Zionist Establishment Research Articles

Sephardic longshoremen at the Haifa Port (1933-1936): dynamics of skill-selective labor immigration from Thessaloniki to mandatory Palestine

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the Zionist challenges regarding “Jewish labor” through the micro-history of the Salonikian longshoremen on the eve of their emigration from Greece (early 1930s), and during the first period of integration in the Haifa Port (1933–1936). To date, the hegemonic perspective on Salonikian longshoremen has emphasized the immigrants’ crucial role in overcoming the Arab-dominated port labor market. However, while tending to paint a romantic picture of national fervor, this Zionist view obscured the economic, ethnic, and cultural confrontation involved in realizing “Jewish labor”. These multiple forms of confrontation occurred not only between ethnic groups (Jewish-Arab struggle) but also within the local Jewish labor community. Re-visiting the Zionist agenda from the vantage point of both the Salonikian longshoremen and the Zionist establishment enables to present largely neglected aspects of the complex relations between the Sephardic Salonikians and the Ashkenazi/Eastern European-dominated Jewish labor establishment. Due to heavy doubts about the Salonikian commitment to the uphill battle for “Jewish labor,” the Haifa Labor Council excluded the latter from the labor community. Consequently, the cultural marginality of the Salonikians weakened the Zionist vision of uniting all Jewish wage earners into a cohesive working class in the middle of the 1930s.

ההסתדרות, הממשלה והמיעוט הערבי בישראל בשנות הממשל הצבאי

Soon after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Histadrut became the primary, and in most cases the only institution of a non-military kind operating within the Palestinian population. During this period, Israel's industrial relations had clear corporatist features. Power relations in this model are based on the balance in which no side can force its will on any other and a dynamic of compromise that recognizes conflicting interests. Most of the research dealing with the relationship between the Palestinian population and the Histadrut during the first two decades of the State views the Histadrut as part of a monolithic Zionist establishment, acting in light of unified goals of oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population. In this research I propose a more nuanced and multi-faceted analysis of historical relations between the Histadrut and the Government in the establishment of policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians in Israel. The article maintains that these relations were shaped in accordance with the Israeli version of the corporatist model of industrial relations, which comprises both cooperation and conflict. While the goals of Jewish Histadrut officials working among the Palestinian population reinforced Zionist hegemony and the rule of the Mapai Party, in practice they were attentive to Palestinian voices and endeavored to meet their needs and to integrate them in the Histadrut.

Local Communities and Separate Space: The Zionist Stance on Jewish Settlement in Arab Cities—The Case of Acre

This article looks at the impact of harsh environmental conditions on the development of the Zionist narrative and the pursuit of Jewish urban settlement in Arab cities, specifically Acre. While overcoming adversity was part of the Zionist farming ethos, settling in areas that were environmentally challenging was one of the factors that kept the Zionist establishment from acknowledging or supporting urban Jewish settlement in Arab towns. In fact, the openly professed ideology of settling in such locations and creating mixed cities was implemented only in the few cases where an economic or political incentive existed. These incentives aside, environmental issues like swampy land and seasonal flooding were major inhibiting factors, not only affecting the scope of Jewish settlement but also the way they were addressed in the Zionist narrative.

