ZIONIST "COLONIALISM": MYTH AND DILEMMA

...Not only the labor Zionists were troubled by contradiction...

...Railing against Zionism to a Jewish student circle, Parvus held up his jacket and pronounced upon the new international order...

...cit., p. 62...

...87-89...

...The "law" of uneven development is operating: any premature integration of the two societies would guarantee "colonialist" relations...

...But with regard to the reconciliation of Arabs to the Zionist project, no amount of "willing" could materialize the fable...

...its aim was the conquest of Palestinian land by European immigrants, just as settlers colonized and indeed raided most of Africa...

...therefore the exploitation of any native population would be impossible...

...The Negev was won by default...

...No one articulated the fundamental incongruities of the Zionist position better than Herzl himself...

...It must be emphasized, however, that Herzl and most of the other early Zionists did not believe modern anti-Semitism to be terribly mysterious...

...130 BERNARD AVISHAI orchestrated with great skill and wide support the development of a comprehensive and cooperative Jewish productive base...

...Many Jewish workers came to Palestine with all the arrogance of purveyors of progress, fantasizing about their common struggle with an imaginary Arab proletariat, and even inciting Arab mob reaction by pub12 Quoted from Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, London, 1972, p. 246...

...YASIR ARAFAT, speech to the United Nations' General Assembly, November 14, 1974 The Dreyfus affair was not uniquely the ordeal of Captain Dreyfus...

...Men do not make history just as they please...

...Davar, the daily newspaper...

...Although the lesson would be fully grasped only later on by the labor Zionist settlers, even at this point such liberal Zionist leaders as Herzl and Nordau could agree about the basic reasons for the failure of the famous Biluim settlements...

...and although Arabs were originally hired through labor exchanges guaranteeing equal wages, Arab wages are in fact not keeping pace with Jewish standards...

...Therefore the fundamental viability of traditional agricultural ZIONIST "COLONIALISM ": MYTH AND DILEMMA 129 society itself was greatly in question at the time of the Jewish National Fund's major land purchases...

...But Jewish colonialism is still a distant nightmare and will not materialize except as the self-fulfilled prophecy of Palestinian maximalists who still resist the very concept of Jewish national life...

...Even if the American colonists were moral cretins about the native population, this did not make them "colons," certainly not in the sense that Rodinson is trying to establish...

...From the New York Tribune, June 25, 1853...

...The image of a mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, so often promoted by modern critics of Zionism— and by hardline Israeli politicians such as Dayan who require this image to justify annexations of occupied territory—is simply a fantasy...

...For European Jews the period of the Dreyfus affair was a watershed of a different sort...

...Shikum," which plans and executes workers' housing...

...The Zionists, of course, built the Yishuv through settlement on the land and, in acquiring this land, displaced from 3,000 to 30,000 peasant fellahin (depending upon which statistics you use...

...The great European languages would be spoken, while Yiddish (and presumably Arabic) would have to earn a status equal to them...

...The penetration of Palestine by independent Jewish settlers would have been quite impossible in any conceivable sovereign Arab state, no matter how primitive...

...Few Arabs read Altneuland...

...Nor can one deny the obvious fact that the Zionist effort would probably have been quite futile had Palestine not been subject to a foreign power...

...Since they obviously did not establish themselves as the colonialist masters of the laboring Arab majority, did the Jews expropriate, slaughter, and destroy the population they found in Palestine...

...Jewish capitalists who hired from the huge pool of comparatively cheap Arab labor were picketed and closed down by Jewish workers, often despite the intervention of the British Army...

...No doubt the Jewish workers were motivated in part by the fear that, as in Russia's Pale of Settlement, they would be rendered superfluous by the illiterate and less demanding peasants...

...he despised the Kaisers and Sultans whom he had to court and hoped to exploit...

...The Zionists often did not appreciate that social revolution encouraged by "foreigners" can easily be misconstrued as cultural repression...

...lishing articles and pamphlets heralding the Arab revolution...

