Independence and Ideology
How many States make a Solution?
Today is Israel’s Independence Day. It is easy to forget, nearly 80 years later, just how significant the creation of the new state felt at the time. Not just because the 2,000 year wait for a Jewish homeland had come to an end. More immediately because, only three years after the destruction of European Jewry, the Jews of the world now had their own place of safety.
Many people considered the creation of the State of Israel to be a miracle. Politically however, the creation of some sort of state was very much on the cards. Pressure in Palestine had been building up for a number of years. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had committed the British government to ‘use its best endeavours’ to facilitate the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine’. In 1922 the League of Nations had granted Britain a mandate to administer the territory and put the Balfour declaration into effect, “it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
By 1947, the British were ready to terminate the Mandate. Caught up in the conflict between Jews and Arabs, coming under attack from both sides, mismanaging the admission of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, exhausted from the war against Germany, struggling to contain uprisings elsewhere in their empire, and desperately short of money, the British had had enough. They announced that their Mandate would come to an end by August 1948.
The United Nations set up a Special Committee to determine the future of the territory. Composed of eleven neutral countries, without any members of the Security Council, their recommendations were expected to be as free from political bias as could be hoped for at the time.
The Special Committee visited Palestine, took evidence from all the interested parties and, by 8 votes to 3, recommended a Partition Plan. Palestine, they advised should be divided into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem governed by a Special International Regime. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan. The Zionists broadly supported it, though some were disappointed in the two-state solution. When the plan was put before the United Nations General Assembly it was approved by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions. The United States and Russia voted in favour, the United Kingdom and China abstained. All the Arab States voted against. On 14th May 1948, David ben Gurion proclaimed the independence of the new State of Israel. The same day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq launched an invasion.
That, in a nutshell, is the background to the immediate events leading up to Israel’s independence. The Partition Plan however was not the only option in circulation at the time.
From its earliest days, the movement to establish a Jewish State was controversial. Even before Balfour issued his statement, the two leading British-Jewish organisations, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo Jewish Association, were “strongly and earnestly” protesting against the very idea. In a letter to The Times they argued that “Emancipated Jews in this country regard themselves primarily as a religious community, and they have always based their claims to political equality with their fellow citizens of other creeds on this assumption. . . . They hold Judaism to be a religious system with which their political status has no concern, and they maintain that, as citizens of the countries in which they live, they are fully and sincerely identified with the national spirit and interests of those countries.”
Opposition to the idea of a Jewish state was also strongly voiced within the Orthodox Jewish communities, on the grounds that the return to Zion, for which Jews pray daily, could only happen in messianic times. (Many within the orthodox community still maintain that view. Others maintain that the establishment of a Jewish state is a harbinger of the messianic age).
There was also opposition, on practical grounds, within Zionist circles themselves. In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, set up to investigate the plight of Jewish holocaust survivors, received a submission from the left-wing youth faction, Hashomer Hatza’ir. They outlined a policy for Palestine which they believed would meet the aspirations of both Jews and Arabs, and lead to co-operation and peace between the two groups: “A state is not an end in itself. In its political implications it is only an instrument whereby a people seeks to ensure its national welfare and felicity. . . . We suggest that the logical and realistic way out of the current situation is an Arab-Jewish state or a Palestinian state which would merit the appellation “Jewish” or “Arab” as little as Belgium deserves to be called Walloon or Flemish, or South Africa Boer or English. . . . Neither in justice nor in practise can either Jews or Arabs maintain exclusive sovereignty over the country. Sovereignty can, however, be exercised jointly and equally to the benefit of all concerned. It is this joint sovereignty which we have laid down as an essential principle in our efforts to formulate a solution. It is, in fact, the core and substance of bi-nationalism.”
There was a political subtext to this statement. Hashomer Hatza’ir was a constituent of the Soviet-aligned Mapam party and although Russia would soon vote in favour of the establishment of the State of Israel, at this stage it would have preferred a bi-national solution. But Hashomer Hatza’ir was not the only voice arguing for bi-nationalism. The philosopher Martin Buber, and the rabbi and scholar Judah Magnes had been promoting the idea since the 1920s. Buber had been one of the founders of Brit Hashalom, a body dedicated to peaceful co-existence between Jews and Arabs. The organisation’s supporters had included Albert Einstein, Henrietta Szold and Gershom Scholem. Always a fringe movement within the Zionist world, Brit Hashalom disbanded in 1929, after Arab riots in which hundreds of Jews were wounded and 100 killed. The popular mood had no interest in the thought of integration.
Although it was only supported by a minority, the possibility of a bi-national state worried the mainstream Zionist leadership. When the United Nations Special Committee visited Palestine, Moshe Sharett, who would eventually become Israel’s foreign minister pointed out bi-nationalism’s flaw. In a rather longwinded and convoluted way, he argued that the policy presupposed “two collective wills acting, by and large, in unison. . . . These pre-requisites do not exist, and therefore the issue, I am afraid, is purely academic. I must stress again and again the question is not whether Jews and Arabs can live together within the framework of one state. They can. They do. They will. The question is whether they can operate a state machinery by pulling an equal weight in its councils. They will pull apart."
Sharett insisted that by giving each side a veto over national policy, Arabs could hinder Jewish development by refusing to allow Jewish refugees to enter the country. Jews, in contrast, could not hinder Arab development since the Arabs were already settled in Palestine. The only solution to this dilemma would be to establish a third, neutral authority to rule on questions of immigration. And that would effectively mean that neither side had independence. The Special Committee accepted Moshe Sharrett’s arguments and recommended that the Jews and Arabs each had their own state.
Time has passed and events since then have dulled the euphoria felt when the State of Israel was founded. Many questions remain, and few, if any, solutions. Asking ‘what if’ is generally pointless. But it could be interesting to consider what might have happened, had the Arab countries accepted the United Nations vote and established their own state alongside Israel. Their acceptance of the vote, in defeat, would certainly have strengthened the authority of the United Nations. And had they taken the decision to build their own nation in 1948, as the resolution indicated, rather than go to war against the Jewish state, we might just be living in a different world today.