in the parliamentary debates over Suez, privately he was uncertain about the meaning of Labour’s opposition and the manner in which it manifested itself. According to Michael Foot: ‘Partly his view was shaped by his strong sympathies for Israel; what he had seen and felt there of their inescapable necessities was never absent from his reckoning.’18 Richard Crossman later recalled a private conversation with Bevan which also confirms his understanding of the realities of the Middle East conflict. Bevan told Crossman: There’s no reason why in attacking the Tories we should commit ourselves to the view that all United Nations decisions must be accepted and that all recourse to force must be opposed as aggression. What makes the Labour Party go wrong in foreign affairs is that it takes its policies from middle class intellectuals, devoid of antennae and with a dreadful habit of falling down and worshipping abstractions. In fact, there is only one motto worse than ‘my country right or wrong’ and that is ‘the United Nations right or wrong.’19

Although this was undoubtedly a dig at Gaitskell, even the Conservatives noticed the subtle difference in approach between Gaitskell and Bevan. Macmillan later utilized this for political gain, terming Gaitskell’s attitude ‘hysterical.’ The Labour leader’s comment that Eden was acting like a policeman who went in ‘to help the burglar and shoot the householder’—was paradoxically more of a Bevanite aside. No doubt it was resented coming from someone who, like many of them, was a product of the middle class and public school. The Bevanites qualified their reservations about the Israeli action by always referring to the terrorism of the provocative fedayeen at-

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tacks from Egyptian territory. Bevan’s target was Eden; he scarcely mentioned Israel. ‘If Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he’s saying,’ he told a mass rally in Trafalgar Square, ‘then he is too stupid to be Prime Minister.’ Whilst opposing the nationalization of the Canal, he wrote in Tribune: When Britain and France appeared to take upon themselves the role of champions of world rights over the Suez, they converted the crisis not into a conflict between Egyptian nationalism and the legitimate claims of world commerce, but into the old acid struggle between imperialism and the new nations.20

Bevan believed that the Suez operation, apart from confining Eden to the political graveyard, actually strengthened Nasser. It promoted his championship of the Arab world against Western imperialism and consolidated his leadership of the Arab struggle against Israel. Clearly the Suez campaign allowed Nasser to win a propaganda victory and to present the success of the Israeli advance as part and parcel of imperialist intrigue. In hindsight, some have suggested that Israel would have been in a better position if Britain and France had not intervened militarily. It is significant to note today that some revisionists on the Left have contented themselves with a simple and ideologically palatable image of Suez rather than confront its complexities. In his book on the British Left between 1956 and 1968, David Widgery21 mourns the fact that ‘Leftist dissenters’ opted for ‘Out with Eden’ rather than ‘solidarity with Nasser.’ Perhaps the disenchantment of the Labour Left with Israel began with the detachment of the anti-Soviet Marxist Left from the Communist Party concurrently with Israel’s apparent collaboration in the British military campaign. Moreover, the close juxtaposition of Suez, Hungary and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes was unfortunate. Israel’s intention of pre-empting a possible Egyptian attack on her borders was viewed as secondary to her military co-ordination with Britain and France. Over the years, Arab propaganda and far Left simplicity have omitted the former and promoted the latter. Many Bevanites supported the moderate position of Moshe Sharett in pursuing peace through negotiations rather than through Ben-Gurion’s military victories. Richard Crossman and Maurice Orbach acted as intermediaries between Nasser and Sharett. The Suez campaign, following the Lavon affair, dealt a death blow to all such possibilities for peace. Sharett’s very different approach was obvious in a cryptic speech to the Knesset in 1957.



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Security is the first and primary condition for the state and this is an axiom; but narrow-minded and short-sighted concentration on security problems along with the diversion of attention from seemingly different considerations is likely to have direct consequences on security itself.22

Indeed, although the overwhelming majority in Israel and in the Jewish world supported Ben-Gurion’s military policy, a small minority had reservations about its use as a panacea for all political evils. Some of these founded the authoritative magazine New Outlook, which today is the principal organ of the peace camp in Israel. Many supporters of Israel in the 1950s could well have pre-empted Golda Meir and asked ‘Who are the Palestinians?’ The festering sore of Palestinian nationalism, ignored by Jew and Arab alike, was incubating under Jordanian occupation and pan-Arab adventurism. Even in Israel, the contradiction of an Arab minority within a culturally alien and politically progressive Jewish state was apparent to Bevan. After his first visit to Israel, he commented: ‘The semi-medieval institutions of the Arab nations are rocking before the comparison and it would be foolish merely to watch the outcome. The peace of the world may well be threatened by this collision between two incompatible ways of life.’23 Bevan was never confronted with the reality of Palestinian nationalism, which arose after 1967. Indeed, it was much easier to defend Israeli policies before the Six-Day War than after it. Even so, it is clear that in his last years, Bevan was already thinking about ways of bringing peace to the Middle East. He was Shadow Foreign Secretary and his acceptance of that post in itself suggested a greater pragmatism. Bevan, it appears, believed that the world and the Labour Party were on the brink of destruction. He saw himself—without a hint of egocentricity—as the man who could bring rationality to an irrational world. He believed that the Soviet Union should be invited as a participant in discussions on settling the Middle East conflict. Despite his opposition to Nasser, the emergence of Arab nationalism in the 1950s was a powerful force which had to be reckoned with and interpreted partially in terms of the anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggle. Bevan well understood how such politically potent and emotional forces could be directed into futile channels, such as the struggle against Israel, rather than the transformation of their own societies. Bevan’s pragmatic approach during these years was evident in a letter he wrote in 1958 to the Ahdut Avodah leader, Yigal Allon, a close friend over many years:

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In fact my capacity to be of service in improving relations between Israel and her neighbours has been to some extent weakened by [the] knowledge by the Arabs of my friendship with Israel. It seems to me that, at this time, the best course I can pursue is to try and adopt a posture that will enable me to have more influence with Arab opinion. Not that I propose to weaken in support of Israel in the slightest degree, but rather to avoid public expressions of opinion which might make it impossible for the Arab ears to be ready to listen to what I have to say. I hope this does not sound too pompous, but I am most anxious to extend some influence from British Labour to nascent socialist groups in the Arab world.24

Bevan’s premature death denied Britain of an original mind. Israel Sieff was a close friend of Bevan’s though he did not agree with him politically, and in his memoirs he waxes eloquent about Nye’s many qualities. Specifically he brings out a quality, perhaps above and beyond Nye’s humanity, which has always captured the Jewish imagination: the inclination to be a prophet. His vision of what is and what could be contained a richness which attracted people of all views. Nye Bevan died twenty-five years ago this summer. Many have chosen to forget but judging by Israel Sieff’s words, Jews have good reason to remember: He was profoundly committed in his attitude to human beings and society, he was empirical about arrangements and institutions. This, I think, would have shown if he had become Prime Minister. What a voice and vision would then have dominated the life of Britain! How many dark places would have been illuminated, how many doubts and dangers would have been dispelled. Our problems would not have been waved away by a magician’s wand overnight; but the attempt to solve them would have been rendered meaningful and more exciting. And I believe would have been solved. Wherever our proper realistic level in the modern world lies, Nye would have seen it, and could have led us there. We would have gone eyes open, tails up, ready to make it not a retreat but a triumph. Men must be led by men who above all can speak to them. There are the prophets whose reason for being is to point a way ahead and make man able and willing to tread it. What makes an Isaiah is an unconquerable faith that good is not only morally better than evil, but that it is socially stronger too, the ability to get ordinary men to think the same and act accordingly. The first task of political leadership is to get men to lift up their hearts. Churchill did it in 1940. Weizmann did it time and time again. Nye would have done it for Britain today.25

(‘Nye Bevan and Zion’, Jewish Quarterly 32, no. 2, 1985)



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NOTES 1.  Gabriel Sheffer, Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Moderate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 686. 2.  Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 107. 3.  Guardian, 10 January 2008. 4.  Ha’aretz, 3 January 2008. 5.  Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Out of the Wilderness’, Marxism Today, October 1987. 6.  Moshe Unna, ‘The Elements of the Religious Kibbutz’, in The Religious Kibbutz Movement: The Revival of the Religious Jewish Community, ed. Aryeh Fishman (Jerusalem: Religious Section of the Youth and Hehalutz Department of the Zionist Organisation, 1957), p. 27. 7. Elsie Janner, Barnett Janner: A Personal Portrait (London: Robson Books, 1984), p. 147. 8.  Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 1945–1960 (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1975), p. 653. 9.  Ibid., p. 416. 10. Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs, 1945–1960 (London: Muller, 1962), p. 199. 11.  Harold Wilson, The Chariot of Israel (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 187. 12.  Tribune, 22 January 1954. 13.  Jewish Vanguard, 29 January 1954. 14.  Tribune, 3 August 1956. 15.  Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1952), p. 167. 16.  Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair (London: Littlehampton Book Services, 1967), p. 69. 17. Foot, Aneurin Bevan, p. 516. 18.  Ibid., p. 515 19.  Manchester Guardian Weekly, 28 December 1961. 20.  Tribune, 14 September 1956. 21.  David Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956–1968 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 51. 22.  Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (London 1970), p. 520. 23.  Jewish Vanguard, 29 January 1954. 24. Foot, Aneurin Bevan, pp. 606–7. 25.  Israel Sieff, The Memoirs of Israel Sieff (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), p. 194.

16 Different Diaspora Voices

A HISTORY OF DISSENT

‘We are One’ was an often promoted slogan of Diaspora Jews to indicate

their total solidarity with Israel. Did this mean uncritical support? Certainly not in the twenty-first century. Yet all too often critics were viewed as the enemy within. The critics of an Israel government built on a tradition of dissent and dissension within a community of Jews. Defining the Jews as ‘a stiffnecked people’ that enjoyed the vagaries of ideology and intellectual argument inevitably meant a reaction against the pretensions of leadership. In America, while many New York Jews signed a declaration of loyalty to King George, there were many others who took up arms in 1776 to fight for independence and to serve the cause of Washington and Jefferson. In revolutionary France the Marseillaise was translated into Hebrew and sung as Jewish soldiers marched away to confront the new republic’s military foes. In Britain, the genesis of the community in modern times ironically occurred during the interregnum due to the good works of Oliver Cromwell’s English republic. There was soon a need for collective representation to the powers-thatbe and a desire to proclaim fidelity to the restored English crown—both an expression of communal insecurity, given the Jewish past, and one of self-importance by Jewish leadership.

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This pattern of conformity was set at an early stage when the Board of Deputies of British Jews was established in 1760. While the Board preached loyalty to His Britannic Majesty, both the French and American Revolutions were in progress, which for some reflected the spirit of universalism within Judaism. Conformity was accompanied by gratitude that Britain offered safety and security. It was in contrast to other locations where Jews had lived. When King George III visited the town in June 1773, the Portsmouth Jewish community gratefully proclaimed a declaration of fealty to the crown. The Sephardim of Bevis Marks synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the UK, expressed their relief in a special prayer that Queen Victoria had survived an assassination attempt at Constitution Hill in June 1840. British Jews felt themselves to be part of the common purpose. So the Bevis Marks congregants gathered to give thanks that peace had returned to Britain when the war for American independence ended in 1783. Similarly, a prayer was composed in July 1814 by Rabbi Raphael Mendola to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Yet such loyalty was not always appreciated. When the Jewish Civil Disabilities Bill came before the House of Lords in August 1833, the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, showed his dislike of Jews and was disparaging about the service of Jewish officers in the military defeat of Napoleon. When the Iron Duke died in 1852, a Jewish Chronicle editorial commented: The Duke was the stern, unbending and uncompromising opponent of Jewish emancipation. But as much as we may and do regret his error of judgement as regards ourselves, we cannot forget that we are Englishmen in whom the fire of patriotism burns as fervently and as purely as in the greatest and the proudest in the land.1

The Board of Deputies of British Jews represented this mindset. From the outset, the Board projected itself as ‘the representative body of Anglo-Jewry.’ Such pomp and circumstance was welcomed by the British authorities who required a conformist central address. Yet the Board is not the Board of Deputies of British Jews—and never has been.

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It is more the Board of Deputies of British Synagogues—with a few additional organisations to cover the Zionists and the secularists. The Hebrew University’s Peter Medding believes that a more accurate model for communal organisations which label themselves ‘representative’ are ‘peak associations’—a free association of voluntary bodies. The true model for the Board, he points out, is the Confederation of British Industry, rather than the House of Commons. Jonathan S. Woocher comments that this pattern of several tiers of communal organisation provides a negative filtering process such that the views, ideas, goals and aspirations of the Jewish grassroots and rank and file reach the top, if at all, only as interpreted and presented by various subleaders who presumably have their own personal and institutional interests to promote, which must clearly influence their transmission of the views of their constituencies.2

To be fair, the Board’s parliamentary pretensions were formalized in a pre-Zionist period when an anglicized quasi-aristocracy held the reins of power. But the traumatic events of the twentieth century forced dramatic changes in the Board’s outlook and by default limited its influence. The response to the Shoah and the guilt of Anglo-Jewish survival gave rise to a rival centre of power—a growing fraternity of fundraisers. In addition, it is clear that the upward social and economic mobility of Jews in recent times has accentuated the significance of fundraising in communal endeavour. As Geoffrey Paul, the former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, pointed out in a recent issue of Manna, the fundraisers occupy a position of central authority in the community. Thus in the post-war period, there seems to have been a considerable shift of authority from an elected Board of Deputies—despite the defects of its structure—to well-meaning but unelected fundraisers. In essence, giving to a worthy Jewish charity or to an Israeli institution has accorded a taxation function to the fundraisers even within a voluntary association and by extension a governmental responsibility to determine direction and priorities. The needs of the State of Israel and a determination to combat creeping assimilation through education provided foci for fundraising in the life of the ordinary Jew. Indeed, for some, giving a donation may be a definition of Jewishness, a recognition of belonging. Some sociologists have even utilized this yardstick in their analysis of the contemporary Jewish scene. Indeed, the very act of giving money to Israel psychologically helped many British Jews to cope



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with their genuine anxieties during the Gulf Crisis. It was their response to the powerlessness of the Diaspora. Perhaps there could have been no other answer. Over the years, Israel has stopped being a real society, warts and all; for many Jews, it has been transformed instead into a symbol of Jewish identity and a focus for fundraising. Ideology, debate and opinion have been made unimportant. As a rule, the Board, as well as their philanthropic partners, have been willing to defer to the ‘good sense’ of the Israeli leadership. Many accepted the viewpoint that they were uninformed about Israel since they did not live there and thereby had nothing else to contribute except their uncritical support and their money. ‘Fact-finding’ missions and the religiosity of solidarity were iconic symptoms of this deideologization of the Diaspora. Professor Charles Liebman of BarIlan University incisively described this impoverishment of Diaspora understanding of Israel: The truth is that, whereas Diaspora Jews now share the classic Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, they have no Zionist vision. Israel, perhaps, has a particularist Jewish meaning for Diaspora Jewry: it is important to the Diaspora for its Jewish survival. But Israel has no universalist meaning for most Diaspora Jews. It is not integrally related to the variety of visions Diaspora Jews may have of a different kind of world, a different kind of society, a different kind of social order. Hence, the Diaspora is not driven to press Israel into doing anything different from that which it is doing today.3

Few who subscribe to Liebman’s view have concerned themselves with involvement in communal affairs. Is it therefore simply a question of money or status that determines leadership in the community? Economic security and time clearly are determining factors, but there are many outsiders who could contribute valuable ideas. There is a wide body of academics and writers—distant from the world of business and commerce—whose talents are underused and undervalued. They seem content to isolate themselves within academic life—and communal leadership is happy that they should remain there. For example, Jewish academics have not been engaged in a serious fashion to conduct research to find out what British Jews think and what their requirements could be. In the United States, the American Jewish Committee has sponsored the National Survey of American Jewry for the past decade and the Federations employ teams of planners. The mere fact that nothing like this exists in Britain calls into

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question the very policies of those who plan for the future in this illogical absence of research. At present, there is little likelihood that new faces will come to the fore. Candidates for leadership do not emerge from the ranks on the strength of their policies. Often they are prejudged to be eminently suitable before being co-opted by the existing leadership. The possibilities for change in the present system are thus relegated to an absolute minimum. As Peter Medding points out: Without elections, it is difficult for potential leaders of different views, outlooks and policies to become members of the community’s leadership group or to re-direct the community’s energies. The talented and motivated can rise into the leadership only insofar as the entrenched incumbents permit them and not through mobilizing wider community support. The test for leadership then is highly personal and in no way democratic.4

Decision-making is still a process which tends to be conducted behind closed doors. Where public discussions do exist, such as the Board’s monthly meetings, rubber-stamping and ratification of decisions already taken seem to be the overriding priority. Controversial issues are to be avoided and not grasped as a tenet of democratic discourse. They are often deemed not to be in the communal interest. Consequently, an aura of secrecy preserves control. Is it not surprising therefore that apathy is widespread? And yet, in contrast, there is a concerted search for roots and identity which a proportion of the alienated post-war generation of Jews appear to be engaged in. The television series and book, A Sense of Belonging, testifies strongly to that phenomenon. Paul Morrison, one of the authors, for whom this project was a voyage of self-discovery, writes: I have two pictures of Anglo-Jewry. One is a picture of a community turned in on itself, like a boxer in a crouch, defensively strong, and yet gasping for air. And the other is of a community unsure of its own true value and richness, looking on helplessly, unable to withstand the waves as they gently wash the castle away.5

While the Board has been successful in areas such as defence and security, and lobbying Parliament for genuinely Jewish interests, there is still an urgent need for real reform, open representation and planned direction. The existing structures are based on an outdated and counterproductive understanding of the needs of the Jews of Britain. (‘1760 and All That’, Jewish Quarterly, Spring 1991)



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AFTER 1945 Historically the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century and the pogroms in tsarist Russia in the nineteenth brought new ways of interpreting Jewishness. In London’s East End a strong Jewish anarchist movement under the leadership of the non-Jewish Rudolf Rocker emerged. This struck a blow at the imagery of hardworking, religiously observant, Jewish Britons. Indeed there was clear blue water between the immigrant workers of the East End of London and their aristocratic, acculturated cousins in the West End. Moreover, both Zionism and Communism were endorsed by the former whereas the latter viewed them as a dangerous threat to their standing in British society. By 1945, the second generation of Jews was about to leave the East End. In one sense it no longer existed—Hitler’s bombs and the V1 and V2 missiles had done their work. They left for pastures new and embraced the social mobility instigated by Atlee’s Labour government. Yet the shadow of what had happened always hovered over them. The approach of the Holocaust generation—those who lived through the period of the Shoah and witnessed the rise of Israel—felt that it would somehow be a betrayal of everything that they had been through, everything that they had lost, to offer even a scintilla of criticism about an Israel government. This wall-to-wall solidarity lasted in the Diaspora until 1967 and partly extended into the 1970s because of the Jewish involvement in the campaign for Soviet Jewry. Yet after the Six-Day War, Israel was gradually perceived as an occupying power by many Jews, who asked: If the Jews are a nation, then what are the Palestinians? The Israel which fought against invading armies in 1948 to secure its independence was not the Israel of 1977 with Menahem Begin’s Likud at its helm. The succeeding generation of Diaspora Jews—those who had been born since 1945—differentiated between the State of Israel and its government. This inevitably led to a clash between generations when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Jewish leadership in the Diaspora blindly followed Jerusalem’s explanation and looked the other way when huge demonstrations took place in Tel Aviv against the war. The succeeding generation of Diaspora Jews did the opposite—they led the protests in New York, London, Paris and Sydney. Moreover, the protesters did not disavow their Zionism. The

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recognised Jewish leadership was not amused. This rumbling of discontent continued throughout the next three decades and beyond. While such dissidents originally reflected liberal views in Israel, their approach became widespread as Diaspora Jews and leadership itself became more and more disaffected by Israeli policies. As Israel grew decidedly less liberal, the Diaspora maintained its broadly liberal credentials. As Israel separated itself from Arabs, the Diaspora remained integrated with non-Jews. Politically Israel believed that its national interests were best served by supporting George W. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry. American Jews however voted in their droves for the losing Democratic candidate. If Israelis shouted ‘Anyone but Obama’, American Jews ignored them both in 2008 and 2012. Clearly Israelis and American Jews were not ‘One’ when it came to supporting a candidate for the office of the most powerful person in the world. The disaffection amongst Diaspora leadership led to a transformation of the protest groups of the 1980s into rival advocacy groups in the twentyfirst century. J Street in the United States in 2008 and Yachad in the UK in 2011 were founded and supported by funders and philanthropists. J Street questioned opposition to the Iran agreement and supported Obama while Yachad sent groups to see the West Bank situation for themselves. The blanket uniformity of the past no longer existed. The self-appointed task of such groups in many parts of the Jewish world was to transform Israel into Zion, to return it to its perceived roots. The New Israel Fund grew out of the euphoria of the visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem and the subsequent Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. It helped fund the social deprivation protests in Israel of 2011. Later organisations such as J Street held to similar liberal values, but their genesis grew out of the stagnation of Israeli policies and the frustration at the inaction of leading American Jewish groups. They occupied a much more difficult position in that they had to face in two directions to ward off attack—the boycotters to their Left and advocacy groups to their Right.

