A State at Any Cost, page 25
*
After his speech, Ben-Gurion fell ill and stayed home. The Convention’s final session stretched into the night and was adjourned only at dawn. At a quarter to six in the morning, the delegates sang “The Internationale” followed by “Hatikvah.” Behind the scenes, contacts were already underway regarding a hitherto unlikely merger between Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avodah. A united Party of the Workers of Palestine, or Mapai as it came to be called by its Hebrew acronym, began to look like a real possibility. The delegates formed circles and danced the hora to wake up, and then set out in procession to Ben-Gurion’s home. He could not have wished himself a more enjoyable morning. In a conciliatory and unifying gesture, one of his opponents ascended to his apartment and pulled him out to the balcony, dressed in a bathrobe. At least one participant reported that he saw tears glistening in Ben-Gurion’s eyes.90
* According to the Haganah’s official version, the order came from the Haganah’s commander, Yosef Hecht, who himself confirmed giving it.
† Elkind founded a farming commune in the Soviet Union. He was executed during Stalin’s purges. (Tzachor 1990, p. 128ff; Tzachor 1994, p. 57ff; Kantrovitz 2007, p. 217ff.)
‡ The authorities generally refused to allow in the mentally ill and tubercular, or prostitutes and sex offenders. The law also provided for refusing immigration permits for political reasons. Britain feared the massive immigration of Communist Jews. Weizmann promised to do all he could to keep such undesirables from coming. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, June 4, 1929, July 30, 1924, BGA; Avraham Tarshish, interview transcript, BGA.; Segev 2000, p. 228.)
§ Ben-Gurion’s two sisters, Rivka and Tzipora, both married opera singers in Palestine. His brother Michel was long the proprietor of a kiosk in Tel Aviv. His brother Avraham’s daughter, Sheindele, remained in Poland. (Giladi 1973, p. 47; Hagani 2010, p. 174ff.)
** On another occasion, Ben-Gurion spoke in this way of the “sick mind of the ghetto Jew.” (Ben-Gurion 1971a, pp. 546, 333, 334; Ben-Gurion to the Fourth Convention of Ahdut Ha’avodah, May 13, 1924, in Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 275.)
†† At the apex of the Histadrut pyramid, there were some who received more. The director-general of Bank Hapoalim, a Histadrut subsidiary, received thirty pounds. (Giladi 1971, p. 131ff; Ben-Gurion Diary, June 14, 1927, BGA.)
‡‡ Remez termed the criticism of the advances “a miniature pogrom.” The advances had been justified, he said, and had been given to only seven or eight of Solel Boneh’s employees. “They could have earned their living elsewhere,” he maintained. “But we rode these beasts of burden day and night. They did not hide the sums they owed and their debts were not canceled.” (Ben-Gurion and Remez at the Third Histadrut Convention, July 10, 1927, Ben-Gurion, minutes, pp. 74ff., 72.)
■ 10 ■
UNIFICATION
“THE CATASTROPHE IS FAR GREATER THAN I THOUGHT”
In September 1930, Ben-Gurion returned to Berlin, where he observed with alarm the rise of the Nazis. He called them “German Revisionists,” with reference to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement. “I read Hitler’s newspaper today and it was as if I were reading Jabotinsky in Doar Hayom,” he wrote. “The same words, the same style, the same spirit.” Jabotinsky spent most of his time in Europe, but a branch of the Revisionist movement he had founded operated in Palestine. In the latter part of the 1920s, he positioned himself as the leader of the Zionist opposition, rival of Chaim Weizmann and nemesis of the labor movement. As a popular journalist and much-admired poet, he excelled, unlike Ben-Gurion, at public speaking. In further contrast to Ben-Gurion, he exuded charisma and was considered an outstanding Jewish intellectual.
