Beyond the Balfour Declaration
1918–1929
In the opening months of 1918, after Allenby's army had liberated Jerusalem, the war was still being fought in Europe, and its outcome was still uncertain. The Turks still controlled the north of Palestine, including the Jewish settlements in Galilee, and could not be dislodged. For nine months the front line lay only a few miles north of Jerusalem.
On 2 February 1918 a newly raised army battalion marched with fixed bayonets through the City of London. Onlookers noticed the unusual appearance of many of the soldiers; all 800 men wore a Star of David insignia on their uniforms. On the following day they set sail for Egypt, and further military training. This was the 38th battalion Royal Fusiliers, known as the Jewish Legion. The 38th was made up of Jews from many lands, but principally from Britain and Russia. A second battalion, the 39th, was being recruited in the United States.
David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi had made their way to the United States as part of a recruiting drive for the Jewish Legion. The 'two Bens', as they were known, also set about organizing a group of American Jews, The Pioneer (Hehalutz), with the aim of returning to Palestine with large numbers of would-be immigrants when the war was over. They spoke in graphic tones of how, with the coming of war, the Turkish authorities in Palestine had turned against the Yishuv, the Jewish community there, expelling many, taking many others for forced labour, and making no efforts to prevent hunger and hardship among those who remained; 56,000 of the earlier Jewish population of 90,000.
One of those who responded to the appeal for volunteers to fight in the Jewish Legion was a Russian immigrant living in Milwaukee, Goldie Mabovitch, later Golda Meir. 'I had never met people like those Palestinians before nor heard stories like those they told about the Yishuv,' she later recalled, after meeting the Jewish Legion emissaries. 'This was my first clue about how terribly it was suffering from the brutality of the Turkish regime, which had already brought normal life in the country to a virtual standstill. They were in a fever of anxiety about the fate of the Jews of Palestine and convinced that an effective Jewish claim could be made to the Land of Israel after the war only if the Jewish people played a significant and visible military role, as Jews, in the fighting. In fact, they spoke about the Jewish Legion with such feeling that I immediately tried to volunteer for it—and was crushed when I learned that girls were not being accepted.'
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In June 1918 the 38th battalion, and advance units of the 39th, were sent to the front line north of Jerusalem, and in the Jordan Valley. One company of the 38th, led by Jabotinsky, successfully forded the River Jordan. Two other companies, Americans of the 39th, drove the Turks from the town of al-Salt. 'By forcing the Jordan fords,' the commander of Allenby's right wing told the Jewish Legion when the war was over, 'you helped in no small measure to win the great victory gained at Damascus.' More than twenty Legionnaires were killed in action. A further thirty died of malaria.
The bulk of the 39th battalion Royal Fusiliers was still being recruited in the United States. Among the Russian-born Jews in America who wanted to live in Palestine, and who saw the battalion as a means to do so, was Nehemia Rubitzov, who enlisted as a private in the British army. Four years after he reached Palestine his son was born: the future Yitzhak Rabin.
Nehemia Rubitzov was one of 2,500 American Jews who joined the 39th battalion. A further 200 Jewish exiles from Palestine who were then living in the United States, among them Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, also joined. But by the time the new recruits had completed their training—first in Canada, then in England and finally in Egypt—the war was over.
Even as the war continued, the British government was faithful to its Balfour Declaration pledge that it would use its 'best endeavours' to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. To this end, it encouraged the establishment of a Zionist Commission to examine the future of Jewish settlement and institutions. Headed by Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist Commission reached Palestine while the war was still being fought. Among its members was Aaron Aaronsohn, who nine months later as a member of the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference was killed in an aeroplane accident over the English Channel while on his way from London to Paris. He was only forty-three years old.
Aaronsohn, like Ben-Gurion, understood that the future of the Jewish community in Palestine depended not only on immigration, but on the cultivation of the land. Less than 10 per cent of the land area of Palestine was under cultivation. The rest, whether stony or fertile, was uncultivated. No Arab cultivator need be dispossessed for the Zionists to make substantial land purchases. The potential of the land, on which fewer than a million people were living on both sides of the Jordan, was regarded as enormous. On 29 January 1918, three months after the Balfour Declaration, Ben-Gurion, who was still in the United States drumming up support for emigration to Palestine, wrote in an article on the future potential of the land:
According to an estimate of Professor Karl Ballod, the country's irrigable plains are capable of supporting a population of six million, to be sure under conditions of intensive cultivation and using proper modern irrigation methods. It is on these vacant lands that the Jewish people demands the right to establish its homeland.