Mainstream and Radicalism in American Zionism: The Avukah Affair, 1934–1945

Mainstream and Radicalism in American Zionism:The Avukah Affair, 1934–1945 Tal Elmaliach (bio) The American Zionist student organization Avukah embarked on a profound transformation in the mid-1930s. Avukah, founded in 1925, was the main representative of the Zionist movement on American campuses. In the years that followed, it metamorphosed from being apolitical, in the sense that it did not support or affiliate with any specific Zionist party or ideology, into a radical left movement that viewed the world through the lens of Marxist analysis, while critiquing American capitalism. It also supported a socialist and binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. This put the movement into conflict with both the American Zionist establishment and other groups of young Zionists. At the beginning of the 1940s, the conflict grew more acute, and its adversaries demanded that Avukah disband. They refused to have any connection with it and, in 1943, the Zionist leadership established a new student organization in its place. Avukah carried on for another two years without support from the Zionist establishment, finally disintegrating in 1945. Avukah's story is not well known, and so far, no coherent account of its path to radicalism and oblivion has been written. That is not to say that its history has not been told—indeed it has, at times in great detail, in a number of works that have focused on subjects indirectly connected to it.1 But these works contradict each other. Some take no account of Avukah's radicalization, while others recount it while disagreeing about [End Page 343] its causes and its manifestations. Neither is there any consensus about how and whether its radicalization contributed to its demise. Furthermore, the case of Avukah does not fit easily into the larger historical context, either that of young Jews around the world during that same period or that of American Zionism. In fact, the study of the Zionist movement has addressed other instances in which the mainstream grappled with groups of young people who underwent left-wing radicalization (mostly, like Avukah, in the 1930s).2 But Avukah's case is different. The left-wing radicalization that took place simultaneously in Europe and in the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—consisted largely of cases of young Zionist leftists who shifted into anti-Zionist movements. For the most part, they adopted communism and idolized the Soviet Union, which led to them being condemned by mainstream Zionism. Avukah, in contrast, was firmly anti-Bolshevik, and remained Zionist throughout its existence. It thus does not fit into the common model of the leftward turn as it appears in Zionist historiography of Europe and Palestine. That begs a question: Was American Zionism different in this regard? When Avukah's story is examined in relation to the conventions of historical writing on American Zionism, it challenges the existing research. These works depict the movement in the United States as having American liberal-progressive characteristics, currently referred to as "General Zionism" in Zionist politics.3 As Rafael Medoff has written, "After all, most American Zionists were 'stam Zionists.' They were convinced of the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not wedded to any particular vision of that homeland's future economic, social, or religious contours."4 [End Page 344] On the face of it, Avukah seems simply to have adopted the views of the socialist wing of American Zionism, which included established organizations such as the avowedly Marxist Poale Zion and the Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement.5 But that view is problematic for several reasons. First, socialist Zionism did not have much influence in the United States, and during the period in question, its youth wings were riven by internal conflict and had little capacity for recruiting new members.6 It was thus unreasonable to expect that this wing could incorporate all Zionist activity on US campuses. Second, by the mid-1930s, Poale Zion had become relatively moderate in its social views, and was largely a Palestine-centered group that focused on the settlement of that country.7 Hashomer Hatza'ir was more radical, and indeed maintained relations with Avukah on that basis, but differed from it in that it explicitly sympathized with the...

The Hero’s Wife: The Depiction of Female Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Cinema Prior to the Eichmann Trial and in its Aftermath

Israeli culture in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by ideological considerations. Zionist films, as other aspects of Eretz-Israel and Israeli culture, distinctively propagated Zionist ideas. As a consequence of their sociopolitical focus, these films neglected the complexities of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the native Jews in Eretz Israel. Instead, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous entity that bore distinct negative connotations. Films depicted female Holocaust survivors as mentally unstable, unfit mothers, and often played up negative sexual stereotypes. In these films, the women were “cured” or went through a process of “purification” thanks to the Zionist establishment. Historical research often cites the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) as being a turning point in the Israeli public’s perception of the Holocaust, and its representation in Israeli culture. This article will focus on an analysis of the film The Hero’s Wife (Peter Frye, 1963) that was produced in the aftermath of the trial. It will discuss the innovative representations of this unresearched film and will seek to answer the questions of why, and in what way, its narrative comprises a subversive antithesis to the narrative shaped by Zionist fiction films made prior to the Eichmann trial.