Since solidifying his control of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion had come to realize that the political arena of Palestine’s Jewish community had limited capacity for advancing Zionist goals. His routine work as Histadrut secretary no longer satisfied his ambitions. Weizmann, Katznelson, Tabenkin, and a number of other figures were more prominent and more admired. The older among them had worked personally with Herzl and had been Ben-Gurion’s own mentors in his youth. Menachem Ussishkin, who headed Keren Kayemet (the Jewish National Fund), the Zionist movement’s land-buying corporation, was a nearly legendary figure in right-wing circles. Ben-Gurion saw him as a nuisance, but treated him with respect. During this period, he also had dealings with Nahum Sokolow, who for a time replaced Weizmann as president of the Zionist Organization. “No one took him seriously,” Ben-Gurion remarked. It was Sokolow who, as editor of Hatzefirah three decades previously, had rejected the sixteen-year-old Ben-Gurion’s suggestion that the newspaper do a piece on his Ezra club.1 Then there was Moshe Smilansky, whose articles Ben-Gurion had read while he was still a teenager in Płońsk; in comparison, Ben-Gurion was still almost a neophyte. Even in his own party he hardly reigned supreme—the road to power was still a long one, and he wanted to shorten it.
*
The Shavuot holiday arrived on Friday, May 25, 1928. That morning Ben-Gurion met with the Jerusalem Workers Council’s board. That afternoon he took Paula, Geula, and Renana to spend the weekend in Ben Shemen, a farming village on the coastal plain, home to a new agricultural boarding school. Berl Katznelson joined them. Ben-Gurion acknowledged Katznelson’s preeminence and during his lifetime made no effort to take his place. He needed his backing and, often, his advice. In later years, he would say that he had had only three real friends his whole life; the names varied, but Katznelson was always one of them.*2
Katznelson was a politician, too, but in his own way. His speeches tended to be overly ideological, overly vague, and, especially, overly long. More than anything else, he needed to be loved. Ben-Gurion believed in power. Katznelson admired Ben-Gurion’s political abilities and generally supported him; unlike Ben-Gurion, Katznelson had many friends. The two went to Ben Shemen to attend a youth assembly. At the time, the negotiations between Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapo’el Hatza’ir over the formation of a unified party were still under way. The impetus for a merger intensified as the Revisionists and the middle-class forces of the Fourth Aliyah gained strength.
The car taking them to Ben Shemen was crowded. Ben-Gurion did not know how to drive, and the driver of the car brought his wife and two daughters along. “When we came to a bend in the road, the car was unable to make the turn properly and I saw we were about to fall off the road,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “I felt my breathing stop for a moment, as if someone was choking me.” When he came to, he found himself sprawled in a field with the other passengers strewn around him. Paula and Renana were covered with blood. Katznelson was sitting in a ditch. Ben-Gurion asked how he was and Berl responded with a wince, indicating that he could not move. “Apparently his bones are broken,” Ben-Gurion thought to himself. He was wounded, too. “I felt pain in my foot and my head. Blood ran down from my forehead. All my clothes were full of blood,” he recounted. They received medical care and were sent home. Katznelson suffered severe injuries and required a long hospital stay.3
*
The accident delayed the unity negotiations, which had stretched on for a few years. The anguished discussions that both parties held gives today’s reader the impression that each of them was called on to bridge a deep ideological abyss. As was their wont, the members of each group clashed vehemently and passionately over ideas and isms. The issue of class struggle was one point of contention, but the principal issues were the wording of the united party’s manifesto and its name. Ben-Gurion employed all his political experience in the negotiations, and must have required nerves of steel to get through the logorrhea alive.
In the meantime, Arab terror once more loomed.
*
The attack on the Jews of Jaffa in 1921 was followed by several relatively peaceful years. The number of Jews killed by Arabs each year reverted to an average of two a year; in 1928, apparently, none were killed at all.4 This seemed to provide a foundation for the Jewish-Arab workers’ alliance that Ben-Gurion spoke of. It was, however, an illusion that could last only for as long as the Arabs did not shatter it, which they did in September 1928. The trigger was a dispute over prayer arrangements at the Western Wall. On Yom Kippur eve a curtain was placed at the site, to separate women and men, as is customary in Orthodox synagogues. It was not the first time this had been done, but this time the Muslim religious authorities, who exercised control over the site, demanded that the curtain be removed. British policemen showed up on Yom Kippur morning and told the Jews to remove the curtain. Some of the worshippers refused and a fight broke out between them and the police. The incident made the Western Wall the focal point of tensions in the city. From time to time violent clashes between Jews and Arabs broke out there. Internal conflicts on each side also exacerbated tensions. Arab and Jewish leaders accused their political rivals of weakness and defeatism; people on both sides were swept along by nationalist demagoguery and religious fanaticism.
