To Understand Oneself: Does It Mean to Understand the Other?—Reflections

Introduction

This article reflects upon the Jewish-Arab conflict from an individual cognitive angle of two leading political figures in the Zionist movement—Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. I choose them because to intents and purposes they were the prominent leaders of two polar ideological movements: the Hebrew Labor movement, and the Revisionist Party in the Zionist movement in the years 1920–1940. I do not intend to deal with their policies toward the conflict but rather to explain their political principles, by which they sought to solve it.

Did Vladimir Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion really understand the “other”, meaning the Palestinian Arabs? The answer lies first of all in their shared modern, progressive and synthetic world-view. Jabotinsky was a liberal nationalist and Ben-Gurion a socialist nationalist. Both were free from religious belief, and their attitude towards religion was based on political interests.

Their political thinking was inspired in some respects by utopian propensities in the social and especially political dimension. These made them the most active and productive Zionist leaders in planning political solutions for the conflict, some of which might be realistic in the distant future.

Since those plans are the best examples of their understanding of the “other,” I first present a short description of their political proposals from the early 1920’s to the mid-1940’s and then compare their different ideological and political approaches. After that I raise the question; did they indeed understand the “other,” and what is the political perspective for the Jews and the Arabs in the future? To put the political and ideological thinking in a broader spectrum, I describe briefly the other federalist ideas within the Zionist movement in their time and afterwards.

In Jabotinsky’s political mind, three stages may be defined. The first one can be described as a political bi-national solution for Palestine, by which was meant a Jewish-Arab federative state, headed by an Arab king and a Jewish prime minister and based on an elected parliament of two houses: a Senate with an equal representation of the two nations, and a Common House with proportional presentation. Of course, this assumed free Jewish immigration to Palestine.¹ After his utopian plan was rejected, both directly by the Zionist Executive and indirectly by the Arab leadership, Jabotinsky retreated from the federation to the famous “Iron Wall” (1923), which was based on two political principles. One was that the Jewish State will be established only by force, and the second posited that only when the Arabs recognize their defeat will the way for a generous national solution will be open.²

Almost twenty years later in 1940, the year of his death, he published his generous political plan foreseeing a Jewish state of five million Jews with an Arab minority of about two million, based on a completely equal bi-national constitution, including citizenship rights, languages, structure of government, etc. For instance, every Jewish minister will have an Arab vice-minister and vice-versa. He even mentioned the possibility of an Arab prime minister.³

Ben-Gurion’s constructive political proposals also went through three stages. In the early 1920’s, when he served as general secretary of the Histadrut, he proposed to unify the workers in Palestine by organizing them in a confederation of two national trade unions—one Jewish and one Arab.⁴

At the end of the 1920’s and the beginning of the 1930’s, he proposed to his party a new and revolutionary plan, which consisted of a joint Jewish-Arab political structure to be based on a system of parity—with a 50% political share for each of the two nations, not dependent on demography, which was expected to change in the future, due to free Jewish immigration.⁵ The third stage followed in the 1930s and lasted until the beginning of World War II. It was based on the idea of making Palestine a Jewish state as a part of a Middle Eastern Arab-Jewish confederation.⁶

According to the respective proposals of both...