The demand of the Jewish people is based on the reality of un-exploited economic potentials, and of unbuilt-up stretches of land that require the productive force of a progressive, cultured people. The demand of the Jewish people is really nothing more than the demand of an entire nation for the right to work.
However we must remember that such rights are also possessed by the inhabitants already living in the country—and these rights must not be infringed upon.
Both the vision of social justice and the equality of all peoples that the Jewish people has cherished for three thousand years, and the vital interests of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and even more so in Palestine, require absolutely and unconditionally that the rights and interests of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the country be guarded and honoured punctiliously.
In analysing the rights and interests of the Jews and non-Jews of Palestine, we note a characteristic difference between the two. The non-Jewish rights consist of existing assets, material or spiritual, which require legal guarantees for their preservation and integrity. The Jewish interests, which also include some existing assets, consist mainly of the age-old opportunities offered by the country, the economic and cultural potential of this semi-desolate land, the hidden wealth of natural resources and the soil which the Jewish people is destined to uncover and exploit through a creative effort and the investment of wealth and toil.
The non-Jewish interests are conservative; the Jewish interests are revolutionary. The former are designed to preserve that which exists, the latter—to create something new, to change values, to reform and to build.
Ben-Gurion sought to combine the dynamic of Jewish settlement with the basically humane ideals of Judaism as it had evolved over the centuries. The rights of the inhabitants of land—not always respected in biblical times—were for him of great importance. Co-existence with the Arabs would, as he saw it, benefit the Arabs considerably, without in any way dispossessing them.
One symbolic step undertaken by the Zionist Commission while Britain and Turkey were still at war was the laying of the foundation-stones of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, overlooking both the Old City of Jerusalem to the west, and the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab to the east. Weizmann, who had dreamed of such a university since the turn of the century, presided over the ceremony. Among those who wrote to congratulate him was Ahad Ha'Am, then living in London. 'I know that owing to present conditions the erection of the building will have to be postponed,' he wrote, 'so that for a long time—Heaven knows how long—the laying of the foundation-stones will remain an isolated episode without practical consequences. Nevertheless I consider it a great historical event.' Ahad Ha'Am's letter continued:
We Jews have been taught by our history to appreciate the real value of laying foundations for future developments. Our share, as a people, in the building up of the general culture of Humanity has been nothing else than the laying of its foundations long before the superstructures were built upon those foundations by other peoples.
When in time to come the Hebrew University stands proudly erect on the historic mountain, equipped with all ancient and modern instruments for the cultivation of mind and soul—what else will be its function but the laying of foundation-stones, on which our future national life will be rebuilt.
Since the beginning of our national movement in connection with the colonization of Palestine, we have always felt—many of us unconsciously—that the reconstruction of our national life is possible only upon spiritual foundations and that, therefore, the laying of those foundations must be taken in hand simultaneously with the colonization work itself.
In the first embryonic period, when the whole work in Palestine was still of very small dimensions and in a very precarious condition, the spiritual effort was concentrated in the then very popular Hebrew school at Jaffa, which was as poor and unstable as was the colonization itself. In the following period, the colonization work having been considerably enlarged and improved, the need for laying spiritual foundations made itself felt more vividly and found its expression in the creation of the 'Hebrew Gymnasium' at Jaffa—an institution incomparably superior to its predecessor.
Now we stand before a new period of our national work in Palestine, and soon we may be faced by problems and possibilities of overwhelming magnitude. We do not know what the future has in store for us, but this we do know: that the brighter the prospects for the re-establishment of our national home in Palestine, the more urgent is the need for laying the spiritual foundations of that home, on a corresponding scale, which can only be conceived in the form of a Hebrew University.
By a 'Hebrew University', Ahad Ha'Am continued, 'I mean—and, so, I am sure, do you—not a mere imitation of a European university with Hebrew as the dominant language, but a university which from the very beginning will endeavour to become the true embodiment of the Hebrew Spirit of old and to shake off the mental and moral servitude to which our people has been so long subjected in the Diaspora. Only so can we be justified in our ambitious hopes as to the future universal influence of the "Teaching" that "will go forth out of Zion".'