...Ben Gurion's major theoretic work, Memaamad Learn (From Class to Nation) is the defense of precisely this principle...

...its sole content seemed to be a savage labor discipline that had to be opposed if only on moral grounds...

...the wool in this coat was taken from Angora...

...The New Society would be, moreover, a model of Millian democracy...

...These Zionists adopted with great enthusiasm the penetrating critique of Europe supplied by the radical milieu while swallowing, often apolo3See Marie Syrkin's memoir, Nachman Syrkin, New York, 1961, pp...

...28-44...

...5 The prevention of colonialist relations with the Arabs would be viewed as a pragmatic imperative as much as a moral ideal...

...But this industrial strategy was rather a stubborn attempt to found a socialist society within the space of a traditional Arab society that did not share socialist aspirations, or, failing this, at least to spike the evolution of Jewish colonialist tendencies...

...Palestine was a backwater of a dying empire where local "bourgeoisaristocrats" were striving to replace the Turkish administration at the apex of a despotic, quasi-feudal pyramid and where the political ambitions of the Zionists could not be easily harmonized with those of Arab political elites...

...All of Europe seemed torn from the liberal moorings so painfully acquired in the middle of the century...

...At present Arab social and economic standards on the West Bank and in Gaza (and how much more so in the refugee camps of Lebanon) lag far behind those of Israel...

...The cultural and educational activities of the Histadrut are undertaken by the Mercaz Lechinukh, the school system...

...the Mercaz Hacooperatzia, the center for transport and industrial producers cooperatives...

...The Jews determined to do their own work and avoid basing the economic viability of their Yishuv on cheap Arab labor...

...The Peel Commission reports that all were successfully relocated within Palestine...

...Herzl, who only a few years before had fantasized about a magnanimous conversion of Jewish children to Christianity, now watched despondently as liberal, cosmopolitan Europe seemed to collapse in a tide of racist hysteria...

...Monopoly capitalism had forged an international division of labor and in so doing seemed to have rendered all narrow national concerns obsolete...

...The separatist industrial strategy of the Yishuv concentrated on the construction of an independent Jewish political and economic infrastructure...

...Nor did he neglect to grapple with the problem of colonialism itself...

...Palestinian "guerrillas" reveal a macabre moral inadequacy when they ZIONIST "COLONIALISM": MYTH AND DILEMMA 133 attack school children, but they reveal perhaps more sharply the insincerity of their revolutionary claims...

...3 The hatred of left-wing Zionists for all that was retrograde in bourgeois Europe was at the very core of their peculiar nationalism...

...Rodinson therefore is driven to the argument that Jewish separatism was the definitive proof of Jewish colonialism...

...fact understood the issue exactly backwards...

...But the Zionists operated within this political context no more comfortably than nationalist Arab leaderships and, on the whole, with far less success...

...Why else, indeed, were the effendis so eager to sell...

...Besides, Herzl maintained, Palestine was virtually "empty"—a contention that would later create great embarrassment for Herzlian Zionists but was at the time not all that far from the mark: Palestine was in fact greatly underpopulated at the turn of the century, largely because of the economic stagnation and political repression imposed by a Turkish administration wary of Arab sympathy for the "entente powers...

...Jewish nationalism and radical anticolonialism are thus the linked stepchildren of the same bleak history: both movements evolved political goals in response to the same historic conditions that aroused in democrats and Jews (often the same people) such bitter skepticism about the survival of democratic ethics in bourgeois, Christian Europe...

...Finally, the Balfour Declaration, granting as it did a virtual veto on Jewish immigration to the Arab leadership, was more the forerunner of anti-Jewish policies—such as the White Paper—than of Jewish independence...

...Imperialism now seemed the project of huge cartels whose colonial agents aimed only at securing more profitable outlets for capital investments and "overproduced" commodities...

...The Zionists were neither colons nor cruel...

...The socialist Zionists, for example, were truly persuaded that the market society had staying power and would provide no solution to the social and economic vulnerability of the Jews...