A few days after the curtain incident, Ussishkin spoke out at a meeting of the National Council, the executive board of the Assembly of Representatives. He said that the Jews should demand of the British administration that it expropriate the Western Wall from the Muslims who were in charge of it. Doar Hayom reported that the meeting was a stormy one, of “great fury.” Ben-Gurion responded with restraint: every Jew, including nonreligious ones, had been shocked by what happened at the Wall, he said. He added that the Zionist movement had missed several opportunities to purchase the site. Those efforts should be continued, he maintained. Only if the “Arab nation” refused to sell, he said, should the Jews demand expropriation. “Redemption” of the Western Wall needed to proceed with caution and moderation, he advised. “If we don’t succeed today,” he said, “we’ll do so half a year from now.” He seems not to have been caught up in the rage the incident set off; he saw the Wall as an issue that did not require an immediate resolution. The problem was not who controlled the Wall, he maintained, but rather the fact that there were not enough Jews in Palestine.
Exceptionally, Jabotinsky himself took part in the discussions—he was a rare guest in Palestine and everyone waited in suspense for his speech. He had arrived in Jerusalem a few days before the confrontation, and would soon take over as editor of Doar Hayom, a daily newspaper that had for years conducted a strident campaign against the labor movement. Charging that the country’s Jewish leadership was not standing up sufficiently to the British administration, he voiced his fear that it would not be long before the Arabs staged a “bloody onslaught” against the Jews. “We cannot dream of a willing agreement between us and the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future,” he declared, quoting words he had written in 1923. He reiterated his opinion that the Arabs needed to be told the truth: the Zionist movement aspired to a Jewish majority in Palestine. No fool would believe any attempt to conceal that. His speech evinced prudence and leadership; the Zionist project required time and patience, he said. He made no mention at all of the labor movement.
Ben-Gurion sounded angry. He did not believe that peace with the Arabs was possible, any more than Jabotinsky did, and could give no less grim a speech, as he had done ten years previously. He, too, had always insisted that the Arabs should be told the truth about Zionism’s aims. But that was now a privilege available only to the opposition. As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion bore a share of national responsibility, and he was also committed to the socialist value of the brotherhood of nations. He attacked Jabotinsky personally, recalling his opposition to the defense of Tel Hai.5
As the summer of 1929 approached, tensions in Jerusalem increased. Rumors once more spread among the Arabs that the Jews were plotting to destroy the Islamic shrines on al-Haram al-Sharif, and rebuild their Temple on the site, which for the Jews is the Temple Mount. At the same time, hostility was on the rise between the Revisionists and the members of the labor movement, including slanders, threats, fistfights, and stone throwing. It was mostly a struggle over power and control. A worker who did not join the Histadrut was virtually unable to find a job; furthermore, the labor movement controlled nearly all the funds that the Zionist Organization allocated to development in Palestine, and also the distribution of immigration certificates. The Revisionists fought to obtain a share of these. Jabotinsky encouraged his supporters to break strikes. The Revisionists carried out their campaign in part with the help of their paramilitary youth movement, Betar. The Histadrut deployed its Workers’ Squads.6
In August 1929, on the eve of the fast of the Ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Jewish Temples, the police permitted three hundred young Jews to stage a procession to the Western Wall; the police also provided protection to the thousands of Jewish worshippers who went to pray there that night. On the following day, Friday, the Muslims celebrated the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. When the prayer service at the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount ended, thousands of Arabs streamed toward the Wall, drove away the Jews, and put several Torah scrolls to the torch. There were other incidents in the city as well, and over the next two days the entire country erupted in bloody clashes, and dozens of Jews were murdered in Hebron.
*
At the time, Ben-Gurion was in Nice on the French Riviera, resting after his travails at a recent Zionist Congress. The reports he received from Palestine were fragmentary at first, among them a telegram from Paula telling him that she and the children had not been injured. Her message may well have helped him internalize the horrors of what had happened. “The catastrophe is far greater than I thought,” he wrote in his diary. He quickly returned home. While still on board his ship, he formulated the central question: would the riots hinder or help the Zionist enterprise? He was not certain what the answer was. They might dishearten the public, cause despair, deter immigration, stymie capital investment, and destroy Zionism. But they might also reveal “hidden strengths” and bolster determination to succeed.
