Fb2 Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Studies in Jewish History) ePub

Little did I know when I began reading Anita Shapira’s monumental study in June, 2014 that events in the Middle East would provide an extra incentive for acquiring the knowledge imparted in these pages. Although Shapira’s book is tough reading due to her thorough and detailed description of the evolution of leading Zionists’ approach to the use of force from the beginning of the modern re-settlement of Palestine by Jews to Independence in 1947, the central thesis is clear and relatively undisputable.

Shapira describes how each major settlement group (of which there were five) viewed the fact that the land they were immigrating to was not barren of human population. Colored by their experience in the countries they had left––mainly Eastern Europe where the promise of equality was repeatedly quashed and lives taken, those who came to Palestine to re-claim the land promised to Abraham for most part rationalized away the potential problem their presence represented to the Arabs who were living there.

A few facts need to be stated for those not well-versed in the history of this region. First, there were Jews already living in Palestine when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the 1880s. Second, Palestine was never an independent, self-governing nation. From the time of the first modern settlers through World War I, the region was part of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, the British and French divided the region, the British being given a mandate to govern what was called Palestine. Third, a form of Arab nationalism emerged over time, but there is no evidence that the notion of one’s being a Palestinian Arab coalesced before Independence. That doesn’t mean the Arabs living in Palestine were neutral to growing Jewish settlement. The problem is that Shapira does not report how they viewed what was happening around them. While most Arabs seemed to ignore the influx of Jews, some reacted negatively. Shapira doesn’t tell us whether their hostility was a reflection of religious teachings that cast Jews along with Christians as infidels, was it distrust of people who differed in so many ways, or whether it had some other basis?

We do know that early Jewish settlers did not see their arrival as a threat to the Arab population. They projected an alliance reflecting the potential for economic development to lift Arab boats as well as their own. The settlers bought land, hired Arab laborers when there weren’t enough Jews to do the work, and, since many settlers were socialists, hoped poor Arabs would develop class consciousness. One thing these settlers did not do is view themselves as colonialists, although after World War I when the treaty of Versailles granted Palestine to the British, it’s likely many Arabs saw the settlers through that prism.

In the early years, faced with occasional attacks by random Arab groups, the settler community developed an ideology Shapira called the defensive ethos, which viewed the use of force by Jews to protect their communities as a necessary evil. That view shifted over time as generations of Jews born in Palestine came to view military capabilities as necessary to their survival. This offensive ethos contributed to the fact that Jews of Palestine were prepared psychologically to defend their home land when in 1947 the British mandate was divided into two nations.

Shirpira’s history is geared towards scholars. She does offer important lessons, however, for the non-scholar, including the fact that the Holocaust did little to change the settler community’s belief that independence would most have to be achieved by military means. By the time word of what was going on in Hitler’s concentration camps reached that community, the majority were already prepared to fight to protect what they had established as well as to protect the right of Jews throughout the world to join them. In other words, the world’s reaction to the Holocaust lent official status to an existing situation––i.e., 650,000 Jews who felt their claim to the land they occupied was equal, if not superior, to that of their Arab neighbors.

Some may feel the absense of references to the Arab point of view in Land and Power is a weakness. Is that because there are few written sources available or because she was unable to access them? I believe the former to be the case. As a result, Shapira is forced to interpret how Arabs living in Palestine viewed the growing Jewish settlement primarily by interpreting the extent to which Zionist leaders viewed the Arab population as a threat.

What can we learn about today’s crisis from reading Shapira? Palestine Arabs whose heritage went back generations had justifiable grounds in 1948 for being unhappy with partition. For some it meant leaving their homes or living once more under “foreign” rule. Did that unhappiness justify going to war? Were other options considered?

Arab hostility to Jews began as individual attacks––crimes of robbery and murder––and evolved into more serious riots and eventually military actions. Shapira doesn’t explain this pattern which began when Jews were a tiny minority, but for the Israel of today the reason doesn’t matter. Israel must deal with the consequences and they are.