Rewriting Israeli History: New Historians and Critical Sociologists

The New Historians and Critical Sociologists were two groups of thinkers who emerged in Israel during the 1980s, strongly criticizing Israeli history and society. Coming from diverse backgrounds and using different methodologies, nonetheless they all shared a highly critical approach towards mainstream historians and sociologists, and, more importantly, towards key moments and issues in Israel’s history. These thinkers blamed the Zionist establishment for ignoring the distress of the European Jews during the Holocaust, committing war crimes against the Arab population during the 1948 War, and abusing immigrants in the years after the state’s independence. These claims raised passionate debates between mainstream and critical scholars, which strongly affected Israeli society. This paper examines the processes that led to the emergence of these thinkers, the novelty of their historical narratives and interpretations, and analyzes the specific terminology they employed, as well as their opponents’ criticisms, which their research provoked.

Language, Identity and Conflict: Examining Collective Identity through the Labels of the Palestinians in Israel

This article argues that the identity labels attached to the Palestinians in Israel resulted from a reciprocal interchange of ideas between the Israeli political establishment and the Palestinians themselves, as part of the struggle over identity between the two parties. Each side chose identity labeling criteria that fit its narrative. This shows that such labels are not mere terms but rather serve through their historical evolution and political context to reflect the struggle for collective identity by Palestinian citizens among themselves as well as with the Zionist establishment of Israel, and highlights their symbolic significance. The main question which this paper attempts to answer is how the collective identity of the Palestinian citizens of Israel was shaped and determined within the Israeli context.

Communists and the 1948 War: PCP, Maki, and the National Liberation League

This paper analyzes the way in which Palestine's Jewish and Arab communist parties, the PCP-Maki and the National Liberation League, acted during the 1948 war. Both groups made separate and different efforts to make the two-state solution a reality as originally conceived in the UN partition plan. Ironically, the decisive Jewish victory in the war resulted in an asymmetry between the Jewish Communists the Palestinian Communists when they were unified toward the end of the 1948 war. Despite Maki's labors for an Israeli victory, its standing in the nascent Israeli political system toward the end of the war remained marginal. The concept of Jewish–Arab cooperation under the aegis of the USSR was seen by the Zionist establishment as dangerous and subversive.

Myth and reality, denial and concealment: American Zionist leadership and the Jewish vote in the 1940s

This article examines how the Jewish vote was brought to bear in the presidential elections of 1944 and in the mid-term elections of 194. It also reveals the essential difficulties that American Zionist leaders faced in activating the Jewish vote, and their efforts to cope with the complex challenges of ethnic politics in the US of the 1940s. Documents of American Zionist leaders at the time show that the political use of the Jewish vote, so simple, so natural to the Zionist establishment in Palestine and in the WZO, presented a predicament for the Americans. It began with the need to cover up the very fact of its use and went on to set the political and social identity of some American Zionist leaders on a collision course with the implications of the ethnic vote in the American political arena.

From Philanthropy to Shaping a State: Hadassah and Ben-Gurion, 1937–1947

Rose Jacobs and the organization among whose leaders she numbered—Hadassah, the American Women's Zionist organization—made, during the 1930s and 1940s, important and unprecedented inroads into the Zionist establishment. Jacobs and other Hadassah women used their organization's size and financial power to claim a voice in the making of Zionist policy both in the United States and in the Jewish community in Palestine. The political, international, and economic crises of these two decades enabled Hadassah to expand out of the traditionally female areas to which it had originally been restricted—health and education—and make its voice heard on other issues, among them Jewish-Arab relations. This culminated in Jacobs' election to the Jewish Agency Executive in 1938. Hadassah broke the limitations under which Jewish women's organizations had theretofore operated and used its newfound influence to offer alternatives to the male Zionist leadership's cultural, social, and political doctrines.