On board, Ben-Gurion met several members of his movement; they, too, were returning from the Zionist Congress. He convened them for a consultation. They made note of one of the fundamental characteristics that enabled him to establish his standing—he was able to respond to nearly every situation immediately, precisely, decisively, and with confidence that he was right. His practical approach, almost devoid of sentiment, reflected the fact, perhaps, that in 1929, as in 1921, he had not experienced the horrors himself.†
Shlomo Lavi, of Ein Harod, recalled sixty children suffering from whooping cough, three of his own among them, packed into one of the kibbutz’s two barns. “The enemy lies in wait and you do not know where he will appear,” he wrote. “There was no fear at all that one of the defenders would fall. But there was great fear that a bullet coming from afar would hit one of the youngsters.” None of Ein Harod’s children were hurt.7 According to official figures, 130 Jews were killed and more than 300 wounded. More than 100 Arabs were killed and more than 200 wounded, most of them by British security forces.8 It was the harshest blow dealt to the Jews of Palestine since World War I.
“IN POLITICAL TERMS IT IS A NATIONAL MOVEMENT”
The mass murder ostensibly corroborated the view of the Arabs that Ben-Gurion had always held—they were “primitive,” he maintained. “We were faced with an outbreak of the worst instincts of savage masses—enflamed religious extremism, a compulsion for robbery and looting, and a thirst for blood,” he said. He offered a psychological explanation for Arab hatred, attributing it to the envy of the “son of the desert” who viewed Tel Aviv from his “shack”; even the Jews’ barns looked to him like royal mansions. An alliance of Jewish and Arab workers now seemed to him far off and less relevant than ever, but Ben-Gurion nevertheless tried to maintain the possibility, at least as a fiction.
He opposed any form of revenge, including a boycott of Arab merchandise. “Let us not forget even at this hour that we must live with the Arabs in this land,” he declared. He also noted that there had been cases in Tel Aviv in which Jews attacked Arabs, and there were Arabs who had saved Jews. Saying this was important for the Zionist movement’s public image. “We must stress the positive,” he said. “It is not good for us to stand in the light of ‘the whole world is against us.’”
But the riots of 1929 again reinforced, as the ones in 1921 had done, his appraisal that the conflict was not amenable to compromise. Huge numbers of Arabs had attacked Jews, he noted, and their purpose had been clear: “annihilation of the entire Jewish community and the destruction of our enterprise in Palestine.” That being the case, there was no point in debating whether there was or was not an Arab national movement. “The movement is a mass movement and that is the principal fact. We do not see a national revival movement, and its moral value is questionable, but in political terms it is a national movement.” As Ben-Gurion saw it, the Arabs were not interested in an agreement with the Zionists because they constituted a majority in the country. “They are fighting to preserve the status quo and to do that they have no need of an agreement of any sort,” he wrote. He did not know whether the Arab masses answered the call to fight the Jews because that was what they wanted or because they were afraid not to. Either way, it seemed unlikely that they would respond with the same alacrity if their leaders were to call for peace. “The Arab worker, too, is not just a worker. He belongs to his people,” he asserted, adding, “Every nation gets the national movement it deserves.”9
*
Against this backdrop, Ben-Gurion needed to engage in a measure of verbal acrobatics so as to distinguish his movement from its rivals to the right and left; he needed to sound no less patriotic than the Revisionists and no less peace-loving than Brit Shalom, a small organization that offered an alternative to Zionist policy. He feared that the Revisionists would grow stronger, and as such he accused them of feeding the flames of violence. They constituted the “black wing” of Zionism, he claimed, and depicted them as nationalist, chauvinist, and fascist fanatics.10 Jabotinsky had previously published an article against the Histadrut’s control of Palestine with the title “The Red Swastika.” And he was not the most extreme figure on the right. A journalist, Abba Ahimeir, founded a tiny society called Brit Habiryonim (the word biryonim means “strongmen,” or “thugs”), and put out a small newspaper called Hazit Ha’am (The People’s Front). In April 1933, the paper carried an article with the headline “The Stalin–Ben-Gurion–Hitler pact.”11
After his speech, Ben-Gurion fell ill and stayed home. The Convention’s final session stretched into the night and was adjourned only at dawn. At a quarter to six in the morning, the delegates sang “The Internationale” followed by “Hatikvah.” Behind the scenes, contacts were already underway regarding a hitherto unlikely merger between Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avodah. A united Party of the Workers of Palestine, or Mapai as it came to be called by its Hebrew acronym, began to look like a real possibility. The delegates formed circles and danced the hora to wake up, and then set out in procession to Ben-Gurion’s home. He could not have wished himself a more enjoyable morning. In a conciliatory and unifying gesture, one of his opponents ascended to his apartment and pulled him out to the balcony, dressed in a bathrobe. At least one participant reported that he saw tears glistening in Ben-Gurion’s eyes.90
* According to the Haganah’s official version, the order came from the Haganah’s commander, Yosef Hecht, who himself confirmed giving it.
† Elkind founded a farming commune in the Soviet Union. He was executed during Stalin’s purges. (Tzachor 1990, p. 128ff; Tzachor 1994, p. 57ff; Kantrovitz 2007, p. 217ff.)
‡ The authorities generally refused to allow in the mentally ill and tubercular, or prostitutes and sex offenders. The law also provided for refusing immigration permits for political reasons. Britain feared the massive immigration of Communist Jews. Weizmann promised to do all he could to keep such undesirables from coming. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, June 4, 1929, July 30, 1924, BGA; Avraham Tarshish, interview transcript, BGA.; Segev 2000, p. 228.)
§ Ben-Gurion’s two sisters, Rivka and Tzipora, both married opera singers in Palestine. His brother Michel was long the proprietor of a kiosk in Tel Aviv. His brother Avraham’s daughter, Sheindele, remained in Poland. (Giladi 1973, p. 47; Hagani 2010, p. 174ff.)
** On another occasion, Ben-Gurion spoke in this way of the “sick mind of the ghetto Jew.” (Ben-Gurion 1971a, pp. 546, 333, 334; Ben-Gurion to the Fourth Convention of Ahdut Ha’avodah, May 13, 1924, in Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 275.)
†† At the apex of the Histadrut pyramid, there were some who received more. The director-general of Bank Hapoalim, a Histadrut subsidiary, received thirty pounds. (Giladi 1971, p. 131ff; Ben-Gurion Diary, June 14, 1927, BGA.)
‡‡ Remez termed the criticism of the advances “a miniature pogrom.” The advances had been justified, he said, and had been given to only seven or eight of Solel Boneh’s employees. “They could have earned their living elsewhere,” he maintained. “But we rode these beasts of burden day and night. They did not hide the sums they owed and their debts were not canceled.” (Ben-Gurion and Remez at the Third Histadrut Convention, July 10, 1927, Ben-Gurion, minutes, pp. 74ff., 72.)
■ 10 ■
UNIFICATION
“THE CATASTROPHE IS FAR GREATER THAN I THOUGHT”
In September 1930, Ben-Gurion returned to Berlin, where he observed with alarm the rise of the Nazis. He called them “German Revisionists,” with reference to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement. “I read Hitler’s newspaper today and it was as if I were reading Jabotinsky in Doar Hayom,” he wrote. “The same words, the same style, the same spirit.” Jabotinsky spent most of his time in Europe, but a branch of the Revisionist movement he had founded operated in Palestine. In the latter part of the 1920s, he positioned himself as the leader of the Zionist opposition, rival of Chaim Weizmann and nemesis of the labor movement. As a popular journalist and much-admired poet, he excelled, unlike Ben-Gurion, at public speaking. In further contrast to Ben-Gurion, he exuded charisma and was considered an outstanding Jewish intellectual.
Since solidifying his control of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion had come to realize that the political arena of Palestine’s Jewish community had limited capacity for advancing Zionist goals. His routine work as Histadrut secretary no longer satisfied his ambitions. Weizmann, Katznelson, Tabenkin, and a number of other figures were more prominent and more admired. The older among them had worked personally with Herzl and had been Ben-Gurion’s own mentors in his youth. Menachem Ussishkin, who headed Keren Kayemet (the Jewish National Fund), the Zionist movement’s land-buying corporation, was a nearly legendary figure in right-wing circles. Ben-Gurion saw him as a nuisance, but treated him with respect. During this period, he also had dealings with Nahum Sokolow, who for a time replaced Weizmann as president of the Zionist Organization. “No one took him seriously,” Ben-Gurion remarked. It was Sokolow who, as editor of Hatzefirah three decades previously, had rejected the sixteen-year-old Ben-Gurion’s suggestion that the newspaper do a piece on his Ezra club.1 Then there was Moshe Smilansky, whose articles Ben-Gurion had read while he was still a teenager in Płońsk; in comparison, Ben-Gurion was still almost a neophyte. Even in his own party he hardly reigned supreme—the road to power was still a long one, and he wanted to shorten it.
*
The Shavuot holiday arrived on Friday, May 25, 1928. That morning Ben-Gurion met with the Jerusalem Workers Council’s board. That afternoon he took Paula, Geula, and Renana to spend the weekend in Ben Shemen, a farming village on the coastal plain, home to a new agricultural boarding school. Berl Katznelson joined them. Ben-Gurion acknowledged Katznelson’s preeminence and during his lifetime made no effort to take his place. He needed his backing and, often, his advice. In later years, he would say that he had had only three real friends his whole life; the names varied, but Katznelson was always one of them.*2
Katznelson was a politician, too, but in his own way. His speeches tended to be overly ideological, overly vague, and, especially, overly long. More than anything else, he needed to be loved. Ben-Gurion believed in power. Katznelson admired Ben-Gurion’s political abilities and generally supported him; unlike Ben-Gurion, Katznelson had many friends. The two went to Ben Shemen to attend a youth assembly. At the time, the negotiations between Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapo’el Hatza’ir over the formation of a unified party were still under way. The impetus for a merger intensified as the Revisionists and the middle-class forces of the Fourth Aliyah gained strength.
The car taking them to Ben Shemen was crowded. Ben-Gurion did not know how to drive, and the driver of the car brought his wife and two daughters along. “When we came to a bend in the road, the car was unable to make the turn properly and I saw we were about to fall off the road,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “I felt my breathing stop for a moment, as if someone was choking me.” When he came to, he found himself sprawled in a field with the other passengers strewn around him. Paula and Renana were covered with blood. Katznelson was sitting in a ditch. Ben-Gurion asked how he was and Berl responded with a wince, indicating that he could not move. “Apparently his bones are broken,” Ben-Gurion thought to himself. He was wounded, too. “I felt pain in my foot and my head. Blood ran down from my forehead. All my clothes were full of blood,” he recounted. They received medical care and were sent home. Katznelson suffered severe injuries and required a long hospital stay.3
*
The accident delayed the unity negotiations, which had stretched on for a few years. The anguished discussions that both parties held gives today’s reader the impression that each of them was called on to bridge a deep ideological abyss. As was their wont, the members of each group clashed vehemently and passionately over ideas and isms. The issue of class struggle was one point of contention, but the principal issues were the wording of the united party’s manifesto and its name. Ben-Gurion employed all his political experience in the negotiations, and must have required nerves of steel to get through the logorrhea alive.
In the meantime, Arab terror once more loomed.
*
The attack on the Jews of Jaffa in 1921 was followed by several relatively peaceful years. The number of Jews killed by Arabs each year reverted to an average of two a year; in 1928, apparently, none were killed at all.4 This seemed to provide a foundation for the Jewish-Arab workers’ alliance that Ben-Gurion spoke of. It was, however, an illusion that could last only for as long as the Arabs did not shatter it, which they did in September 1928. The trigger was a dispute over prayer arrangements at the Western Wall. On Yom Kippur eve a curtain was placed at the site, to separate women and men, as is customary in Orthodox synagogues. It was not the first time this had been done, but this time the Muslim religious authorities, who exercised control over the site, demanded that the curtain be removed. British policemen showed up on Yom Kippur morning and told the Jews to remove the curtain. Some of the worshippers refused and a fight broke out between them and the police. The incident made the Western Wall the focal point of tensions in the city. From time to time violent clashes between Jews and Arabs broke out there. Internal conflicts on each side also exacerbated tensions. Arab and Jewish leaders accused their political rivals of weakness and defeatism; people on both sides were swept along by nationalist demagoguery and religious fanaticism.
A few days after the curtain incident, Ussishkin spoke out at a meeting of the National Council, the executive board of the Assembly of Representatives. He said that the Jews should demand of the British administration that it expropriate the Western Wall from the Muslims who were in charge of it. Doar Hayom reported that the meeting was a stormy one, of “great fury.” Ben-Gurion responded with restraint: every Jew, including nonreligious ones, had been shocked by what happened at the Wall, he said. He added that the Zionist movement had missed several opportunities to purchase the site. Those efforts should be continued, he maintained. Only if the “Arab nation” refused to sell, he said, should the Jews demand expropriation. “Redemption” of the Western Wall needed to proceed with caution and moderation, he advised. “If we don’t succeed today,” he said, “we’ll do so half a year from now.” He seems not to have been caught up in the rage the incident set off; he saw the Wall as an issue that did not require an immediate resolution. The problem was not who controlled the Wall, he maintained, but rather the fact that there were not enough Jews in Palestine.
Exceptionally, Jabotinsky himself took part in the discussions—he was a rare guest in Palestine and everyone waited in suspense for his speech. He had arrived in Jerusalem a few days before the confrontation, and would soon take over as editor of Doar Hayom, a daily newspaper that had for years conducted a strident campaign against the labor movement. Charging that the country’s Jewish leadership was not standing up sufficiently to the British administration, he voiced his fear that it would not be long before the Arabs staged a “bloody onslaught” against the Jews. “We cannot dream of a willing agreement between us and the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future,” he declared, quoting words he had written in 1923. He reiterated his opinion that the Arabs needed to be told the truth: the Zionist movement aspired to a Jewish majority in Palestine. No fool would believe any attempt to conceal that. His speech evinced prudence and leadership; the Zionist project required time and patience, he said. He made no mention at all of the labor movement.
Ben-Gurion sounded angry. He did not believe that peace with the Arabs was possible, any more than Jabotinsky did, and could give no less grim a speech, as he had done ten years previously. He, too, had always insisted that the Arabs should be told the truth about Zionism’s aims. But that was now a privilege available only to the opposition. As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion bore a share of national responsibility, and he was also committed to the socialist value of the brotherhood of nations. He attacked Jabotinsky personally, recalling his opposition to the defense of Tel Hai.5
As the summer of 1929 approached, tensions in Jerusalem increased. Rumors once more spread among the Arabs that the Jews were plotting to destroy the Islamic shrines on al-Haram al-Sharif, and rebuild their Temple on the site, which for the Jews is the Temple Mount. At the same time, hostility was on the rise between the Revisionists and the members of the labor movement, including slanders, threats, fistfights, and stone throwing. It was mostly a struggle over power and control. A worker who did not join the Histadrut was virtually unable to find a job; furthermore, the labor movement controlled nearly all the funds that the Zionist Organization allocated to development in Palestine, and also the distribution of immigration certificates. The Revisionists fought to obtain a share of these. Jabotinsky encouraged his supporters to break strikes. The Revisionists carried out their campaign in part with the help of their paramilitary youth movement, Betar. The Histadrut deployed its Workers’ Squads.6
In August 1929, on the eve of the fast of the Ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Jewish Temples, the police permitted three hundred young Jews to stage a procession to the Western Wall; the police also provided protection to the thousands of Jewish worshippers who went to pray there that night. On the following day, Friday, the Muslims celebrated the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. When the prayer service at the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount ended, thousands of Arabs streamed toward the Wall, drove away the Jews, and put several Torah scrolls to the torch. There were other incidents in the city as well, and over the next two days the entire country erupted in bloody clashes, and dozens of Jews were murdered in Hebron.
*
At the time, Ben-Gurion was in Nice on the French Riviera, resting after his travails at a recent Zionist Congress. The reports he received from Palestine were fragmentary at first, among them a telegram from Paula telling him that she and the children had not been injured. Her message may well have helped him internalize the horrors of what had happened. “The catastrophe is far greater than I thought,” he wrote in his diary. He quickly returned home. While still on board his ship, he formulated the central question: would the riots hinder or help the Zionist enterprise? He was not certain what the answer was. They might dishearten the public, cause despair, deter immigration, stymie capital investment, and destroy Zionism. But they might also reveal “hidden strengths” and bolster determination to succeed.
On board, Ben-Gurion met several members of his movement; they, too, were returning from the Zionist Congress. He convened them for a consultation. They made note of one of the fundamental characteristics that enabled him to establish his standing—he was able to respond to nearly every situation immediately, precisely, decisively, and with confidence that he was right. His practical approach, almost devoid of sentiment, reflected the fact, perhaps, that in 1929, as in 1921, he had not experienced the horrors himself.†
Shlomo Lavi, of Ein Harod, recalled sixty children suffering from whooping cough, three of his own among them, packed into one of the kibbutz’s two barns. “The enemy lies in wait and you do not know where he will appear,” he wrote. “There was no fear at all that one of the defenders would fall. But there was great fear that a bullet coming from afar would hit one of the youngsters.” None of Ein Harod’s children were hurt.7 According to official figures, 130 Jews were killed and more than 300 wounded. More than 100 Arabs were killed and more than 200 wounded, most of them by British security forces.8 It was the harshest blow dealt to the Jews of Palestine since World War I.
“IN POLITICAL TERMS IT IS A NATIONAL MOVEMENT”
The mass murder ostensibly corroborated the view of the Arabs that Ben-Gurion had always held—they were “primitive,” he maintained. “We were faced with an outbreak of the worst instincts of savage masses—enflamed religious extremism, a compulsion for robbery and looting, and a thirst for blood,” he said. He offered a psychological explanation for Arab hatred, attributing it to the envy of the “son of the desert” who viewed Tel Aviv from his “shack”; even the Jews’ barns looked to him like royal mansions. An alliance of Jewish and Arab workers now seemed to him far off and less relevant than ever, but Ben-Gurion nevertheless tried to maintain the possibility, at least as a fiction.
He opposed any form of revenge, including a boycott of Arab merchandise. “Let us not forget even at this hour that we must live with the Arabs in this land,” he declared. He also noted that there had been cases in Tel Aviv in which Jews attacked Arabs, and there were Arabs who had saved Jews. Saying this was important for the Zionist movement’s public image. “We must stress the positive,” he said. “It is not good for us to stand in the light of ‘the whole world is against us.’”
But the riots of 1929 again reinforced, as the ones in 1921 had done, his appraisal that the conflict was not amenable to compromise. Huge numbers of Arabs had attacked Jews, he noted, and their purpose had been clear: “annihilation of the entire Jewish community and the destruction of our enterprise in Palestine.” That being the case, there was no point in debating whether there was or was not an Arab national movement. “The movement is a mass movement and that is the principal fact. We do not see a national revival movement, and its moral value is questionable, but in political terms it is a national movement.” As Ben-Gurion saw it, the Arabs were not interested in an agreement with the Zionists because they constituted a majority in the country. “They are fighting to preserve the status quo and to do that they have no need of an agreement of any sort,” he wrote. He did not know whether the Arab masses answered the call to fight the Jews because that was what they wanted or because they were afraid not to. Either way, it seemed unlikely that they would respond with the same alacrity if their leaders were to call for peace. “The Arab worker, too, is not just a worker. He belongs to his people,” he asserted, adding, “Every nation gets the national movement it deserves.”9
*
Against this backdrop, Ben-Gurion needed to engage in a measure of verbal acrobatics so as to distinguish his movement from its rivals to the right and left; he needed to sound no less patriotic than the Revisionists and no less peace-loving than Brit Shalom, a small organization that offered an alternative to Zionist policy. He feared that the Revisionists would grow stronger, and as such he accused them of feeding the flames of violence. They constituted the “black wing” of Zionism, he claimed, and depicted them as nationalist, chauvinist, and fascist fanatics.10 Jabotinsky had previously published an article against the Histadrut’s control of Palestine with the title “The Red Swastika.” And he was not the most extreme figure on the right. A journalist, Abba Ahimeir, founded a tiny society called Brit Habiryonim (the word biryonim means “strongmen,” or “thugs”), and put out a small newspaper called Hazit Ha’am (The People’s Front). In April 1933, the paper carried an article with the headline “The Stalin–Ben-Gurion–Hitler pact.”11
