Keep the homeland fires burning

Raymond Carr

THE CONTROVERSY OF ZION by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Sinclair-Stevenson, £17.99, pp.396

Geoffrey Wheatcroft eschews the simplicities of narrative history for the more exacting task of analysing the inter- play of ideas, ideologies and events. Fully aware as he is of the impact of Zionism on Arabs, his theme is the impact of Zionism on Jews.

His story starts with the Roman con- quest of Palestine and the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. As exiles, in the diaspora, the faith of the Jews remained their sign of identity. What Gibbon called 'the sullen obstinacy with which they main- tained the rules and social manners' of their religion made them a people apart. It is Wheatcroft's thesis that the history of the Jews was made for them by outsiders, in mediaeval Christian Europe by the host countries in which they had settled. They were savagely persecuted as stiff-necked heretics who refused — Gibbon again 'to join the common interest of mankind'.

The exception was Spain, where Jews were tolerated as second-rate citizens, 'court Jews', useful as money-lenders to bankrupt Christian kings. Jewish culture flourished in what was looked back on as a Golden Age. But it was a false dawn. In 1391 a pogrom swept over Spain in a vicious outbreak of Jew hatred. To save their skins, many Jews converted to become 'New Christians'. But this forced assimilation did not work. To 'Old Christians' Jewishness was not a matter of adherence to a false faith, the abandon- ment of which admitted to the Christian gentile community. It was a matter of 'purity of blood', a genetic stain that noth- ing would wipe away. By the 15th century, Jew hatred had crossed the frontier to become anti-Semitism. Contaminated from birth, Jews would pollute the Christian community they had sought to invade.

All this was to change with the 18th- century Enlightenment, Joseph II's 1782 Edict of Toleration and the emancipation of the Jews in the French Revolution. Entry into the gentile world by assimilation was now open to individual Jews in the West willing to discard their Jewishness in order to become patriotic citizens. For Heine, conversion provided the necessary entrance ticket. In 1868, the Jew Disraeli, a baptised Christian, became Prime Minister of England. Another Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, married the daughter of Baron Meyer de Rothschild, the first Jew to become a member of the Jockey Club. Such dizzy social success did not mean that prejudice against Jews had vanished among the English upper classes; but it was not anti-Semitism, rather it was a matter of personal taste and of snobbery, becoming, as Wheatcroft describes it, an exquisitely complicated, ambiguous affair. The Catholic Hilaire Belloc's attempt to import continental anti-Semitism ruined for him any prospect of a political career.

It was in countries with a large Jewish population — there were more Jews in Berlin than in the whole of Britain, and by the 1900s a tenth of the inhabitants of Vienna were Jews — that political anti- Semitism surfaced. Anti-Semitism there had always been in Germany, from Luther to Wagner. Nevertheless, Jews flourished, in Bismarckian Germany. In the Hapsburg empire, Jews enriched Viennese, cultural life and made fortunes as financiers and industrialists, among them the father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1869, Isidore Kaim could assert, 'There is no more a Jewish question.' Jews would dissolve into the societies that accepted them.

Hope, Wheatcroft argues throughout, can be turned off like a tap. In the 1880s, the Russian pogroms shook the optimism of Jews everywhere. Of the eight million Eastern Jews, by 1914 nearly two million had emigrated to America to found a Jew- ish community whose influence on Zion- ism and Israel is a major theme of this book, To western Jews, the trial of Dreyfus in 1895 demonstrated the limits of assimi- lation. Dreyfus was a Jew but an enthusias- tic French patriot. Patriotism was not enough. Proust's Baron de Charlus argued that it was absurd to charge Dreyfus as a traitor since he could not be a Frenchman; he was a guest who had abused the laws of hospitality. In Vienna German nationalists attacked Jews precisely because they were patriotic citizens of a multinational empire. 'Our anti-Semitism is not directed against the racial traits of the Jews.' Between 1904 and 1913 Hitler was living on his wits in Vienna, He got the message.

Kaim had misread the times. There was a Jewish problem that neither emigration nor assimilation could solve. The solution was political Zionism, created by a Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl. In his Jewish State (1896) he argued that the Jews were a nation; they could only live in dig- nity, as free men and masters of their des- tiny, in a Jewish state. By 1905 it was clear that this state would be the Holy Land. In 1896, this seemed an idle dream. But in 1917 a combination of British protestant philo-Semitism and British strategic inter- ests led to the Balfour Declaration promis- ing British support for a 'national home' for the Jews in Palestine. But the promise had two conditions, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries.

Not all Jews 'in other countries' welcomed the Balfour Declaration. Assimilationist Jews argued that the creation of a homeland was a surrender to anti-Semitism. Had not fiercely anti- Semitic Tsarist ministers seen in Herzl's Jewish state a device to rid Russia of its Jews? The existence of a homeland raised the issue of double allegiances. Had not Carlyle raged that a Jew could not become a citizen of any country except his 'wretched Palestine'? And now Belloc and Chesterton were peddling the same message. Edwin Montagu, in 1917 the only Jew in the Cabinet, had no wish to be classed as an 'Oriental', sensing the dangers to assimilated Jews like himself. He fought a tenacious but unsuccessful rearguard action against the Declaration.

