The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History

Section II: Building the Jewish National Home

  The Yishuv in 1939 (reprinted from Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time [New York: Knopf, 2000])      T he Zionist enterprise succeeded as a result of the efforts of three separate but intertwined actors: the New Yishuv, Diaspora Jewry, and the United Kingdom. Between 1914 and 1918, while the Yishuv endured the privations of war, Zionism’s fate was determined by an alliance between a handful of Zionist leaders and high officials of the British government. Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), a Zionist activist and chemist, enjoyed access to the British political elite thanks in part to his wartime discoveries in the formulation of explosives. In 1917 Weizmann and his colleagues in the English Zionist Federation successfully negotiated a declaration of British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” As part of the general Allied campaign against the Turks, and Britain’s desire to hold Palestine in the postwar division of the Ottoman Empire, the British army invaded Palestine in October 1917. By Hanukkah, Jerusalem had been taken, and the entire land was under British control by September of the following year. Several thousand Jews from North America, Britain, and the Yishuv served in Palestine during the war, organized into three battalions and known collectively as the Jewish Legion. The Legion was the brainchild of three Zionist activists—Joseph Trumpeldor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Pinchas Rutenberg—who believed that a Jewish unit fighting for the entente would gain international support for Zionism in the postwar restructuring of the Middle East. But they were wrong: the Legion was disbanded, its members sent home, and the fate of postwar Palestine was determined not by Zionists but by the Allied powers and the League of Nations. Palestine remained under British military administration until 1920 when, at the San Remo conference, the Allied powers formally divided former Ottoman territories between France and Britain, with the former receiving Lebanon and Syria and the latter Palestine and Iraq. The Allies and the newly formed League of Nations spoke of these 87 dependencies as “mandates,” that is, charges on the Great Powers, who were obliged to guide them toward eventual political independence. The Zionists, seeking to maximize the economic capacity of their national home, envisioned a Palestine that would include the fertile land east of the Jordan River and the sources of the Jordan in southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights. The British, on the other hand, did not need to reach so far north in order to fulfill the strategic goal of protecting Egypt and the Suez Canal. Also, policymakers in London did not want to clash with French interests in Syria. As to the territory east of the Jordan River, although the British Mandate in Palestine included what is today’s kingdom of Jordan, from the beginning it had a special status. During the war, much of this territory had come under the control of military forces loyal to Husayn, a British ally and the emir of the Hejaz, an area of western Arabia that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In 1921 the Transjordanian territory was closed to Jewish settlement, and the British formally offered it to Husayn’s son Abdullah. In 1923 Transjordan was pronounced an autonomous entity. In July 1920, British military rule in Palestine was replaced by civilian colonial control. The first high commissioner for Palestine was Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew and committed Zionist. Samuel opened the doors to Jewish immigration, which jumped from 1,800 in 1919 to more than 8,000 in 1920 and 1921. But the surge of Jews into Palestine, occurring at the same time as the overthrow by French forces of an independent Arab kingdom in Damascus, enraged Palestinian Arabs. In May 1921, rioting in Jaffa and nearby Jewish colonies killed dozens of Jews. The British government reacted by affirming the 1917 Balfour Declaration while denying that Palestine was to become an entirely Jewish land. They also tied Jewish immigration to the economic capacity of the land to absorb it. This policy actually pleased the Zionists, as the Yishuv was too small to absorb large numbers of immigrants, and the Zionist Organization did not have the resources to make work for them. Selective Jewish immigration thus served Zionist as well as British interests. The mandate benefited the Zionists in other ways as well. Jews in...