JEWISH APOSTATES? The fact that so many were now willing to openly criticise successive Netanyahu governments led to acerbic commentary from their opponents. In



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Jews against Themselves, Edward Alexander, a retired English professor from Seattle, dealt with the idea of ‘Jewish apostasy’—members of the tribe who were considered to have ‘abandoned’ the State of Israel. Throughout this collection of essays, the author vents his anger against Jews of ‘the progressive persuasion’ who fail to mobilize their intellectual resources on behalf of Israel.’ He links anti-Semitism of the past to present-day Israelphobia and anti-Zionism. He traces a direct line from the Holocaust to the situation today and disparages any critic of Israel— whether loyalist or not—with a barrage of withering commentary. Thus, Rabbi Michael Lerner becomes ‘Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin.’ J Street is described as ‘fancying itself as a Jewish governmentin-exile.’ Alexander’s belief is that uniformity will bring about unity—and unity will help the Jews to defeat their genuine enemies. Hence the title. But debate, discussion and dissent have characterized the Jews throughout their history. Alexander too often conflates criticism of the policies of an Israeli government with a delegitimizing attack on the state itself. Thus Benny Morris is bracketed with his most severe critic, the anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe, simply because both address the reasons why many Arabs left Israel in 1948. Writers Amos Oz and David Grossman are assailed for their criticism of the settlement drive on the West Bank over many decades. On the other hand, Alexander is keen to attack the Rabin government itself over the Oslo Accords, which he labels ‘post-Zionism’s major political achievement.’ Before 1993, American Jews were told that they should criticize only in private. With the advent of the Oslo Accords and with the Likud out of power, Jews were suddenly exhorted to protest and save Israel. Such ‘patriotism’ even led to the establishment of an office of Israeli lobbyists in Washington with the express task of propagating an anti-Rabin government line in Congress to rival the approach taken by the Israeli Embassy. Alexander endorses this phenomenon when he comments that after Oslo, ‘Peres and his Foreign Ministry routinely promoted the interests not of a sovereign Jewish state, but of the (largely Arab) Middle East.’ Why is dissent on the Left forbidden and disloyal, yet wholesome and welcome when coming from the Right? Either dissent is part and parcel of a healthy democracy or it is not. Moreover, Alexander does not ask whether the policies of one Israeli government produce the same resonance in the world as those of another

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Israeli government. Are all Israeli governments treated the same by global critics simply because of blind Jew-hatred? Significantly, the author predicates his views on ‘the need to choose between survival and definition.’ Alexander cites a letter by Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion in 1935 in support of this approach. Jabotinsky commented that if he was sure that socialism or Orthodox Judaism would secure a state, then he would be only too willing to follow that path. Jabotinsky’s monism was based on the idea that there should be no ideological distractions blocking the road to statehood. There could be only one goal—to secure a state of the Jews. What Alexander does not mention is that Jabotinsky further advocated that after the establishment of the state, Israeli society should be a laboratory of ideas—a place of debate to secure the best way forward. While Jabotinsky passionately attacked the wishy-washy liberalism of assimilationists and opponents, he also wrote about his respect for the liberalism of pre–World War I Italy. Indeed, how does Alexander look upon President Reuven Rivlin’s invocation of Jabotinsky’s teachings in the context of publicly discussing the ills of Israeli society today? Alexander deals in black-and-white situations—there can be no middle ground. For him, the Israel-Palestine conflict is simple, not complex. But is anti-Zionism always a manifestation of anti-Semitism? Is it the mirror image of the Trotskyist position that anti-Zionism can never be anti-Semitic? Or is the reality somewhere in between, depending on the context and the circumstances? There is a history of Jewish anti-Zionism. For example, thousands of Zionists turned to Communism after the October Revolution in 1917. It might be argued that they were deluded—and they eventually paid a heavy price for their choice of a political path—but were they also antiSemitic in the early 1920s? Alexander wants all Jews to be defenders of Israel. If only! Yet many Jews in the Diaspora are acculturated and assimilated. There is a profound difference between Jewish Americans and American Jews. It can be argued that the tribulations of Jewish history have produced a multiplicity of Jewish identities—including ones where a pro-Israelism hardly registers. Interestingly, there is neither mention nor discussion in this book of Isaac Deutscher’s essay on non-Jewish Jews. Alexander is a retired professor of English who writes very well when examining literary subjects (rather than overtly political ones). Thus, his essay on Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question is a tour de force. His dissection of Jacobson’s ‘Ashamed Jews’ is informed and enlightening.



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In one sense, Jews against Themselves shouts at its readers. Vociferous intellectual remonstrance, however, is counter-productive. This book is undoubtedly sincere in defending the right of the Jews to selfdetermination and in opposing the genus ‘enemies of Israel.’ Yet it is astoundingly unfair in including in this definition concerned and informed critics of government policy. This is a work of intellect which does not consistently manifest intelligence. (Review of Edward Alexander’s Jews against Themselves in the Jerusalem Post, 19 September 2015)

UNCIVIL WAR This tension between generations was widespread in the Jewish world. In Britain Jewish organisations remained silent on issues such as the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Officially this was construed as not taking a stand which would divide the Jewish community, but silence also implied lack of opposition and collusion. Surveys of British Jewish opinion in 20106 and 20157 indicated that the approach of representative bodies was highly unrepresentative of the individual members of the community. In the United States there was a far older tradition of seeking the opinions of ordinary Jews regarding Israel. This stretched back to 1948. During the 1980s, Steven M. Cohen carried out several surveys of American Jewish opinion towards Israel for the American Jewish Committee.8 Here too there were discrepancies between the views of leadership and the ordinary citizen. Often leadership shared such critical views, but were fearful of revealing them in public—because leaders worried that it might weaken the efficacy of their diplomacy, hand ammunition to their communal opponents and probably damage their reputation. A studied neutrality avoided all such pitfalls. The angst and anguish of British Jews in comprehending and coping with Israel’s political and military actions are documented and dissected in Keith Kahn-Harris’s book, Uncivil War. It attempts to disentangle

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the different types of reaction to a specific event. Indeed the author lists fourteen categories—from the ‘decent Left’ to the ‘neo-conservative Right,’ from ‘private engagers’ to the ‘apathetic.’ Even Howard Jacobson’s fictional ‘Ashamed Jews’ gets a look-in. In particular the book documents and explains the divisions amongst British Jews during the first decade of the twenty-first century. But what do British Jews really think? Significantly there has only been one UK survey of Jewish attitudes towards Israel even though the American Jewish Committee has been carrying out regular surveys for the past thirty years. The JPR survey of 2010 suggested that British Jews are decidedly dovish—74% opposing the settlement drive, 67% endorsing ‘land for peace’ while remaining strong on Israel’s right to security. Thus a similar proportion supported Operation Cast Lead in 2009 and the erection of a security barrier to thwart the suicide bombers. It is unlikely that many would have voted for Netanyahu in last year’s election. However such surveys do highlight the distinct difference between Jewish organisations which stand in the public arena against ill-informed critics and the views of the ordinary Jew in the street. Many ‘representative’ Jewish organisations choose not to get involved and do not express an opinion. In not having a policy about the West Bank settlements and in not criticising an Israel government, the silence of organisations can easily be construed as a quiet support. Keith Kahn-Harris’s book rightly reflects unease and disquiet during the period of the al-Aqsa Intifada. It adopts a sociological, psychotherapeutic and spiritual reflection rather than an overtly political and historical analysis. Civilian casualties in any incursion into Gaza attract the media far more than Israel’s reasons for actually being there. On the moral level, the wholesale killing of families is terrible, but it is also a political weapon that Hamas deploys. This is Israel’s Achilles heel that eventually brings about a ceasefire. The advent of social media has played an important role in the polarisation since 2000. It is a great leveller in that it allows constructive comment alongside anti-Semitic innuendo in the name of free speech. The blogosphere occasionally resembles a pub discussion which starts off rationally and then descends into foul-mouthed rants as its participants become progressively more intoxicated. Pour the complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict into this whirlpool and it is not surprising that ‘uncivil wars’ break out. The book is good on events since the year 2000, but is often incorrect in its recording of history before then. It is not the case to suggest that



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there was a broad consensus after the Six-Day War in 1967. Groups such as Siah (Israel New Left), BAZO (British Anti-Zionist Organisation), Mapam and the Israel-Palestine Committee all existed in the 1970s. This peripheral concern moved into the mainstream in 1982 when Begin and Sharon misled British Jews with the rationale for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. This catalysed the formation of the British Friends of Peace Now in 1982—not 1987 as the author maintains. It became the central focus of opposition since many of its founders were intellectuals and academics—people who were disposed to ask questions and did not imbibe the accepted wisdom emanating from Jerusalem. The period since 1982 has also been marked by the rise of Palestinian Islamism which has divided the ‘peace camp.’ Some believed that just as it was possible to talk to the PLO, the same could be done with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This resulted in the emergence of such groups as Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices—and leftist opposition to them. The development of real-time television news has brought home the brutality and nihilism of war— and this has clearly affected many Jews who live and work amongst non-Jews. On the spiritual plain, the morality of Judaism is invoked. The idea of deference to Israeli political figures has waned. While many British Jews passionately believe in Israel’s survival, the blanket survivalism of the 1948 generation—a generation which tolerated little dissent—has diminished as they have passed on. The current generation of British Jews is more discerning. Unity is not synonymous with uniformity. The spat between the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Leadership Council is evidence of the latter’s willingness to break with the past. It also relates to the significant influence which communal philanthropists can exert. This book overflows with good intentions, but as the Oslo process of the 1990s indicated, it is only a meaningful peace which will soothe the savage Jewish breast. (Review of Keith Kahn-Harris’s Uncivil War: The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community, in the Jewish Journal of Sociology, 2014)

A PLETHORA OF JEWISH CRITICS There were, of course, many reasons to oppose Israeli government policies by Diaspora Jews. In very broad terms, this divided opponents into ideological camps—Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist. Americans for

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Peace Now were generally Zionists whereas Jews for Justice for Palestinians in Britain were not. Such groups were often more radical and hoped to play on the frustrations of mainstream Zionists at Israeli policy and thereby draw them away to a different ideological position. In addition, there were other orbiting Jewish groups which proclaimed their antiZionism and often considered themselves part of their home-grown far Left. All tried to win adherents from within this Jewish continuum amidst the shifting sands of the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. Such divisions became accentuated with the breakdown of the peace process and the advent of Palestinian Islamism at the end of the second millennium. Groups often appeared in a fanfare of publicity and then faded away just as rapidly. A Jewish supernova which disappeared into nothingness. Many were attracted because of ‘the urgency of the situation’. Some were disaffected Zionists. Others felt strongly about the Palestinian cause. Still others were in search of an identity. One such group that appeared in Britain in 2006 was Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). This arose at an opportune time when violence had reached a low ebb in the Middle East and suicide bombing had ceased. With the fog of publicity lifting, it is still difficult to know what Independent Jewish Voices actually stands for. Its advocacy in support of the universality of human rights, condemnation of racism and a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not exactly revolutionary. It is certainly not new. The political innocence of its open letter was clearly attractive to the many academic, literary and theatrical celebrities who signed it. Yet many other Jewish commentators in England were decidedly bemused by unworldly claims that ‘this could be the most serious challenge to the Jewish establishment since the creation of the State of Israel.’ One labelled them as ‘freedom fighters from Hampstead’ (a wellto-do London suburb) who were stuck in a time warp, believing that this was still the epoch of Yasser Arafat and that the rise of Islamism had never taken place. Significantly, a large number of Jews of liberal and left-wing opinion were never approached to sign. It seems that the common denominator here has been a disqualification of those who were unwilling to sufficiently distance themselves from Zionism or to turn a blind eye to issues such as the academic boycott of Israel or the comments of London



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Mayor Ken Livingstone. Indeed, the failure to cultivate well-known liberal writers such as Howard Jacobson and David Aaronovitch has led to highly critical articles in the British press. The central issue that has been trumpeted has been the lack of communal space to espouse alternative views. Yet groups such as the British Friends of Peace Now or the annual Limmud conference have been in existence for more than 20 years. Whereas such cries of censorship may have arguably been true in Britain at the time of the Lebanon war in 1982, there is a much more open Jewish media today, and through the advances of technology a multitude of ways of expressing alternative views. Despite this, there is the claim that institutions such as the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbinate do not reflect communal views. It is probably true that a majority of British Jews, if asked, would wish to see further evacuation of the settlements on the West Bank. Any representative body should not merely offer an arena for debate, but also be prepared to act on such views. Yet no one from the long list of signatories, it seems, has actually ever been elected as a member of the Board of Deputies and argued this position. The ambiguity of Independent Jewish Voices is that it wants to be represented, but does not wish to participate. The list of signatories comprises a stream of the disappointed, the alienated and those whose Jewishness is neither primary nor central to their being. Several signatories were not previously known to be Jewish, while others were not inclined to parade their Jewishness in public. Others, dedicated liberal rabbis and devout Bundists included, compensated for this. Although Israel is featured predominantly, the letter is very much a Diaspora matter. It is more about the politics of identity than freedom of expression and representation. Some signatories have spoken of their embarrassment and shame about Israeli policies. Yet this is more than expressing an identification with Palestinian suffering. In one sense, they reflect a part of the liberal intelligentsia in Britain which is highly selective in its outrage—opinions which often appear in the Comment and Debate pages of The Guardian. A part of the body politic which never speaks about Chinese dissidents, Burma or Zimbabwe, but focuses solely on Western failures—and of course, Israel. There is another part of the Left—with a significantly disproportionate number of Jews—which does not close its eyes to human rights abuses wherever they occur. This difference is also reflected in the opposition to the IJV initiative. Independent Jewish Voices is more the Jewish reflection of the British

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Left than the standard bearers of the Jewish Left per se. The repeated emphasis on universalism rather than particularism suggests a distancing from Israel, yet they are constantly reminded and often asked to take responsibility for Israeli actions. On the other hand, there is a dislike of crude displays of Jewish tribalism in their eyes which others understand as displays of solidarity. How to relate to Israel is an ongoing problem. Should Israel be regarded as merely a fait accompli that you have to live with or a good thing in itself? If you disagree with Israeli actions, how do you make yourself heard? There is no doubt that the al-Aqsa Intifada and last year’s war in Lebanon have brought such feelings bubbling to the surface and catalyzed the formation of the IJV. The initiative of the IJV is unlikely to influence a Jewish community which is essentially composed of small businessmen, accountants, estate agents and taxi drivers—people for whom Israel is a pillar of their identity and who often have family ties to the country. IJV’s tactical weakness is that it approaches the community from the outside and is not embedded in the mundane reality of its existence. The IJV initiative will, however, probably produce a community of sorts, one that is troubled by and reacts to the overzealous activities of advocates for Israel in the Diaspora. Yet there is a certain resemblance to the haredim. Not in a religious sense, but in a belief that Jews should not be nationally assertive. That Jews should be confined to their synagogues, to their devotion to customs and traditions. That the community should operate quietly and civilly and not be publicly troublesome. Identification with Israel, for good or ill, is therefore a rather large fly in the ointment. Yet this initiative is probably yet another step on the road toward an accommodation with neo-progressivism in British society. If disillusionment with Israeli policies, Diaspora assimilation and the ignorance about Zionism among non-Jews deepens, not raising your head above the communal parapet will become a more familiar cry. If the mainstream community shrinks, there will probably be more voices in the coming decades to imitate Independent Jewish Voices’ pleas. Zionism and the rise of the state was a revolt against Jewish history and the designated place of Jews in non-Jewish societies. There were at least another 22 solutions to the Jewish problem a century ago. It should not be surprising that such ideas should now be gaining credence among some Diaspora Jews who feel increasingly uncomfortable. (‘The First Word: Sudden Critics Syndrome’, Jerusalem Post, 15 February 2007)



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This was not so much a split in the Jewish community, but more a split in the Jewish Left as the outcome of frustration with the situation in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The IJV initiative also reflected Sharon’s posthumous victory in fragmenting the peace camp in the Diaspora.

NOTES 1.  Jewish Chronicle, 24 September 1852. 2.  Jonathan S. Woocher, ‘The Democratization of the American Jewish Polity’, in Authority, Power and Leadership in the Jewish Polity, ed. Daniel Elazar (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), p. 176. 3.  Charles S. Liebman, ‘Diaspora Influence on Israeli Policy’, in World Jewry and the State of Israel, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Arno Press, 1977), p. 314. 4.  Peter Medding, ‘Patterns of Political Organisation and Leadership in Contemporary Jewish Communities’, in Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and its Contemporary Uses, ed. Daniel Elazar (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983) p. 282. 5.  Howard Cooper and Paul Morrison, A Sense of Belonging: Dilemmas of British Jewish Identity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991). 6.  Jonathan Boyd and David Graham, Committed, Concerned and Conciliatory: The Attitudes of Jews in Britain towards Israel (London: Institute of Jewish Policy Research, 2010). 7.  Stephen Miller, Margaret Harris, Colin Shindler and Edward Temko, The Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel (London: City University, 2015). 8. Eytan Gilboa, ‘Attitudes of American Jews towards Israel: Trends over Time’, American Jewish Year Book 86, 1986, pp. 110–25.

17 Non-Jewish Jews and Israel

ISAAC DEUTSCHER AND ELISHA BEN-ABUYA

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an era when Jews are not popular—particularly on the European Left—because of their support for Israel, the presence of Jews whose Jewishness is accidental and not central to their identity is a reoccurring event. They are wheeled out into the public arena, more often than not to protest the justice of the Palestinian cause. They claim to speak ‘as a Jew’ on such occasions so as to point out that not all Jews are Zionists or support the government of Israel. This follows a long historical tradition, followed by Jews such as Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek, who identified first and foremost as internationalists—Jews who had transcended their narrow national identity. Yet, as history records, their Stalinist enemies discovered their Jewishness for them—often with lethal consequences. The implication of those who speak ‘as a Jew’ is that they are believed by the broad Left to represent a considerable body of opinion among Jews who are somehow part and parcel of the Jewish community. Lenin utilised this ploy in his ideological tussle with the Bund over one hundred years ago when he too paraded ‘Jewish workers’ who happened to follow his line. City University’s report on Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel in 2015 discovered that only 7 per cent of the respondents felt that a relationship to Israel did not form a part of their identity.1 Like the Bundists in 1903, many Jews today feel aggrieved at this misrepresentation.

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While some are ‘accidental Jews’, there are others who do have a Jewish consciousness and knowledge and yet have moved beyond the borders of community affairs. Pablo Christiani, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism took part in a disputation with Nahmanides in Barcelona in 1263. As someone well versed in Judaic texts, he was considered a worthy opponent and likely to convert the medieval philosopher. Similarly the head of the Yevsektsia, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s, Semyon Diamanstein, was a former follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. In this sense, they were more an apikhores (a dissenter with knowledge) than an am ha’aretz (a dissenter without knowledge) such as the assimilated Trotsky. Perhaps the classic example of the apikhores was the great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher. His essay entitled ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’2 became required reading for the student revolutionaries of the 1960s. Deutscher tried to explain why some Jews embraced the revolutionary imperative and relegated their Jewishness to a secondary level. As an ilui (child prodigy) of the yeshiva of Chrzanow in Poland, Deutscher supplanted God with Lenin and Trotsky at an early age. Although he moved beyond the Jewish community, he never renounced his Jewishness. He believed that non-Jewish Jews symbolised ‘the highest ideals of mankind’ and that Jewish revolutionaries carried ‘the message of universal human emancipation.’ He regarded such figures as optimists. And yet his father, the author of a book in Hebrew on Spinoza, disappeared in the hell of Auschwitz. Deutscher argued that such Jews existed on the borderlines of various civilisations, religions and cultures. And from there on the margins, they were able to clearly analyse societies and events and guide humanity into more benevolent channels. His revolutionary heroes included the Talmudic heretic, Elisha Ben Abuya who was the teacher and friend, according to the midrash, of Rabbi Meir Baal Hanas.3 While his actual misdemeanours were never revealed, Ben Abuya was at pains to warn his close friend, Rabbi Meir not to transgress the Sabbath when he was unwittingly in danger of doing so. Why did Elisha do this if he was the advocate of heresy? Why did Rabbi Meir maintain his friendship with Elisha when the entire Jewish community had boycotted him? Such questions perplexed Deutscher, who identified with Ben Abuya and regarded him as the

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model for contemporary revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Yet this story and its mystery did point to the convoluted issues that faced non-Jewish Jews who had travelled outside the community yet culturally remained within. Such issues of national identity and internationalism affected many Jews on the European Left who were often marooned between identities. Indeed the socialist intellectual, and father of David and Ed, Ralph Miliband, exclaimed that his kind of socialism did not exclude Jewishness, but his kind of Jewishness did exclude that sort of Jewishness which regarded all non-Jews as enemies. Since the French Revolution, Jews found themselves torn between the national interests of the Jews and their desire to repair the world. Both tendencies exist within Jewish tradition. Indeed, the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik revolution happened within days of each other in 1917. Which path should Jews with a social conscience follow? Some like Ben-Gurion admired Lenin for his ability to make a revolution with few resources, but kept communists, both in the Kremlin and locally, at arms’ length. Others like the Marxist-Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, regarded itself as the USSR’s representative in Israel. Indeed it was argued that if Stalin had not swung the Soviet Union and its satellites behind the UN vote in November 1947, the state of Israel might not have come into existence. There was, of course, a fair number of Jews in the leadership of the party when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. But leading revolutionaries like Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Kamenev were highly assimilated Jews. It was only when Communism was seen as no flash in the pan that many former Zionists flooded into the Soviet system to take the place of the apparatchiks that had fled the revolution. In 1920 Palestine was viewed as a far-off land and Zionism no more than a pipe dream. Wasn’t the Soviet Union now truly the promised land? Such former Zionists, now in a position of authority, displayed the zeal of the convert and often instigated the full wrath of the Soviet state against their former colleagues—many of whom were sent into the embryonic Gulag. Many non-Jewish communists, from Lenin down, were perplexed at the vehemence of these former Zionists. Anti-Semitism, it was claimed, had been virtually eliminated and the Soviet experiment was successfully solving the age-old Jewish problem. The dawn of humanity had arrived and Jews should rejoice. And yet, when Trotsky was in the midst of his power struggle with Stalin in the mid-1920s, many of his Jewish supporters complained

Cover of Trofim Kichko’s Judaism without Embellishment, published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1963. Its anti-Semitic stereotypes provoked protests to the Kremlin from West European Communist parties. Property of the author

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that anti-Semitism was being used as a political weapon inside the party to discredit them. This often led to exclusion and exile. It was remarked that Moses may have taken the Jews out of Egypt, but Stalin also took them out of the Communist party. Following Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, many European Jews were attracted to his standard. The study of Marxist theory and the intellectual cut and thrust of debate appealed, but real power and state responsibility was the prerogative of the Kremlin. The purity of theory was seductive, but it also led into an otherworldly existence and quite often to bitter schisms about ideological issues that tended to be incomprehensible to the outsider. There were often uncanny resemblances to a hasidic court with its ‘rebbe’ living in poverty and devoting his waking hours to the study of Marxist texts. Despite his recognition of the virulence of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, his growing understanding of Jewish nationalism and his opposition to assimilation as a solution to the Jewish question, Trotsky, like Stalin, understood the Second World War as a fight between rival imperialisms. Even if the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state under Stalin, it had to survive. Indeed why should workers die—as they had done in their millions in the First World War for the cause of the capitalists? Shortly before his assassination, Trotsky wrote: As victors, Britain and France would be no less fearful for the fate of mankind than Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy is not to be saved. Lending aid to its own bourgeoisie against the foreign fascism, the workers would hasten the victory of fascism in their own country. The task set by history is not to support one part of the imperialist system against another but to cast the entire system over the precipice.4

