Yosef Gorny: Zionism and the Arabs
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
Dec. 10, 2005
Notes on "Zionist Ideological Attitudes to the Arab Question" (for the handout from Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology [1987], pp. 40-77)
Gorny's general argument is that the physical weakness of the early Zionist settlements in Palestine increased the weight of ideological issues, which are the focus of his work. The "outer-directed" claim, that Jewish history demonstrates the validity of its "homeland" rights in Palestine, was paired with an "inner-directed" argument, that the task of turning contemporary Palestine into a Jewish state required an effort of self-transformation, individually and collectively. From the outset, Gorny argues, these ideological emphases were incorporated into the pragmatic strategies of building a Jewish demographic majority. Pragmatically, the Zionist leadership chose to defer confrontations with the Arabs until the Yishuv was strengthened by immigration and development. From about 1910, however, the reality of Arab opposition to Zionism became too obvious to ignore. Gorny's study of the competing Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Problem that emerged at this time provides us with the tools to imagine ways it "might have been otherwise," while helping us identify the political stresses that favored the path of separation rather than cooperation.
Recent revisionist scholarship-- both of the 1948 war by the "New Historians" (Morris, Pappe and Shlaim) and of the formative period of Zionism by the "Post-Zionist" sociologists (Kimmerling and Shafir)-- stresses the non-ideological (economic, political and military) factors. Like them, however, Gorny intends to foreground Jewish-Arab relations, and his focus on ideology enables him to do so with refreshing directness. His survey of the different Zionist attitudes to the Arab question thus provides a useful complement to more recent studies.
Gorny's second chapter, called "Ideological Outlooks," lays out the early Zionist attitudes toward the "Arab problem" in terms of four competing positions: 1. Active co-operation, or "integrationism"; 2. "Separatism," the antithesis of #1, which became associated with Jabotinsky's militarist approach; 3. "Liberalism," typified by Arthur Ruppin's pragmatic balance between cooperation and increasing Zionist development; 4. "Constructive Socialism," by which Gorny refers to the Zionist labor movement's effort to lead the national movement despite the contradictions posed by the Arab Problem. In the handout I have included key pages from each of the four positions, including Gorny's discussion of the main leaders and spokesmen. Although the four positions emerged before World War One, Gorny sees all but the first, idealizing approach as evolving rather than disappearing after the British mandate. Thus the two famous "liberals," Ahad Haam and Arthur Ruppin, figure as the chief spokesmen for the road not taken. The binationalist future they and other pre-war "liberals" favored was effectively politicized by Ruppin when he founded the Brit Shalom movement in 1925. Brit Shalom was rejuvenated by Judah Magnes and Martin Buber in the 1940s, and its binationalist vision has been kept alive by the Israeli Left despite its unpopularity.
I found Gorny's first position, the "integrative outlook" (shared by a variety of intellectuals before WWI) somewhat difficult to distinguish from the third, "liberal" position mentioned above with reference to Arthur Ruppin. Gorny’s aim, I think, is to have a separate classification for the early idealistic pro-Arab position that was influenced by the romantic-Orientalist movement we now associate with T.E. Lawrence. Gorny quotes Yitzhak Epstein's claim that "the Arab's physical development surpasses that of all the people of Europe" (94), because Arabs are "semi-vegetarians who drink water." This suggests the primitivist ideology that permeated European modernism in the early 20th century. (Both T.E. and D.H. Lawrence are major carriers of it.) For us, I believe, the task is alertness to the way primitivist stereotypes have contributed to the production of Arab "invisibility" at this time. This is an aspect of Zionist ideology that Gorny surely glosses over, or at least under-analyzes, by confining it to Epstein's statement of "the Hidden Problem" of the Arab population.
It may be useful to add a note on Gorny's account of how the "constructive socialist" position emerged after the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate. Gorny argues that the post-war Ahdut Haavoda party addressed the Arab Problem by means of a twofold policy: 1. To affirm the exclusive national right of the Jewish people to Palestine, legitimated by international law, with Arabs having the rights of a national minority. 2. To avoid dispossessing Arab fellahin by settling in unpopulated areas wherever possible.
Gorny argues that this long-term plan for national autonomy made future confrontations with the Arabs inevitable (132). Strategically, the Ahdut Haavoda leaders were caught between conflicting goals, especially after the Arab violence in 1920 and 1921. They knew they should promote class solidarity with the Arabs, both on principle (Marxist or humanitarian) and to prevent an alliance between Arab landowners and Jewish capitalists. On the other hand, as one leader put it, they did not want to help organize the Arabs and thus "consolidate their stand against us" (134). They also underestimated the seriousness of the Arab opposition. Gorny argues that most of the Ahdut Haavoda leaders "rejected the idea that nationalistic motives underlay Arab opposition to Zionism," preferring to treat Arab violence as a British security problem, given the "disorderly" population. After 1921, however, Ben Gurion began to acknowledge that it was a nationalist struggle. He contended that rapid demographic expansion was needed to alter the balance of power before a military confrontation occurred. Consistently, Ben-Gurion opposed any move to include Arab workers, promoting instead a far-off goal of separate national associations.
Hapoel Hatzair-- the anti-Marxist rival of Poale Zion, and then of Ahdut Haavoda, before it finally merged with the latter in the late 1920s-- plays a relatively unimportant role in Gorny's study. Unhampered by formal ideological constraints, Hapoel Hatzair never went through the struggles the Socialist Zionists had in reconciling theory with the desire to exclude Arab workers. Gorny sees Hapoel Hatzair staying true to the "tradition" of the Second Aliya, in which "constructive achievement" by the Jewish worker was the only valid basis for the right to return to the homeland (150). Hapoel Hatzair's recognition of the existence of an Arab nationalist movement did not alter its faith in Zionist achievements, or its tendency to restrict its focus to that sphere. It appears that Hapoel Hatzair was too self-absorbed to allow it to address the emergence of Arab nationalism directly and concretely. In any case, Gorny argues, the Zionist attitudes about the Arab Problem that prevailed in the 1920s made what is now called the "dual economy," with its apartheid social implications, virtually inevitable.
