History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

the mufti’s doing, and in the long run it was the failure to negotiate directly with the Jews, forcing them into unilateral action, which lost the Arabs Palestine.

All the same, there was an inherent conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs which pointed not to a unitary state, in which both races had rights, but to partition in some form. If this fact had been recognized from the start, the chances of a rational solution would have been much greater. Unfortunately, the mandate was born in the Versailles ear, a time when it was widely assumed that universal ideals and the ties of human brotherhood could overcome the more ancient and primitive sources of discord.

The Arabs already constituted several states; soon there would be many. The Jews had none. It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule.

whole future of Palestine turned on the issue of Jewish immigration. It was another axiom of Zionism that all Jews should be free to return to the national home.

The British government initially accepted this, or rather took it for granted.

Nevertheless, immigration soon became the issue. It was the point on which Arab resistance increasingly concentrated.

pogrom of May 1921,

Samuel’s response to the riots was to suspend Jewish immigration completely for a time.

The Jewish national home grew only slowly in the 1920s but British restrictions on immigration were not the main inhibiting factor.

One reason was that the Jewish leaders were divided among themselves on both objects and methods.

Weizmann

believed that the creation of the Zionist state would take a long time, and that the more solidly the infrastructure and foundations were built, the more ...

What he wanted to see emerge in Palestine, in the first place, were social, cultural, educational and economic institutions which were ex...

David Ben Gurion. For him what mattered most was the political and economic nature of the Zionist society and the state it would create.

collectivist roots.

Most Jewish socialists in Russia went in a Marxist-internationalist direction, arguing that Jewishness was simply an outmoded consequence of a dying religion and a capitalist-bourgeois society, and would disappear along with them.

Ben Gurion

three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land; ‘the settlement of the land is the only true Zionism, all else being self-deception, empty verbiage and merely a pastime’.47 Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework. Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society must be the Hebrew language.

Jabotinsky. His absolute priority was to get the maximum numbers of Jews into Palestine at the earliest possible moment, so that they could be organized politically and militarily to take over the state.

a great missed opportunity, and the makings of tragedy. During the calm years, when Palestine was relatively open, the Jews would not come.

From 1929 their economic and political position, and still more their security, began to deteriorate all over Europe. But as their anxiety to go to Palestine increased, so did the obstacles to their entering it. There was another Arab pogrom in 1929, in which over 150 Jews were killed. The British response, as before, was to tighten immigration.

The fundamental breach, between Mapai on the one hand and the Revisionists on the other, which was to dominate the politics of the Zionist state from its inception, was envenomed by abuse.

All over the world, Jewish idealists begged their leaders to come to terms with the Arabs.

Only an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’, he concluded, could force the Arabs to accept the inevitable.50 Jabotinsky made this harsh statement in 1923. The next two decades were to give an ever-growing force to the logic of his argument that the Jews could not afford idealism. It was not just a matter of providing Jewish Palestine with its iron wall of bayonets to ensure its safety. It was a question of whether European Jewry could survive at all, in a world which was turning increasingly and almost universally hostile.

an additional cause of hostility–the Jewish identification with Bolshevism.

For this the Jews bore some responsibility; or rather, the particular type of political Jew which had emerged in radical politics during the second half of the nineteenth century: the Non-Jewish Jew, the Jew who denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all. This group were all socialists, and for a brief period they were of paramount importance in European and Jewish history.

Rosa Lux...

she argued that the Jewish problem did not exist at all. Anti-Semitism, she insisted, was a function of capitalism,

Rosa Luxemburg’s moral and emotional distortions were characteristic of an intellectual trying to force people into a structure of ideas, rather than allowing ideas to evolve from the way people actually behaved.

They were vehement in repudiating Bundist claims. And their hostility to separate political organizations of Jews shaped the orthodoxy of the revolutionary left. Lenin, in particular, became a fierce opponent of specifically Jewish rights.

Hence the whole philosophy of the proletarian revolution was based on the assumption that the Jew, as such, did not exist except as a fantasy promoted by a distorted socio-economic system. Destroy that system and the caricature Jew of history would vanish, like an ugly nightmare, and the Jew would become an ex-Jew, an ordinary man. It is hard now for us to get back inside the minds of highly intelligent, well-educated Jews who believed this theory. But many thousands of them did. They hated their Jewishness, and to fight for the revolution was the most morally acceptable means to escape from it. It gave to their revolutionary struggle a peculiar emotional vehemence, because they believed its success would involve a personal liberation from their Jewish burden, as well as a general liberation of humanity from autocracy.

At all events, such non-Jewish Jews were prominent in every revolutionary party, in virtually every European country, just before, during and immediately after the First World War.

Leon Trotsky

More than anyone, he was responsible for the popular identification of revolution with the Jews.

In the Ukraine, the Civil War developed into the most extensive pogrom in Jewish history.

more than 1,000 separate incidents involving the killing of Jews.

Between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews were murdered.56 In other parts of eastern Europe, a similar identification of Jews with Bolshevism led directly to murder...

It is true that Jews were prominent in the Bolshevik Party, in the top echelons as well as among the rank and file: at party congresses, 15-20 per cent of the delegates were Jewish. But these were Non-Jewish Jews; the Bolshevik Party itself was the only post-Tsarist party which was actively hostile to Jewish objectives and interests. Indeed ordinary Jews suffered on account of Jewish involvement with the regime.

Jewish fear of the soviets was well founded. In August 1919, all Jewish religious communities were dissolved, their property confiscated and the overwhelming majority of synagogues shut for ever. The study of Hebrew and the publication of secular works in Hebrew were banned. Yiddish printing was permitted, but only in phonetic transcription, and Yiddish culture, though tolerated for a time, was placed under careful supervision.

They broke up the Bund, then set about destroying Russian Zionism.

Once Stalin, who was deeply anti-Semitic, took power, the pressure on the Jews increased, and by the end of the 1920s all forms of specifically Jewish activity had been destroyed or emasculated.

By this time, Jews had been eliminated from nearly all senior posts in the regime, and anti-Semitism was once more a powerful force within the party.

In the outside world, however, little was known about the survival of anti-Semitism, in new forms, in Soviet Russia, the destruction of Jewish institutions and the growing physical threat to Jews under Stalinism. It was simply assumed that, since the Jews were among the principal instigators of Bolshevism, they must be among its principal beneficiaries.

The all-important distinction between the great mass of Jews, who were observant, assimilationist or Zionist, and the specific group of Non-Jewish Jews who had actually helped to create the revolution, was not understood at all.

But then it had always been an axiom of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that apparent conflicts of interest among Jews were mere camouflage for an underlying identity of aim. It was the commonest of all anti-Semitic smears that Jews ‘worked toget...

Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It was the Bolshevist triumph in 1917 which gave the Protocols a second, and far more successful, birth.

In France,

The great victory in the Dreyfus case had given French Jews a false sense of final acceptance,

In France, unlike Britain, there seems to have been a natural constituency for anti-Semitic agitators. They seized eagerly on the Bolshevik scare and the mythology promoted by the Protocols, which went into many French editions.