Many future leaders of the far Left in Britain followed Trotsky’s line. Tony Cliff, founder and mentor of the Socialist Workers Party, was born into the Zionist aristocracy as Ygael Gluckstein in Zikhron Yaakov. His father was in business with Chaim Weizmann’s brother. His uncle was Chaim Kalvarisky who was involved in the purchase of the Jezreel Valley and an advocate of Jewish-Arab reconciliation. In the 1930s, Gluckstein moved from a social democratic Zionist position to a Trotskyist one and along with figures such as Avraham Stern (of the ‘Stern Gang’) was imprisoned by the British on the outbreak of the war. On his release, he led a small group called Brit Spartakus, which tried to persuade Hebrew University students not to join the British war effort in fighting Nazism. Brit Spartakus argued for ‘an end to the imperialist



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war and for a peoples’ peace.’ No one heeded this utopian vision. Millions continued to die at the hands of the Nazis. In 1946 when Jews were attempting to enter Palestine, often illegally from the displaced persons’ camps, Gluckstein sailed in the opposite direction to Britain. Others such as Ted Grant, the mentor of the Militant Tendency of the 1980s, was born Isaac Blank in Johannesburg and was part of a group of Jewish Trotskyists who arrived in Britain in the 1930s. Like the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, Cliff, Grant and others tried to make sense of the dire situation in 1940 and guarantee the survival of the USSR. The revolutionary imperative, however, came before any danger to themselves and their families because of their Jewish origin, no matter how insignificant in their eyes. In the larger picture, Jewish national interests were secondary. Following the revelations of the death camps, there was an identification by most British Jews with the desire to build a state with a Jewish majority within Palestine. Many turned away from the British Left towards the Jewish Left and supported the establishment of a Hebrew socialist republic. The ideals remained, but without illusions. Yet there were also Jewish revolutionaries who did not see salvation in the establishment of a nation-state, but regarded it instead solely as ‘the consummation of the Jewish tragedy.’ Deutscher asked aloud whether Jews generally were able to share together with Jewish revolutionaries a faith in humanity. Deutscher admitted that if this question was answered from a purely Jewish standpoint, then ‘it would be hard, perhaps impossible to give a positive answer.’ Moreover Deutscher said that he personally did not approach it from an exclusively Jewish viewpoint. He spoke instead about the ‘ultimate solidarity of humanity.’ This then is the crucial difference between non-Jewish Jews who regard themselves as following an authentic Jewish tradition and the majority of Jews, composed of non non-Jewish Jews, who define themselves in terms of Jewish national interests. For the latter, the realities of the 20th century intervened. There was no uprising of the workers to stop the mass murder of the Jews. Millions of soldiers did not shed their guns and uniforms to embrace the foe. There was no football match between British and German troops on Christmas Day 1940. The Allies may have won the war, but the Jews certainly lost it. The critical ‘as a Jew’ proclamations about the state of Israel therefore often follow a century old tradition which rarely endorses Jew-

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ish national interests. As Pavel Axelrod, one of the very first Russian Jewish revolutionaries wrote as early as 1872: ‘What significance could the interests of a handful of Jews have in comparison with the idea of the working class and the all-embracing universal interests of socialism.’ How then should an episode as momentous as the Arab Spring be understood? Of course, there should be tremendous admiration for the courageous people who have thrown off the heavy hand of a dictator. Yet what the Google youth of Tahrir Square started, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists were able to finish as they swept to power in the recent series of elections. For most Jews, a central question is: ‘What does this mean for Israel and for Jews generally?’ For others this is unimportant. The idyllic vision of a future that may never arrive supersedes this. Considering the Jewish national interest is certainly less attractive than working towards universal redemption. It is certainly less wholesome theoretically and far more politically restrictive. Conversely there is the danger that all Jewish endeavours will be reduced to survivalism and the demand that any criticism of Israel government policies should only be uttered in private. Most steer a path between nonchalant nonJewish Jews and ultra-cautious Jewish Jews. The yardstick for evaluation is the perception of the here and now. (‘The Non-Jewish Jews Who Became the Scholars of an Ideological Dreamworld’, Jewish Chronicle, 10 May 2012)

RALPH MILIBAND AND JEWISH REALITY Between the assimilated Trotsky and the lapsed traditionalist Deutscher, there are a plethora of relationships to Jewishness. Moreover, such a relationship is not static. Trotsky recognised that anti-Semitism in the Europe of the 1930s was profoundly more threatening than in fin de siècle tsarist Russia. While admitting that the Jews were a nation and that ‘the nation cannot normally exist without common territory’,5 he remained unconvinced that Zionism was the solution to resolving the Jewish problem. Even so, he is said to have listened intently to news of the Zionist experiment in Palestine when he met Mapai’s Beba Idelson in 1937.6 Ralph Miliband was a revered scholar and socialist writer in London in the latter half of the twentieth century who influenced many. Yet



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he said little publicly about his Jewish background and his flight from Belgium in 1940. During the prelude to the Six-Day War in 1967, in a remarkable exchange of correspondence, he vociferously defended Israel to another Jewish Marxist, Marcel Liebman, who just as adamantly decried such views. The exchange was published as a short book in 2006.7 What comes across is not simply Miliband’s resolute belief in the need for a Jewish home, but that before and indeed since, he never voiced any particularly strong identification with Israel. In one sense Miliband positioned himself differently, compared to his fellow Jewish socialists, Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Laski in terms of his identification with Israel. Each grappled with their Jewishness and how to repair the world in dark times. Hobsbawm remained an unrepentant Stalinist, who, despite his Jewish origin, supported the Nazi-Soviet pact at a time when the Miliband family was fleeing from Hitler’s stormtroopers. Laski became a passionate supporter of the Zionist cause and a scathing critic of anti-Jewish feeling within the Labour Party. His targets included Sidney Webb, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin. In a broadcast from Germany in April 1943, the traitor William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw,’ described Laski as ‘this detestable and wily Jew.’ He became chairman of the Labour Party and mentor at the London School of Economics to the young Ralph Miliband. Miliband’s family left Poland in the mid-1920s during a terrible economic crisis. The odyssey of the Milibands—from Poland to Belgium to Britain—indicates the fragility of existence for the wandering Jew during that period. Many were torn between a universalism which supported the oppressed everywhere, and a particularism in following a national path. This was starkly depicted when the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution occurred within days of each other in 1917. One proclaimed a national home for the Jews in Palestine, the other declared that a new dawn would see the disappearance of injustice and evil in the world. Jews were attracted to both and had to make a choice. Many Zionists joined the Soviet Communist party and turned on their former comrades to prove their conversion. Others utilised Marxism to guide their Zionism. Ben-Gurion, Tabenkin and even Jabotinsky used Marxism as a ‘diagnostic tool.’

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Still others such as those in the Marxist-Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, expressed an unrequited ideological love for the Soviet Union. Ralph Miliband was a member of Hashomer Hatzair in Belgium. As the stormclouds gathered over Europe in the late 1930s, many left the movement since Zionism at that time seemed no answer to the advance of Nazism. Many were also repelled by the show trials in the Soviet Union and Hashomer’s subservience to Stalinism. At Cambridge in the 1940s, his friend and fellow Polish Jew, Ya’akov Talmon, tried to persuade Miliband to emigrate to Palestine with him. Miliband remained; he was wedded to the intellectual socialist tradition of Orwell, rather than to the Marxism of the kibbutz. Talmon became one of Israel’s most revered historians. On the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, Miliband entered into a ferocious correspondence with a fellow Belgian Jewish Marxist, Marcel Liebman,8 in which he strongly supported Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. Miliband sarcastically asked Liebman how many Arab protests about persecution of Jews in the Arab world had taken place. Miliband further commented: ‘It is no duty of socialists to support pseudo-socialist revolutions unconditionally, they should do it in a nuanced way. But the rottenness of official Marxism in our time makes this kind of attitude impossible.’ (‘Ralph Miliband: Marxist and Zionist’, Jewish Chronicle, 3 October 2013)

ERIC HOBSBAWM AND 1940 Eric Hobsbawm was similarly revered by generations of left-wing thinkers and young people. His books were required reading. Although they were friends, the formative experiences of Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband, while in certain respects similar, also differed. Hobsbawm had grown up in Vienna and Berlin. The rise of Hitler turned him towards Communism—and he never left the party. Miliband however had a background—albeit fleetingly—in left-wing Zionism. His father had identified with the Bund. Both were refugees from Nazism. Hobsbawm left in 1933 when his English uncle was relocated to the UK. Miliband’s passage to Britain was also abrupt, but less organised. He and his father left Belgium as the Nazis over-



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ran Belgium in May 1940. Yet these two acculturated Jewish Marxist intellectuals differed in that Hobsbawm remained chained to his fidelity to the USSR, while Miliband preserved his independence by remaining outside of any formal party structure and regarded the Soviet Union with disdain. Hobsbawm, like Miliband, accepted the reality of Israel—possibly because the USSR did so as well in 1948. In his memoirs, as an acculturated Jew, he embraced the label of being a ‘non-Jewish Jew’.9 But there is silence about his feelings at the time on the establishment of Israel in 1948. He was vociferous in distancing himself from Zionist ideology.10 In 1977 he wrote, ‘The test of a Jewish Marxist, even one who wishes to preserve what is now an established Jewish people in Israel, is that he or she is not a Zionist’.11 The Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 proved to be the acid test as to how Jews on the Left defined themselves. Poland was overrun by the Nazi war machine in September 1939—should communist Jews therefore remain silent about the impending doom facing the three-million-strong Jewish community because of faith in the pact? Was Jewishness secondary to their faith in Stalin and their support for the Soviet Union? Would Hitler have spared communist Jews if the Final Solution had been enacted in September 1939 rather than a couple of years later? Would Stalin have intervened with the Nazis if this had come to pass? Eric Hobsbawm remained a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and observed the party line in supporting the MolotovRibbentrop pact. What would have been Hobsbawm’s reaction if Hitler had successfully invaded the United Kingdom in 1940? The Labour Party leadership would have joined the resistance or fled to Canada to establish a government-in-exile. But what would have been the approach of the CPGB? How would British communists have coped with the albatross of the non-aggression pact between the Nazis and the Soviets around their necks? Would they have opted for the French model and passively distributed leaflets? Would they have followed the Czech model and looked upon the German soldiers as fellow-workers in uniform, with whom they should fraternise? These would have been profound questions for Hobsbawm the communist if Operation Sea Lion had been successful and Britain had been conquered. But how would they have affected Hobsbawm the Jew?

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One common rationale for the Nazi-Soviet pact was that Stalin was buying time to build up his forces in the event of an inevitable German invasion. Others have suggested that Stalin was waiting for the antagonists to exhaust themselves so that the Red Army could march into Western Europe—and ‘liberate’ the working masses. What would have happened if the Nazis had eventually come for the Jews in Britain in 1940? Was their fate ultimately inconsequential in the greater scheme of things? Was their sacrifice in the short term a sad necessity so that the Soviet Union might live? Would British communists have remained inactive out of a rigid loyalty to the USSR and therefore supported Stalin’s pact with Hitler? On the other hand, would the antifascist inclinations of both Stalinists and Trotskyists have propelled them to do something to save Jews? A few days after the invasion of Poland, Stalin decreed that there should be no opposition to Nazism and local communists should argue in favour of peace and abandoning the conflict. Stalin depicted the war as one between rival imperialisms, along the model of the First World War. Indeed, Molotov argued that the war between Britain and France against Nazi Germany was ‘a sort of holy war like those waged during the Middle Ages.’ Many on the far Left retained traumatic memories of the slaughter in the trenches and the senseless loss of life—and were determined that it should never happen again. Soviet appeals for peace therefore resonated with them. Stalin was quick to accord diplomatic recognition to Slovakia, which had aligned itself with Germany. The Czech ambassador was asked to leave Moscow. When Belgium, Yugoslavia, Norway and Greece were conquered, Stalin withdrew diplomatic recognition and their ambassadors similarly were forced to leave the USSR. Stalin also recognized the pro-Nazi regime of Prime Minister Rashid Ali in Iraq. Following the German invasion of Norway, the Labour paper Arbeiderbladet and the liberal Dagbladet did not resume publication, but the communist Arbeideren did. When Italy entered the war and invaded Greece, British communists asked the Greeks to seek peace with the invader. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Soviet press was saturated by anti-British commentary. Another agreement was signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany whereby the former would supply grain, fuel and raw materials to the latter in order to circumvent the British blockade. In Belgium, the Communist Party launched the slogan, ‘Neither London nor Berlin’ and campaigned instead for higher pay for the mobilised



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conscripts. The future leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, wrote in February 1940 that ‘this war policy [of the Allies] is the more criminal because. . . [Britain] is the most reactionary force in the world.’ Stalin even provided a port for the German navy near Murmansk. The German vessel, Komet, sailed through Arctic waters, north of the USSR, and was aided by Soviet icebreakers—it went on to attack Allied shipping. While Stalin congratulated Hitler on entering Paris in May 1940, he was also surprised at the rapid collapse of France. He therefore moved very quickly to realise the gains of the pact, occupying the Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. All the elites—as in Poland were deported and replaced by Russians. The ongoing arrests and passage to the Gulag included members of Jewish and Zionist organisations, which were regarded as subversive, anti-Soviet elements. For British Jews who were Communist Party members or just sympathisers, the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland meant a terrible choice. Should they adhere to the cause of world revolution and relegate their Jewishness to a lower, less important, rung? Should they place their trust in Stalin and the Soviet Union? By closing off retaliation on the Eastern front, were they implicitly aiding Hitler in subduing Poland and thereby placing its three million Jews in mortal danger? Suppose Hitler, once he had disposed of Poland, then turned his attention to Western Europe. Were they therefore encouraging the Nazi war machine and thereby positioning their own families in its path, putting their friends in danger? Where were the boundaries of self-sacrifice? Some interpreted the struggle against ‘our own imperialism’ as sabotaging the war effort. Churchill had spoken of dealing with fifth columnists ‘with a heavy hand.’ The British communists therefore set up a Workers’ Music Association as a front in case it was banned. They collected classified information from supporters and sympathisers about weapons and military operations. In France, a powder factory at Sorques, an arms manufacturer at Bourges and an aeroplane motor plant at Boulogne were also sabotaged during the phoney war. Some local, anticolonial movements believed that their moment had come since their imperial overlords, Britain and France, were on the ropes. On the basis of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ feelers were extended to Berlin. There had been, for example, several overtures by Sean Russell, the chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army even before the outbreak of war. Plan Kathleen had envisaged an IRA uprising of 30,000 people, joined by a German invasion force of 50,000, to take Northern Ireland.

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This was superseded by Hitler’s plan to invade Northern Ireland at the same time as the invasion of England in Operation Sea Lion. Northern Ireland, the Nazis argued, would provide a firm base for the Luftwaffe to bomb targets in the north of England. Likewise, ‘the prophet outcast,’ Leon Trotsky, and many of his supporters similarly regarded the Second World War as a repeat of the Great War when workers died in their millions in the muddy fields of Flanders. The rival imperialists of 1940, it was argued, were no better than their forebears a quarter of a century earlier. There was little to choose between the Axis and the Allies, between Hitler and Churchill. Why die for the cause of capitalism? Unlike the Stalinists, Trotskyists were not weighed down by the burden of state responsibilities. Their deep belief in ideological purity demanded an adherence to theory. If the reality of 1940 did not match the theory, then the reality had to be changed through making the masses aware. The conflict had to be brought to an end by workers overthrowing the regimes that had sent them to fight their brothers. Even in Palestine, there was a small group of Jewish Trotskyists, including the future founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, which condemned the conflict and campaigned to halt the mobilisation of the Jews of Palestine and their enlistment in the British war effort. The British, like the Nazis, it was claimed, similarly oppressed a hundred million people in their colonies. The British only fought for the interests of ‘several thousand very wealthy families in the City of London.’ Jewish immigrants, whether from ‘Vienna or Berlin, Brno or Budapest’ were asked to oppose mobilisation and to establish a united front ‘for jobs, free meal tickets, free housing, free medical assistance.’ Stalinists in support of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists as exponents of revolutionary theory, colonial nationalists as ardent advocates of liberation movements, even revolutionary Marxists in Mandatory Palestine—they all had their own political interests. They consisted of philo-Semites, anti-Semites and the indifferent. The fate of the Jews was not at the top of their agenda. In parallel, argued the Allies, the Jews would be saved, but only once the Nazis had been vanquished. The quicker the victory, the better for the Jewish people. Yet no British aircraft bombed the railway lines leading to Auschwitz. Neither did the Red Air Force, when it was within striking distance. To be sure, there were bold declarations and dire warnings delivered to the Nazis by the Allies, but the exterminations continued and gathered



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pace. Some resigned themselves to the impending Jewish catastrophe. Others were indifferent to it. Communist and capitalist, Stalinist and Trotskyist, the oppressor and the oppressed—not all, but many accepted the abandonment of the Jews. Despite the great victory over Nazism, the revelations of the death camps in the spring of 1945, profoundly shocked the surviving Jewish community of Great Britain. It turned to Zionism with an abiding determination. The revelations of Belsen and Dachau convinced a majority of Jews that the European far Left had failed them. This did not mean an automatic turn to the Right, but British Jews made a distinction between a Jewish Left and a non-Jewish Left. It meant auto-emancipation and not emancipation by others. Marxism, Communism, Trotskyism—socialism and social democracy—had always exhibited a magnetic attraction for Jews. Perhaps at the root of this was a desire to repair and perfect the world, consciously and subconsciously in accordance with both Judaic teachings and Jewish experience. A desire to imitate the prophets who rebelled rather than the kings who ruled. While the tradition of Jewish involvement in the European Left was a long and honourable one, it was Jewish suffering that disproportionately greased the wheels of revolution. A communist redemption did not liberate the Jews from their historic ills. Such a dream perished in the permafrost of the Soviet Gulag. British Jews absorbed the hard lesson that absolute obedience to an ideology was lethal and understood it as obsolete. While many remained idealists without illusions, there was a great reticence to believe in the construction of utopia without guarantees. This has been glossed over by all too many on the far Left trying to bend the Jewish reality to fit political theory. For many Jews, ‘the occult power of political messianism’ had lost its potency. This mindset finds its reflection in an identification with the state of Israel by the overwhelming majority of British Jews even though they may have a low opinion of successive governments and recycled politicians. The great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher, exalted the non-Jewish Jew in his writings. Perhaps it is the non non-Jewish majority that better understands the political reality—a reality based on real events rather than ingenious theory. (‘Political Theories and Jewish Realities’, Jewish Chronicle, 3 January 2012)

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THE LONG MARCH OF THE CORBYNISTAS The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party in the summer of 2015 initiated an attempt by the far Left to reconfigure the Labour Party from one based on the pre-eminence of parliamentary representatives to one based on a syndicalist model—to expand the role of trade unions far beyond that of defending workers’ rights into a vehicle for greater public democracy and to diminish the deliberations of distant parliamentarians. It challenged Labour’s decision in 1918 to follow the parliamentary road instead of the syndicalist one. Moreover, the fervour which the Corbynistas brought with them did not involve a respect for the dignity of difference. Jewish voters who had regarded the party historically as its natural home began to desert Labour in droves. The age of ideological certainty had brought catastrophe during the last century. Mass movements and political messianism were looked upon with great suspicion. At the beginning of 2016 the British Labour Party was in turmoil over repeated accusations of anti-Semitism. Numerous party members were revealed in tweets and on Facebook as having made remarks which many Jews considered to be offensive. In April 2016, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London once more made an incendiary contribution to the debate in asserting that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’. The Labour Party now began to take action by suspending members including Livingstone and setting up a commission of inquiry. Yet some Jewish members of the Labour Party dismissed the furore over anti-Semitism as a red herring and pointed the finger of blame at both the party’s right wing and Labour’s Conservative opponents. As the Livingstone outburst once more demonstrated, Zionism has become a pejorative term in 2016. But is Zionism wrong or is it just different? If it cannot be accommodated by post-colonial or Marxist theory, could it also be that such current thinking is limited? Could it be that it is easier for some to accept conventional wisdom rather than develop new modes of integrating the reality of a national movement which created a state? Livingstone’s defenders pointed to the Ha’avarah agreement, concluded between Nazi officials and the Jewish Agency in 1933. They



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implied that this agreement violated the very tenets of socialist morality and demonstrated the shallowness of Zionism. The agreement permitted German Jews to leave for Palestine with a small amount of cash and to purchase German goods in place of their life’s savings. In this fashion, the Nazis could not only rid Germany of its Jews, but also boost their economy. Yet this questionable arrangement aided over 50,000 Jews in escaping certain death during World War II. Would it have been better, would it have made more sense, if they had stayed behind in Nazi Germany? If Zionism is simply different—and not wrong—then it poses the possibility of two equally just narratives about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It implicitly suggests partition of the Land as the solution. The Corbynistas do not entertain this possibility of difference. In 2013 Jeremy Corbyn suggested that the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was an historic mistake. Yet he was silent about the McMahon-Sharif Hussein correspondence of 1915–16 in which British imperialism offered national independence to the Arabs. If there is an ingrained stubbornness about sticking to a different narrative such as Zionism—and its adherents do not go the way of the crowd—does this then produce a condemnation of difference? If there is no respect for the dignity of difference, does an all-encompassing certitude produce intolerance? Does intolerance then morph into discrimination? And if the Zionists happen to be Jews, can rational criticism of Zionism tip over into stereotypical anti-Semitism? The Attitudes survey of City University indicates that some 93 percent of its Jewish respondents believe that identification with Israel forms a part of their identity. Who then are the “zios” in today’s leftist parlance? If selective outrage exists in the sense that Israel alone is singled out for condemnation whilst silence prevails over authoritarian states such as China and Russia and human rights abuses in many developing countries, then is this a one-issue campaign or a covert anti-Semitism? One can rationally be anti-anti-Semitic, but that is not necessarily the same as being pro-Jewish. For leaders of the Labour Party who have associated themselves with reactionaries, who have tossed out anti-Jewish epithets in the past—this may indeed not be a measure of conscious antiSemitism, but it is certainly an indication of an ongoing poor judgement if not an ideological superficiality. Another feature of Corbynista arguments is that accidental Jews are implicitly representative of broad Jewish opinion. Yet the At-