Induced to Volunteer? The Predicament of Jewish Communists in Palestine and the Spanish Civil War

Despite there being no recruitment office in Palestine, dozens of members of the local Communist Party, mainly Jews, left the country to take part in the Spanish Civil War. First, this article examines the political and social circumstances which influenced individuals’ decisions to volunteer. The Palestine Communist Party operated illegally. A combination of pressure from the British mandate authorities, hostility from the Zionist establishment and acute internal disputes, following the party’s participation in the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–9), created strong push factors that encouraged many Party members to leave the country. The article also examines the volunteers’ ideological motivation and the transport and support networks that were necessary to bring them to the war zone. By exploring these issues, the article seeks not only to illuminate the particular case of the volunteers from Palestine, but also to make a contribution to the comparative study of foreign volunteers in modern conflicts.

THE WAR ON THE MIXED CITIES: THE DEPOPULATION OF ARAB TIBERIAS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ITS OLD, ‘SACRED’ CITY (1948–9)

The Old City of Tiberias was one of the most beautiful and ancient cities in Palestine. With a mixed population of Palestinian Arabs and (largely) Mizrahi 1 1 The Mizrahim are eastern or oriental Jews. and Sephardic Jews until the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, Tiberias – in which Maimonides is buried – is, according to Jewish tradition, among the four ‘sacred’ cities in the country. Shortly after Israel was established, the secular Zionist establishment decided to raze the Old City to its foundations. As a result of this policy, the Old City, with all its historical buildings and nearly all its historical walls, was entirely erased, and in its place today there are parking lots and modern high-rise hotels. This article traces the story of the destruction of Old Tiberias and examines the attitudes of the secular Labour Zionist leadership to a ‘sacred’ Jewish city and the reactions to these attitudes of the local Sephardic and Mizrahi public.

The War on the Mixed Cities: The Depopulation of Arab Tiberias and the Destruction of its Old, 'Sacred' City (1948-9)

The Old City of Tiberias was one of the most beautiful and ancient cities in Palestine. With a mixed population of Palestinian Arabs and (largely) Mizrahi 1 and Sephardic Jews until the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, Tiberias– in which Maimonides is buried–is, according to Jewish tradition, among the four ‘sacred’ cities in the country. Shortly after Israel was established, the secular Zionist establishment decided to raze the Old City to its foundations. As a result of this policy, the Old City, with all its historical buildings and nearly all its historical walls, was entirely erased, and in its place today there are parking lots and modern high-rise hotels. This article traces the story of the destruction of Old Tiberias and examines the attitudes of the secular Labour Zionist leadership to a ‘sacred’ Jewish city and the reactions to these attitudes of the local Sephardic and Mizrahi public.

Struggle for cooperation and integration: American Zionists and Arab oil, 1940s

From the late 1930s, American Jewry grew in prominence within the international Jewish framework and the Zionist movement. This was a natural consequence of the rising importance of the United States with its increased involvement in the Middle East, and the crisis of European Jewry that reached its tragic climax in the Holocaust. An examination of political events in the Zionist movement in Palestine and in the international arena reveals the intense involvement of American Zionists between the 1930s and the founding of Israel in 1948. After the Holocaust and perceiving the chance to realize Zionist aims, American Jews in general, and members of the Zionist movement in particular, had an exceptional opportunity to enlist American Jewry into the Zionist cause.' The leadership of the American Zionist movement was not content to serve Zionism and the Jewish community in Palestine economically and politically. They also tried to use the window of opportunity to influence the development and structure of the future Jewish national home, and the manner in which a Jewish state would fit into the Middle East. The central role of American Zionists, they felt, obliged them to confront key questions that would arise with the war's end, and, most importantly, the place of the future Jewish state in its geographical region. Documents indicate that the American Zionist leaders went beyond the question of Jewish-Arab relations: they proposed plans that dealt with such questions as water, the future refugee problem, regional economic cooperation and the role of international organizations in the Middle East, with a view to assuring JewishArab coexistence and cooperation. These American Zionist attempts to influence Jewish-Arab relations met with strenuous opposition from David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Zionist executive at the time and the most important leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. In the end, Jewish-Arab relations were determined by the Zionist establishment in Palestine in accordance with political and social realities that developed there, and were altogether different from the ideas expressed in American Zionist plans. Just how deeply American Zionism was involved in the future of the Middle East and attempted to influence events in Palestine is apparent in relation to the oil issue in the 1940s, especially in the latter half of the decade, when political activity leading to Israel's establishment intensified.2 The mounting importance of oil for the Allied war effort and the American economy caused the United States to be increasingly involved in the Middle East. The American Zionist establishment felt obliged to try to influence the patterns of that involvement. Documents of American

