Israel: The Rise of Zionism and the Zero-Sum Game

             At the end of WW1, the geopolitical condition of the area known as the Middle East  inspired maneuvering amongst powerful European and American persons that allowed for the growth of existing Jewish colonies. The designs for this plan were contrived by Zionists and British politicians with both humane and political intentions and continued a related policy for the area that had been adopted by the Ottoman leadership prior to WW1. The subsequent breakdown of this shared goal was caused by differences of vision within these political groups on what this growth should look like. Moreover, it was undermined by British manipulation of Arab leadership who had assisted in the success of the war and it was destabilized by a misjudgment on the part of the Zionists as to the reaction the Arabs would have to an unrestrained expansion of their Jewish population. The outcome of this conflagration of geopolitical manoeuvrings has been a century of confrontation and bloodshed resulting from a zero-sum game where Jewish gains are Palestinian losses and vice versa.
                At the close of WW1, regions previously under Ottoman Empire rule became a vacuum for political control by the powers that enabled the Entente victory. Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, the leader of the Arab Revolt,  stood at the bottom of this list of expectant recipients. After a successful military campaign that undermined Ottoman effectiveness during the war, Husayn received a series of letters from Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt assuring him the areas now known as Palestine, Israel and a portion of the Arabian Peninsula would be under his rule. At the same time as this correspondence was occurring, the British government met secretly with France, concluding the Sykes-Picot(-Sazonov) Agreement of 1916 that divided up the Middle East into French, British and Russian protectorates. All notions of self-determination for the existing Arab populations were abandoned by this arrangement. The area now known as Palestine was left for international administration contingent on discussions with Russia and the other powers at a later date. While McMahon may not have had the full authority of the British government to have offered Husayn the areas in question, this renege exacerbated the Arab mistrust of western objectives for Arab territory.
              The next party in line vying for a piece of the Middle East was the Zionist movement, under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann. British Conservatives, with a pre-WW1 history of defining Britain as the protector of the “Jews in the East,”  conspired with Weizmann and Sokolow to confirm the expansion of Jewish settlements in the outline of the Balfour Declaration, a classified formal statement of intended policy for the Middle East following WW1. This document was directed to Walter Rothschild, a powerful and wealthy Zionist capable of a large financial investment in the machinations of increasing these colonies.
            The notion of increasing Jewish settlements in Palestine was an idea adopted by previous British politicians such as Lord Shaftesbury, an enthusiastic advocate of human rights during his long career in the British Parliament. In 1840, Shaftesbury put forward a public memorandum calling for a return of “the Hebrew race”  to the “land of their fathers.”  Sir Moses Montefiore, the first Jew to hold municipal office in England, had also advocated the return of Jewish people to the Middle East a few years prior to Shaftesbury’s declaration. In 1856, Montefiore obtained permission from the Sultan in Constantinople, who was particularly empathetic to the plight of the Jewish people, to purchase land for small, Jewish, agricultural settlements.  In Britain and in the Ottoman leadership, there was clearly an historical political will to place a colony of Jewish settlers from around the world in what was believed to be an area of cultural and historical significance to the Jewish people. The difficulty with this plan was the assumption by all the aforementioned interested parties that the non-Jewish occupants of Palestine would welcome an ever-expanding settlement of Jews in Palestine. Although there was a humanist intention to create a safe haven for an ethnicity with a history of oppression and atrocities committed against them in their countries of origin, there was a naivety to the effect the growth of existing Jewish settlements would have on the region.
             While there was also a rising tide of tolerance and empathy for Judaism within the leadership of the Ottoman Empire immediately prior to the advent of WW1, the intention differed from the exclusivity of Zionism in that it advocated an egalitarian theological paradigm where Judaism and Christianity were to be treated as equals with the Islamic religion, all under the nationalistic banner of an Ottoman empire. Between 1908 and 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had moved to abandon the millet system that structured the inequality amongst Ottoman religions in an attempt to propagate the idea that all Ottoman religions “could share in a common Ottoman bond.”  While this was mostly a political tactic meant to inspire an inclusive sense of nationalism, it also showed a willingness by young, intellectual Turks to recognize the Judeo-Christian religions under their control as respected, equal members of the community, a progressive value when dictated by the leadership of a predominantly Islamic state.
