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

Introduction

3 Introduction This reader provides a documentary history of the Yishuv, Palestine’s Jewish community, from the beginnings of Zionist settlement in 1882 to Israel’s establishment in 1948. It brings to the English-speaking world many sources that were previously unpublished or available only in Hebrew or other foreign languages. And it is different from other document collections or textbooks on the history of Zionism in its focus on Palestine rather than the Diaspora, and on social, economic, and cultural history as opposed to Zionist thought, high politics, and diplomacy.1 Political and military affairs receive due attention within a broader framework of the construction of a new Jewish society in the Land of Israel. This book offers a holistic history of the process by which a small enclave of Orthodox Jews, numbering some 25,000 in 1880, was transformed within sixty-five years into a secular proto-state with well-developed political, military, and economic institutions, a vigorous Hebrew culture, and around 600,000 inhabitants. The reader complements the recently reissued volume Israel in the Middle East, a documentary history focusing mainly on Israel since 1948.2 This important work has a section on the pre-1948 period, but the documents are mostly related to diplomatic history or the origins of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Documents on these topics are also available on the Internet from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and many educational institutions and advocacy groups. Here, however, we have a different purview: to trace the Yishuv’s internal development, the interplay between politics and culture, immigration and economics, ideology and material reality. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948 seeks to be innovative in other ways as well. Many of the documents were penned by leaders of the Zionist labor movement , which was the hegemonic political and cultural force during the Yishuv’s formative decades. Appropriate attention is paid as well to Revisionism and other forms of right-wing Zionism, which, no less than Labor, strove to transform the old Diaspora Jew into a New Hebrew. The views of Orthodox Zionists and ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionists, bourgeois urban intellectuals and artists, and apolitical functionaries are offered, thus mitigating the common tendency to identify the Yishuv with Labor Zionism tout court. Where possible, we have recovered voices of ordinary Jews, far from elite circles: factory workers and shopkeepers, pioneer farm wives and women workers. When we have dealt with subjects more familiar to the English reader, such as the origins of the Arab– Israeli conflict, we have included archival documents often cited in scholarly literature but never reproduced in full. When read in their entirety, such documents emerge as products of a time of crisis that demanded decisive action, yet whose consequences were unforeseeable. Taken together, the documents in this reader convey the ferment, energy, and anxiety that permeated the Zionist project from its inception to Israel’s creation and beyond. Each document is preceded by introductory material that provides background and biographical information. After the document, notes identify foreign language terms, historical personages and events, and references to works from the Jewish literary canon. Although the notes in the documents refer to relevant information elsewhere in the volume, each document is selfstanding , and the book does not need to be read in any fixed order. That said, the book’s sections correspond to certain overarching themes and chronological periods in the history of the Yishuv in its transition from foothold to state. Section I covers the period from the beginning of Zionist colonization in the 1880s up to World War I. Sections II, III, and IV cover different aspects of the Yishuv over the two decades between the world wars. Section II traces social, economic, and political development; section III focuses on the invention and dissemination of a new Hebrew culture; and section IV deals with Jewish– Arab conflict. Sections V and VI deal with two related yet separate subjects: World War II and the Holocaust on the one hand, and on the other, the diplomatic and military struggle for Jewish statehood from 1945 until 1948. It is the editors’ intent for this book to be used as a classroom resource that might accompany a textbook or stand alone. As a stand-alone source, a documentary history can be more challenging than a textbook but also more rewarding. It does not provide a smooth and coherent narrative of the past but rather presents the reader with the sources upon which historical narratives are based...