These were high ideals, yet they reflected a strand in Zionism that was already strong, and which Ahad Ha'Am himself had done much, through his writings, to foster: that the Jewish State would not be merely another political entity in the world, but would have a deeper moral and ethical basis, derived from the ethical legacy of the Old Testament. This attitude was reflected three years later when Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, planted a tree on the still unfinished site of the university, and told the leaders of Palestinian Jewry, 'We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be the most precious possession of mankind, worth, in fact, the fruit of all other wisdom and learning together.'
Churchill did not come to Palestine only with words: as part of Britain's commitment to the Zionists, he granted a substantial economic concession to the Russian-born engineer, Pinhas Rutenberg, and his Palestine Electric Corporation, for the development of the water power of Palestine. Under the Rutenberg Concession, the Zionists were able to expropriate land—even Arab owned land—if needed for pumping stations and other facilities in connection with damming the River Jordan. The Rutenberg works, just below the Sea of Galilee, became a symbol of hope for the modernization of all Palestine, Jewish and Arab alike. In the 1948 War of Independence they were destroyed; today, following the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, the ruins are a tourist attraction.
While on Mount Scopus, Churchill also spoke of what he called the 'blessing' that a Jewish National Home could be 'to all the inhabitants of this country, without distinction of race and religion', and he went on to explain:
This last blessing depends greatly upon you. Our promise was a double one. On the one hand, we promised to give our help to Zionism, and on the other, we assured the non-Jewish inhabitants that they should not suffer in consequence.
Every step you take should therefore be also for normal and material benefit of all Palestinians. If you do this, Palestine will be happy and prosperous, and peace and concord will always reign; it will turn into a paradise, and will become, as is written in the scriptures you have just presented to me, a land flowing with milk and honey, in which sufferers of all races and religions will find a rest from their sufferings.
You Jews of Palestine have a very great responsibility; you are the representatives of the Jewish nation all over the world, and your conduct should provide an example for, and do honour to, Jews in all countries. The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here, not only for your own good but for the good of all the world.
The status of Palestine with regard to the Jewish National Home depended entirely upon the fate of the Balfour Declaration. This had to be accepted by the victorious powers, and enshrined in the Mandates provisions of the League of Nations. To secure this, a Jewish delegation, headed by Chaim Weizmann, addressed the Paris Peace Conference on 27 February 1919. Of the four delegates, only Menachem Ussishkin spoke in Hebrew (the others spoke in English and French). By speaking in Hebrew he made an extraordinary impact on delegates who had never heard the biblical tongue used in ordinary speech. Ussishkin spoke, he said, on behalf of 'the largest Jewish community', the Jews of Russia—numbering more millions in those days than even the Jews of the United States.
In the immediate aftermath of the First World War there had been an upsurge in attacks on Jews in Russia, especially in the Ukraine, where, 250 years earlier, the Cossacks led by Bodgan Chmielnicki had wrought such havoc. Once more, Jews were singled out as targets for physical attack, looting and murder. After speaking to the Peace Conference of the historic attachment of the Jews to Palestine, of which they had been 'robbed' by the Romans, Ussishkin declaimed, 'restore that historic robbery to us!' and went on to tell the Allied statesmen of the years of exile and wandering:
Nowhere have we found rest for our weary spirit nor for our aching feet. Persecution, expulsion, cruel riots, unbroken distress—such have been our lot during all these generations in all the countries of the world, and in these very days—when the wielders of the world's destiny have proclaimed the liberation of the nations, the equality of the nations, and the self-determination of every separate nation—Russian Jewry, which I represent here, is undergoing fresh torrents of murder and rioting the like of which were never known even in the Middle Ages.
For us there is no way out save to receive, under your authority and subject to your supervision, one secure place in the world where we shall be able to renew our own lives and revive the national and cultural tradition which has come down to us from ancient times, and where can that secure spot be save in our historic country? Throughout all these generations we have not ceased to yearn for it, but have prayed the God of Israel for our return thither. Not for a moment have we forgotten it, just as we have not forsaken our God, our tongue and our culture.