...a genuine meritocracy in which opportunity was equal, civil liberties safeguarded, and public service a reluctantly accepted privilege (like the secretaryship of a kibbutz...

...When Nachman Syrkin visited an early kibbutz in 1920, he was startled to find that most members of the young settlement opposed producing an economic surplus in order to avoid the exploitation that was presumed to obtain in commerce with the neighboring Arabs...

...Clearly the aim, for the great majority of Zionists, was national reconstruction upon a territory and not—although this is being increasingly forgotten—the redemption of some historical "promise...

...No doubt, although this dispfacement was achieved by legal land purchase from absentee effendi landlords, it created tremendous immediate suffering for the families involved...

...In 1938 the Palestine Partition Commission reported that the average-size farm of Arab tenant farmers was approximately 57 dunams, which, given their average technological standard, was dangerously small for supporting a single family...

...Their crime was that they were Israelis, not that they were colons...

...From 1922 to 194.7 the Arab population of Palestine rose about 100 percent—from 565,000 to 1,200,000...

...ZIONIST "COLONIALISM": MYTH AND DILEMMA 131 The anti-Zionist reaction that developed very early and gained great momentum in the 1930s was hardly an expression of revolutionary resistance to colonial domination...

...But this will not do...

...Within a few years of his first trial, a collection of dissenting groups—liberals, socialists, and Zionists—had become his champions, primarily because they admired him for his enemies...

...This realistic separation, moreover, need not preclude cooperative or federative relations between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs in the future...

...The radicals who (often grudgingly) took up Dreyfus's defense perceived that they were equally vulnerable to the powerful alliance that, at least for the time, was aimed against the unlikely Captain...

...In fact, until it became obvious that the symbols of "Eretz Yisrael" were indispensable for harnessing the energies of the Jews in Eastern Europe—still culturally fixated by the orthodox liturgy, although more and more attracted to radical solutions—most "Zionists," including Herzl and Syrkin, were eager to take on any territory at all...

...and, Hevrat Ovsdim, the centralizing institution of economic and social branches...

...Credit Cooperatives—loans and savings funds for workers...

...For weather-vane liberals such as Hobson, Morel, Clemenceau, and Emile Duclaux, the ascendence of reactionary forces, linked to repressive colonialist policies, shattered the image of a self-regulating market society that might encourage democratic practice...

...Boneh, the contracting cooperative [which would become the largest construction firm in the Middle East—B.A...

...It mattered little to these Arab elites that the Zionists came, not as agents or allies of European imperialism, but as Jews fearful that they were to be the chief victims of a Europe going mad...

...Beyond these considerations, other points stand out...

...By contrast, when Herzl finally gets down to his vision of the "New Society"—the name alone suggests the criteria by which he insisted the Jewish national home be judged—he exhibits all the monotonous righteousness of a Thomas More: economic development would be coordinated by a planning commission committed to the "national interest...

...every foreign adventure became suspect as a particularly rapacious business operation...

...Most of the land—the Huleh Valley, the Eastern Jezreel Valley, and the Bet Shean Valley—was reclaimed from swamp...

...Ohel, the workers' theatre...

...Today, after ten years of unprecedented industrial growth, only about 70 percent of domestic consumption (including military hardware) is produced in Israel...

...Almost out of breath, Himadeh then halflaments: Arab labor organization, as compared with Jewish, is still at an early stage of development...

...Secretary of the Higher Arab Council Jamal Husseini testified petulantly before the Royal Commission in 1937: As to the Communist principles and ideas of Jewish immigrants, most repugnant to the religion, customs, and ethical principles of this country, which are imported and disseminated, I need not dwell upon them, as these ideas are well-known to have been imported by the Jewish Community...

...Armies and navies were mushrooming in the service of these imperial ventures...

...13 Furthermore, the Israeli economy as a whole has become so dependent upon American 13See my "Israel: The Threat from the Right," the New York Review, May 16, 1973...

