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4
Toward a Single State Solution
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine

By NOEL IGNATIEV

Zionism as a political movement developed in the late 19th century. Its
founder, Theodore Herzl, was influenced by two phenomena: the extent of French
anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Trial, and nationalist ideals then
popular in Europe. Herzl held that Jews cannot be assimilated by the nations
in which they live, and that the only solution to the "Jewish question" was
the formation of a "Jewish state" in which all the Jews would come together.
The early Zionists contemplated as the site of the future state Argentina or
Uganda, among other locales. Herzl favored Palestine, because, although an
agnostic, he wanted to make use of the custom, widespread among Jewish
mystics, of going on pilgrimages to the "holy land" and establishing religious
communities there.

In 1868, there were 13,000 Jews in Palestine, out of an estimated population
of 400,000. The majority were religious pilgrims supported by charity from
overseas. They encountered no opposition from the Muslims, and their presence
led to no clashes with the Arab population, whether Muslim or Christian.

In 1882, Baron Rothschild, combining philanthropy and investment, began to
bring Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe to build a plantation system along
the model the French used in Algeria. They spoke Yiddish, Arabic, Persian, and
Georgian. Significantly, Hebrew was not among the languages spoken. The
outcome of Rothschild's experiment was predictable: Jews managed the land,
while Arabs worked it. This was not the result the Zionists had in mind; a
Jewish society could not be based on Arab labor. Consequently, they began to
encourage the immigration of Jews to work in agriculture, industry, and transport.

In 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, seeking support for Britain's
efforts in World War I, issued his famous declaration expressing sympathy with
efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionists immediately
seized upon this statement, which they interpreted to mean support for a
Jewish state. At the time of Balfour's declaration, Jews comprised less than
10% of the population and owned 2.5% of the land of Palestine.

The problem of building a Jewish society among an overwhelming Arab majority
came to be known as the "conquest of land and labor." Land, once acquired, had
to remain in Jewish hands. The other half of this project, known as Labor
Zionism, called for the exclusive use of Jewish labor on the land acquired by
the Jews in Palestine. The Labor Zionists maintained this dual exclusionism
(or apartheid, as we would now call it) in order to build up purely Jewish
institutions.

To achieve the conquest of the land, the Zionists set up an arrangement
whereby land was acquired not by individuals, but by a corporation, known as
the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF acquired land and leased it only to
Jews, who were not allowed to sublet it. Thus land was acquired in the name of
"the Jewish people," held for their use, and not subject to market conditions.
The idea was for the JNF to gradually acquire as much land as possible as the
basis for the expected Jewish state.

Naturally, in order for the land to serve this function, Arab labor had to be
excluded. Leases from the JNF specifically prohibited the use of non-Jewish
labor on JNF plots. One way to achieve this goal was to lease land only to
those Jews who intended to work it themselves. In some cases, when land was
bought from Arab absentee landlords, the peasants who resided on and worked
the land were expelled. Jewish landholders who refused to exclude Arab labor
could lose their leases or be faced with a boycott.

The conquest of labor pertained not only to agriculture but also to industry.
The Labor Zionists formed an institution to organize Jewish labor and exclude
Arabs: the Histadrut. The Histadrut was (and largely is) an all-Jewish
combination trade union and cooperative society providing its members with a
number of services. From the beginning it was a means of segregating Arab and
Jewish labor and bringing into existence a strictly Jewish economic sector.
Even when Arab and Jewish laborers performed precisely the same job, Jewish
workers were paid significantly higher salaries. These policies were the death
knell for any attempt to organize labor on a non-racial basis. The "laborism"
of Labor Zionism killed and continues to kill efforts at building a unified
labor movement.

Despite these policies and even with the encouragement of the British
government, in the thirty years following the Balfour Declaration, the
Zionists were able to increase the Jewish-owned portion of the land of
Palestine to only 7%. Moreover, the majority of the world's Jews showed no
interest in settling there. In the years between 1920 and 1932, only 118,000
Jews moved to Palestine, less than 1% of world Jewry. Even after the rise of
Hitler, Jews in Europe did not choose Israel: out of 2.5 million Jewish
victims of Nazism who fled abroad between 1935 and 1943, scarcely 8.5% went to
Palestine. 182,000 went to the U.S., 67,000 to Britain, and almost 2 million
to the Soviet Union. After the war, the U.S. began to encourage Jewish
settlement in Palestine. Aneurin Bevin, postwar British Foreign Minister,
publicly blurted out that American policy mainly arose from the fact that
"they did not want too many of them in New York." The Pakistani delegate to
the UN was to make the same point sarcastically:

Australia, an overpopulated small country with congested areas, says no, no,
no; Canada, equally congested and overpopulated, says no; the United States, a
great humanitarian country, a small area, with small resources, says no. This
is their contribution to the humanitarian principle. But they state, let them
go into Palestine, where there are vast areas, a large economy and no trouble;
they can easily be taken in there (Weinstock, 226).

The U.S. limitation on the number of Jews allowed into the country coincided
with Zionist policy, as enunciated by David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister
of Israel: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in
Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second
alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also
the history of the People of Israel." (Yoav Gelber, "Zionist Policy and the
Fate of European Jewry (1932-1945)" Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, 199.)

This policy of attaching more importance to the establishment of Israel than
to the survival of the Jews led the Zionists to collaborate with Nazism and
even be decorated by Hitler's government. The best known case was that of
Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated the emigration to Palestine of some of
Hungary's most prominent Jews in return for his help in arranging the orderly
deportation of the remainder of Hungary's Jews to the camps. For his efforts,
Kastner was praised as an "idealist" by no less an authority than Adolf
Eichmann. (The best study of Zionist-Nazi relations is Lenni Brenner, Zionism
in the Age of the Dictators.)

The Zionists knew they had to rid themselves of the Arab majority in order to
have a specifically Jewish state. Although 75,000 Jews moved to Israel between
1945 and 1948, Jews still constituted a minority in Palestine. The 1948 war
afforded the Zionists an excellent opportunity to rectify this; as a result of
the war, more than three-quarters of a million Arabs fled their homes. The
case of Deir Yasin, in which Israeli paramilitary forces, under the command of
future prime minister Menachem Begin, massacred over 250 civilians, sending a
message to Palestinians that they should depart, is the most well known
example of how this flight was brought about. In his book, The R