We let ourselves be slain for these possessions of ours rather than betray them. And on this very day I address you in our Hebrew tongue, the tongue of our kings and prophets which we have never forgotten. This tongue is bound up with all our national aspirations. At the beginning of the national revival in the Land of Israel, when we had barely begun our upbuilding work there, even before the war, we devoted our efforts to the revival of our language and our culture.
The Paris Peace Conference agreed to grant the Palestine Mandate to Britain, and to accept the promise of the Balfour Declaration to 'facilitate' the establishment of a Jewish National Home there. Herzl had confided in his diary in 1897 that he had founded the Jewish State; now, only twenty-two years later, the international community had made it possible, under Britain's aegis, for the Jews to build up the institutions and infrastructure of statehood. The Zionist Commission was already in Palestine, working to establish such a structure.
Reaching Palestine in November 1919, Ussishkin became Chairman of the Commission. It fell to him to fashion the administrative and structural form of the National Home: the Jewish National Institutions. A Jewish National Assembly was set up by the Jews of Palestine. From it, delegates elected a Jewish National Council (Va'ad Leumi). Ussishkin himself was elected to the Council by the vote of Sephardi Jews. He had always understood their needs, and recognized their unease at the Ashkenazi dominance of the Zionist movement, both in its early days, and through the Russian and Polish immigration that had constituted the main numerical influx of the previous three decades.
Ussishkin was very conscious of the fact that the Sephardi Jews had been the principal dwellers in the land for many centuries before the advent of political Zionism, and urged Sephardi participation in every institutional forum. He was determined that the Sephardi customs should not only be respected, but become an integral part of the new society. For him, Zionism was a 'Gathering of the Exiles' that would unite very diverse and hitherto isolated strands of Jewish life in the Diaspora into a single national unit.
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In Upper Galilee, Jewish settlements were caught in the middle of a series of armed skirmishes between local Arabs and the French authorities who controlled the area immediately after the First World War. In 1919 the area was transferred to Britain. Arab attacks on the Jewish settlements continued. To protect them, Joseph Trumpeldor, the one-armed veteran of both the Russo-Japanese War and the Gallipoli campaign, who had just returned to Palestine from Russia, was asked to organize the defence of the northern settlements. On 1 January 1920 he reached Tel Hai, which he began to fortify. On March 1, Tel Hai was attacked by a large number of armed Bedouin. The besieged Jews opened negotiations with their attackers. As talks were continuing, there was an exchange of rifle fire and Trumpeldor was wounded in the stomach. Fighting continued for the rest of the day. That evening, Trumpeldor died of his wound. His last words were said to have been, 'Never mind; it is worthwhile to die for our country.' Five other defenders were killed with him, among them twenty-three-year-old Sarah Chizik, who had come with her family from the Ukraine at the age of ten.
The death of Trumpeldor was to have a substantial impact on the Zionist movement. He was only forty when he was killed. Songs, poems and short stories were written about him. Children were named after him. His correspondence, diary and personal memoirs, which were published two years after his death, became a basic text for Zionist youth. Both socialist and right-wing Zionists were to find inspiration in his life's story. A youth movement, Brit Trumpeldor (Betar), founded in the Latvian city of Riga three years after Trumpeldor's death, became the standard bearer of militaristic and nationalistic ideology.
Among those who fought at Tel Hai was Shaul Meirov, who had come to Palestine from Russia ten years earlier at the age of thirteen, and was one of the first graduates of the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. In the 1930s he was to be the main organizer of illegal immigration, defying the British restrictions which had been imposed, and bringing in thousands of Jews clandestinely by sea and overland. After the death of his son Gur Meirov in the War of Independence, he took the surname Avigur (Gur's father).
The defence of Tel Hai, like that of Kfar Giladi during the First World War, ensured that the northern finger of Galilee was later to be a part of the State of Israel.
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The wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine after the First World War was known as the Third Aliyah. It lasted for four years and saw the arrival of many Socialist-inspired pioneers. In all, 35,000 newcomers came during that short period. Some worked on road building. Others set up kibbutzim and founded the first moshavim: villages of smallholders in which elements of cooperative and private farming were combined. The first moshav was founded in September 1921 at Nahalal, in the Jezreel Valley. The name was taken from the Bible, where it refers to a town in the territory of the tribe of Zebulun. Two pre-First World War attempts to found a village there, first by Arabs and then by Germans, had failed, because of the malarial surroundings.