...Palestinian terrorists seem incapable of appreciating not only the inherent morality but even the reality of Jewish economic and social independence...

...Since 1967 the Israeli economy has, to be sure, strayed considerably from the ambitious principles of "Jewish laboring...

...Only after it became obvious '°0p...

...Some form of repartition of historic Palestine—acceptable to Palestinian national aspirations and Israeli security considerations— must now be placed on the agenda in Geneva or elsewhere...

...There is, of course, no denying that the strategy of the Yishuv's leadership and (to a greater degree) the subsequent scourge of war have exacted a heavy toll from Palestinian Arabs...

...European antiSemitism helped provoke Jewish dreams of independence in Palestine, just when Arab elites were becoming determined to kick out all Europeans...

...Ironically, Herzl could not foresee any need for army service...

...This insight was first articulated by Achad Haam in 1899, but Syrkin and his young protegees in Palestine—Ben Gurion, Ben Tzvi, and Shazar—would eventually transform it into the animating dogma of the Yishuv (Jewish population): i.e., socialism among Jewish settlers must presuppose the reconstitution of a Jewish nation in Palestine...

...West European Jews with what came to seem their failing attempt at assimilation...

...Today Arabs and Jews can still be reconciled to one another in historic Palestine precisely because the intended result of Zionist policies has been substantially achieved' and class domination of one people by the other avoided...

...It is, on the contrary, because the Zionists did not come as profiteers to Palestine, because they rejected established exploitative relations, that traditional Arab elites felt so deeply threatened...

...7 Having dispensed with the "imperialist link," I now want to argue that colonization is not the same as colonialism...

...Indeed, the maintenance of separate political entities—assuming Palestinian Arabs are permitted and willing to get down to the painful task of economic development—is a precondition for whatever "binational" harmony may someday be possible...

...126 BERNARD AVISHAI getically, the profound contradiction implied in their separatist hunt for an overseas territory...

...Hasneh, providing general insurance coverage...

...It was the separatist, socialist, and hence corrosive ethos of the Yishuv in Palestine that could not be accepted...

...There would be no Jewish colons...

...it was spun in England, woven in Lodz...

...Beginning with the formation of the kvutzot, the kibbutz movement, and the Histadrut (the general federation of Jewish labor) in the 1920s, and culminating with the struggle for "Jewish Laboring" in the mid-1930s, socialist leaders—Ben Gurion, Ben-Tzvi, Katznelson— 90p...

...government patronage and American Jewish capital that the pretensions of the early kibbutzim to self-sufficiency appear now as a cruel joke...

...The effendis and muftis would no doubt have been eager to accommodate such Jews in the "pores" of this quasi-feudal society, so long as these new settlers would reciprocate with recognition of the political preeminence and the religious-cultural authority of existing Arab elites—and, of course, with a piece of the economic action...

...N. Brailsford's apt name for the European conflagration he foresaw) was already being plotted, in an atmosphere of panic and chauvinism...

...A number of Arab unions have been formed but few of them have been active...

...The young Jewish pioneers, who had come to Palestine to take up a national challenge, found themselves increasingly transformed into Arabic-speaking overseers of Arab labor and finally grew disgusted...

...228-29...

...Rodinson unyieldingly concludes that this condescension was a feature of Jewish colonialism, forgetting that colonialist administrations, although their members privately denigrate the "natives," thrive precisely on the preservation of primitive practices...

...The great powers (even America...

...And it is a fitting vindication of the obstinate, indispensable foresight of socialist Zionists that arguments in favor of political partition can still be put to work...

...Ten years ago, Israel produced about 80 percent of her needs...

...Jewish and Arab nationalisms were apparently fated to clash for reasons far transcending the concrete relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine...

...Those "Biluim" who remained became preoccupied with the viability of their vineyard enterprises and lacked the social cohesion that would prove to be an indispensable condition for the revival of the national language, Hebrew, and of the Jewish culture for which Hebrew would be a major instrument...