American Literature and Israeli Culture: The Case of the Canaanites

IN THE SPRING OF 1988, Israeli television dedicated its monthly literary magazine to a roundtable discussion of the writings of Mark Twain, following the 1987 publication of a new Hebrew translation of two of Twain's ouevres The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' The focus of the program was solely on Twain himself-his life, his characters, his humor, his world-view-whereas the name ofAharon Amir, the translator of these books, was mentioned only in passing. Nothing was really said about the translator or the nature of this new translation, and nobody even raised a question about the policy of translation; such as, why Amir had taken it upon himself to translate these two novels about boyhood life on the Mississippi in the mid-nineteenth century, which had already been published in Hebrew several times. The answer to this question lies in the understanding of the ideological and political affiliation ofAmirpoet, writer, eminent editor, and indisputably one of Israel's leading translators. Aharon Amir was a founding father of the Canaanites, a group of Israeli writers and intellectuals who emerged in the early I940s and aroused much public interest and controversy during the mid-195os. This group which has been treated in Homeland or Holy Land?, a study by James S. Diamond -presented a serious ideological challenge to the Jewish and Zionist establishment of the time. The Canaanites argued that modern immigration to Palestine, which was mainly Jewish, was creating a new national entity which was totally disconnected from its Jewish origin and from Jewish tradition. The Canaanites expected this new nation of Israeli natives (whom they preferred to call Hebrews) to become the avantgarde, the melting pot of all the ethnic groups in the West-Semitic world'3 creating a massive, homogeneous Middle-Eastern nation similar to that of the ancient Hebrews who had been the dominant national, cultural and

The marginal role of Jerusalem in Zionist settlement activity prior to the founding of the state of Israel

The role of Jerusalem in the settlement activity of the Zionist establishment from the beginning of the Zionist movement until the founding of the state of Israel has not been definitively researched. However, based on several studies that touch on Jerusalem during this period, a general picture emerges in which, to put it mildly, Jerusalem was not at the forefront of activity of the Zionist establishment; even though at two points -just prior to the First World War and immediately following it- a change of approach was evident, this did not continue. This general picture may be surprising in light of expectations from a national movement whose very name derived from the historic name of its eternal capital. The attitude of the Zionist establishment to Jerusalem can be explained by a number of factors: the large population of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city who opposed Zionism and everything that Zionism stood for; the Zionist establishment's preference for agricultural settlement; the distance of Jerusalem from concentrations of Jewish agricultural settlement and its lack of an agricultural hinterland; political constraints due to foreign interests - the Ottomans, the British, and the world powers - and the significance of Jerusalem to the Muslim and Christian worlds; the growth of Jaffa and then Tel Aviv as the settlement and economic focus of the Jewish community in Palestine; obstacles to economic, particularly industrial, development in Jerusalem; and difficulties in acquiring land in Jerusalem and its environs.' This article seeks to examine whether there were any changes in the approach of the Zionist establishment to Jerusalem during the years immediately preceding the founding of the state of Israel (1948) - years when Zionist efforts to found a Jewish state in Palestine were definitive, when decisions about the political future of Palestine and Jerusalem were just around the corner, and when the Jewish presence in Jerusalem was clear. The answer to this question will be drawn from an examination of the programmes and plans for Jerusalem's development that were initiated by the Zionist establishment during this period, the reactions to these plans, and the implementation of decisions it made about Jerusalem at the time. This article deals primarily with the period from the end of the