               Following the close of the war in 1918 and the implementation of the actions prescribed in the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann delivered a speech to the Arab communal leaders in Jerusalem outlining Zionist intentions for Palestine. In this speech, he called for “peace, harmony and cooperation between the communities”  and denied allegations that Zionists intended to take “supreme political power”  of the area. Weizmann claimed to envision a Palestine that would serve as a “link between East and West, interpreting the one to the other and harmonizing their different but not opposing conceptions of life.”  There is some question as to the veracity of the temperate, inclusive rhetoric contained in this and other early speeches by Weizmann. To have declared, publicly, the intention of establishing a fully autonomous Jewish state in an area where Jews made up only 10 percent of the population would have further enraged the Arab populations that had long sought self-determination over the same region. Moreover, there was a backlash amongst certain British Jews to the idea of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine that was causing pressure on the British government to curtail its backing of a fully autonomous Jewish state.   This speech may have been a reaction meant to curb opposition to Zionist settlements in Palestine by implementing a gradualist approach that would be viewed as less confrontational.
             Regardless of the moderate rhetoric of the Zionist leadership, confrontation was exactly what the growing number of Jewish settlers had inspired. Between 1918 and 1948, 482 857  Jews immigrated to Jewish colonies in Palestine from all over the world. One of the catalysts for this mass migration was a declaration made public by the British government the day after the capture of Gaza: November 17th, 1917. The order announced that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people; and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”  This proclamation and the ensuing arrival of Jewish immigrants infuriated indigenous Arab populations waiting for the self-determination promised by earlier British mandates and violence against the growing Jewish settlements erupted. Frustrated by the decision of the Allies to grant Britain the mandate over Palestine, the el-Husseinis, an Arab nationalist group led by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, began to organize attacks against the growing Jewish settlements in the hopes of driving them from what they perceived as an Arab homeland for Palestinians stolen by western interference. Anticipating the likelihood of violent repercussions stemming from the rising tide of immigration, the Jewish settlers had armed themselves in preparation for just these sorts of attacks. The security dilemma that has plagued this portion of the Middle East since had begun.
            There is a scene, described in Chiam Weizmann’s Journal, relating the events of the opening ceremony for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that begs to be used as a metaphor for the geopolitical condition of Israel and Palestine in the years to follow WW1. Due to the enormous amount of guests that had come from all over the world to see the opening of the University (12000 to 15000 people that included the authors of the Balfour declaration), Weizmann had decided to hold the ceremony in a large wadi  on the slopes of Mount Scopus above the actual site of the University, as the University itself would not accommodate this many people. The difficulty with this location was that in order for the leaders of the ceremony to face the audience, a make-shift bridge needed to be built over the wadi itself. As Weizmann describes it, the “gorge was deep, sheer and rocky; the bridge was an improvised wooden affair”  that inspired “little confidence.”  As the bridge needed to carry the weight of more than 200 people for the ceremony to be performed, the builders were questioned repeatedly about the soundness of the structure, to which they gave their guarantee of its reliability. 250 young Jewish men then volunteered to test it. Together, they walked out on the bridge and danced an “energetic hora on the contraption.”  It withstood this initial test. The date of this ceremony was April 1st, 1925, "April Fool's Day."  Perhaps it was foolish for the architects of the Balfour Declaration to assume the viability of a growing Jewish contingent on land promised to Arab nationalists without the violent repercussions that time has illustrated would occur.

Bibliography

Bentwich, Norman. England in Palestine. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company Limited, 1932.

Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East, Third Edition. Simon Fraser University: Westview Press, 2004.

Jewish Virtual Library, A Division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Immigration to Israel By Period of Immigration and Last Continent of Residence. The Library: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/Immigration_by_Period_and_Continent.html (accessed February 7 2009).

Litvinoff, Barnett. The Essential Chaim Weizmann. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1982.

Roberts, Samuel J. Survival or Hegemony? The Foundations of Israeli Foreign Policy. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973.