...Although it reinforced the suspicion of Europe's radicals toward nationalist appeals and colonial arrangements, the anti-Semitism unleashed by the alleged treachery of a Jewish officer drove thousands of Jews toward openly nationalist solutions and even colonial scheming...

...that "fraternal cooperation" between Arab and Jewish workers could not succeed did the Zionist labor movement adopt its new tactic—Avodah Ivrit (Jewish Laboring...

...Clearly defensive about his advocacy of a new colonial project just when stories of horrible cruelty inflicted by whites during the Boer War were reaching the "salons," Herzl was eager to anticipate criticism...

...Most Arabs understandably saw "Jewish Laboring" as an exclusivist (even racist) plan to deny Arabs their livelihood...

...those who did, feared for their way of life...

...The Zionist project was perceived as a European outpost: a relic of foreign domination and a challenge to stirred-up Arab xenophobia and nationalism...

...After all, no private interests would foul the public good...

...First of all, only a relatively small portion (between 25 and 30 percent) of the land that the Jews settled was acquired by purchase...

...But seen in the context of the other achievements and goals of the Zionist labor movement, including violently rebuffed attempts to organize Arab workers, "Jewish Laboring" made sense as a revolutionary tool...

...cit., pp...

...These had been founded in the 1880s and, even with Rothschild's extensive support, quickly became demoralized, losing many of their original members...

...This puts the Jewish state in a class with Taiwan with regard to American economic leverage...

...Israel today employs regularly about 70,000 Arabs from the occuped territories in construction, industry, and agriculture...

...If Zionist development strategy is to be criticized for the dislocations and injury it inflicted upon the Arab population of Palestine, it ought to be also appreciated for the miseries it prevented (another Algeria...

...The "new imperialism"—as Hobson dubbed it— had neither progressive features nor Christian mission...

...It might be credibly argued, in fact, that an imminent Palestinian Arab "enclosure movement," far more devastating to small Arab peasants than the Yishuv, was forestalled by these very purchases, and that those peasants who retained their land quickly benefited from superior Jewish technology...

...This fact enabled leftist critics of Zionism, such as Maxime Rodinson,s to allege an inextricable connection between Zionism and imperialism—in order to promote a critical perspective on Israel within the Middle East conflict...

...Jews would therefore have to take up the international struggle for socialism and democracy only after they solved their own special problems...

...But no matter how imperiled Israeli socialism has become—mainly owing to the fitful industrial booms and depressions, and labor "hard-hattism," resulting from periodic wars—this has little to do with the reality of the Yishuv or the ideological content of Zionism...

...4 The "emptiness" of Palestine was not crucial for Herzl, since the Jewish national home would anyway strive to be a paragon of cosmopolitan values...

...and the "war for steel and gold" (H...

...The Jews, it is essential to grasp, were perceived as a foreign body, not because they came from another continent, but because they were the self-conscious catalyst of modernization in Palestine and so became the focus of reactionary resistance to it...

...125 evident...

...but the dialectical possibilities for liberal progress in the colonies— free property relations, a genuine market in labor, an "end to national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness"—which Marx had attributed to the imperial experience, seemed little ' As with Marx: "whatever may have been the crimes of England [in Hindustan] she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about [social] revolution...

...were locked in a frantic competition to plunder the resources, labor, and economic surplus of African, Asian, and Latin-American "natives...

...Hobson and Lenin both understood the difference between refugees and imperial adventurers—the former coming to establish a self-sufficient community, the latter to dominate and exploit, an existing one for metropolitan benefit...

...Yakhin, contracting for the plantation and management of citrus groves...

...land would be publicly owned, workers' cooperatives encouraged and private ownership controlled although market incentives would be retained...

...Ironically, it was the very success of Jewish anticolonialism that proved to be the greatest historic impediment to peaceful Arab-Jewish relations...

...His alter ego in the book, Dr...

...The Yishuv was from its inception perceived by the Arabs of Palestine as a spin-off of "European imperialism," and, no doubt, Herzl's grandstanding with imperial potentates—whether the Sultan or the Colonial Office—did little to dispel this perception...