Status and rights of the Arab minority in the Nascent Jewish state

The attitude of Zionism toward the issue of the Arabs in Palestine from the beginning of Zionism until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 has been the subject of considerable scholarly interest. Among the more prominent studies are those by Alsberg, Ro'i, Hattis, Sela, Mandel, Kollat, Rubinstein, Goldstein, Haim, Caplan, Be'eri, Gorny, and Shafir.1 These works deal not just with the attitude toward the Arab issue of prestate official Zionist bodies (all constituents of the World Zionist Organization, primarily the Zionist Congress, the Zionist General Council, the Zionist Executive, and the Jewish Agency Executive), but also with the prevailing attitudes of the right and left wings of the Zionist movement.2 This research draws a broad picture of the role of the Arab issue in the Zionist movement and responds to fundamental questions such as the roots of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine; the perception of Arabs among various camps of the Zionist movement - official Zionism, the Revisionists, Berit Shalom, and HaShomer HaZa'ir; Zionist efforts to reach agreement with the Arabs; the reasons for the failure to reach agreement, and so forth. However, although the foregoing studies are in general agreement that it was the mission of Zionism from its earliest stages to establish a state in Palestine, they do not examine in depth the approach of the Zionist movement to the status and rights of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state.3 This issue was relevant for official and Revisionist Zionism in particular, as neither accepted the concept of a binational state, which had been proposed by other Zionist camps such as Berit Shalom and HaShomer HaZa'ir. Indeed, the Zionist movement did not ignore the issue of an Arab minority in the Jewish state, but issued statements about it in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.4 In other words, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 as a Jewish state having an Arab minority was not the first time that the Zionist establishment was called upon to deliberate the issue of minority rights of non-Jews. The issue seems to have been first addressed by official Zionist bodies in a comprehensive, thorough, and detailed manner, looking at all the dilemmas, in the context of the recommendation of the British Royal Commission in 1937. This Commission proposed that the JewishArab conflict be resolved by partitioning the land and founding two states in Palestine, one for the Jews and the other for the Arabs. In that era, in

The IZL Delegation in the USA 1939–1948: Anatomy of an ethnic interest/protest group

Between 1939 and 1948, a small contingent of young men from Palestine promoted Zionist and rescue related activities throughout the United States. During its ten year existence this group affiliated with the Irgun Z'vai Leumi (IZL V'XX)1 underwent several organizational transformations, each time adopting a different name and announcing new goals in accordance with the type of body created. Organizational diversities notwithstanding, all of the bodies had three common denominators: their core activists were members of the "IZL Delegation in the USA" headed by Hillel Kook, alias Peter Bergson (hence the group's nickname, the "Bergson Boys"); they adopted the same unique and in the words of their opponents "hyperactive" modus operandi, and they maintained a complex and problematic relationship with both the Zionist establishment and the Revisionist Movement in Palestine and abroad. These three characteristics were often accompanied by success in spheres where other American Zionist movements had failed, viz., mass fundraising during the early war years, tapping formerly unaffiliated sectors of the American Jewish public, and a role in establishing the "War Refugee Board" in January, 1944.

Israel's Expanding Arms Industry

The rapid expansion of Israel's arms industry since 1967 offers one of the most striking refutations of the notion of a defenceless Israel. Although Israeli officials still claim to represent a peace-loving state imperilled by Arab belligerency, Israeli exports of military hardware in 1970 amounted to $75 million and are expected to double by 1975. $75 million, if viewed in isolation, seems negligible, but arms exports in fact constituted nearly ten per cent of Israel's 1970 gross exports, rivalling traditional items such as citrus goods, chemicals or textiles and apparel. 1 Israel's expanding weapons trade with other nations reflects not only the aims of the Zionist establishment, but the ambitions of foreign investors who hope to develop Israel as a profitable technological outpost. The cdncept is well expressed in such newly created entities as Motorola Israel, whose parent company in the United States is a major manufacturer of sophisticated military equipment: