Table Of ContentISRAEL: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS
Israeli History, Politics and Society
Series Editor: Efraim Karsh, King's College London
ISSN 1368-4795
Providing a multidisciplinary examination in all aspects, this series serves as a means
of communication between the various communities interested in Israel: academics,
policy-makers, practitioners, journalists and the informed public.
Other books in the series:
Peace in the Middle East: The Challenge for Israel
edited by Efraim Karsh
The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma
edited by Robert Wistrich and David Ghana
Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security
edited by Efraim Karsh
U.S.-Israeli Relations at the Crossroads
edited by Gabriel Sheffer
From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel's Troubled Agenda
edited by Efraim Karsh
Israel at the Polls 1996
edited by Daniel J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler
In Search of Identity: Jewish Aspects in Israeli Culture
edited by Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh
Israel: The Dynamics of Change and Continuity
edited by David Levi-Faur, Gabriel Sheffer and David Vogel
Revisiting the Yom Kippur War
edited by P.R. Kumaraswamy
Peacemaking in Israel after Rabin
edited by Sasson Sofer
Israel: The First Hundred
Years
Volume I
Israel's Transition from Community
to State
Editor
Efraim Karsh
First published 2000 by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park. Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. USA
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otherwise, without the prior writ/en permission of the publishm of this book.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Israel: the first hundred years
Vol. 1: Israel's transition from community 10 state. -
(Israeli history, politics and society; v. 9)
I. Nationalism - Israel 2. Israel - Politics and government
1. Karsh, Efraim
320.5'4'095694
ISBN 978-0·714·68024·8 (pbk)
ISSN 1368-4795
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
This group of studies fim appeared in a Special Issue on
'Israel's Transition from Community to State' of Israel Affairs 5/4 (Summer 1999)
Contents
Introduction Efraim Karsh 1
NATIONS, NATIONALISM AND STATE-BUILDING
Sacred Territories and National Conflict Anthony D. Smith 13
From 'State within a State' to State David Vital 32
From Civil Society to Sovereign State:
The Israeli Experience and the
Palestinian Quest Donna Robinson Divine 43
THE MAKING OF THE YISHUV
The Jews in Eretz-IsraeVPalestine:
From Traditional Peripherality to Modern Ruth Kark and
Centrality Joseph B. Glass 73
The Boundaries of Mandatory Palestine:
How the Past Influences the Future Gideon Biger 108
Zionism and Jerusalem - the Conflict of Priorities:
Changes in Zionist Settlement
in the Jerusalem Vicinity, 1937-48 Yossi Katz 120
Railways in Israel: The Past and the Future Walter Rothschild 144
The Hebrew Absorption of German Literature
in the Yishuv Na'ama Sheffi 158
The Ideological and Political Background
of the Israel Defence Forces Yaacov N. Goldstein 172
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
Jewish Armed Struggle in Palestine in the 1940s:
Its Impact on British Morale and Public Opinion Shaul Zadka 181
vi ISRAEL'S TRANSITION FROM COMMUNITY TO STATE
The Other Side of the Coin:
Arab Propaganda and the Battle against Zionism in
London, 1937-48 Rocy Miller 198
The Jewish and Arab Lobbies in Canada and the
UN Partition of Palestine Eliezer Tauber 229
Abstracts 245
Index 251
Introduction
EFRAIM KARSH
'At Basle I founded the Jewish State', Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on
3 September 1897, following the First Zionist Congress which he had
convened in the Swiss town. 'If I said this aloud today, I would be
answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty,
everyone will know it.' Precisely fifty years later, on 29 November 1947,
the United Nations' General Assembly passed a special resolution on the
partition of Mandatory Palestine into two independent states - one Jewish
and one Arab. On 14 May 1948, as the last British forces were leaving the
country, David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive,
declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
This achievement is all the more remarkable given the environment in
which the Jewish national movement had to operate. This included, inter
alia, obstacles raised by the reigning imperial power, be it the Ottoman or
the British empires; political and armed resistance by the Palestinians and
the Arab states; creation of nationwide social, political and economic
institutions; transforming the demographic balance within both
Mandatory Palestine and the Jewish People at large through a steady
growth; overcoming the devastating consequences of the Holocaust;
pushing the British out of Palestine and obtaining international acceptance
for the creation of a Jewish State; and, last but not least, protecting this
state from the concerted Palestinian and Arab attempt to abort it at birth.
The importance of restating these facts, especially at this particular
point in time, cannot be overstated. A century after Herzl's prophetic
words, with Israel celebrating its fiftieth year of independence and Middle
Eastern peace seemingly closer than ever, the Zionist saga has been turned
upside down by its detractors, with aggressors turned into hapless victims
and vice versa. The Jewish acceptance of Palestinian statehood, as
stipulated by the UN Partition Resolution, is completely ignored or
dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; the violent Palestinian and Arab attempt
to kill this resolution overlooked. It has even been suggested that the
Palestinians, rather than the Israelis, were the target of this concerted Arab
attack.1 More incredibly, Israel has been cast as the unlawful 'beneficiary'
of the Holocaust, and the Palestinians as its 'real victims' for allegedly
footing the bill for the West's presumed desire to atone for this genocidal
act through the establishment of a Jewish State.