Americans who judge Israel negatively might want to reflect on our own past. Placing our history of dealing with the native populations against that of Israel’s ought to give us pause. After the Civil War we waged war against the tribes that lived in areas we coveted killing women and children as well as warriors, eventually reducing the survivors to reservation captives. Israel allows equal rights to non-Jewish residents and although some Palestinian Arabs have been driven from their homes, that has largely been a response to Israel’s being under attack.

Shapira reports that some settlers feared teaching the young the art of warfare would harm the community. Violence tends to drive out moderation and to beget more violence, but moderation doesn’t always lead to peace. We learn from history that the choices people make are not pre-determined. Being aware of choices is the first step to avoid falling back on options that yield negative results. Perhaps after the War of 2014, Palestinian Arabs will reflect on the choices they have made in the past and decide to try a different approach. We can always hope.

I learned a lot about the political issues and social fabric of Mandate Palestine. The translation is smooth and the book reads well. The author's political views color her understanding and analysis of the more right wing politicians and figures - as long as you're aware of it and sensitive to it, you can still get a lot out of this book. I did.

Illuminating and critical, up to a point. Shapira is still too willing to explain away the Zionist language of "conquest" that predates any serious manifestations of Palestinian nationalism. She reliably characterizes every aggressive, violent act by Jews, even before World War I as a "response" to Arab hostility, never an expression of reflexive European superiority. All of this, one suspects, reflects her commitment to the orthodox "labor Zionist" view of their own history.

In spite of the extreme popularity of the subject, there are surprisingly few scholarly works about Zionism. Much of the material that has been produced has paid more attention to political correctness than historical accuracy.

I am glad to say that this book is a serious and scholarly work.

The book starts by explaining the extent to which the Jews of the early nineteenth century had spent centuries as non-belligerents and pacifists. This was due in part to an aversion of war and to an even greater extent on the fact that the Jews were a defeated people who were not permitted to hold weapons. The book then examines how such a humiliated people finally acquired the willingness, ability, and nerve to defend itself and finally even attack its enemies.

Shapira starts with the development of a "defensive ethos" in the Levant, from 1881 to 1921. The next segment of the book tells of the defensive ethos at work from 1921 to 1936. The remainder tells of the trials of the Jews in the Levant from 1936 to 1947 that led at first to use of force by irregulars and finally to military offenses approved of by the representatives of the population at large.

As Shapira explains, at first, this use of force against the Arab pogroms of 1936 was confined to the Irgun, which represented a small minority of the Jews of the Levant, and an even smaller splinter group from the Irgun, namely the Stern Gang. The majority had a policy of "self-restraint." This continued even after the perfidious British White Paper of 1939 shifted the Jewish population to almost total insistence on the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. However, after World War 2, when British policy became even more unbalanced in favor of Arab aggression, the majority started to approve of counterattacks, starting in October, 1945. While the counterattacks by the majority ended in 1946, the stage had been set for military action. In April, 1948, that action was taken, and what became the Israeli army the following month went into action to actively relieve the siege of Jerusalem. As Shapira points out in her introduction, in 1982 Israeli forces even went into action in Lebanon as a matter of "choice." For the first time in many, many centuries, Jews had fought an offensive military action as Jews without believing that they needed to do so at once simply to survive. The transition from a humiliated people that neither was able to fight nor wished to do so to one that was willing and able to fight was finally accomplished.

One interesting point that Shapira makes has to do with the Shoah or Holocaust. The slaughter of millions of European Jews was a disaster for the Jews of the Levant. It was also an embarrassment that so many Jews appeared to go to their deaths "as sheep to the slaughter." Shapira discusses the effect of having the Jews appear so weak and hapless on this occasion, and how this helped to catalyze the transition of the Jews to a people that were willing to fight. But Shapira shows that the establishment of Israel was not a direct result of the Holocaust. "It is possible to imagine," says Shapira, "that if the Holocaust had not occurred, the pressure of many more millions of living Jews would not have been inferior to the moral weight of the martyred dead."