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titudes survey indicated that only 7 percent of British Jews regard identification with Israel as an irrelevance—virtually the same figure as the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) survey of 2010. Accidental Jews, however, do act as a convenient ideological cover in suggesting that anti-Zionism can never be anti-Semitic. This reticence in dealing with mainstream Jewry goes back to Lenin’s disregard of the plight of the Jewish masses and his ignorance about the existence of Marxist-Zionists. It is also rooted in his belief that the solution to the Jewish question resided in assimilation and his close association with those Jews escaping Jewishness. It is also manifested in Corbyn’s embrace of the far Left in Israel rather than a sister Labour party. The Jewish desire to repair the world is a powerful one. The narrow nationalism which the current government of Israel espouses is unattractive to many thinking young Jews. It provides an incentive to transform Jewish Jews into non-Jewish Jews. Originally protest against the settlements amongst British Jews came from groups such as Mapam and Peace Now organisations which did not disavow Zionism. Their successors in the twenty-first century have been more circumspect. Significantly the number of respondents who regard themselves as Zionists in the Attitudes survey falls to two thirds of the figure of those who identify with Israel. Is it that they recoil from the fact that Zionism has been transformed into a pro-Israelism—and that public relations are intellectually inauthentic? Many on the Left, both Jew and non-Jew, have turned away disillusioned. Today some young Jews proclaim Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as the clear answer to Israeli policies. Many young Jews sought a change from the men in blue suits that have characterised Labour. They wanted policies which dealt with the poor and the disadvantaged, the downtrodden and the marginalised— and many found their saviour in the unlikely figure of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet he also arrived with the baggage of convoluted approaches to the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. While some speak of him with messianic fervour, others regard him as an ideological anti-Zionist who tries to look the other way when the odour of anti-Jewish commentary pollutes political discourse on the Left. As the Livingstone affair indicated, some commentary just cannot be explained away. Harold Wilson said that a week is a long time in poli-



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tics. Jeremy Corbyn has slightly longer to convince the Jewish Left that he can deal with their genuine concerns. (‘Corbynistas and Zionists’, Jewish Quarterly, Summer 2016)

When asked about the perceived motives for applying double standards to the judgement of Israel’s actions during the conflict with Hamas in 2014, some 70 per cent of British Jews in the Attitudes survey felt that it was due to anti-Semitism. Perhaps for the first time, many Labour-voting Jews began to question their political allegiance. Why had the previously strong relationship between Jews and the Labour Party virtually ruptured in this manner? Fifty years ago, it was all very different. Most British Jews felt that Labour was their natural home. The Conservatives, it was argued, had a streak of snobbish English anti-Semitism running through their veins. As the Conservative prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, pointed out after Kristallnacht: ‘No doubt the Jews aren’t a loveable people. I don’t care about them myself, but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.’ In contrast, the British Left, together with the Jews, fought the local fascists in London’s East End in the 1930s. Labour leader Harold Wilson was regarded as ‘a friend of Israel’ and even sent his son to Kibbutz Yagur to learn Hebrew. The parliamentary Labour Party boasted of between 30 and 40 Jewish members of the House of Commons—a hugely disproportionate number, given the small number of Jews in Britain (around 400,000, less than 1% of the population). Gerald Kaufman, currently ‘Father of the House of Commons’ (its most veteran member) and now a virulent critic of Israel, was Wilson’s intermediary with the Israel Embassy, admirer of Ben-Gurion and all-round uber-Zionist. Wilson had been a follower of Aneurin Bevan, the acknowledged leader of the Labour Left (but never PM) in post-war Britain and the revered founder of the National Health Service. Bevan was a dyed-in-thewool Zionist and threatened to resign from Atlee’s government because of British policy in Mandate Palestine in the 1940s. Today’s Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and indeed Livingstone himself, were members of the succeeding generation. A ‘New Left’ that had neither experienced the Shoah nor lived through the rise of Israel came of age during the post-war period of decolonization. They understood

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the nascent Palestinian national movement in the context of other national liberation movements—and this mindset was in place before Israel’s settlement drive after the Six-Day War. The establishment of West Bank settlements merely exacerbated this outlook. The New Left was often indifferent to the right of the Jews to national self-determination. For them, Zionism was wrong, not different. Such a view of Israel has moved from the political periphery in the 1960s to the centre of the Labour Party in 2016. Corbyn has not been a mediator in the past in bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, but a facilitator of Palestinian hasbarah. Like Sadiq Khan, the new mayor of London, he has shared platforms with reactionaries and looked the other way when anti-Zionism has tipped over into anti-Semitism. One feature that has gone largely unnoticed in this current controversy has been the willingness of many Jewish liberals to now publicly attack the Labour Party. This would have been unthinkable a short time ago. The Britain of 2016 is very much an operating multi-cultural society. Many of the post-war and newer immigrants identify with an anti-colonial ethos. Moreover, just as a majority of British Jews look to Israel, a majority of British Muslims identify with the Palestinians. The Muslim population of the UK is seven or eight times as large as the Jewish population and thus far more electorally significant. It is no surprise that all political parties, especially during election campaigns, take note of this. The trade unions parachuted Ed Miliband into the Labour leadership in 2010 over the wishes of both local constituencies and the parliamentary party (who preferred his brother David). His disastrous tenure was marked by a new system of party membership which enabled an influx of hundreds of thousands. Many were young people who wished to rid Labour of the men in blue suits and return the party to its traditional values on behalf of working people. For others, this was a subtle form of entryism such that many members of the far Left found a new home. The unlikely figure of Jeremy Corbyn on Labour’s most peripheral Left was carried on a wave of messianic fervour to the leadership. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 was a turning point. The large number of Palestinian civilian casualties blotted out any rational explanation of the conflict. It was accentuated by instant and blanket media coverage in Britain and became a cause célèbre on the Left. The election of Corbyn last year was a psychological green light to what had been bubbling up below to overflow publicly. Social media acted as



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a loudspeaker. Ken Livingstone’s outburst, reminiscent of the mutterings of the white working-class far Right, was the spark that ignited the fire—and persuaded many Jewish Labour supporters to think twice about voting for Sadiq Khan. While undoubtedly Jews have moved to the Right as a result of a growing affluence, and the philo-Semitism of Margaret Thatcher’s long tenure, there is also a widening schism between Labour-voting Jews and the party. Anti-Semitism is a live issue now for British Jews and Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an albatross around Labour’s neck. Some two-thirds of Jewish Labour voters have deserted Labour since Tony Blair’s period in office. A Survation poll for the Jewish Chronicle which was conducted this week indicates that only 8.5 percent of British Jews would vote Labour if a general election was held tomorrow. Accusations of anti-Semitism and covert racism are an ideological dagger pointed at Labour’s heart, and it shouldn’t be a problem only for British Jews. While some members are being suspended and an inquiry has been established, will this be successful? Is it a political environment that is the problem or simply the opinions of a few individual members? Perhaps the victor in this controversy is the depth of ignorance about the Israel-Palestine conflict among party members and an indifference to inappropriate and racist language—when it’s targeted at Jews. Education doesn’t only start with the young, but also with the ignorant. (‘The Labour Party and Its Jewish Voters’, Ha’aretz, 6 May 2016)

NOTES 1.  Stephen Miller, Margaret Harris, Colin Shindler, and Edward Temko, The Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel (London: City University London, 2015). 2.  Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 3.  Talmud Yerushalmi, Hagiga 77b; Talmud Bavli, Hagiga 15a–b. 4. Leon Trotsky, ‘Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International’, May 1940, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933–40 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973). 5.  Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 18 January 1937. 6.  Davar, 6 July 1956.

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7. Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman, The Israeli Dilemma: A Debate between Two Left-Wing Jews, ed. Gilbert Achcar (London: Merlin Press, 2006). 8. Ibid. 9.  Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 24. 10.  Guardian, 14 September 2002. 11.  Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Socialism and Nationalism: Some Reflections on “The Break-Up of Britain”’, in Politics for a Rational Left (London: Verso, 1989), p. 125.

18 Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions

THE CAMPAIGN AND ITS ORIGINS

During the last decade, the campaign to initiate a policy of Boycott,

Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel has become the centrepiece of the propaganda war between Israel and Palestine on campus and in intellectual debates. It has filled the vacuum left by the failure of the peace process of the 1990s. In addition, a growing number of academics, writers, actors and scientists refused to visit Israel or to participate in literary events, music concerts and scientific conferences. In one sense, this campaign was a recognition of Israel’s democratic credentials in that it would be sensitive to charges of abuses of human rights—and, therefore, due to pressure from intellectual circles, move to rectify them. Mahmoud Abbas recognised the simplistic nature of this approach in facilitating real change when he called for a boycott of settlement produce, but not of Israel itself. The reaction of several BDS advocates was certainly not welcoming, since it separated attitudes towards Israel from attitudes towards those territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War. It asked the question: Is the problem the existence of Israel itself or is it with its occupation of the West Bank? Does it suggest that the answer is a two-state solution or a Greater Palestine? Why then does the BDS campaign also discriminate against those who oppose the occupation if it is not a blanket boycott of Israeli society?

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Moreover, the effectiveness of boycotts has always been disputed— even in the case of the collapse of apartheid South Africa. During the period of the BDS campaign, Israel has acquired an abundance of energy reserves and accumulated a wealth of technological expertise. While Israel has appeared to become weaker in the popularity and public relations stakes, it has become stronger economically in a period of austerity and disarray in the West. Britain has often been at the epicentre of any campaign to emphasise the Palestinian question. In part, this is due to the connection between Israel and Palestine during the Mandate period. In part, it is due to Britain’s colonial legacy and the desire to recognise past misdemeanours. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) came into a short-term existence in the UK just after the Six-Day War in 1967, mimicking the highly successful Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. It was refounded in the wake of Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The formal genesis of BDS lies in the outbreak of violence during the al-Aqsa Intifada at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The boycott was formally initiated by a letter to the Guardian in April 2002 which was signed by over 120 British and international academics. Prior to its publication, Operation Protective Shield—an incursion into Palestinian cities—had taken place in response to the suicide bombing in Netanya as Israeli Jews sat down to celebrate the festival of Passover. It coincided with the entry of the Israeli military into Jenin on the West Bank, considered to be a stronghold of Islamic Jihad and the suicide bombers’ ‘capital’. The Israelis—unwisely in hindsight—excluded the press from Jenin, and this led to the suspicion of a cover-up. A Palestinian misinformation campaign claimed that there had been a massacre of 500 people. The intention was to re-create the international furore that had surrounded the real massacre of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatilla camps by Christian Phalangist gunmen during the Lebanon war in 1982. On that occasion, Israeli troops had stood guard outside the gates of the camp. Sharon was held responsible by the Kahan Commission in 1983 and forced to resign as minister of defence. Sharon was now prime minister and the instigator of Operation Protective Shield. It therefore made sense in Palestinian eyes to resurrect the spectre of his past record. Reports appeared in the reputable press by suspicious re-



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porters outside the camp that there had been summary executions, mass graves and civilians buried alive by Israeli bulldozers. The reality had actually been a period of prolonged pitched fighting between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants which left over fifty Palestinian dead and slightly less than half of that number of Israeli dead. The fighting, which had taken place in a built-up area, left a scene of great devastation. Some buildings had been booby-trapped by the militants. The initial account emerging from this conflict with its accompanying inaccuracies persuaded many horrified liberals to sign the letter to the Guardian. This was a letter which had been initiated by academics on the far Left, who had seen little value in the Oslo Accords in 1993 and sympathised with the Palestinian rejectionists of that agreement between Rabin and Arafat. The language of the letter was genteel, designed to appeal to a wide catchment area: Odd though it may appear, many national and European cultural and research institutions, including especially those funded from the EU and the European Science Foundation, regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts. Would it not therefore be timely if at both national and European level a moratorium was called upon any further such support unless and until Israel abides by UN resolutions and opens serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians along the lines proposed in many peace plans, including most recently that sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League.1

This soft approach, coming on the heels of televised destruction and distorted reportage, omitted the accusations of war crimes and apartheid Israel, which was the lingua franca of the far Left. It did not talk about suicide bombing as part of ‘Palestinian resistance’. The far Left attacked Sharon for refusing to negotiate while there were outbreaks of violence yet was silent about the desire of his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who did wish to talk to Arafat. Indeed many Israelis supported an exploration of the Saudi and Arab League proposals, even if the leaders of the Likud did not. The initiators of the letter were in contact with members of the Palestinian intelligentsia and academics at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, many of whom had spent time at universities in the West, but never shared

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the enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords. It was a period when the status quo was being rejected and the epoch of Arafat, Habash and Hawatmeh was drawing to a close. In Palestinian eyes, the failure of Oslo was seen to be a failure of the Israeli peace camp—and that the future did not lie with them. It was also the era of ascendant Palestinian Islamism. The radicals of Bir Zeit and Ramallah wanted to tread a different pathway, one which was non-violent, but utilised the methods of the far Left in the United States and Europe. It not only marked a loss of patience with the mainstream Israeli liberals, it also advocated replacing them with those who devoutly adhered to a Palestinian version of events. Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, was also very clear how he saw liberals in Israel in 2016: Racism was always there but it was always very couched, very hidden by a supposedly liberal Zionist façade that projects to the world Israeli scientific miracles and cultural miracles and whitewashing very well Israel’s deeply rooted racist colonial society.2

In July 2005 this group of Palestinians representing ‘Palestinian Civic Society’ issued a call for BDS, which would remain in force until Israel complied with ‘International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights’. While it recommended an end to the occupation, the security fence and settlement policy, it also demanded: ‘Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194’. This was seen as an own goal by many, such as Noam Chomsky, who supported the cause of the Palestinians, since there was a wall-to-wall coalition in Israel in opposition to the right of return. This suggested a difference of approach between the advocates of BDS in Europe and those in Palestine. Some academics, opposed to the boycott, argued that it was ‘bad for Israelis, bad for Palestinians, and . . . corrosive of progressive movements and civil society’. The authors [of Boycotting Israel Is Wrong] believe the campaign plays on the lack of understanding about the complexity of the IsraelPalestine conflict and is ambiguous on many key issues in order to form a united front of those opposed to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Is the campaign designed to bring Israel to the negotiating table or to negate Jews’ right to national self-determination?



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Does it want to go back to 1967 or to 1948? Does ‘occupied territory’ mean the West Bank or pre-1967 Israel? BDS formally takes no position on a two-state solution and there is a lack of clarity on its stand on the Palestinian right of return. This grey political mist benefits those who wish to delegitimise Israel. The polarisation of the situation into simplistic categories—bad Israel, good Palestine—means that BDS prefers to oppose communal organisations rather than left-wing Jews who criticise the policies of the Israeli government yet do not disavow Zionism. There is a profound difference between left-wing Jews and the Jewish faction of the British Left: the difference between British Jews and Jewish Britons. The advocates of BDS prefer to bury any mention of the Geneva initiative—a structured partition of the land into two sovereign states, formulated by leading Israelis and Palestinians. It is also significant that the Palestinian National Boycott Committee denounced the Palestinian Peace Coalition in November 2014. Unfortunately for BDS, a majority of Israelis just happen to be Jews—and occasionally anti-Zionism tips over into anti-Semitism. The authors cite a spin on the anti-apartheid song ‘Shoot the Boer,’ changed by BDS supporters into ‘Dubula e judo’ (Shoot the Jew). There is selective outrage—directed only at Israel. The demand to the Jewish American musician Matisyahu to state his views at a recent Spanish music festival is also a sign of the growing authoritarian nature of BDS. This short book describes the closing of the progressive mind from the era of decolonisation until the present day. It relates the ease with which the British Left responds to the reactionaries instead of to the issue. It is a long way from the days of Aneurin Bevan, who castigated Arab nationalism for its inability to promulgate change. He, too, would be harshly criticised today for his stand on Israel by his self-proclaimed heirs. (Review of Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth’s Boycotting Israel Is Wrong in Jewish Renaissance, October 2015)

THE ANTI-NORMALISATION CAMPAIGN Did the advocates of BDS place opposition to normalisation with Israel above that of promoting the boycott? It seemed that this was true of the advocates of BDS amongst the Palestinian intelligentsia and the European

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far Left. Both the advocates of Arab nationalism and European MarxismLeninism had historically opposed Zionism. In broader terms, the Arab intelligentsia had generally enacted an anti-normalisation approach when its authoritarian leaders concluded agreements with Israel. It did not look favourably upon the Camp David Agreement of 1979 between Israel and Egypt—in part because it was negotiated with the military regime of Anwar Sadat. The Palestinian intelligentsia similarly did not favour the Oslo Accords with the PLO or the Arava agreement with Jordan a year later. Ordinary Palestinian workers, however, did not share the perspectives of both the intellectual and Islamist rejectionists of Oslo. The advent of suicide bombings by Hamas initiated closures and prevented many Palestinians from coming to work in Israel. Between 1993 and 1996, Palestinian workers lost a third of their earnings each year.3 In addition, there was a profound difference between Palestinians who actually lived in Palestine and those in the Diaspora—who were often in dialogue with PSC campaigners in their host country.4 With the assassination of Rabin and the election of Netanyahu, the peace process floundered and sank—almost without trace—and presented an opportunity for Palestinian Islamists to replace Palestinian nationalists in opposing Israel. The ascendency of Islamism also strengthened the elite’s predisposition to enact anti-normalisation policies. Ron Pundak, a leading Israeli peace activist whose contribution helped to forge the Oslo Accords, commented: The Arabic term for normalisation, ‘tatbeeh,’ now serves as a word of remonstration and criticism against Arab organisations and individuals who maintain ties and relations with Israel and Israelis. It is linked to another concept, that of conspiracy, ‘muamara,’ that has found its way into the discourse. The two terms converge easily among the anti-peace process camp that sees in nearly every Israeli initiative part of a conspiracy, and in normalisation an integral aspect of a grand conspiracy, designed to deliver to Israel, in the course of its transition from wartime military dominance to more subtle control in the post-peace era, social, cultural and economic control of the Arab world.5

The al-Aqsa Intifada and the election of Sharon changed the balance of influence both within Palestine and within the European far Left. It pro-



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vided the opportunity for non-Islamist Palestinian rejectionism to emerge from its opposition to the Oslo Accords into the mainstream. In Britain, in particular the lecturers’ union, the University and College Union (UCU) took the lead in creating an environment where BDS became acceptable. Yet such telescoping of the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict and injecting this reductionist approach into the world of learning where complexity is valued and studied, led to some strange anomalies. Some Israeli academics, often on the far Left, supported a boycott of their own country and often a boycott of their own educational institution. Yet they remained in post themselves. In Britain, the campaign by the UCU created bizarre scenarios, if obeyed to the letter, by those teaching Israel studies. As Reader in Israeli Studies at SOAS, University of London, I teach the Israel-Palestine conflict to large classes that include Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Muslims. I do this without any difficulties in the multicultural environment at SOAS, and I work hard for all my students. I am also a loyal trade unionist. While my union, the UCU, does not directly call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions—presumably for fear of legal action—the spirit of last week’s motion is just that. The UCU initiative effectively hinders me in doing my job, since it frowns upon contacts with Israeli universities and, implicitly, with its academics. It would impede archival research. Should I now tell my students who spend time researching in Israel not to do so? If they disregard this advice, how should I approach the eventual marking of their theses? Ironically, I have been a supporter of the Israeli peace movement for decades, publicly opposed the Jewish settlements on the West Bank from the outset and been an advocate of a Palestinian state since the Six-Day War in 1967. Yet, paradoxically, my academic expertise is the Israeli Right. Do I now have to cut off contact with its members, even though my own views are diametrically opposed to theirs? How do I continue to do research in this area? Since the resolution argues that ‘passivity or neutrality is unacceptable,’ do I now have to self-censor my lectures in order to adapt to the union’s view of the Israel-Palestine conflict? I will shortly be presenting a paper at the annual conference of the Association of Israeli Studies. Should I fraternise with my American colleagues, although some of them may support Bush’s war in Iraq,

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and cold-shoulder my Israeli ones, even though they overwhelmingly identify with the Israeli peace camp? Perhaps I should argue that Israeli studies is not really an authentic discipline and that the association should dissolve itself. The UCU has agreed to finance a travelling roadshow to UK campuses of that section of Palestinian academia committed to the boycott. Is this in reality the first step towards banning visiting Israelis? I recently facilitated a ‘day of negotiations’ at SOAS between Israeli and Palestinian academics, including the Palestinian ambassador and a retired Israeli brigadier general. Would the union condemn the very idea of such a discourse, since Israelis are present? Several of my students identify with Israel, but not with its government’s policies. The resolution speaks only of ‘criticism of Israel.’ Is the underlying meaning that Israel is an illegitimate entity? Should I heed ‘the moral implications’ of the resolution and thereby advise my undergraduates not to spend a year at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University? To whom can I turn for advice in this Kafkaesque situation? My union? My local branch at SOAS? Will the UCU vote for the Canadian resolution at the forthcoming Educational International Congress that ‘excellence in higher education rests upon ironclad guarantees of academic freedom, which includes the right of higher education teaching personnel to engage in teaching, research and scholarship without interference’? If it does, then why is my case deemed to be outside the box? The union leadership does not seem to have even heard of the forthcoming UNESCO proposals for Israeli-Palestinian academic cooperation—a code of ethics for all academics in the region. Boycotts spawn boycotts. One US foundation has already decided to refuse applications from British researchers into brain cancer. The resolution suggests that criticism of Israel can never be construed as anti-Semitic. Quite a few Jewish students would argue differently, and suggest that some who genuinely oppose Israeli government policy nevertheless employ time-honoured anti-Jewish stereotypes. There is a fear that what begins with the delegitimisation of the state will end with the delegitimisation of the people. The resolution’s proponents are, of course, not anti-Semites, but they are incredibly ignorant about Jewish history. Despite being on the political Left, they would, for example, be horrified to learn about Trotsky’s profound interest in the Jewish experiment in building socialism in Palestine in the 1930s.



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Since the UCU will probably consult its members in local meetings, will they make space for informed views? Will individuals like myself be excluded from UCU platforms, since my intellectual face doesn’t fit? My hope has always been that the knowledge gained by my students will somehow prepare the ground for a better future, for peace between the two peoples and an alleviation of Palestinian suffering. The UCU initiative will undermine this and blindly encourage the rejectionists on both sides of this bitter conflict to further their agenda. (‘Divide and Rule?’, Education Guardian, 5 June 2007)

APARTHEID ISRAEL The advocates of BDS utilised the analogy of apartheid South Africa as a non-violent means of isolating Israel. This emerged from the UN Conference against Racism, which took place in Durban in 2001. A preparatory meeting in February 2001, held in Teheran, excluded both Israeli and Jewish non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and introduced into the text the idea that Israel was propagating ‘a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity’. In part, this was an attempt to revive UN Resolution 3379 that ‘Zionism is racism’—a motion which was dropped in 1991. Ten years later, the view that Zionism was based on ‘a racial superiority’ was reintroduced. Zionism was bracketed with the practitioners of anti-Semitism as categories of racist practices. While the UN Secretariat rejected the approach of the Teheran meeting and attempted to include instead a mention of the violation of Palestinian rights, Arab and Muslim states took a harder line. They secured its inclusion in the public arena within a category of motions that had been proposed but not actually agreed upon. It provided the spark to catalyse a vociferous campaign which occasionally projected anti-Jewish stereotypes. ‘Apartheid’, like ‘fascism’, had become a catch-all word which transcended its original context and meaning. The international popularity of Nelson Mandela and the success of liberation movements in the developing world provided an environment for such reductionist ideas to take root. The Reverend Jesse Jackson commented that a failure to apologise would indicate that these countries were proud of their colonial past. This reflected both the Arab and the far Left narrative that Zionism had been an integral part of colonialism.