Wherever there was, as in the Jezreel Valley, abundant but often stagnant water the malaria mosquito flourished. Many new immigrants, especially those from countries like Britain and France to which they could easily return, were unable to take the privations which malaria imposed, and left Palestine for ever.
For fifteen years the Jewish settlers at Nahalal lived in wooden huts; the only concrete was used for their stables. A second moshav was founded three months later, east of Nahalal, at Kfar Yehezkel. It was named after Yehezkel (Ezekiel) Sassoon, an Iraqi Jew who served as Minister of Finance in five Iraqi governments between 1921 and 1925, and whose donation to the Jewish National Fund was a crucial element in the Jezreel valley purchase. Within the next decade, eight more moshavim had been set up in the valley. One of them, Kfar Gideon, was founded in 1923 by religious Jews from Roumania; they were to struggle against nature for twenty years, until sufficient water reserves were discovered. Herzliya was founded on the coast, as a moshav, in 1924; it later became a flourishing town.
The inspiration for the moshav movement came from Eliezer Joffe who, born in Russian Bessarabia in 1882, had gone to the United States before the First World War, and had trained agricultural students there for life in Palestine. Joffe had emigrated to Palestine in 1910, and established an experimental farm at Ein Gannim (Garden Spring), near Petah Tikvah. Within a decade of the establishment of the first moshav, he founded a marketing cooperative, Tnuva (Produce), which was to become the largest of its kind in Israel, selling the produce of the settlements throughout the country. Another strong supporter of the moshav movement from its earliest days was Russian-born Yitzhak Elazari-Volcani (born Wilkansky), who had been a farm manager in Palestine before the First World War. In 1921, as the moshav movement began, he set up an experimental agricultural station, under the auspices of the Zionist Executive, and worked to improve the cultivation of the soil and the quality of the crops.
The kibbutz movement was also active in 1921, the Jewish National Fund having purchased an area of land at the foot of Mount Gilboa, in the Jezreel Valley. It was largely swamp, and cursed with malaria, but this did not deter the pioneers who set up two tented camps near Ein Harod (the Harod Spring). This was the site where, according to tradition, Gideon and his people had camped during their war against the Midianites; and perhaps also where Saul had camped against the Philistines—from Byzantine times the spring was believed to be the site of the battle between David and Goliath. Among its founders was Russian-born Yitzhak Tabenkin.
Ein Harod, and a nearby kibbutz, Tel Yosef, founded two years later and named after Joseph Trumpeldor, were part of a new kibbutz movement that advocated a single countrywide commune. Calling itself Gedud Ha-Avodah (The Labour Legion), it consisted of workers, including those contracted to build part of the Tiberias–Tabgha road in Galilee, and others laying the railway track between Ras al-Ain and Petah Tikvah. They had decided to form permanent communal settlements near their places of work, and defined their aim as 'the building of the land by the creation of a general commune of the workers of the Land of Israel'.
One of the main organizers of the Labour Legion was Shlomo Lavi (born Levkovitz, in Russian Poland), who had been a labourer and later a watchman before the First World War. It was he who had conceived the idea of the 'large collective' which would combine agriculture, crafts and industry, and would be capable of absorbing new immigrants who had no previous agricultural training or experience. Another of the most active members, Yitzhak Landsberg—later Sadeh—who had been decorated for bravery while serving in the Russian army in the First World War, was to play a leading part in the War of Independence.
Not all the new settlements flourished. In 1921 the British authorities had allocated land in the Negev, near Tel Arad, for demobilized soldiers of the Jewish Legion. When no water was found, they were forced to move. It took them eleven years to find another site.
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British military rule in Palestine continued for two years following the defeat of Germany. But the existence of the Balfour Declaration and the steady growth of immigration led to the establishment of new settlements even before the setting up of a civil administration. In 1920 kibbutz Kiryat Anavim (City of Grapes) was founded just outside Jerusalem. It was on a hillside opposite the predominantly Muslim Arab village of Abu Ghosh, with which it quickly established friendly relations; relations that were to remain good for the next eight decades, despite the turmoils and wars of future years.