...This is precisely the period during which Zionism was born...

...Most of these people, however, were compensated by receiving other lands or became wage-earners in Palestine's newly energetic economy...

...The "myopia" of Zionists was rather generated by their all-too-enthusiastic acceptance of radical dogma, sanctioning only those national projects that promise to hasten democratic and socialist vitality...

...and Herzl's melodrama dwells broodingly on their apparent defeat...

...290-99...

...In his revealing work Altneuland (1902), Herzl emerges as a confounded Viennese "progressive" far more than a Jewish nationalist...

...128 BERNARD AVISHAI the fate of Palestine, as it did every other Middle Eastern and African country...

...71bid., pp...

...Naturally these figures on employment and American economic leverage provide potent ammunition for leftish polemics against the Jewish state (and make for sleepless nights among Israeli socialists...

...the Jews, on the contrary, would provide a model of self-determination for the Arabs of Palestine and even for the 4See Desmond Stewart's "Herzl's Journeys in Palestine and Egypt," in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Kuwait University, Spring 1974, pp...

...For better or for worse—for Jews, better—Israel has elaborate roots of its own...

...The hero's profound ennui results directly from his reflection upon the betrayal of equality and liberty by the bureaucrats running the Austro-Hungarian empire...

...Rodinson stumbles onto an important insight—he could hardly have missed it—without appreciating its significance: the Zionists came, not to dominate the inhabitants of Palestine, but to control sufficient land to facilitate the creation of an independent Jewish society, i.e., one in which Jews would be a majority...

...Quite deviously, Rodinson stretches the term "colonialism" to account for this phenomenon, also invoking the example of the brutal colonization of the New World...

...It was obvious to Lowenberg that the Jewish stake in the victory of democratic values cut deep...

...The British, unlike the Jews, made a great show of admiration for Arab political culture...

...And it was a short hop from this opinion to the revolutionary theories of Lenin and Luxemburg: European colonialism might be effectively challenged only by colonial liberation movements charged with a measure of socialist internationalism...

...One can only wish with Rodinson that this were really the point...

...political choices are at best the decision to grapple with one set of problems and not with another...

...Hamashibir Hamercazi, consumer cooperatives for Jewish workers...

...Israelis are not subject to the strategic weaknesses of a colonialist ruling class, and one reason is that their fathers determined not to become one...

...Moreover, the Arab population of Palestine enjoyed the highest birthrate in the Arab world, partly because of much higher wages, but also because of the Kupat Holim health care extended to them (while their reproduction rate remained that of a peasant society...

...by stretching the term he destroys its descriptive value...

...Bourgeois societies were swaggering to the corners of the globe...

...The refugee camps are a human tragedy and a political powder keg...

...the buttons came from Germany, the thread from India...

...Market society, Borochov argued, was indefinitely mired in complex class conflicts, of which anti-Semitic scape-goating was a predictable result...

...The Jewish Yishuv came to be despised by the Arab leadership, and hence by the Arab masses, not because of Zionist colonialist practice, but precisely because of Zionist anticolonialist practice...

...Rodinson and similar "pathfinders," like Ernest Mandel and Isaac Deutscher, have in 'Said B. Himadeh, The Economic Organization of Palestine, Beirut, 1938, pp...

...The displacement of some Arab fellahin was less important than the fear that the traditional peasant society itself was to be displaced...

...This was actually a familiar pattern throughout the rest of the Arab world where Jews were shown a measure of tolerance and respect...

...But Rodinson would not find such an evaluation to be a useful weapon...

...The Pilgrim colonists, like the Zionist pioneers, were not "colonialist...

...But their attempt to ape Algeria's FLN with revolutionary rhetoric and the more sensationalist motions of "guerrilla war" is bound to be disappointed...

...Government officials, easily bought off by "special interests," channeled national resources into the extension of empire and the support of brutal colonial administrations...