The truth, of course, was quite different. Israel was established despite
2 ISRAEL'S TRANSITION FROM COMMUNITY TO STATE
the Holocaust and not because of it. The destruction of Central and East
European Jewry not only inflicted a devastating blow upon the Jewish
People: it also deprived the Zionist Movement of its foremost human
reservoir, not to speak of the vibrant Zionist activity and extensive
infrastructure operating there prior to the Second World War. Even by
the most conservative estimates Israel's population would now be
several times its present size had the extermination of six million
European Jews not taken place - something which would have entailed
far-reaching consequences for the development of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
On the other hand, those were the days of global decolonization. The
last of Europe's traditional overseas empires, Britain and France, were
losing their possessions in rapid succession to resurgent Mro-Asian
nationalism. And there is no conceivable reason why Britain would have
been able to resist Arab and Jewish nationalism in Palestine, or for that
matter in the wider Middle East, better than it did in any other part of
the world, not least since this region was a temporary rather than an
integral part of the British Empire. This in turn would have led to the
creation of a Jewish State as part of the worldwide decolonization
process, even if the Holocaust had never happened.
Nor did Israel sail to independence on a tidal wave of world
sympathy attending the Holocaust, but rather had to fight tooth and nail
to attain this goal. Those who were favourable to Jewish issues prior to
the Second World War, US President Harry Truman being an obvious
example, felt vindicated in their position in its wake; those who were
not, such as British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin, remained totally unmoved by the Holocaust. Hence
Bevin's (in)famous advice to the remnants of European Jewry not 'to get
too much at the head of the queue' in seeking a solution to their plight,
and his eagerness to resettle German Jewish survivors in the very
country which had just butchered six million of their brethren;2 hence
Attlee's preposterous comparison of Holocaust survivors seeking refuge
in Mandatory Palestine to Nazi troops bent on the subjugation of an
entire continent.3
Given such views, which were by no means confined to Attlee and
Bevin but were prevalent in both British and American defence and
foreign-policy establishments, it is scarcely surprising that the Holocaust
did not make the British Government amenable in the least to Jewish
national aspirations. The restrictions of the 1939 White Paper, which
made the future development of the Yishuv Uewish community in
Mandatory Palestine) captive to Arab whims, were thus kept in place,
and a naval cordon san ita ire was imposed around Palestine to prevent
Jewish immigration, in stark contrast to the UN Partition Resolution
and, indeed, to Britain's duty as the League of Nations Mandatory 'to
INTRODUCTION 3
facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage close settlement by Jews on
the land'. Of the 70,000 'illegal immigrants' who braved the British
naval blockade in the three-year period between the end of the war in
May 1945 and the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, only
2,500 managed to enter the Promised Land. The overwhelming majority
of these Holocaust survivors were herded for years in detention camps
in Cyprus, or returned to Germany, or incarcerated at the Atlit camp (in
Palestine) until granted entry permits from the minuscule monthly quota
assigned to Jewish immigrants.4
The British efforts to frustrate the will of the international
community, as expressed through the UN Partition Resolution, in favour
of creating an independent Jewish State in part of Mandatory Palestine,
were not confined to the prevention of immigration, the elixir of life of
the prospective Jewish State, up to their departure from Palestine;
indeed, they continued well after the establishment of the State of Israel.
As the occupying power of Palestine, Britain was far better poised than
any international actor to influence the country's future, and it had no
qualms about using all the arrows in its quiver to this end. These
included, inter alia, a relentless refusal to help the implementation of the
UN Partition Resolution;5 supply of weapons and technicaVadvisory
services to the Arab armies and a lax attitude towards the flow of
weapons from the neighbouring Arab states into Palestine, coupled with
a tight naval blockade aimed at preventing the arrival of weapons for the
Jews; non-recognition of the newly-established State of Israel for some
nine months and vehement opposition to its admission to the United
Nations; and sustained efforts to reduce Israel to a far smaller and
weaker state than that envisaged by the UN Partition Resolution -
despite the Foreign Office's keen awareness that 'life for the Jews in such
a small State would sooner or later become intolerable and it could be
eliminated altogether'. 6
That the Yishuv managed to surmount these obstructionist measures, as
well as the Palestinian-Arab concerted onslaught, is above all a testament
to its national cohesion and resilience. Indeed, in the late 1940s, the
Zionist Movement was the most effective anti-imperialist national
liberation movement in the Middle East, steadily pushing Britain out of
Palestine through a combined political and armed struggle which was to
leave a lasting scar on Anglo-Israeli relations for many years to come. In
the words of the veteran British diplomat, Sir Anthony Parsons: 'Many
of us, including myself, who spent the last years of the British Mandate
in Palestine will never recover fully from the shame and humiliation of
the dismal retreat in the spring of 1948'.7
Most regrettably, this fundamental fact has all too often been ignored