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The Durban conference had taken place when open conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was an ongoing daily occurrence during the alAqsa Intifada. Unlike the First Intifada, this one was led by Palestinian Islamists, the Sunni Hamas, which in turn depended on Shi’ite Iran for support. This catalysed a parallel campaign by Palestinian nationalists who did not wish to be displaced by their rivals. In Israel, the violence brought Ariel Sharon back from the political dead, and he was elected prime minister in place of Ehud Barak. Overruling his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, Sharon declared that there would be no negotiations while violence prevailed. Yet the interpretation of this was unclear, as was its extent. This policy of no contact and no dialogue was ironically reflected by Hamas, which had no desire to talk to Israelis— including its peace camp. The retreat into national camps—while understandable in a time of armed conflict—also contained within it the seeds of opposition to normalisation of relations with the other side. The conflict was characterised by new depths of violence. For Israelis, the proliferation of suicide bombings signalled a symbolic end to the faltering peace process which had originally held out hope for the future. For the Palestinians, the figure of the hated Sharon as head of government and his willingness to use force, exacerbated bitterness. Although stones had been thrown during the First Intifada, the general lack of lethal weapons allowed Israelis and Palestinians to come together and to create the imagery of a better future. The al-Aqsa Intifada, less than a decade later, polarised Israelis and Palestinians into rival camps. The Arab League, which was never comfortable with the Camp David agreement in 1979 or the Oslo Accords in 1993, reflected both its own past and the present reality in the Middle East. At Durban, its representatives rejected any compromises during negotiations, with the result that both the United States and Israel left the conference in protest. It symbolised the end of the peace process, which Palestinian Islamism had always opposed, and a return to the good old days of propaganda and point scoring. In Europe, the sluice gates were opened to the rejectionism of the far Left and proclamations of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians. Israelis were viewed as a single entity, with no difference between Left and Right. Palestinians were similarly seen as homogeneous, with no difference between socialists, nationalists and Islamists. It was as if the Oslo Accords had never existed.



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The far Left, which gladly embraced the notion of Palestinian resistance without differentiating between suicide bomber and peacenik, vehemently rejected any notion of anti-Semitism. For some, anti-Zionism could never tip over into anti-Semitism, and such accusations were no more than a ploy to divert attention away from legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies.

JEWISH REACTION TO THE BOYCOTT The idea of a boycott was anathema to many Diaspora Jews who recalled past boycotts of Jews, in particular the one enacted by the Nazis of Jewish shops. When the proposed boycott of 2002 was compared to that of 1933, there was profound indignation on the part of the far Left. It was significant that the focus of Diaspora disdain was boycott and not disinvestment and sanctions. Yet Diaspora Jews, by and large, opposed the settlement drive on the West Bank. In 2015, 75 per cent of British Jews agreed that ‘the expansion of settlements on the West Bank is a major obstacle to peace’.6 In light of the refusal of successive Israeli governments to separate the labelling of produce of Israel from that produced in the settlements, there was no great protest from British Jews when the Trades Union Congress boycotted settlement goods. It was one thing to boycott Israel, another to boycott the settlements on the West Bank. Yet it was also recognised that accepting a boycott of settlements’ produce would clearly strengthen the hand of those who wanted a boycott of Israel per se. The attempt to imply equivalence between the Shoah and the Nakhba, Hitler’s genocide and Israeli treatment of Palestinians, the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza, Israelis and Nazis diminished Jewish history and Jews in their understanding of themselves. It antagonised many Jews and undermined any attempt at dialogue between the two sides. In Britain, there was a backlash against the assault on cultural events which featured Israeli artists, such as the disruption of concerts by proPalestinian protesters or a boycott of the Jewish Film Festival, which promoted Israeli films, because it had accepted a small grant from the Israeli Embassy.

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The danger to those advocating the right to another narrative in universities and academic literature was described as ‘exaggerated’ by the initiators of BDS. They argued that, while whistle-blowers had drawn attention to the hazards of genetic engineering and faced the prospect of losing their positions due to the pressure of multi-national corporations, no one is likely to lose their jobs as a result of being boycotted. At worst they risked isolation from the international academic research community. Those who have been threatened with dismissal, and worse, for supporting the boycott are those few courageous Israelis who have endorsed the call. The choice today for civil society—and academics and researchers are part of civil society—is to remain silent and do nothing or to try to bring pressure to bear.7

Yet the very act of marginalising those who held a different viewpoint and effectively turning them into pariahs evoked the Jewish past of discrimination and second-class citizenship. The development of BDS, with its accompanying Israel Apartheid Week, also involved many non-Jewish Jews on the Left who deeply opposed Zionism. The very idea of a state with a Jewish majority—a state based on nationality rather than class—proved to be nightmarish for some Jewish Marxists.8 In the figure of Ronnie Kasrils, a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and a leading member of the South African Communist Party, numerous historical signifiers were once again observed. Even the question of anti-Semitic stereotypes was an ingredient. Kasrils commented that ‘Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity’.9 Substituting ‘Jews’ for ‘Israelis’ and ‘Jewish’ for ‘Zionist’, such commentary sounded remarkably familiar to utterances from far Right politicians. Yet the apartheid analogy appeals in terms of public relations even though actual fighters against apartheid vigorously disputed the rationale of such a comparison.10 A closer examination often revealed the superficiality of such annual events. Some British Jews believe that London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is a den of anti-Semitic iniquity. Some



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British Trotskyists believe that it is the epicentre of the Zionist conspiracy. Both caricatures exist at one and the same time. Both are false. SOAS, however, is unusual in London colleges in that its first-class academic programs rightly attract many students from the Arab, Islamic and developing worlds who are often more predisposed towards the cause of the Palestinians on arrival in the UK. Yet this built-in structural situation has also instigated an interest in the expanding field of Israel Studies. SOAS is one of the leaders in Israel Studies in the UK and is the headquarters of the European Association of Israel Studies. The study of modern Hebrew and the Holy Land reach back into the 19th century. The founding of SOAS in 1916 coincided with the Foreign Office’s desire in developing a cadre of experts which would help it understand and indeed control the Middle East. As history records, a year later Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild whereby the British promised ‘a national home for the Jewish people.’ The smooth governance of the British Empire required trained administrators who understood the language, history and culture of the governed. From the Belgian Congo to Italian Libya, there was a need for experts to assist in the making of policy and in the training of bureaucrats. The need for speakers of modern Hebrew was no different. Thus, in one sense, the advent of the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate for Palestine, and the development of the Yishuv brought the precursor of Israel Studies to Western Europe. Today many students wish to explore all aspects of Israel as an academic subject and to make up their own minds about the IsraelPalestine conflict—to go beyond the soundbites, the clichés and the banal utterances of politicians. Any honest lecturer will strive for objectivity while giving his own interpretation of a specific event such as the exodus of Palestinian Arabs in 1948. In equilibrium with this, there has been an ongoing campaign to promote BDS at SOAS and other British colleges—often by those who view the conflict in a simplistic and monolithic fashion, often those who have never taken academic courses on the conflict. The recent non-binding student-led referendum on BDS at SOAS was another building block in the annual Israel Apartheid Week ritual. It was designed as both a public relations exercise and as a trial run for other colleges worldwide. Given SOAS’s structural composition and egged on by the lecturers’ union, the results of the referendum were a foregone conclusion—a tremendous victory for BDS. However, both Arab and Jewish media erroneously interpreted the exercise as if SOAS,

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the institution, had voted. The Qatari-owned website Al-Araby proudly proclaimed that ‘SOAS becomes the first UK University to boycott Israel.’ Yet it was not the governing body, not the administration, not even formally the lecturers’ union, but an invented ‘SOAS community’ that participated. Anyone could vote who wanted to—including the SOAS cleaners, catering staff and security guards. A total of 1,283 students supported the BDS motion—three-quarters of all students who voted. Yet there are some 5,000 students at SOAS plus another 3,600 engaged in distance learning. Some 86 percent did not vote for BDS. Despite all the self-congratulatory self-deception, this was not exactly a resounding success for a week-long referendum. The results mask the inability of the BDS movement, now in its bar mitzvah year, to make a concerted breakthrough in changing the political reality in Israel. Governments are elected. Conflicts with the Islamists take place. The advocates of BDS continue to preach the same mantra. . . . The far Left in Britain jumped into the vacuum left by the collapse of the peace process (in Israel and Palestine) and expanded due to public disaffection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in particular was prominent during this period and dominant in the national lecturers’ union, both nationally and at SOAS. SWP thinking has been characterized in many of its political activities by selective outrage. Many human rights abuses are passed over in silence, but Israel is always a permanent feature. It is therefore not surprising that the unions at SOAS could not bring themselves to mention the Charlie Hebdo killings. SOAS students can opt for a year at the Hebrew University to improve their Hebrew and take relevant courses. In part, BDS wishes to break this link. It promotes guilt by association primarily because they are Israeli universities integrated into Israeli society. It would prefer to isolate the disproportionate number of Israeli academics who are actually opposed to the West Bank settlements. The raison d’être of the BDS movement appears to be more anti-normalisation than anti-occupation. The BDS movement feels intellectually comforted in laying down ground rules about who can and who cannot be spoken to. It tries to separate institutional boycotts from personal ones, but all too often there is a blurring of the lines. Even Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein—not exactly breast-beating Zionists—have little time for BDS. Academic institutions worldwide including the SOAS administration do not take a stand on the Israel-Palestine question, but they do strongly



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defend the right to a different narrative. When there were calls to ban a series of lectures by Tel Aviv University academics, organized by the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS which coincided with Operation Cast Lead in 2009, the administration steadfastly refused to capitulate. Similarly when one of the originators of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, registered to study at Tel Aviv University, the university authorities resisted calls to expel him. This then is the red line that BDS indirectly tries to cross, sometimes around it, other times beneath it. The right of freedom of expression is a sacred principle, upheld by all academic institutions. Governing bodies in most cases stand up to lobby groups from all quarters. The BDS movement will continue to looks for chinks in their intellectual armour. Embedded in a rarefied environment of discourse and theory, the BDS movement will continue to enthusiastically practice the politics of stalemate. (‘BDS’s Victory at London University’s SOAS’, Jerusalem Post, 10 March 2015)

NOTES 1.  Guardian, 6 April 2002. 2.  Interview with Omar Barghouti, The Intercept, 13 May 2016. 3.  Sara Roy, ‘Why Peace Failed: An Oslo Autopsy’, Current History 100, no. 651, 8 January 2002. 4. Wendy Kristianasen, ‘Challenge and Counter-Challenge: Hamas’s response to Oslo’, Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 3, Spring 1999. 5.  Ron Pundak, ‘Civil Society Normalisation as a Step towards Peace’, Bitter Lemons 42, no. 5, 15 November 2007. 6.  Stephen Miller, The Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel (London: City University, 2015). 7.  Guardian, 15 July 2002. 8.  Guardian, 25 May 2005. 9.  Guardian, 7 February 2006. 10.  See Benjamin Pogrund, Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

19 Twenty-First-Century Politics

THE RISE OF THE FAR RIGHT

Since Netanyahu’s election in 2009 after a hiatus of ten years and his

political resurrection, the parties of the far Right have played an important part in his administrations. In the government coalition, forged in 2015, the parties which exhibit far Right tendencies—HaBayit HaYehudi, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu and United Torah Judaism—account for twenty-seven seats. The Likud itself attained a representation of thirty seats—albeit bolstered by another ten from the centre Right. This exceeds the blocking majority of sixty-one, needed to form any Israeli government. On the other hand, the broad centre Left of the Zionist Union, Yesh Atid and Meretz only account for another forty seats, while another thirteen represent the united Arab parties. The advance of the far Right marks a remarkable development in Israeli politics in recent years—from a first appearance in the 1980s to a considerable presence thirty years later. In part, it is a reaction to the rise of political Islamism externally. In part, it reflects Netanyahu’s preference to anchor the centre Right to the far Right rather than to the centre Left. In part, it also represents Netanyahu’s ever-present fear of being outflanked on the Right and his preference for an easier ideological comfort zone when compared to the alternative. Yet the far Right has also been a driving force in challenging the norms of a hitherto liberal society. Indeed the political conflict has evolved from 340



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being one between Left and Right to becoming one between liberalism and illiberalism. The opponents of the far Right include the Jabotinsky wing of the Likud, represented by figures such as President Reuven Rivlin, Benny Begin and Dan Meridor. This repeated a pattern in the history of the Zionist Right, which has been characterised by a movement from the Left to the Right as well as from the centre Right to the far Right. In the 1920s, Abba Ahimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yehoshua Hirsh Yeivin all moved from leftist parties to join Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. Menahem Begin emerged from the Maximalist wing of the Revisionist movement. His Herut movement actually stood against the official Revisionists in the first Israel election in 1949. Similarly, a large section of today’s far Right moved from being a highly marginalised grouping on the periphery of the Israeli Right to the very centre of government, such that it now holds the balance of power. Its genesis lies in the Camp David agreement between Menahem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1979, which brought peace to Israel and Egypt. At the same time, it catalysed an irreparable split in Begin’s coalition of the Right, spawning an often besieged central party, the Likud, surrounded by a host of far Right parties. Begin had painstakingly built the Likud from his own party, Herut, the Liberals and defectors from the Labour Zionist camp such as Ariel Sharon, and it took power in 1977. Labour had grown indolent and come to believe that it alone had a right to rule. It plummeted to earth amid a plethora of corruption scandals. Yet with power came responsibility and Begin soon discovered that hard-and-fast ideological lines were malleable when in government. The price of Camp David—the handing back of Sinai to Egypt—was anathema to many in the Likud, such as Moshe Arens and Yitzhak Shamir. Many on the Right feared that this was the first step towards handing back the West Bank to the Palestinians. Begin justified his approach by stating that he did not consider Sinai as part of the Land of Israel whereas the West Bank certainly was. Despite this, many left the Likud to form a far Right breakaway party, Tehiya, a mixed grouping of West Bank secular and religious settlers. Other far Right parties such Tsomet and Moledet followed. Moledet appealed to the most impoverished in Israeli society and advocated the voluntary transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank. The far Right grew dramatically, leading to Shamir including such parties in a Likud-led government in 1990. They were strongly sup-

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Menahem Begin (right) and Anwar Sadat meet in Aswan in January 1980 to discuss Palestinian autonomy in Gaza. Jewish Chronicle photographic archive

ported by the right wing of the Likud, whose standard bearer at that time was Ariel Sharon. Any concessions to the Palestinians, any cessation of settlement building on the West Bank was anathema to the far Right. They left Shamir’s government in protest at Israel’s attendance at the Madrid conference in 1991. The election of Labour’s Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 and the signing of the Oslo Accords brought them on to the streets. ‘Israel is in danger’ was the war cry and, in a volte-face, even Diaspora Jews were now urged to protest against an Israeli government and its policies. Sharon belittled threats to kill Rabin and depicted them as government-inspired fabrications. As history records, the incitement against Rabin by the far-right preceded the shots fired into his back by Yigal Amir by just a few weeks. The National Religious Party (NRP), the traditional home for religious Zionists, underwent a tremendous transformation after the SixDay War in 1967. The NRP had formerly been close to the Labour party and saw its mission as protecting the rights of the observant in a secular society. The 1967 war awakened the sleeping messianism within religious Zionism.



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The conquered territories offered the opportunity to expand the borders of the state of Israel to that of the biblical Land of Israel. Religious Zionism was morphing into Zionist religion. Under the influence of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, young religious Jews began to establish settlements on the newly conquered West Bank in locations which resonated with biblical splendour. Retaining the territories became the status quo. Land became more important than peace. The NRP’s old guard was eventually ousted and its successors felt far more comfortable in the company of the traditional Menahem Begin than consorting with the open-necked, freethinkers of secular Labour. Yet, like the Likud, the NRP also began to experience fragmentation after Camp David. Its defectors joined far Right religious parties such as Tehiya or Morasha—and even the leader of the controversial Jewish Defence League, Rabbi Meir Kahane, a former FBI informer and notorious womaniser, was elected to the Knesset in 1984. These trends signalled the demise of respect for the rule of law and democratic procedure—hallowed principles held by Menahem Begin. The handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 forced a further split within the Likud. There were ideological purists who opposed any sort of compromise, while others entertained the hitherto heretical idea of negotiating with the PLO. The new leader of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, took a middle path and argued that the Likud now had to adapt to the reality in the post-Oslo era. Unlike Begin and Shamir, Netanyahu promised allegiance to retaining ‘the Land of Israel’ but, crucially, not in its entirety. The guiding principle for Netanyahu was not totally a matter of ideology, but one of reciprocity. Israel would respond to a Palestinian negative action by a punitive action against Palestinian interests—more often than not, the announcement of an expansion of an existing settlement. Other political groupings now moved to the Right—often as a result of the rise of the Islamist suicide bomber and the increasing number and range of missiles fired into Israel’s heartland. The politics of fear—the Iranian nuclear threat and the Islamist capture of the Arab Spring—provided many an ambitious right-wing politician with a drum to bang. Many of the newly-arrived Jews from the former Soviet Union initially voted for Rabin in 1992. Labour had astutely ditched the Red Flag for fear of conjuring up memories of the old days. But such memories died hard

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and coupled with acts of terror by members of Hamas, many Russians voted for Natan Sharansky’s right-leaning Yisrael B’Aliyah in 1996. This in turn was eclipsed by a hybrid party of Russians and the far Right— Yisrael Beiteinu—led by the Kishinev-born Avigdor Lieberman. Even Shas, the party of the Mizrahim moved to the Right as the pronouncements of its spiritual mentor, Ovadia Yosef, became increasingly hawkish and acerbic. During the past decade, a range of different far Right groupings have coalesced and fragmented but, overall, the far Right has been a permanent feature of government. It has only been marginalised when a popular leader like Sharon has made a stand to break the mould and follow a different approach such as the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Netanyahu’s Likud accounts for about 20 seats today—far short of a blocking majority of 61 in the Knesset. Many of his partners in government are therefore parties of the far Right. His priority has been to prevent any coalition from falling apart. This has led to the politics of stagnation. A bold peace initiative is out of the question since it would lead to dissension and dissolution. And a rival pole of attraction has arrived in the form of the revamped NRP, now called HaBayit HaYehudi, led by Naftali Bennett, who has attracted many younger, secular voters to this religious party. A 21st-century, self-made millionaire, Bennett has become the dominant voice on the far Right, eclipsing even Lieberman. (‘Disturbing Rise of the Far Right’, Jewish Chronicle, 12 March 2015)

IN GOVERNMENT WITH LIEBERMAN AND BENNETT The Israeli election in February 2009 marked the demise of the centreright party Kadima, which was founded in 2003 as a public vote of confidence in Sharon as leader. Kadima was projected as ‘a new national liberal party’—the language of both Jabotinsky and Begin—a virtual statement that this would be a Likud that would be pragmatic and, if necessary, compromise. Sharon even quoted Jabotinsky to support the proposed withdrawal—that ‘a settlement was never an end in and of itself’.1 Sharon’s incapacitation due to illness and his removal from the political equation led to Ehud Olmert’s succession. While lacking Sharon’s standing, Tzipi Livni maintained Kadima’s supremacy as the largest party emerg-



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ing from the 2009 election. Yet it was Netanyahu’s Likud that formed the government, since the kingmakers in this instance were the parties of the far Right—and the pragmatism, moderation and willingness to compromise of Kadima did not appeal. Moreover the religious parties shrank at the very idea of being led by a woman. The leverage of the far Right followed the pattern seen elsewhere. It meant that no peace initiatives were forthcoming, the power of an independent judiciary was challenged, the exponents of the creative arts and independently minded academics were instructed to conform and the activities of left-wing organisations were deemed to be unpatriotic. Successive Netanyahu governments practiced the politics of stagnation. Netanyahu was re-elected in 2013 and again in 2015. While often the subject of scandal, and distinctly unloved, he was seen above all as the guarantor of the nation’s security—’the national goalkeeper’—during a period of severe instability in the Middle East. In this respect the current intertwining of domestic and regional issues follows a consistent pattern, whereby violence in the Middle East is always accompanied by an electoral move to the right in Israel. The First Intifada (which began in 1987) led to the election of Yitzhak Shamir in 1988; the wave of Hamas suicide-bombings catapulted Benjamin Netanyahu into office in 1996; and the onset of the Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada in 2000 persuaded the Israeli electorate to bring back Ariel Sharon from the political wilderness in 2001. The logic has been that only the Right can stand up to nihilist enemies. After the three-week conflagration in Gaza in 2008–2009—amid near-universal expectation that this is not the end of the story—virtually all the Israeli parties prepared for the election of 10 February 2009 by producing platforms of militant defiance and national resilience to entice the voters. The Israeli peace camp, undermined for years by the bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, shrank into oblivion. For them and their counterparts in the Palestinian peace camp, there was no political space to enunciate a rationalist approach. Now, the Palestinian rejectionists have in effect elected the Israeli rejectionists. Indeed, the success of Avigdor Lieberman—the enfant terrible of Israeli politics, whose Yisrael Beiteinu won a record number of seats (fifteen) and seems certain to enter government alongside Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud—marks a shift not just rightwards but to the far Right. True, Israelis often endorse maverick groups as a measure of their profound irritation with their leaders—and then unceremoniously dump