The inspiration for founding Kiryat Anavim came from Akiva Ettinger, who had settled in Palestine as soon as the war was over as director of the agricultural settlement department of the World Zionist Organization. His aim was to institute, in this ancient stony landscape, the most modern methods of land reclamation, hill farming and afforestation. At first the hardships were such that there was a move to transfer the village to the more hospitable soil of the Jezreel Valley, but the settlers resisted this and determined to make their hillside flourish. Kiryat Anavim became a model for all hill settlements. The fruit orchards, dairy cattle and vineyards that they successfully set up were to be of inestimable value to Jerusalem when it was under siege in 1948.
Ettinger had a powerful ally in setting up Kiryat Anavim. This was Menachem Ussishkin who feared the isolation of the Jews of Jerusalem if there were not a series of Jewish settlements between the Holy City and the coast. The need for some form of Jewish settlement in the Jerusalem Corridor became all the more imperative as Jerusalem's own Jewish suburbs—on the garden city model—were established, and the city's Jewish majority, a demographic fact since the 1840s, felt cut off from the more populous Jewish towns and villages of the coastal plain. It was Ussishkin who used the money available to him as head of the Jewish National Fund to purchase the land on which Kiryat Anavim was then built.
The main work of the Jewish National Fund in 1920 was an ambitious scheme to which many Zionists were opposed. This was the proposed purchase of a substantial expanse of land in the Jezreel Valley (known in Hebrew as the Emek—the Valley). Much of the land was swamp, and infested with malaria, and the price being asked by an absentee Lebanese landowner was high. But it was for sale, and both Menachem Ussishkin and Arthur Ruppin—in a powerful alliance of the often divergent Russian and German Jewish outlooks—were emphatic that the land should be bought. There could be no such thing as overcharging for land, Ussishkin argued. 'The cost of land in Palestine would increase from year to year; while what was not redeemed today could quite possibly never again be redeemed by us.'
Ussishkin bought almost forty square kilometres of land. This was by far the largest Jewish land purchase in Palestine up to that time. After the purchase was made, he was astounded to learn that several of his colleagues on the Palestine Executive wanted to bring him before the court of the Zionist Congress for squandering money. He prepared his case, but during the Twelfth Zionist Congress, held in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia between 1 and 14 September 1921, his action was approved.
Funds would still be needed, on a substantial scale, to enable the newly acquired land to be developed, to pay for the cost of irrigation, and also for the education of the children of the settlers. To this end, a special development fund, Keren Hayesod (Foundation Fund), had been set up the previous year, and was registered on 23 March 1921. Vladimir Jabotinsky was appointed its director of propaganda. The fund hoped to mobilize capital for its work in Palestine through donations from the 'Jewish masses' throughout the world. In 1921 Ussishkin set off for the United States to raise money for the fund. Among those who accompanied him was Albert Einstein, who had always shown sympathy for the Zionist ideal. Fifty years later, at the age of seventy-two, he was to decline the offer to become President of the State of Israel on Chaim Weizmann's death. The Ussishkin–Einstein mission was a success, the precursor of thousands of such missions in the years to come.
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In December 1920 a major step forward was taken in unifying the different and competing Labour Zionist groups which had emerged since the First World War. This was the creation of the General Federation of Jewish Labour, the Histadrut, the main aim of which was the provision of work, cooperative supplies, vocational training, and education. As its secretary-general, the Histadrut elected David Ben-Gurion, who believed with a fierce conviction that its members were the 'army of labour' that would redeem the country. But when his sister Rivka, still in Russia, asked if he would help her come to Palestine, he would not do so. 'I do not believe that she will be able to work,' he explained, 'or to find work she is fitted for.'
For Ben-Gurion, as for many of those in the Histadrut, the task of building up the land was not one that could be shared by all Jews. Even within Palestine, the 4,000 members of the Histadrut were a minority of the 65,000 Jewish inhabitants; and many of them, as a result of the general economic depression at that time, were unemployed, or working in the harshest of conditions building roads for the Mandatory government.