...and so on, until Syrkin wryly observed that the rip in the sleeve had no doubt come from Kiev...

...The Zionist settlers, unlike the large yet economically primitive and politically inconspicuous orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem and Safed, seemed strange and unwelcome intruders...

...45-51...

...Sole...

...No doubt, this has been largely responsible for the enthusiasm Israeli leaders have shown—particularly before October 1973—for the protection of other American interests in the Middle East...

...But Rodinson's rhetorical connection between Zionism and imperialism is not quite as irritating as are his cryptic allegations about Zionist "colonialism "—based on the obvious fact that Palestine was "colonized" by Jews...

...He was a nationalist to whom nationalism seemed vulgar...

...Most Arabs were attracted to Palestine during this period because of the vigorous commercial and industrial life developed by Jewish immigrants, and because of the lucrative Jewish market...

...Programs for settling in Argentina, Texas, and Uganda were promoted at various times...

...Even those socialists who had been disposed to view imperialism with profound ambivalence began to reassess their attitudes...

...See Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, Cambridge (England), 1970...

...This was of course a vulgar interpretation of Marxian economics—" exploitation" occurs in production, not in exchange...

...But instead of ascribing to the Yishuv a character it never possessed—indeed set out not to possess— Arab leaders must come to grips with its concrete reality...

...Continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza demeans Palestinian national potential...

...The despair that seized Herzl at the Dreyfus trial epitomized the widespread impatience of 'See Hannah Arendt's fascinating account, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today," in Essays on AntiSemitism, New York, 1946...

...Achdut Haavoda and Shomer Hatzair committed themselves to socialist binationalism—the latter abandoning this principle only in 1948...

...Nor should it be forgotten that the mere promise of a Jewish National Home contained in the Balfour Declaration was promulgated during those same years that "British imperialism" actually created the three new Arab states of Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, mainly as reward for the Hashemite clan's support in World War I; and that this support was no more sincere or decisive than that given the Jewish Legion during that war...

...the employment fund for Histadrut workers...

...Despite Weizmann's stubborn commitment to the "British connection," Arab elites were far more closely patronized by the Mandate government and the Colonial Office, and so indeed the Jewish settlers were finally driven to expel the British administration...

...and Hapoel, the workers' sport organization...

...It was a clash of two national movements, each promoting widely divergent images of human society...

...Were it not for this historical fact, the political autonomy of Jews and Palestinian Arabs would be impossible even in principle: How (unless one is the South African foreign minister) could one fathom the peaceful coexistence 132 BERNARD AVISHAI of two nations, each presumably exercising sovereignty and cultural independence to the extent that the modern world permits, if the two form a single productive structure in which one nation commands property and the other does the labor...

...the Arab population of the area that became Israel almost quadrupled between 1918 and 1947...

...This apprehension was intensified by a widely held conviction that the attack on Dreyfus was but the domestic side effect of a much larger and more ominous trend in international affairs...

...The "imperialists" appeared to be prostituting the foundations of democratic life in the Republic...

...Social tranquillity in Palestine would be underpinned by mutually advantageous business relations, assuring the progress of the Moslem inhabitants (such as Lowenberg's devoted friend, Reshid Bey), and Jewish science, prosperity, and liberalism would serve as a catalyst for Arab modernization...

...One recalls the poignant confrontation between Parvus, already a well-known Menshevik theoretician, and Nachman Syrkin, a mentor of labor Zionism, which occurred while the two young men were studying in Berlin...

...Lowenberg, is bitterly estranged from the decadence of the new imperial bourgeoisie yet remains loyal to the cosmopolitan promise of "European civilization...

...Exhorted by their influential socialist theoreticians, the builders of the Yishuv determined to avoid the creation of a new South, Africa, and they did avoid it—often at great immediate sacrifice...

...The Israeli labor establishment appears exhausted and more eager to accommodate a politically strengthened Israeli bourgeoisie than to reimpose those restrictions upon which its power and moral authority originally rested...