In the diaspora, many Jews shared Montagu's doubts. Zionism had little appeal to assimilated German Jews, for whom the Weimar Republic was another Golden Age. Once more the tap of hope was turned off. In 1938 I saw the results of the destruction of the Jewish quarter of Nuremberg by Nazi thugs; two days later, seeking entrance to the cathedral museum of Bamberg, I was confronted by the notice 'JEWS NOT ADMITTED'. Assimilation was ruled out in the Reich of an anti-Semitic ideologue. Most American Jews had been at best tepid Zionists. As free citizens of a great republic, they had prospered, partic- ularly on Wall Street and in Hollywood. America was their Zion. It was Hitler's persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that produced what Wheatcroft calls a 'sea change' in the diaspora. But it was the Holocaust that completed the conversion of American Jews to Zionism. Fearing an anti-Semitic backlash, they had been reluc- tant to press Congress for a revision of the restrictive immigration laws to admit a new flood of refugees; but now they were to press for the realisation of the Zionist dream; the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

What of the other condition of the Balfour Declaration guaranteeing the rights of the half million Muslim Arabs living in Palestine? The Arab problem was swept under the carpet. Intelligent Arabs would welcome the prosperity brought by enterprising Jews as bearers of a superior European culture, By a process of peaceful penetration, 'goat by goat', Jewish farmers would become sons of a soil willingly sold them by Arabs.

This gradualist approach was rejected by Zionist revisionists whose leader was the Russian Jew Vladimir Jabotinsky, a com- pelling orator and a brilliant organiser. For him, a minority of Jewish nationalists were locked in a classic nationalist struggle with a majority of Arab nationalists. Only massive immigration would change the balance. Wheatcroft argues that nation- alisms are double-faced, the oppressed nationality achieving freedom only to become, in its turn, an oppressor. As for the displaced Arabs, they had plenty of other places to go. If they did not go volun- tarily, they must be fprced out. And so must the British who had ruled Palestine as a mandated territory, landed with the thankless task of maintaining a balance between the competing claims of Jews and Arabs. To achieve their aims, the revision- ists became terrorists. Very few Zionists accepted Jabotinsky's brutal logic; those that did included Shamir and Begin, later to emerge in Israel as leaders of the right- Wing nationalism of the Likud. Wheatcroft describes the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, defended in a hero- ic and costly struggle against Arab attacks. Jews everywhere felt a sense of pride. The 1967 victory of the Six Days War was for them 'an unimaginable exhilaration'. But most American and Western Jews had no desire to become citizens of a poor Middle Eastern mini-state. Israel did not become, as Herzl had dreamed, an outpost of the central European bourgeoisie with 'gen- uine Viennese cafes'. Those who came after 1945 to what was to become Israel came from Eastern Europe as poor refugees, later to be joined by Jews from Arab countries and latterly from Russia.

If many American Jews did not make the 'ascent' to their Holy Land — and among those who came were the fanatics of the Right — the support of the Jewish lobby in Congress, so powerful that President Bush confessed to being 'one lonely, little guy' when confronted by its demands, was vital to the survival of Israel. There was a sense in which American Jews' support was unconditional when Israel was against the ropes; it was less enthusiastic when Israel kicked against the pricks of American efforts to impose policies in line with American interests. Israeli hawks scorned these 'sentimental Zionists'. Israel could go it alone contra mundum regardless of out- side criticism and help.

By the 1960s, Israel was becoming unfashionable; Israelis were nuisances dis- playing 'the sullen obstinacy' deplored by Gibbon. And this at a time when Israel was faced with a new threat, the hostility of the radical Left for whom the world was divid- ed between the oppressed Goodies of the Third World and the imperialist Baddies represented by the US and its 'racist' client state Israel.

Political anti-Zionism bore a heavy load of anti-Semitism. Walking round the Sorbonne during the Events of 1968, I was appalled to see posters reviving the slanders of the anti-Dreyfusard Right; the denunciations of the haute banque juive, as

if the Protocols of Zion, once the bible of the extreme Right, had become the text- book of the extreme Left.

Herzl had hoped that Zionism would solve the Jewish question. It did not do so, Wheatcroft argues, for the Jews of the diaspora, where the continued existence of a Jewish community was threatened by secularisation and intermarriage and where even the Holocaust had not made anti- Semitism a thing of the past. But for the sabras, born and brought up in Israel, Herzl's dream of a country where Jews could live as free men on their own soil ' and as citizens of an independent state has been realised.

Definition of security for that state, a' small democracy surrounded by hostile Arab authoritarian regimes, divides Israelis. Yet most Israelis all but a disrep- utable collection of fanatics for whom the assassin of Rabin is a national hero accept that security can only be bought by a settle- ment of the Palestinian question and a negotiated peace with Syria. It is the heirs of Jabotinsky, whose recent vault to power was based on the exploitation of ancient fears, who must face this task. Will prag- matism triumph over ideology? Gentile supporters of Israel like myself must, on occasion, grit their teeth and hope for the best.

Journalists of Wheatcroft's talents make excellent contemporary historians while professional historians who take to the fields as journalists frequently fall at their fences. An admirer of the stupendous achievement of Israel, Wheatcroft achieves the objectivity of distance. He has that rarest of gifts, that of compressing complex issues into a few sharp sentences without losing a sense of their complexity, and no issue is more complex than Zionism. This is a book that demands and deserves dili- gent reading. Altogether a stunning achievement.

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