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them in subsequent elections (the secularist Shinui and the Pensioners’ Party are examples from recent times). But the advance of Lieberman is a commentary on Israeli politics’ deeper stagnation—marked as it is by failed, recycled figures such as Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, tainted by incredulous tales of financial corruption, and exemplified in the moral flaws of presidents and premiers. There is also a sense of resignation that there has been no movement towards peace with the Palestinians due to the rise of Islamism. Hamas does not simply not recognise Israel, it does not recognise Israelis. There is no dialogue with the Israeli peace camp, nor—even if indirect and clandestine—with Israeli officials. For Hamas, unlike the Palestinian nationalists of Fatah, there is a theological imperative to root out the Zionist weed from hallowed ground; and it makes no distinction between Jews and Zionists. When Hamas calls a ceasefire, it is not to secure time to be left alone to rebuild a damaged society, but to rearm with more sophisticated weapons. The range of missiles from Gaza has increased fivefold since 2001. Now Beer-Sheva University is in range. Even the Israeli Left was muted over the ‘cruel necessity’ of the Gaza operation. What, they asked, will happen if the Islamists acquire bigger and better missiles? Even after Ariel Sharon had facilitated the evacuation of the Jewish settlers from Gaza in August 2005, the Islamists continued to fire their rockets into Israel, thus eradicating the possibility of further settlements being evacuated from the northern West Bank. An analogy with the peace process in Northern Ireland is increasingly invoked, but often in a misleading way: for the proper comparison is not between Hamas and Sinn Fein, but between Fatah and Sinn Fein. Both the latter are nationalist movements in the end capable of being influenced by Enlightenment values in the sense of formulating a rational compromise, whether it was the Oslo Accords (1993) or the Good Friday agreement (1998). Israelis see no sign of such movement within Hamas, and this has encouraged a centuries-old fatalism amongst the Jews—to batten down the hatches until the storm passes over. The political immobility of the period since the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has allowed West Bank settlements to expand and to establish new outposts. There is a growing public acceptance that any attempt to uproot the 300,000 settlers will be near impossible, even though a majority of Israelis would desire this. This dire situation has boosted Avigdor Lieberman’s party as well as many other far-right parties. The fact that Yisrael Beiteinu is ideologi-



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cally closer to Benjamin Netanyahu than to Tzipi Livni underlines Bibi’s claim to be the election victor, even though Livni’s centrist Kadima party won a seat more. Yet the Israeli Right split as well as advanced in this election—many members of Likud’s natural constituency switched to Lieberman’s party. Yisrael Beiteinu’s name in Hebrew translates to ‘Israel, Our Home’ in English. This betrays its Russian immigrant origins. When the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his perestroika and glasnost policies in the second half of the 1980s, the reins restricting Jewish immigration from the USSR were loosened; with the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, the trickle became a flood. In the 1990s, a million Russian immigrants came to Israel. Yasser Arafat believed that they would all settle on the West Bank, but his fear was not realised. Indeed all the Russians wanted was a modicum of normality following their Soviet experience. They did not want the uncertainty of living in the settlements. Moreover, they were also assimilated and secular—and thus rejected the immediate embrace of Israel’s religious parties. Indeed, many voted for Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. At the same time, probably 25%–30% of the immigrants were not even Jewish according to the strictures of Jewish religious law. They could be educated as Jews, fight for Israel and die for Israel, but not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. As the Russian immigrants enter their third decade in Israel, this problem has still not been solved by the rabbis, causing much anguish and annoyance. Here, Lieberman’s promise to introduce civil marriage in Israel (rather than obliging Israelis of Russian origin to travel abroad) and in addition to ease the conversion process delighted Russian Jews. It also stimulated the bitter opposition of right-wing religious parties such as Shas and HaBayit HaYehudi—which, forced to choose between their religious adherence and their political affinity, opted for the former. This schism within the right-wing camp has made Netanyahu’s job of forming a broad coalition much more contentious. The Russians—like other immigrants to Israel from countries with a history of authoritarian regimes, such as South Africa and Iraq—have tended to favour ‘strong leaders’ to navigate them out of a political morass. Lieberman—a former refusenik from Kishinev (Moldova) who during Netanyahu’s first term (1996–99) headed the prime minister’s office—fitted the role. In 1999, he effectively fragmented the first Russian immigrant party, Yisrael B’Aliyah, to form Yisrael Beiteinu. A decade on, the party retains a Russian core, but has moved

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far beyond this constituency to embrace the radical Right, the alienated and the disillusioned. This shift is reflected in the fact that the number-two to Lieberman on the party list in the election was Uzi Landau, an articulate and long-time member of the Likud who broke with both Sharon and Netanyahu over the question of returning territory to the Palestinians. The other midwife of the Likud, Ariel Sharon, was a follower of Ben-Gurion and not Jabotinsky. His lack of ties to the idea of a ‘greater Israel’ for purely ideological or religious reasons meant that he was able in 2005 to initiate the disengagement from Gaza and to break with the Likud to form Kadima. This splitting of the Likud unravelled Begin’s painstaking work that had created a grand coalescence of the Right. The future of the Likud then seemed to be that of a minor grouping— alongside a range of other small far Right parties—led by an unpopular leader, Bibi Netanyahu. But two factors—Sharon’s stroke and removal from the political scene, and the failure of his successor Ehud Olmert during the Lebanon war in July–August 2006—allowed Netanyahu to rise once more from the political graveyard. In this perspective, Avigdor Lieberman’s success in the election of February 2009 appears to be yet another stage in the fragmentation of Menahem Begin’s grand coalition. But Likud’s new opponents are not part of a resurgent Left or even Centre, but parties still further to the Right. This development, apart from its impact on domestic Israeli politics, makes it even harder to envisage that after the apathy of the George W. Bush years, a constructive approach from Barack Obama’s administration will make a real difference. While the Palestinians are split between nationalists and Islamists, the Israelis believe that the Right is their salvation in difficult times—though the prospective Netanyahu government may be short-lived, especially if it comes under concerted pressure from Washington. The new political constellation, however, may provide the impetus for Hamas to be on its best behaviour, utter soothing words and decrease its volley of missiles in order to initiate a dialogue with the United States while effectively excluding Israel from key deliberations. For their part, the Americans may hope that increased involvement on their part will prevent further outbreaks of violence. But the current political dynamics in both Israel and the Palestinian territories suggest that even this—let alone the long-term solutions needed—will be a vain hope. (‘Israel’s Rightward Shift: A History of the Present’, Open Democracy, 23 February 2009)



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SUPPORTING THE RIGHT In 2011, widespread protests erupted in Israel over the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Netanyahu’s trickledown economic policies did not provide young couples with a step on the ladder to purchase their own home. While the cost of mobile phone charges dropped dramatically, the official Trajtenberg committee, established to look into this problem, proved to be a damp squib and a temporary distraction. By March 2016, home prices had increased by a third compared to 12 per cent in the average wage. While the CPI rose just 2 per cent, the price of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, climbed at more than double that pace. Meat prices increased by 8 per cent.2 Israelis were prepared to put up with a higher cost of living compared to most Europeans and North Americans. The governments of Israel did not pay the price at elections and its politicians did not resign. In contrast to past prime ministers, Netanyahu appears to lead an extravagant life where money appears to be no object. In spite of this, it does not affect his political standing despite continuous attacks from his political opponents and regular exposés by the liberal press such as Ha’aretz. Why do so many impoverished Israelis vote for the Right? Netanyahu’s policies of privatisation and empowerment of the private sector clearly seem to be against their interests. Yet they shout: ‘Long live Bibi and Israel.’ Dani Filc of Ben-Gurion University argues that this is a nuanced version of what has always existed in Israeli political life—an exclusion of specific cultural and ideological groups. Labour excluded the Mizrahim, Israeli Arabs and the nationalist Right. Menahem Begin reacted by preaching that the people were the source of all truth and raged against ‘elites’ and ‘kibbutz millionaires.’ But, on attaining power, Likud took a similar, exclusionary line. Party membership became a means of identity for its adherents who remembered the bad old days under Labour. Netanyahu has managed successfully to retain these symbols of populism—even as the number of the working poor has increased and the gap between skilled and unskilled workers has widened. (The Bank of Israel recently observed that 75 per cent of all new jobs in Israel are part-time.) Such transitions to a neo-liberal economy and a contraction of the traditional industrial sector, combined with the breakdown of the Oslo

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peace process and the emergence of the suicide bomber, have created a sense of insecurity and a real challenge to cherished identities. ‘Meltingpot’ Israel has given way to a plethora of separate identities—secular, ultra-Orthodox, Ethiopian, Sephardi and many others. The civic republicanism of Zionism has been undermined. Parties have effectively abandoned, to a robust media, their role as mediators between people and government. ‘I consume, therefore I am’ is now what motivates the average Israeli, it seems, rather than the urge to build a new society. A weakened Histadrut has been unable to articulate the problems, leaving the way open for radical right-wing parties such as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu to capitalise on deep-seated fears. Filc describes how Lieberman—who projects himself as both a Putin-like strongman and the oracle of the common man—appeals to those fears by arguing for the exclusion of different groups from the Israeli consensus, exemplified by the loyalty test for Israeli Arabs. The Supreme Court, he suggests, should be replaced by another body whose members are elected by politicians. Writers, intellectuals and thinkers, Lieberman argues, are subversive, and all leftists are potential traitors. The recent attacks on New Israel Fund president, Professor Naomi Chazan, demonstrate this impulse. (Review of Dani Filc’s The Political Right in Israel, in the Jewish Chronicle, 15 April 2010)

Netanyahu’s desire to keep the far Right at bay led to a race in the public arena to demonstrate an undiluted patriotism. The case of Sergeant Elor Azaria, who shot dead an unarmed Palestinian following a knife attack—much to the consternation and astonishment of his commanding officer and fellow soldiers—divided Israeli opinion. During the summer of 2016, Azaria was placed on trial on a charge of manslaughter. Both Bennett and Lieberman jumped to Azaria’s defence—telephoning his father and attending a court hearing. Fearful of being outmanoeuvred, Netanyahu considered inviting Azaria’s parents to visit him. In March 2017, Azaria was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment.

RECOGNISING ISRAEL AS A JEWISH STATE Netanyahu’s sojourn in the United States during the 1980s had demonstrated his expertise in putting the case for Israel in the American media.



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This deep belief in public relations served him well when he became prime minister in 1996. After he returned to office in 2009, he publicly demonstrated a deliberately simplistic approach to political issues, easily reducing all questions to their lowest common denominator. This was apparent when he addressed both the United Nations (2014) and the US Congress (2015) about Iran’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons. He also introduced a new principle into the negotiations with the Palestinians that Israel should be recognised as ‘a Jewish state’. To many an Israeli ear, this sounded perfectly reasonable—a statement of Zionist belief before the Islamist whirlwind sweeping the Arab world. To many a Diaspora ear, it seemed like a rebuke to the advocates of Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions—those who wished to delegitimise the state. After all, who would contemplate questioning the very idea of recognising ‘Israel as a Jewish state’? Indeed many Diaspora organisations echoed this approach, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews when they visited Foreign Secretary William Hague in June 2011. They requested, in the context of any negotiated peace, ‘the acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state, with full and equal rights for all its citizens’. Hague, in turn, acknowledged ‘the centrality of Israel as the Jewish national homeland, with full rights for all of its citizens’. Were they in agreement? Or was Hague employing a subtle form of language that implied disagreement? Ironically, Hague was ironically much closer to the wording of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This approach however did not make any sense in an ideological and historical sense. As Israel celebrates the 66th anniversary of its founding, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to introduce an addition to the country’s basic laws—the closest thing it has to a constitution—to ‘legally anchor’ Israel as a Jewish state. It seems that Mr. Netanyahu wishes to define the country as the nation-state solely of the Jews. But if this is a point of Zionist principle, then why has it taken 66 years to implement? Israel’s first right-wing prime minister, Menahem Begin, did not make the 1979 Camp David agreement with Egypt conditional on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Nor did Yitzhak Rabin, the Labour Party prime minister who signed the peace accord with Jordan in 1994.

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Mr. Netanyahu himself did not advocate recognition of Israel as ‘a Jewish state’ during his first period of office between 1996 and 1999. Why now? This demand appears to be more a subtle weapon in Mr. Netanyahu’s public relations arsenal rather than a genuine declaration of belief in the Zionist experiment. The suggestion that Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state emerged clearly after the Israeli army’s offensive in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, in late 2008 and early 2009. It was broached again after the Palestinian Authority attempted to seek United Nations recognition of Palestinian statehood. During the last decade there have been occasional replacements of ‘Israel’ with ‘the Jewish state’ by American leaders and diplomats—a shorthand term rather than a political statement of any consequence. Barack Obama used the phrase during his first election campaign and in a speech to the United Nations in September 2010. Similarly, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and his minister of foreign affairs, Tzipi Livni, occasionally used the phrase during their terms of office. Yet Ms. Livni, who is currently in charge of the negotiations with the Palestinians, was vociferous last week in her opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s proposition. It seems that the idea only became a matter of apparent Zionist conviction with the formation of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition with far Right parties in 2009. Back then, there was concerted criticism of Mr. Netanyahu’s approach by Israeli public figures. The president, Shimon Peres, was apparently not in favour while Gabriela Shalev, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, bluntly commented that ‘the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is superfluous; there are no preconditions for talks with Palestinians.’ Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad, succinctly pointed out that while Israel benefits from ongoing recognition by the outside world, ‘our Jewishness does not depend on them.’ It is significant that Mr. Netanyahu’s most recent push to define Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ comes directly after the breakdown of talks with the Palestinians and the threat of a newly united Palestinian leadership that could include the Islamist party, Hamas. Jews living in the Diaspora often use the terms ‘Israel’ and ‘Jewish state’ interchangeably, without a second thought. But when it comes to diplomacy, such a formal declaration by the Israeli government would clearly make resuming the talks with the Palestinians significantly more difficult. Mr. Netanyahu told the United States Congress in May 2011 that the six words ‘I will accept a Jewish state’ would change history. This was confidently delivered to enthusiastic applause, but other supporters of



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Israel did not see it with such wide-eyed rapture. After all, what was the Oslo Accords—the difficult handshake between Yasser Arafat and Mr. Rabin on the White House lawn—all about, if not mutual recognition. For many of the early Zionists, a ‘Jewish state’ meant a state with a Jewish majority in which the Jews could exercise national selfdetermination. It did not mean an exclusive state of only Jews. Nor did it suggest an implicit ‘transfer’ of its Arab inhabitants. Even Vladimir Jabotinsky, the revered forefather of the Israeli Right and a close associate of Mr. Netanyahu’s father, remarked in January 1938 that ‘it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of its nonJewish citizens.’ To his credit, Mr. Netanyahu has quashed several attempts by members of his own party and those further to his Right to practice the politics of exclusion, but he has also continued his policy of conducting negotiations with the Palestinians in a halting fashion that has promoted the politics of stagnation. Moreover Mr. Netanyahu’s move is a nod to the Israeli far Right, which desires a Greater Israel and utilizes recognition of the state’s Jewishness as a step in this direction. In the context of the unresolved situation on the West Bank, it purports to elevate Jewishness over democratic norms. In May 1948, a democratic republic arose in the Land of Israel and it was greeted by a people who had survived to dance on Hitler’s grave. It is unfortunate that the principles behind that historic event have now been relegated to a mere shot in the megaphone war. In 1902, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism, wrote a novel, Altneuland, which depicted a harmonious society of Jews and Arabs. When a Jewish nationalist character seeks to ban non-Jews from voting, Mr. Herzl prevents him from succeeding. Almost a century ago, Vladimir Jabotinsky preached a return to Herzlian principles in place of political shadowboxing. Mr. Netanyahu should heed that call in 2014. (‘Bibi’s Big PR Stunt’, New York Times, 12 May 2014)

NOTES 1.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, Di Tribune, 15 October 1915. 2.  Ha’aretz, 8 July 2016.

Index

AACI. See Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry Abbas, Mahmoud, 157, 263, 267; on BDS, 325; Olmert and, 264 Abdullah, Emir, 15 Abed-Shafi, Haidar, 222 Abramsky, Chimen, 86 Abu Marzook, Mousa, 263–65 Abu-Ter, Muhammad, 266 accidental Jews, 305, 319–20 activists: for Sakharov, 212–13; for Soviet Jewish emigration, xvi, 186, 188–97, 197 Adler, Hermann, 31 aeroplane affair, 192–96 African National Congress (ANC), 149–51 Afrikanerdom. See South Africa Agranat Commission, 244 Agudat Yisrael, 76–77, 250 Ahdut Ha’avodah, 14, 42, 117, 246; Hashomer Hatzair and, 115–16; Mapai and, 115, 123; Rabin and,

225; Soviet Union and, 116. See also Allon, Yigal Ahimeir, Abba, xiv, 16–18; Betar and, 134; Hitler and, 45–46; on Irish, 135–36; Jabotinsky and, 45, 51; Lehi and, 136–37; Right ascendency and, 133–36; Zionism of, 133–34 Ahuzat Bayit, 6–7 Alexander, Edward, 294–97 Alhambra Decree, 166–67 aliyah: first, 5, 27–28; second, 6, 36–37, 202; Soviet, 217 Allende, Salvador, 158–59 Allon, Yigal: background of, 114–15; Ben-Gurion against, 116–18; Britain and, 116; Dayan compared to, 117–18; in Labour dissension, 113–18; Palestinians related to, 116–17; in Palmach, 115–17, 123; in partition debate, 113, 225 Alroy (Disraeli), 90 Alroy, David, 90 Alshansky, Naum, 201–2

355

356

Index

Alterman, Natan, 5, 42 Altman, Anatoly, 193, 196 Altman, Arieh, 78 Altman, Yehezkel, 54 Altneuland (Herzl), 7, 353 America, 82, 171, 288; Argentina and, 153, 155; Camp David Agreement in, 133, 246, 330, 334, 341, 351; Congress of, 352–53; critical friends in, 274–75; funds from, 223; Israeli arms from, 141; J Street in, xiv–xv, 294–95; Sharon and, 250–51, 253, 255–56, 275; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 183 American Jewish Committee, 297–98 American Jews, 71, 296; secularism of, 169; as soldiers, 8–9 American religious Right: Falwell in, 165, 169–70; International Christian Embassy in, 173–75; liberalism in, 172; Likud and, 170–71; National Jewish Coalition and, 171–72; Netanyahu and, 172–75; Voices United for Israel in, 172–73 am ha’aretz (dissenter without knowledge), 305 Amir, Yigal, 228–29, 231–33 ‘Am Olam’ movement, 27 Amos, 162 anarchy, 293 ANC. See African National Congress Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry (AACI), 75, 78 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 53, 55 Anti-Defamation League, 171–72 anti-normalisation, 329–33, 338 anti-Semitism, 29, 44; anti-Zionism and, 296, 329; in Argentina, 151–53, 154, 155–58; in BDS, 329,

332; in Britain, 15, 90, 318–23; in British Labour Party, 318–19; Churchill, W., against, 94–95; Corbyn and, 318–23; among Irish, 53–55; of Mussolini, 49–51; Solzhenitsyn and, 209; in South Africa, 144–48; in Soviet Union, 178, 198–99, 306, 307, 308 ‘anti-Soviet activities,’ 190–91 anti-Zionism, 295–96, 329 apartheid, 143, 329, 333 apartheid Israel: BDS and, 333–39; referendum on, 337–38 apikhores (dissenter with knowledge), 305 al-Aqsa Intifada (Second Intifada), xv, 235, 262, 298; First Intifada compared to, 334; Sharon and, 254–55 Arab parties, 224, 340 Arab Revolt, 49 Arabs, 16; Bevan, A., and, 286; Christian, 268; Kennedy, R., on, 104; Mein Kampf for, 105; nationalism of, 112. See also Palestinians Arab Spring, 166, 310, 343 Arab states, 141–42 Arafat, Yasser, 112, 225, 269; Hezbollah and, 272; Nobel Peace Prize of, 255; Olmert against, 227; Oslo Accords and, 233–34; Palestinian state and, 259–60; Rabin and, 233–35, 261, 343; Sharon and, 238, 253 Arens, Moshe, 224 Argentina: anti-Semitism in, 151–53, 154, 155–58; Catholicism in, 151–53, 157–58; Israeli arms to, xvi, 156–57; kidnappings in, 152,



Index

155–56, 158; killings in, 152–53, 155–58; Nazism in, 153 Arlosoroff, Haim (Vitaly, Viktor), 14, 45; assassination of, 15–19, 48; Goebbels, M., and, 19, 46–48 arms, 53, 101–2. See also Israeli arms arrests, 215; of Pinochet, 160–64 Asefat Hanivharim, 40 Ashrawi, Hanan, 221–22 Asquith, Herbert, 9 assassinations, 18–19, 104; of Arlosoroff, 15–19, 48; of Kennedy, J. F., 101–3; of Petliura, 60–62; of Rabin, 228–29, 230, 231–34; of Stern, 22–24 assimilation, 29, 33, 217, 320; in Argentina, 152, 155, 157; in South Africa, 143, 148–49; Soviet Jews and, 57–58, 178–79, 181 Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel, xiv, 304, 319–21 Attlee, Clement, 71–72 Auschwitz railway lines, 68, 70, 91, 317 Autoemancipation (Pinsker), 3, 28 autonomy, 221–22 Avigur, Shaul, 180 Avnery, Uri, 265–66 Axelrod, Pavel, 309–10 Azaria, Elor, 350 Baal Shem Tov, 235 Baghdad, 168 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 109 Baker, James, 250–51 Balfour, Arthur, 337 Balfour Declaration, 14, 177, 311; Jewish state related to, 351; SykesPicot agreement and, 110–11 Barak, Ehud, 175, 253–54

357

Barghouti, Omar, 328 Barker, Evelyn, 72–73 Bar-Lev, Haim, 243–44, 245 Barnett, Zerach, 3, 5–6 Basic Trends in the History of the Jewish People (Margolin), 35 BDS. See Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions Bedouin, 6, 114 Begin, Menahem, 19–20, 107, 153, 246; Ben-Gurion and, 42; in Betar, 127–28; Chile and, 160; coalitions of, 132–33; Dayan and, 120; Disraeli and, 89; Herut and, 125–26; history and, 126–27, 133; intellectuals and, 126; Irgun and, 71–72; Jabotinsky and, 128, 130; Lehi and, 137; Likud from, 341; luck of, 126; in partition debate, 79, 112; persona of, 125–27; in Poland, 127–28, 129, 130; Rabin compared to, 225; Right ascendency and, 125–28, 129, 130– 33; Sadat with, 120, 133, 294, 341, 342; Shamir and, 137–38; Sharon and, 243, 247–48; South Africa and, 149; Stern and, 23 Belgium, 314–15 Ben-Amotz, Dan, 5 Bendery, Soviet Union, 191–92 Ben-Gurion, David, 13, 17, 118; Allon against, 116–18; Begin and, 42; on borders, 40; Churchill, W., and, 92; in Cold War, 141; on declaration of independence, 82–85; Jabotinsky and, 39–40; Kennedy, J. F., and, 101–2; Knesset and, 40–42; on language, 39; Lenin and, 37–38; in partition debate, 75; Sharon and, 242–44; Zionism of, 36–42