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The Balfour Declaration had included a phrase that nothing should be done with regard to establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine that might be to the detriment of the other communities in Palestine. By far the largest of these communities, and indeed by far the largest group in the country, was the Arabs, some 500,000, as against 65,000 Jews. Arab hostility to Zionism had emerged before the First World War, and intensified after it. In 1920 there were violent Arab protests against further Jewish immigration. It was during the defence of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem against Arab attack that year that Yitzhak Rabin's father, Nehemia Rubitzov, who had volunteered to join the defenders, met his future wife, who was likewise a volunteer.
During the 1920 Arab riots an attempt was made, led by Jabotinsky, to protect the Jews from attack. For breaking the law by carrying arms, Jabotinsky was arrested by the British and imprisoned. The pre-war Ha-Shomer had been essentially small local groups set up to defend individual settlements, mostly in Galilee. What was needed now seemed to be a special defence organization, and in the Histadrut founding conference in December 1920 this was organized on a countrywide basis. The Histadrut would be responsible for all guard and defence duties, for which purpose a Haganah (Defence) organization was set up in March 1921. The Haganah was essentially a clandestine organization operating without the approval of the British authorities, but dedicated to maintaining the security of the settlements which the British could not do, through either lack of means or lack of will. The first tasks of the Haganah were the training of members and the purchase of arms. It was to defend Jewish property and protect Jewish life in Palestine until the establishment of the State twenty-seven years later.
The Haganah was set up not a moment too soon. In May 1921 Arab riots were renewed on an even more serious scale than the previous year. Many Jewish settlements were attacked, as well as the Jewish quarters of Jerusalem. When rioters tried to break into the village of Petah Tikvah, it was the guardsmen established thirty years earlier by Abraham Shapira who defended it, with Shapira himself still at their head. Shapira, a pioneer of Jewish self-defence in Palestine, lived to see the State of Israel established, and died in 1965 at the age of ninety-five. Chaim Weizmann wrote of him, 'He was a primitive person, spoke better Arabic than Hebrew, and seemed so much a part of the rocks and stony hillsides of the country that it was difficult to believe that he had been born in Russia. He was a man who in his own lifetime bridged a gap of thousands of years; who, once in Palestine, had shed his Galuth environment like an old coat.'
Galuth (Exile) is the Hebrew name for Diaspora. For Jews, it is regarded as a temporary existence, to be abandoned when the Messiah comes—or, in the case of modern Zionism, on reaching the land of Israel.
Among the successful defenders of the Neve Shalom Jewish quarter of Jaffa in the riots of May 1921 was Ephraim Chizhik, whose sister Sarah had been killed a year earlier at Tel Hai. It was not possible to defend all those who were attacked. During a week of rioting across the country, forty-seven Jews were killed. Among the Jewish settlements destroyed was Kfar Malal, which had been rebuilt after being destroyed four years earlier during the fighting between the British and Turkish armies. The recently appointed British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel—himself a Jew—sought to calm Arab anger by a temporary suspension of Jewish immigration. It was an act of appeasement that angered many Zionists.
Among those whose ships were unable to land their passengers as a result of the ban was the one on which Golda Meir was travelling. But it was only a temporary setback, and she was able to make her way from Egypt to Palestine by rail a few weeks later. The Arabs had seen, however, that a show of violence could lead to political gains. The leader of the 1921 riots, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was appointed within a year Mufti of Jerusalem, in the hope that he would exercise a moderating influence. But he was to use his position as Mufti—the senior Muslim cleric in Palestine—to press the British to halt Jewish immigration altogether. Within a decade the Mufti had established himself as the predominant Arab political figure, challenging the traditional leadership of the Nashashibi and El Hadi families. The Mufti also soon eclipsed the influence of his uncle Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini whom the British had dismissed as mayor of Jerusalem following his encouragement of the anti-Jewish riots of April 1920 and his opposition to the recognition of Hebrew as one of the three official languages of Palestine (the others being English and Arabic).
Conditions for the new immigrants in Palestine continued to be hard, economically and emotionally. The Jewish community was not rich, much of the soil was not naturally fertile, housing in the towns was simple, even primitive, and the Arab majority was increasingly ill at ease with the influx of Jewish newcomers. Golda Meir recalled how, within a few hours of reaching Tel Aviv, one of her companions turned to her and said, 'Well Goldie, you wanted to come to Eretz Yisroel. Here we are. Now we can all go back—it's enough.' Six weeks later, Golda Meir wrote to a Zionist friend in the United States: 'Those who talk about returning are the recent arrivals. An old worker is full of inspiration and faith. I say that as long as those who created the little that is here are still here, I cannot leave and you must come.'
