E.Kedourie & S.Haim (ed) Palestine & Israel in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries
Frank Cass. London.1982 (Middle East International (London), No.217. 27 January 1984)

In 1922 Arthur Ruppin, a leading Zionist who was in charge of Jewish settlement in Palestine, wrote "..it became clear how difficult it is to realise Zionism and still bring it continually into line with the demands of general ethics..will Zionism indeed deteriorate into a pointless chauvinism? Is there in fact no way of assigning, in Israel, a sphere of activity to a growing number of Jews without oppressing the Arabs?" He went on: "On every site where we purchase land and where we settle people, the present cultivators will inevitably be dispossessed." By 1936 Ruppin arrived at the conclusion that "..it is our destiny to be in a state of continual warfare with the Arabs.."

The articles by Emile Marmorstein and Yaacov Ro'I devote themselves to this very issue, the early Zionist attitudes to the Arab population of Palestine. The general trend as in so much Zionist propaganda masquerading as scholarship is to highlight "the innocence" of the early Zionist settlers who believed that no conflict of interests existed between the native Arab inhabitants and the Jewish immigrants, who had no policy because of their "topographical and mental remoteness from Palestine". Yet Ro'i quotes Ruppin writing as early as 1913, that "the Yishuv had been forced to learn that an indigenous population did exist", and E.Ben Yehuda, writing as early as 1883, who was clear that the object was to drive "the people of the land" from the land. Indeed there was confusion: some early Zionist immigrants found highly original ways of getting round the problem of the nature of their colonial venture, arguing, like Israel Belkind in 1894, that "the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants are descended from Jews". The practical activity of the leadership of the Yishuv, like the setting up of the Hagana in 1920, indicates that they were not relying on Arab goodwill and indeed were preparing for the "state of continual warfare" which characterised the whole history of the Zionist enterprise from the very beginning.

Mayir Verete addresses himself to the question of what the Balfour Declaration was "really about", and proceeds to examine the motives of the British government. He argues convincingly, basing himself on official British documents, that the Balfour Declaration was not the result of successful Zionist diplomacy. Rather it was the British who wanted Palestine in order to ensure that there would be no European power or an Arab state alongside Egypt which could open negotiations with the Zionists. The latter were merely tools used by the British to exclude France and secure the Mandate for Britain. Verete's thesis is best summed up in his phrase: "Had there been no Zionists in those days, the British would have invented them".

While a great deal of propaganda has been diffused alleging Arab complicity with the Nazis in the 1930s, very little has appeared in English on Zionist relations with Nazi Germany. The articles by David Yisraeli and R.Melka on The Third Reich and Palestine, and Nazi Germany and the Palestine Question, while incomplete and not directly addressing themselves to the issue of German-Zionist relations, nevertheless contain a certain amount of relevant information. Both writers agree that Germany gave "negligible material support" to the Arabs, that the declared sympathy and propaganda for the Arabs was not backed by military and political aid, and that the German foreign ministry refused to get involved officially in the Jewish-Arab struggle.

As far as the Zionist movement was concerned, the Germans actively encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine and Melka writes that "Germany herself was co-operating in the building of Zion". In 1933 the Haavara agreement was signed between the German ministry of economics and Zionist groups permitting German Jews emigrating to Palestine to deposit their assets in a special account in Germany, which was used to pay for German exports to Palestine, the Jewish emigrants being reimbursed by the importers. In 1938 Hitler himself was reported to have declared that Jewish immigration was to be "promoted by all available means", and Eichmann was involved in providing training and special trains for Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1938.

Yisraeli states that in 1939 the Gestapo was involved in helping illegal (i.e. Without British permission) immigration to Palestine, while Melka briefly mentions Dr Kastner of the Jewish Agency rescue committee in Budapest and the deal for the "sale" of Hungarian Jews which concluded with Eichmann in 1944. A detailed examination of this bizarre relationship is contained in Eliahu Ben Elissar's La Diplomatie due III Reich et les Juifs (Julliard 1969).

Until Menachem Begin became prime minister, the Irgun, which was commanded by him, and its Stern Gang offshoot, one of whose leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, now Israel's prime minister, were regarded as the lunatic fringe of the Zionist movement. The article by Y.S.Brenner is an attempt to rehabilitate the Stern Gang. Presenting a glowing account of its various exploits including the murder of Lord Moyne and Count Folke Bernadotte, the repeated attempts at murder the British High Commissioner in Palestine, and even the murder of one of its own leaders, described as "without moral scruples and with autocratic manners", the author calls to its defence " the American atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki..the German massacres of Jews, Poles, and Russians.." It is indeed a strange kind of justification which points to these acts and declares "if ends justify means everywhere, why not in Palestine?"

The remaining six articles deal with Arab issues. Only Ya'akov Firestone on Crop Sharing in Mandatory Palestine and Gabriel Ben-Dor on Intellectuals in Israeli Druze Society deserve some mention. The first is an original piece of scholarly research on landlord-peasant relations in Palestine using records kept by a Palestinian landowner. The author examines two villages, explaining the forms of tenure that existed, and the attempts to draw a picture of the mutual relationship of dependence and obligation which extended into the social and political fields.

Ben-Dor's article rests on the Israeli claim that the Druze are "a minority within a minority" and their total separateness from the Arabs. Thus those Druze who identify themselves as Arabs are dismissed by the author as "the losers and the disappointed", failing to mention that in the 1977 Kenesset elections 5000 Druze voters out of a total community of 34,000 gave their support to the communist party which was outspokenly pro-Palestinian. The Israeli authorities have for years been trying to foster a separate Druze identity by creating a special Druze school curriculum, Druze history text books, and even Druze poetry. Yet despite compulsory military serviced, which is supposed to accord them equal rights with the Jewish inhabitants of the state, the Druze, as one respondent in the article says, have "the same obligations as the Jews, and the same rights as the Arabs".

The twelve articles which make up this volume are drawn from various issues of the Middle Eastern Studies Journal. As with a previous collection edited by the same authors, the articles are uneven; the only thing they have in common is their Zionist ideological framework, and the Israeli authorship.