358

Index

Benn, Tony, 279, 321–22 Bennett, Nafatli, 344, 350 Ben-Abuya, Elisha, 304–5 Ben-Yair, Eleazar, 22 Ben-Zakai, Yohanan, 1–2 Benziman, Uzi, 237, 249 Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak, 13, 41 Berit Ha-Biryonim, 17, 48 Betar, 130, 135; Ahimeir and, 134; Arabs and, 16; Begin in, 127–28 Bevan, Aneurin (Nye), 321, 329; Arabs and, 286; on Egypt, 281–82; against Franco-British collusion, 278; Palestinian nationalism and, 285; respect of, 280–81; Sharett and, 284–85; silence related to, 278–79; on Stalin, 282 Bevin, Ernest, 74–75, 278, 280–81 Bewley, Charles, 54 Biluim, 27 biryonim (sicarii), 17–18 Blair, Tony, 237 Blank, Asher, 192–93 Blank, Isaac, 309 Board of Deputies of British Jews: conformity of, 289–90, 301; funds and, 290–91; identity and, 291–92; leadership of, 292 Bolsheviks, 38, 58, 60, 111, 306 bombing, 70–74, 85, 226, 228. See also suicide bombing Bonner, Yelena, 212 borders, 40. See also settlements; territory Borokhov, Ber, 4, 38 boycott, 264 Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS), xv, 320; Abbas on, 325; anti-normalisation related to, 329– 33, 338; anti-Semitism in, 329,

332; apartheid Israel and, 333–39; backlash from, 335–36; Diaspora on, 335–39; effectiveness of, 326; Jewish state related to, 351; letter on, 327–28; Oslo Accords and, 327–28; SOAS related to, 331–32, 336–39; suicide bombing and, 326, 334–35; territory related to, 325; UCU and, 331–33 Boycotting Israel Is Wrong, 328–29 Briscoe, Robert, 52–55 Britain, 206, 278, 288–89; Allon and, 116; anti-Semitism in, 15, 90, 318– 23; Auschwitz railway lines and, 68, 70, 91, 317; communism in, 86, 313, 315; critical friends in, 275–86; declaration of independence and, 83–87; Foreign Office in, 75, 109, 156, 275–77, 337; Haganah against, 38–39; Irgun against, 20, 85; Jabotinsky and, 66–67; Jewish army in, 67–68, 70; Nazis and, 65; on partition debate, 74–75; Pinochet and, 160–61; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 182; Sykes-Picot agreement from, 108–11; Wales, 280; White Paper of 1939, 70–71. See also Bevan, Aneurin; Irish Brit HaCanaim, 41 British Friends of Peace Now, 299, 301 British Jews, 31–32, 309; anarchy and, 293; communism of, 315; declaration of independence and, 85–87; demonstrations of, 293–94; divisions among, 297–99; identity of, 291–92, 300–302; IJV of, 300– 303; liberalism of, 296, 300–301; media and, 298–99; in partition debate, 86; on Pinochet, 161–63;



Index

representation of, 301, 321; research on, 291–92, 297–98, 304, 319–21, 323; against settlements, 335; Shoah and, 293; Trotsky related to, 316; WWII and, 68–70. See also Board of Deputies of British Jews British Labour Party, 71, 73, 86–87; anti-Semitism in, 318–19. See also Corbyn, Jeremy; Thatcher, Margaret British Mandate, 2, 21 British Muslims, 322 Brodetskaya, Tina, 186 Broederbond, 145 Buber-Neumann, Margarete, 46, 65 Bund, 37, 177–78, 304 Bush, George H. W., 274 Bush, George W., 223, 255–56, 274– 75, 294, 348 Butman, Hillel, 192–93, 195 Camp David Agreement (1979), 133, 246, 330, 334, 341, 351 Carmel, Moshe, 117 Carter, Jimmy, 215–16 Catholicism, 53–54; in Argentina, 151–53, 157–58; popes, 22, 30, 157–58, 167 ceasefire, 265, 346 censorship, 42 Central Committee of the Communist party, 204 Cesarani, David, 89 Chamberlain, Neville, 94, 321 Chile: Israel and, 159–60, 163; Pinochet in, 158–64 Chmielnicki, Bohdan, 56, 61 Chomsky, Noam, 328 Christian Arabs, 268

359

Christian Coalition, 171 Christian evangelists, 165 Christiani, Pablo, 305 Christianity, 165–66; Catholicism, 22, 30, 53–54, 151–53, 157–58, 167; International Christian Embassy, 173–75; Soviet Jews and, 201 Christian Right, 170–71. See also American religious Right The Chronicle of Current Events, 206 Church, Frank, 169 Churchill, Randolph, 91 Churchill, Winston, 11, 38, 68; against anti-Semitism, 94–95; BenGurion and, 92; celebrity of, 92; criticism of, 91–92; in partition debate, 93–94; Peel Commission and, 93; refugees and, 95; Weizmann and, 94 circumcision, 198–99 civil rights, 102, 183 class, 329–30 von Clausewitz, Carl, 234 Cliff, Tony. See Gluckstein, Ygael Cohen, Michael J., 91 Cohen, Steven M., 297 Cold War, 141–42 collaborators, 147 Collins, Michael, 53 colonialism, 108–9 Communiqué 112, 21 communism, 177–78, 296; in Britain, 86, 313, 315; Central Committee of the Communist party, 204; Eurocommunists, 214; Israel and, 184; Jewish communists, 13, 16, 65, 68–69, 91, 180. See also Soviet Union Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 313

360

Index

community, 302–3 conformity, 289–90, 301 Congress, 352–53 Congress of the Peoples of the East, 38 conspiracies: Christian Right and, 170–71; Hezbollah and, 270–71; normalisation and, 330; Stalin and, 99–101, 180 constitution, 41 contracts, 251 conversion, 347 Corbyn, Jeremy: anti-Semitism and, 318–23; Operation Protective Edge and, 322–23; public democracy and, 318; Zionism and, 322–23 Coty, François, 62 CPGB. See Communist Party of Great Britain critical friends: in America, 274–75; in Britain, 275–86 criticism: of Churchill, W., 91–92; of Eban, A., 120–21; against Rabin, 225–29, 231–33 Crossman, Richard, 86, 283 Cruz, Ted, 165–66, 169 Czechoslovakia, 203 Dachau, 69 David, Assaf, 106 Dayan, Moshe, 113–14; Allon compared to, 117–18; Begin and, 120; character of, 119; in Labour dissension, 118–20; Sharon and, 241–42, 244; women and, 118, 120; Yom Kippur war and, 119–20 death camps, 68, 70, 91, 316–17 deaths: of Herzl, 31, 33; Irgun and, 131; of Jabotinsky, 66–67; of refugees, 22, 24; of Stalin,

100–101. See also assassinations; killings; suicide bombing death sentences, 196 Declaration of Human Rights, 160 declaration of independence, 80, 81, 92; Ben-Gurion on, 82–85; bombing after, 85; Britain and, 83–87; British Jews and, 85–87; ceremony of, 84; dissent over, 82–83; Irgun and, 84; secularism and, 83; Soviet Union and, 96–97; text of, 83 democracy, 41, 218–19, 318 democratization, 57–58 demonstrations: of British Jews, 293– 94; in Tel Aviv, 4 Deutscher, Isaac, 305–6, 309, 317 De Valera, Éamon, 52–55, 136 Diaspora, xiii–xv, 178, 301–3; on BDS, 335–39; dissent of, 288–92; Jewish apostates in, 294–97; liberalism of, 294; after 1945, 293– 94; uncivil war among, 297–300 dispensationalists, 174–75 Disraeli, Benjamin: absenteeism of, 88–90; Alroy and, 90; Begin and, 89; Jabotinsky compared to, 90–91; Marx compared to, 89–90; romanticism of, 88; Suez Canal Company, 88–89 dissent: of Diaspora, 288–92; over declaration of independence, 82–83 dissenter with knowledge (apikhores), 305 dissenter without knowledge (am ha’aretz), 305 Dizengoff, Meir, 6 Dobkin, Eliahu, 39–40 Dobry, Hernan, 156–57 Doctors’ Plot, 100–1, 104, 180, 202



Dole, Bob, 216 drop out (neshira), 217 drugs, 206–7 Dylan, Bob, xv Dymshits, Mark, 193, 196 Easter Rising, 52, 55 Eban, Abba, 113, 122; criticism of, 120–21; Peres against, 123; Rabin and, 121, 123 Eban, Suzy, 121–22 economics, 223, 349–50 Eden, Anthony, 282–84 education, 190–92 Educational International Congress, 332 Egypt, 283–84; Bevan, A., on, 281– 82; in WWI, 9–11. See also Sadat, Anwar Eisenhower, Dwight D., 183 Eisenhower administration, 104, 141 Elashvili, Shabata, 186–87 Elazar, David, 244 Eldad, Israel, 131 Eliashevich, Lev, 194–95 Elon, Amos, 231–32 Elon, Benny, 227 emigration. See Soviet Jewish emigration Eretz-Israel, 79–80 Eshkol, Levi, 114, 121 Eurocommunists, 214 Exodus, 69 Ezekiel, 7 Ezquivel, Pérez, 155 Ezrat Israel, 5 Falklands War, 156–57, 164 Falwell, Jerry, 165, 169–70 far Right, 340–41; NRP and, 342–44

Index

361

fascism, 16, 44, 134–35, 308; Jabotinsky and, 51; Jewish AntiFascist Committee, 99–100; Jewish fascists, 50–51. See also Mussolini, Benito; Nazi Germany Fatah, 263, 267, 346 Fedorov, Yuri, 193, 196 Ferdinand (king), 166 Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. See Lehi Filc, Dani, 349 first aliyah, 5, 27–28 The First Circle (Solzhenitsyn), 208–9 First Intifada, 225, 250, 259–60; alAqsa Intifada compared to, 334; Rabin and, 220–21, 249 Fischer, Alan, 151 Foot, Michael, 279–81 Foreign Office, 75, 109, 156, 275–77, 337 France, 61–62, 288, 315; Sykes-Picot agreement from, 108–11 Francis (pope), 157–58 Franco, Francisco, 44, 65, 167, 192 Franco-British collusion, 278 Friedländer, Max, 46 Friedman, Thomas L., 232 Frolov, Oleg, 190–91 Fromm, Bella, 48 funds, 294, 350; from America, 223; Board of Deputies of British Jews and, 290–91 Gaitskell, Hugh, 282–83 Gallipoli, 10 Gaster, Moses, 31 Gaza, 80, 259–60; under Hamas, 267–69 Gaza-Jericho Accord, 261 Geddes, Patrick, 2, 8

362

Index

George III (king), 289 Germans, 44–49, 280 Germany, 44–49, 280; Ha’avarah agreement and, 14–15, 44, 318–19; Jewish soldiers from, 9. See also Nazi Germany Geronda, Heinz, 19, 48 ghetto, 4 Gluckstein, Louis, 85 Gluckstein, Ygael (Tony Cliff), 308–9 Godelman, Solomon, 62–63 Goebbels, Joseph, 19, 47–49 Goebbels, Magda, 19, 46–49 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 53 Golan Heights, 106, 172–73, 241 Goldberg, Giora, 41–42 Goldmann, Nahum, 74, 82, 101 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 216; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 347 Graetz, Heinrich, xiii–xiv Greece, 314 Greenberg, Ivan, 86 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 38 Greenstein, Tony, 279 Grillius, Shimon, 190–91 Grobman, Mikhail, 209 Gromyko, Andrei, 77 Grossman, David, 228 Gulag, 46, 65, 99, 131, 202; Soviet Union as, 218 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 208–9 gun-running, 53 Gur, Motta, 243 Gush Shalom, 265–66 Ha’am, Ahad, 4, 36 Ha’avarah (Transfer) agreement, 14–15, 44, 318–19 HaBayit Hayehudi, 344, 347

Haganah, 73, 84, 115, 239, 258n2; against Britain, 38–39 Hague, William, 351 halakhah, 229, 232, 347 Halevy, Ephraim, 256; Jewish state and, 352 Hamas, 259, 348; boycott and, 264; dialogue with, 264–65; Fatah compared to, 346; Gaza under, 267–69; Islamism of, 260–61; Jewish state and, 352; kidnappings by, 260; killings by, 267–68; missiles from, 269–70, 346; negotiating with, 262–67; peace camp and, 266; PLO compared to, 265, 268; rights from, 263–64; terrorism from, 260; West Bank and, 267 Handler, Arieh, 82–85 Haniyeh, Ismail, 265–66 Hapoel Hatzair, 15–16 haredim, 2, 76–77, 257 Harel, Isser, 180 Hartman, David, 232 Hashomer Hatzair, 77, 117–18, 312; Ahdut Ha’avodah and, 115–16 Hass, Amira, 267 Hazan, Eliahu, 181 Hebrew language, 97–98, 338 Hebron, 16, 20 Heller, Daniel, 127–28 Helsinki Accord (Helsinki Agreement), 210, 212; Shcharansky related to, 213–19 Helsinki Group, 210, 212; arrests in, 215; Carter and, 215–16; Eurocommunists and, 214; international problems related to, 214; publicity and, 214; vulnerability and, 214–15



Index

heroes, 4; Muslims as, 168 Hertz, Joseph, 8 Herut, 42, 125, 132, 341 Herzl, Theodor, 7, 353; antiSemitism and, 29; on Britain, 31–32; death of, 31, 33; identity of, 28–29; Jabotinsky on, 33; Judaism and, 35; liberalism of, 30; Lüeger and, 29–30; superiority of, 30; Weizmann against, 34–36; Zionism of, 29–30 Herzliya Conference, 256 Herzog, Isaac, 54, 70, 76 Hess, Moses, 28 Hezbollah: Arafat and, 272; conspiracies and, 270–71; martyrs of, 271–72; missiles from, 269–70 Hillel, Rabbi, 16 Hirt, Norman, 205 Histadrut, 350 history, xiii–xiv, 232; Begin and, 126–27, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 105; Ahimeir and, 45–46; in Northern Ireland, 316; Zionism of, 318–19 Hobsbawm, Eric, 311–13 Hoffman, Tziporah, 151 Hosea, 39 Howard, Ebenezer, 2–3 Huckabee, Mike, 165 human rights, 30, 160, 162; civil rights, 102, 183; psychiatry and, 203–7; Soviet Union and, 201–19. See also Argentina; Chile; South Africa; Soviet Jewish emigration hunting season (saison), 115, 239, 248, 258n2 Hussein (king), 106, 132, 220–21 Hussein, Saddam, 247, 250

363

Hussein, Sherif, 109 Husseini, Faisal, 221–22 Ibn Darwish, Issa, 19 identity, 304; Board of Deputies of British Jews and, 291–92; of British Jews, 291–92, 300–302; of Herzl, 28–29; in Israel, 349–50; of Miliband, R., 310–12 IDF. See Israel Defense Forces IJV. See Independent Jewish Voices Ilyinka, Russia, 198–99 immigration quotas, to South Africa, 144–47 independence, 81, 82. See also declaration of independence Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), 300; community of, 302–3; universalism of, 301–2 India, 141–42 injustice, 103. See also human rights International Christian Embassy, 173–75 international problems, 214 Iran, 260; missiles from, 269 Iraqi Jews, 191–92 Irgun Zvai Leumi (Irgun), 23, 55, 67; Begin and, 71–72; against Britain, 20, 85; deaths and, 131; declaration of independence and, 84; kidnappings by, 73; King David Hotel bombing by, 70–74; in partition debate, 77–79; Right ascendency and, 130–33. See also Herut Irish, 139; Ahimeir on, 135–36; Anglo-Irish Treaty, 53, 55; antiSemitism among, 53–55; Easter Rising, 52, 55; Jabotinsky on, 136; martyrs of, 52; Plan Kathleen

364

Index

of, 315–16; refugees and, 54–55; Republicanism, 16, 20, 23; Zionism and, 52–55 Iron Dome, 270 Isabella (queen), 166 Islam, 166 Islamism, xv, 234–35, 259, 299; antinormalization and, 330; of Hamas, 260–61 Israel: Arab parties in, 224, 340; Chile and, 159–60, 163; communism and, 184; constitution of, 41; democracy of, 41; economics of, 223, 349–50; identity in, 349–50; legitimacy of, xiii; nation states and, xvi, 108–9, 116, 309, 351; Thatcher and, 276–77, 277. See also specific topics Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 239, 249–50 Israeli arms: from America, 141; in Argentina, xvi, 156–57; in Chile, 159–60 Israel Studies, 331–33, 337–39 Italians, 49–51. See also Mussolini The Italians and the Holocaust (Zuccotti), 50 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 93–94, 129, 257; Ahimeir and, 45, 51; on assassination, 18–19; Begin and, 128, 130; Ben-Gurion and, 39–40; Briscoe and, 54; Britain and, 66–67; cosmopolitanism of, 34; death of, 66–67; Disraeli compared to, 90–91; fascism and, 51; fatalism of, 45; on Herzl, 33; on Irish, 136; Jewish state and, 353; on liberalism, 296; Right ascendency and, 130–32, 134–35; Shamir and, 138–39;

Sharon and, 345; Slavinsky and, 58–60, 62; Stern and, 21, 67; on Tel Aviv, 4–5; Ukrainians and, 56–63; Weizmann with, 59–60; WWI and, 9, 11–12; Zionism of, 33–34 Jackson, Jesse, 333 Jackson Amendment, 216 Jacobs, Julius, 72, 74 Jaffa, 3–6 Janner, Barnett, 280 Janner, Elsie, 280 Jeremiah, 5, 24n6, 162 Jerusalem, 1–6, 18, 22, 29–30, 70, 72–75, 79, 82, 97, 100, 116, 127, 168, 172–74, 185, 187, 191–92, 225, 227, 246–47, 250, 253, 256, 264, 266, 272, 293–94, 299, 332 Jewish Agency, 15, 44, 248 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 99–100 Jewish apostates, 294–97 Jewish army, in Britain, 67–68, 70 Jewish communists, 13, 16, 65, 68– 69, 91, 180 Jewish fascists, 50–51 Jewish Legion, 12–13; Ukrainians in, 59–60 Jewish Rifle Volunteer Corps, 10 Jewish soldiers, 8–13, 59–60, 67–68, 70 Jewish state: BDS related to, 351; Hamas and, 352; Jabotinsky and, 353; for Netanyahu, 351–53 The Jewish State (Herzl), 29–30, 32, 36 Jewish tradition, 277–78 Jews against Themselves (Alexander), 294–97 The Jews of South Africa: What Future? (Fischer and Hoffman), 151



John Paul II (pope), 167 John XXIII (pope), 167 Jordan, 78, 80, 132 J Street, xiv–xv, 294–95 ‘Judaea Capta’ coins, 1 Judaism, xiii–xiv, 35–36 Judaism without Embellishment (Kichko), 307 Kadima, 257, 344–45, 347–48 Kahan Commission, 248, 326 Kahane, Meir, 343 Kahn-Harris, Keith, 298 Kasrils, Ronnie, 336 Kaufman, Gerald, 321 Keller, Adam, 266 Kendrew, John, 121–22 Kennedy, John F., 103; Ben-Gurion and, 101–2; civil rights and, 102 Kennedy, Robert, 103–4 Kerry, John, 294 KGB, 203–5 Khan, Sadiq, 322–23 Khansis, Yaakov, 204–5 Khavkin, David, 210 Khrushchev, Nikita, 203–4 Kichko, Trofim, 307 kidnappings: in Argentina, 152, 155–56, 158; by Hamas, 260; by Irgun, 73 killings, 27, 168, 248, 261; in Argentina, 152–53, 155–58; by Hamas, 267–68; by Palestinians, 16, 19–20; of Palestinians, 237, 241–42, 326, 350; in Poland, 167; of prisoners, 202–3; in Qibya, 241–42; in South Africa, 144; of Soviet Jews, 56, 58, 60, 180; of Ukrainians, 56, 58, 60 King David Hotel bombing, 70–74

Index

365

Kissinger, Henry, 183 Klabunde, Anja, 19, 47–49 Kleiner, Israel, 58–59, 62 Klerk, F. W. de, 143 Knesset, 185, 188; Ben-Gurion and, 40–42 Kollek, Teddy, 39 Kook, Zvi Yehuda, 343 Kopelev, Lev, 208–9 Korth, Theo, 19, 48 Kotel (western or Wailing Wall), 1–2 Krilsky, Yan, 205–7 Kuznetsov, Edward, 193, 196 Labour Alignment of 1969, 112 Labour dissension: Ahdut Ha’avodah, 115–16; Allon in, 113–18; Dayan in, 118–20; Eban, A., in, 120–23; West Bank in, 113 Labour Party, 37, 311, 313. See also Ben-Gurion, David; Bevan, Aneurin; British Labour Party; Rabin, Yitzhak Labour Zionism: Balfour Declaration and, 110–11; nationalism and, 112; Sykes-Picot agreement related to, 108–11 Landau, David, 238. See also Sharon, Ariel Landau, Uzi, 348 Land of Israel manifesto, 113 language, 105, 122; Ben-Gurion on, 39; Hebrew, 97–98, 338 Lanzmann, Claude, 167 Laski, Harold, 311 Lavon, Pinhas, 241 Lebanon, 173–74, 237, 270 Lee, Jennie, 280–81 Legend in His Lifetime, 135 Legge-Bourke, Harry, 85–86

366

Index

Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), 21, 71–73; Ahimeir and, 136–37; in partition debate, 77–78; Shamir and, 138–39 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 13, 17, 304; Ben-Gurion and, 37–38; against Bund, 177–78; Marxist-Leninist Zionists, 201–3 Leningrad: Soviet Jewish emigration trials in, 192–96; treason in, 195–96 Levanon, Nehemiah, 180 liberalism: in American religious Right, 172; of British Jews, 296, 300–301; of Diaspora, 294; far Right and, 340–41; of Herzl, 30; Jabotinsky on, 296 Lieberman, Avigdor, 347–48, 350; stagnation related to, 345–46; Yisrael Beiteinu and, 344 Liebman, Charles, 291 Liebman, Marcel, 311–12 Likud, 107, 125, 244–46; American religious Right and, 170–75; from Begin, 341; Oslo Accords and, 226; Sharon and, 248–49, 255–56, 348 Lilienblum, Moses Leib, 28 Litvinoff, Emanuel, 181–82 Livingstone, Ken, 318–19, 323 Livni, Tsipi: Jewish state and, 352; Kadima and, 344–45; sexism and, 345 Loew, Eric, 147 Lüeger, Karl, 29–30 Lunts, Daniel, 205, 207 MacDonagh, Thomas, 52 Majud, Abdul, 19 Makleff, Mordecai, 241 Makovsky, Michael, 93

Malan, Daniel François, 144–45, 147 Mandela, Nelson, 142–43, 333 Mapai, 18, 77, 113, 246; Ahdut Ha’avodah and, 115, 123 Mapam, 113, 115–18, 299, 320 Margolin, Moses, 35 marriage, civil, 347 martyrs, 271–72 Marx, Karl, 89–90 Marxism, 311–12 Marxist-Leninist Zionists, 201–3 Mash‘al, Khālid, 253, 258n17 Matveyev, Shmuel, 199 Maximalists, 134–35; Revisionists and, 51, 128, 130, 341 McCarthy, Kevin, 52–53, 55 Mea Shearim, 5–6 Medding, Peter, 290 media, 298; Netanyahu and, 350–51 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 105 Meir, Golda, 106, 114, 159; Eban, A. and, 121; in partition debate, 74; on Soviet Jewish emigration, 184–85, 188; in Soviet Union, 97–98, 185 Memoirs (Sakharov), 211–12 Mendelevich, Iosif, 193–94 Merskey, Harold, 206 Meshener, Yosef, 191–92 messianism, 21, 23–24 Meyer, Marshall, 155 Mikado, Ian, 279–80 Mikhailashvili, Albert, 186–87, 189 Miliband, Ed, 322 Miliband, Ralph, 306, 310–12 military, 241–43. See also specific topics minorities, 56–57 missiles, 269–70, 346 Mitzna, Amram, 240



Index

Moda’i, Yitzhak, 223 Mogilever, Vladimir, 193 Moledet, 227, 341 Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, 65 Montefiore, Claude, 31–32 Montefiore, Francis, 31–32 Moore, Thomas, 283 Morris, Benny, 241, 295 Morrison, Paul, 292 Morton, Geoffrey, 24 Mossad, 106, 115, 139, 247, 258n17 muamara. See conspiracies Mubarak, Hosni, 261, 262 al-Musawi, Abbas, 271 Muslims, 168, 322; Sunni–Shi’ite conflict, 270–71. See also Palestinians Mussolini, Benito, 45; anti-Semitism of, 49–51; Stern and, 20–22 Nahmanides, 167, 305 Nasrallah, Hassan, 270–71 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 281–82, 284–85 nation, 178 nationalism, xv, 108; of Arabs, 112; Labour Zionism and, 112; Palestinian, xvi, 149, 259–60, 274, 285, 322; in Poland, 127–28; in Soviet Jewish emigration trials, 190–91; Zionism and, 27–28 National Jewish Coalition, 171–72 National Religious Party (NRP), 342–44 nation states, xvi, 108–9, 116, 309, 351 Nativ, 180, 210 Nazi Germany, 17; death camps in, 68, 70, 91, 316–17; idealism in, 134–35

367

Nazis: in Argentina, 153; Arlosoroff and, 19, 45; Britain and, 65; collaborators with, 147; war criminals, 160 Nazism, 144–46 Nazi-Soviet pact, 65, 313–14 negotiating, 262–67 Neruda, Pablo, 156 neshira (drop out), 217 Netanyahu, Benjamin (Bibi), 73, 165; American religious Right and, 172–75; economics related to, 349– 50; far Right with, 340, 343–44; Jewish state for, 351–53; Livni against, 352; media and, 350–51; Rabin and, 226–28, 233–34, 262; re-elections of, 345; Sharon and, 252–54, 256–57; Yisrael Beiteinu and, 346–47 Neumann, Emanuel, 102 Neve Shalom, 5–7 Neve Tsedek, 5–7 New Israel Fund, 294, 350 ‘new Jew,’ 2, 4, 72, 121 Nicosia, Francis, 44 Nixon, Richard, 183; Yom Kippur war and, 104, 106 Nobel Peace Prize, 155, 255; of Sakharov, 211–12 non-Jewish Jews, 320; death camps and, 316–17; Deutscher as, 305–6, 309, 317; Gluckstein as, 308–9; Hobsbawm as, 311–13; Miliband, R., as, 306, 310–12; reality for, 309, 317; Trotsky as, 304, 306, 308, 310, 316 Nordau, Max, xiv, 35 normalisation, 329–33, 338 Northern Ireland, 316 Norway, 314

368

Index

NRP. See National Religious Party nuclear weapons, 101–2 Obama, Barack, 352 October Revolution, 14, 50, 56, 60, 133, 177 Olmert, Ehud: Abbas and, 264; against Arafat, 227; on withdrawal, 256 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (Solzhenitsyn), 203 Operation Malonchik, 73 Operation Protective Edge, 322–23 Operation Protective Shield, 326 Orlov, Yuri, 213–15 orthodoxy, 32–33, 228–29, 231–33; haredim, 2, 76–77, 257 Oslo Accords, xv, 295, 353; Arafat and, 233–34; BDS and, 327–28; Likud and, 226 Ottoman Empire, 108 Oz, Amos, 118 Palestine, 2; memory related to, 28; Turks in, 9–12; UNSCOP, 75–79; after VE day, 70 Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), 326 Palestinian Christians, 166 Palestinian Islamism, 226, 255, 259, 261, 299 Palestinian Legislative Election (2006), 263 Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO): Abed-Shafi of, 222; autonomy and, 221–22; Hamas compared to, 265, 268. See also Arafat, Yasser Palestinian National Boycott Committee, 329

Palestinian nationalism, xvi, 149, 259–60, 274, 285, 322 Palestinians, 30, 80, 174, 221, 240; Allon related to, 116–17; Arlosoroff on, 15; class and, 329–30; killings by, 16, 19–20; killings of, 237, 241–42, 326, 350; in partition debate, 79. See also Hamas; Hezbollah Palestinian state, 113, 174, 221, 233, 250, 331; in West Bank, 259–60 Palmach, 220; Allon in, 115–17, 123; censorship about, 42 partition debate: Allon in, 113, 225; Begin in, 79, 112; Britain on, 74– 75; British Jews in, 86; Churchill, W., in, 93–94; haredim in, 76–77; opposition in, 77–79; Stalin in, 95–96; UNSCOP in, 75–79 Passover, 69 Patterson, John, 10–11, 13 Paul, Geoffrey, 156, 290 peace: Camp David Agreement, 133, 246, 330, 334, 341, 351; orthodoxy and, 228–29, 231–33 peace camp: Hamas and, 266; Palestinian Islamism and, 299; Rabin and, 222, 225–26 Pearse, Padraig, 55 Peel Commission, 93 Peres, Shimon, 174–75, 250; Abbas and, 157; against Eban, A., 123; Rabin and, 220, 223, 225, 261; South Africa and, 149 Petah Tikva, 3 Petliura, Symon, 57; assassination of, 60–62; pogroms and, 58–63 Pinochet, Augusto, 158–59; arrest of, 160–64; British Jews on, 161–63 Pinsker, Leon, 28



Index

Pius X (pope), 30 Pius XII (pope), 22 Plan Kathleen, 315–16 PLO. See Palestinian Liberation Organisation poetry, 12, 42; of Stern, 21–24, 137 pogroms, 58–63 Poland, 56–57, 315; Begin in, 127–28, 129, 130; killings in, 167; nationalism in, 127–28; refugees in, 66 prime minister, 254–57. See also Barak, Ehud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Olmert, Ehud; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak Principles of Renaissance (Stern), 21 prisoners, 202–3 Promised Land, 173–74 prophets, 7, 162, 286 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 153, 154, 212 PSC. See Palestine Solidarity Campaign psychiatry, 208–13; drugs in, 206–7; KGB and, 203–5; malpractice of, 204–7 public democracy, 318 publicity, 214; media, 298, 350–51 Pundak, Ron, 330 Qibya attack, 241–42, 274 al-Qaeda, 260 Rabin, Yitzhak, 120; Ahdut Ha’avodah and, 225; Arafat and, 233–35, 261, 343; assassination of, 228–29, 230, 231–34; background of, 220; Begin compared to, 225; von Clausewitz and, 234; criticism against, 225–29, 231–33; Eban, A.

369

and, 121, 123; First Intifada and, 220–21, 249; government of, 224; Netanyahu and, 226–29, 233–34, 262; on Palestinians, 221; peace camp and, 222, 225–26; Peres and, 220, 223, 225, 261; Shamir and, 221; Sharon and, 239, 249, 251– 52, 342; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 347; territory and, 224 Rafi, 243 Ramadan War. See Yom Kippur war rape, 61 Rauff, Walter, 160 Raziel, David, 20, 67, 131 Reagan, Ronald, 274 reality: for non-Jewish Jews, 309, 317; of Sakharov, 211–12 Reato, Ceferino, 151–52 Red Army, 60, 116, 240, 314 Reed, Ralph, 171–72 refugees, 68–69, 70, 145; Churchill, W., and, 95; deaths of, 22, 24; Irish and, 54–55; in Poland, 66 refusniks. See Soviet Jewish emigration Republicanism, Irish, 16, 20, 23 Republican Party, 171 research, 337–38; on British Jews, 291–92, 297–98, 304, 319–21, 323 Reshef, Amnon, 244 Revisionists, 14–16, 62–63, 134; Maximalists and, 51, 128, 130, 341 The Revolt (Begin), 153 Riazan, Soviet Union, 189–91 Riazan Institute of Radio Technology, 189–90 Right ascendency: Ahimeir and, 133– 36; Begin and, 125–28, 129, 130– 33; Irgun and, 130–33; Jabotinsky

370

Index

and, 130–32, 134–35; Shamir and, 136–39 rights, 263–64. See also human rights Robertson, Pat, 170–72 Rokach, Eleazar, 5 Rokach, Shimon, 5 Rome, 1–2 Rommel, Erwin, 23, 115 Romney, Mitt, 165 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 74 Rosenberg, Isaac, 12 Rosenblatt, Ze’ev, 19 Roth, Cecil, 50 Rothberg, Ro’i, 119 Rubenstein, Joshua, 100–101 Rubin, Isaac, 202–3 Rubin, Vitaly, 202–3, 213–14 Ruby, Jack, 103 Ruppin, Arthur, 6–7 Russell, Bertrand, 191 Russian Jews. See Soviet Jews Russification, 56–58 Ruttledge, Paddy, 54 Ruzinek, Ezra, 194–95 Sadat, Anwar, 106; Begin with, 120, 133, 294, 341, 342 Safed, 16, 20 saison (hunting season), 115, 239, 248, 258n2 Sakharov, Andrei: activists for, 212–13; reality of, 211–12; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 212–13 Samuel, Herbert, 9, 109 Schechtman, Joseph, 59, 62 Schejter, Amit, 237 Schneerson, Menahem Mendel, 250 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 331–32, 336–39 Schwartzbard, Shalom, 60–62

second aliyah, 6, 36–37, 202 Second Intifada. See al-Aqsa Intifada Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (Webster), 170 secularism, 5, 345–46; of American Jews, 169; declaration of independence and, 83 security fence, 255–56 A Sense of Belonging, 292 settlements, 248, 257, 275; British Jews against, 335; in West Bank, 174–75, 246–47 sexism, 345 Shalev, Gabriela, 352 Shamir, Yitzhak, 23, 78, 237, 341–42; autonomy and, 222; Begin and, 137–38; Jabotinsky and, 138–39; Rabin and, 221; Right ascendency and, 136–39 Shapira, Anita, 114–18 Sharansky, Natan. See Shcharansky, Anatoly Sharett, Moshe (Moshe Shertok), 80–83, 122, 181, 241; Bevan, A., and, 284–85 Sharon, Ariel (Arik), 222, 341; America and, 250–51, 253, 255– 56, 275; al-Aqsa Intifada and, 254– 55; Arafat and, 238, 253; Barak and, 253–54; Begin and, 243, 247–48; Ben-Gurion and, 242–44; complexity of, 239–40; contracts and, 251; Dayan and, 241–42, 244; disengagement and, 256–57; family of, 240; Jabotinsky and, 345; Likud and, 248–49, 255–56, 348; in military, 241–43; Netanyahu and, 252–54, 256–57; as prime minister, 254–57; Rabin and, 239, 249, 251–52, 342; saison related



Index

to, 239, 248, 258n2; security fence and, 255–56; settlements and, 257; Sinai and, 247; at Temple Mount, 253–54; against violence, 262, 327, 334; West Bank and, 246–47 Shcharansky, Anatoly (Natan Sharansky), 211, 344; Helsinki Accord related to, 213–19 Sheinkin, Menahem, 7 Shertok, Moshe. See Sharett, Moshe Shilon, Avi, 72 Shimoni, Gideon, 150 Shindler, Colin, 266 Shoah, 69–70, 87, 183, 293; Soviet Jews and, 178–79 Shperber, Joachim, 96, 98–99 Shulamit Aloni, 224 sicarii (biryonim), 17–18 Sieff, Israel, 286 Silver, Abba Hillel, 74–76 Sinai, 247, 341 Sinai Campaign, 105 Sinn Fein, 346 Six-Day War, 40, 104, 112, 220; PSC and, 326; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 182, 184–86, 203, 210 slave trade, 30 Slavinsky, Maksym, 58–60, 62 Slepak, Vladimir, 198–99; Helsinki Group and, 210, 212, 214, 216 Sneh, Moshe, 179 SOAS. See School of Oriental and African Studies social individualism, 275–76 socialists, 44–45 Socialist Workers Party, 308, 316, 338 social media, 298 Sokolov, Nahum, 7 soldiers, Jewish, 8–13, 59–60, 67–68, 70

371

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 203; antiSemitism and, 209; expulsion of, 208–10; on psychiatry, 207; Sakharov and, 212 South Africa, 151, 334; ANC in, 149–50; anti-Semitism in, 144–48; assimilation in, 143, 148–49; immigration quotas to, 144–47; Mandela for, 142–43, 333; Nazism in, 144–46; polarisation in, 148– 49; representation in, 148, 150 South African Communist Party, 336 Soviet Jewish emigration, 96–98, 104, 217, 347; activists for, xvi, 186, 188–97, 197; America and, 183; Britain and, 182; collective letters for, 185–89; democracy related to, 218–19; going public on, 188–89; Helsinki Accord and, 210; from Ilyinka, 198–99; Jackson Amendment and, 216; MarxistLeninist Zionists and, 201–3; Meir on, 184–85, 188; Nativ for, 180– 81; politics of, 187–88; Sakharov and, 212–13; Six-Day War and, 182, 184–86, 203, 210; Stalin and, 179–80 Soviet Jewish emigration trials: aeroplane affair in, 192–96; ‘antiSoviet activities’ in, 190–91; in Bendery, 191–92; death sentences in, 196; in Leningrad, 192–96; nationalism in, 190–91; in Riazan, 189–91 Soviet Jewish immigration, 223; Yisrael Beiteinu and, 347–48 Soviet Jews, 177, 276; assimilation and, 57–58, 178–79, 181; Christianity and, 201; diversity among, 197–98; Doctors’ Plot

372

Index

related to, 100–101, 104, 180, 202; education for, 190–92; killings of, 56, 58, 60, 180; Shoah and, 178–79; WWI and, 9, 13. See also Stalin, Joseph Soviet Union, 141, 189–92; Ahdut Ha’avodah and, 116; antiSemitism in, 178, 198–99, 306, 307, 308; Bolsheviks in, 38, 58, 60, 111, 306; Czechoslovakia and, 203; declaration of independence and, 96–97; as Gulag, 218; human rights and, 201–19; Meir in, 97–98, 185; Nazi-Soviet pact, 65, 313–14; October Revolution in, 14, 50, 56, 60, 133, 177; psychiatry in, 203–13; Red Army of, 60, 116, 240, 314. See also Stalin, Joseph Spain, 44, 65, 166–67, 192 SSSJ. See Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Stalin, Joseph, 17, 178, 204, 314–15; Bevan, A., on, 282; conspiracies and, 99–101, 180; death of, 100– 101; Hebrew language and, 97–98; Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and, 99–100; in partition debate, 95–96; Soviet Jewish emigration and, 179–80 Stavsky, Avraham, 18 Stern, Abraham (Avraham), 130–31; assassination of, 22–24; Begin and, 23; Jabotinsky and, 21, 67; Mussolini and, 20–22; poetry of, 21–24, 137; Shamir compared to, 137; against Weizmann, 21 Straw, Jack, 161, 163–64 Strejilevich, Nora, 153, 155 Strijdom, Johannes Gerhardus, 145

Struma, 22, 24 Struve, Petr, 57–58 Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), 183 Succot (Tabernacles), 22 Suez Canal, 106, 281–84 Suez Canal Company, 88–89 suicide bombing, 233, 255, 261–62; anti-normalisation and, 330; BDS and, 326, 334–35 Sunni–Shi’ite conflict, 270–71 superpowers, 218 survivalism, 299, 310 Suslensky, Yaakov, 191–92 Suzman, Helen, 148 Svechinsky, Vitaly, 186 Swart, Charles Robberts, 147 Sykes, Mark, 109–11 Sykes-Picot agreement, 108–11 symbolism, 2, 279 Tabenkin, Yitzhak, 114–15 Tabernacles (Succot), 22 Tahar-Lev, Yoram, 3 Talmon, Ya’akov, 312 Talmud Torah, 6 Tehiya, 341, 343 Tekoah, Yosef, 187–88 Tel Aviv: expansion of, 7; Jabotinsky on, 4–5; planning of, 2–3, 7–8; secularism of, 5; symbolism of, 2 Temple Mount, 253–54 Temple’s destruction, 1 territory, 224, 325. See also Gaza; West Bank terrorism, 260; pogroms, 58–63. See also assassinations; kidnapping; suicide bombing Thatcher, Margaret, 164; Israel and, 276–77, 277; Jewish tradition and,



Index

277–78; social individualism of, 275–76; for Soviet Jews, 276 Thomas, Hugh, 282 Thompson, E. P., 218 Timmerman, Jacobo, 153, 156 Tortolo, Adolfo, 152 trade unions, 116, 145, 318, 322 Transfer (Ha’avarah) agreement, 14–15, 44, 318–19 treason in the USSR, 194–96, 215 Treger, Hannah, 6 trial, 61–62. See also Soviet Jewish emigration trials Trial and Error (Weizmann), 34 Trotsky, Leon, 304, 306, 308, 310, 316 Trump, Donald, 166 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 10–11 Tsitsuashvili, Gershon, 186 tunnels, 270 twenty-first century politics, 340–43; Lieberman in, 344–48, 350 UCU. See University and College Union Ukrainians: democratization in, 57–58; Jabotinsky and, 56–63; in Jewish Legion, 59–60; killings of, 56, 58, 60; minorities of, 56–57 Ulbricht, Walter, 315 UN. See United Nations uncivil war, 297–300 UNESCO, 332 United Nations (UN), 283, 351; Conference against Racism, 333– 34; Resolution 181, 80, 85, 92, 112, 225; Resolution 3379, 333; Tekoah at, 187–88 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), 75–79

373

United Torah Judaism, 224, 257, 340 universalism, 301–2, 311 University and College Union (UCU), 331–33 UNSCOP. See United Nations Special Committee on Palestine van der Hoeven, Jan Willem, 173–75 Varnavisky, Grigory Yefimovich, 198–99 VE Day, 39, 70 Verbitsky, Horacio, 158 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 145–47 Vespasian (emperor), 1–2 Victoria (queen), 89, 289 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 151–52 violence, 262, 327, 334. See also specific topics Voice of Israel, 187 Voices United for Israel, 172–73 Vudka, Yuri, 190–91 Wales, 280 war, 36, 80, 81, 181; Cold, 141–42; Falklands, 156–57, 164; Six-Day, 40, 104, 112, 183, 184–86, 203, 210, 220, 326; uncivil, 297–300; Yom Kippur, 104, 106, 119–20, 244. See also World War I; World War II war criminals, 160 War of Independence (1947-1948), 36, 80, 81, 96 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 95 Waskow, Arthur, 162 Webster, Nesta, 170 Weiss, Akiva, 6 Weizmann, Chaim, 9, 21, 68; Churchill, W., and, 94; against Herzl, 34–36; Jabotinsky with, 59–60; Judaism and, 35–36; on

374

Index

partition debate, 74; Sykes-Picot agreement and, 110 Wellington, Duke of, 289 Weltsch, Robert, 47–48 Wendehorst, Stephan E. C., 68–69 West Bank, 80, 112, 120, 127, 133; battle in, 326–27; Hamas and, 267; in Labour dissension, 113; Palestinian state in, 259–60; settlement in, 174–75, 246–47, 346; Sharon and, 246–47 White Nights (Begin), 127, 131 White Paper of 1939, 70–71 Wiesel, Elie, 185 Wilson, Harold, 281, 320–21 Witte, Sergei, 30 women, 122, 345; Dayan and, 118, 120 World Poale Zion, 38 World War I (WWI), 108–9; Egypt in, 9–11; Jewish soldiers in, 8–12; Soviet Jews and, 9, 13; Zionism and, 9–10, 68–69; Zion Mule Corps in, 10–12 World War II: British Jews and, 68–70; Shoah in, 69–70, 87, 183, 293; South Africa and, 146; VE Day, 39, 70 WWI. See World War I Wye Plantation talks, 253 Yadlin, Aharon, 158, 159 Yakobishvili, Ben-Zion, 187

Yassin, Ahmed, 259, 268–69 Yeivin, Yehoshua Hirsh, 14–15 Yellin-Mor, Natan, 137 Yishuv, 14, 37 Yisrael B’Aliyah, 344, 347–48 Yisrael Beiteinu, 344, 346–48, 350 Yom Kippur war (Ramadan War): Dayan and, 119–20; Nixon and, 104, 106; Sharon and, 244 Yosef, Ovadia, 344 Zalmanson, Sylva, 193, 196 Zangwill, Israel, 30–31 Zionism, 13; Agudat Yisrael and, 76–77; of Ahimeir, 133–34; of American Jews, 71; anti-, 295–96, 329; of Ben-Gurion, 36–42; colonialism and, 108; Corbyn and, 322–24; of Herzl, 29–30; of Hitler, 318–19; Irish and, 52–55; of Jabotinsky, 33–34; nationalism and, 27–28; orthodoxy and, 32–33; as racism, 333; WWI and, 9–10; WWII and, 68–69. See also Labour Zionism Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Nicosia), 44 Zionist Congress, xiv, 32–33, 35, 37, 40, 59 Zionist Organisation, 32 Zion Mule Corps, 10–12 Zuccotti, Susan, 50

About the Author

Colin Shindler is Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was the first Professor of Israel Studies in the UK and Founding Chair of the European Association of Israel Studies. He is the author of numerous books about Israel. His The Rise of the Israeli Right (2015) won the gold medal for 2016 in the annual Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s book prize. His recent publications include a second edition of his History of Modern Israel (2013) and Israel and the European Left (2012). His areas of expertise include both the Israeli Right as well as the European Left. He often contributes to the international media including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz.

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