...and the oil blackmail of the sheiks, when directed against America and Europe (as a result of which millions of Asians are starving), may be hailed as third-world antiimperialism...

...Mercaz Letarbut, the adult cultural organization...

...This was far more perplexing than a conflict over land...

...Separatism was an instrument, not an end in itself...

...2 If the time of imperialism provided the context for the Dreyfus affair, the anti-Semitism of the mob was its obvious content...

...But in a persistent flood of sophistry such distinctions blur...

...But the attitude was an appropriate, if somewhat humorous, precursor of other self-imposed restraints by which the Jews sought to avoid the violation of the Arab communities in Palestine, while earning instead Arab suspicion and contempt...

...The Yishuv can and ought to be evaluated by the same moral criteria that made the American example so reprehensible...

...This same point might be argued from a different angle...

...This plodding self-development was so genuinely impressive, that Said B. Himadeh, an economist at American University (of Beirut), related admiringly: Economic and social activities of the Histadrut are performed by the following main organizations: the Workers Bank, which was established in 1921 with the aid of the Zionist Organization...

...Moreover, the Jewish National Fund purchased land at such inflated values that many Arab small-holders who might otherwise have lost their property found a new and vital source of collateral for the purchase of labor-saving (and hence land-saving) equipment...

...The Jewish question had suddenly returned...

...Herzl's Altneuland was therefore more prophetic than any document so unoriginal had a right to be...

...the Nir Company, granting long-term loans to agricultural settlements...

...Herzl's suspicion of conventional colonial models reflected not only a newly popular radical morality but also the disappointing experience of earlier attempts at Jewish settlement in Palestine...

...This new view of imperialism quickly became a conventional wisdom among socialists...

...12 Not surprisingly, Jamal Husseini himself was no laborer...

...and the political possibilities it created...

...The massive paradox of the Yishuv is surely that had the Jews attempted to penetrate Palestine as adventurer capitalists intent on the economic and political oppression of Arabs—the process for which the term colonialism was invented—they (the Jews) probably would have created little fuss...

...Kupat Holim, health insurance...

...He was an avid promoter of colonization who was revolted by the inhumanity of existing colonial arrangements...

...22-23...

...For the openly condescending attitude of the labor Zionists toward cherished Arab cultural values—fundamentalist and fatalist religious precepts, accepted notions of political legitimacy and class privilege—did not help matters...

...Children, if they are Jewish, may be killed in the name of democracy...

...They saw its recurrence as but a fragment of a larger problem whose universalist solutions, although compelling, seemed remote and utopian...

...The victims of MaalotJewish and Arab—were clearly not constituents of some exploitative apparatus...

...Israel will not be shaken out of Palestine like some ripe olive from a tree...

...Of course, "imperialism" dominated 6lsrael: A Colonial Settler State ?, New York, 1973, pp...

...Truva cooperative society which markets all products of all Histadrut agricultural centers...

...The problem of cheap native labor was attacked in part by (Jewish) attempts to organize Arab labor, but .. . these attempts met with little success.' ° What had been clear to Himadeh is fudged by Rodinson...

...The Zionist settlers made a choice that, for all its shortcomings, has provided and still provides the two peoples of historic Palestine with genuine opportunity...

...War, not Zionism, is driving Israel step by step, expediency by expediency, to particular colonialist policies...

...The point of this analysis is, however, not to provide some leftish moral sanction to Zionism and the Yishuv, but to probe to the nerves of the present conflict...

...ZIONIST "COLONIALISM": MYTH AND DILEMMA 127 blacks of Africa ("all peoples need a home...

...The New Society, he asserted, would be braced by proletarian virtues—selfreliance, discipline, and cooperation...

...So the socialist Left began to argue, abandoning Marx's more cautious understanding of modernization and its slowly evolving preconditions...

...The bitterness revealed in Jamal Husseini's testimony is therefore greatly revealing...

...9 but here he is both confusing and confused...

...Many Arabs simply did not understand the Jewish settlers...