She added: 'I would not say this if I did not know that you are ready to work hard. True, even hard work is hard to find, but I have no doubt you will find something. Of course this is no America, and one may have to suffer a lot economically. There may even be riots again. But if one wants one's own land and if one wants it with one's whole heart, one must be ready for this. When you come I am sure we will be able to plan. There is nothing to wait for.'
***
Following the 1921 riots, the Haganah sent emissaries to Vienna to purchase revolvers and ammunition. To avoid detection by the British, this weaponry was smuggled into Palestine in various guises: beehives, refrigerators and steamrollers. A course of instruction in the use of arms was organized under the command of a former member of the Jewish Legion, Elimelekh Zelkovich (known as 'Avner'). When an Arab mob tried to attack the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on 2 November 1921—the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration—an organized group of Jewish defenders drove them off, and four Jews were killed.
The rioting was a frightening experience for those caught up in it, often leaving vivid memories and scars. Four-year-old Yigael Sukenik, later the soldier-archaeologist Yigael Yadin, remembered for the rest of his life watching from his house in Jerusalem as a crowd of Arabs, wielding wooden clubs and shouting nationalist slogans, marched along the street outside.
In response to the continuing Arab riots, and in a further attempt to curb Arab hostility, the Mandate authorities, at Herbert Samuel's urging, introduced one permanent condition with regard to all future Jewish immigration. Such immigration would henceforth depend on the 'economic absorptive capacity' of Palestine at any given time. In fact, the Zionists themselves had begun to seek a limit to the number of immigrants, because of the economic burdens they imposed on the land and resources of the Zionist movement. The Zionist Executive went so far as to report to the Twelfth Zionist Congress that 'in the light of the economic conditions reigning in Palestine, and the World Zionist Organization's financial straits, the Executive considered sending penniless pioneers to Palestine undesirable and accordingly dispatched to all the principal migration offices telegraphic instructions to refrain from sending emigrants to Palestine for the time being.'
It was not the views of the Zionist Executive, however, but the realities of European politics, that determined whether immigrants would come to Palestine in large numbers or not. The anti-Jewish violence in the Ukraine, in which more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, was a powerful catalyst for immigration. Hardly had that violence ended than the rigours of Communist rule were imposed on the Ukraine, with a rapid elimination of private productive enterprise and hostility to all manifestations of Jewish cultural, educational and spiritual activity. Then, in 1924, the Polish government issued a series of economic decrees that discriminated against Jews, making it hard for many Jews to earn their livelihood at all.
The response of tens of thousands of Polish Jews was to sell whatever assets they had, take out what money they had in Polish banks and savings societies, and emigrate. For the first time since the mass emigration of Jews two decades earlier, the United States was imposing restrictions. But Palestine, the Jewish National Home, was open. It was also the scene of continual growth. Thus, in 1922, the year in which the Second Aliyah pioneer and ideologist A. D. Gordon died at Deganya, a new kibbutz was established seven miles south-east of Haifa. Given the name Yagur, after a biblical location mentioned in the Book of Joshua, it quickly became the largest kibbutz in the country, farming its own lands and providing dock labourers for Haifa port (Jewish dock labour was also a feature during those inter-war years of the port of Salonica, in Greece: the dockers were deported and murdered by the Nazis in 1943).
***
There were sustained Arab diplomatic attempts, including a high-level delegation to London, to persuade the British government to reduce Jewish immigration and even to halt it altogether. But in 1922 the Churchill White Paper, a British policy statement, emphasized that the Jews were in Palestine 'of right, and not on sufferance'. The means whereby the Zionists could take maximum advantage of this pledge came as a result of Article Four of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which was ratified by the League Council in July 1922. This stated that 'an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the administration of Palestine in such economic, social, and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish National Home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine.' The article went on to recognize the Palestine representatives of the World Zionist Organization as such an agency (to be known as the Jewish Agency) 'so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate'.
Following the League Council's ratification, the Jewish Agency became the main organization through which Palestinian Jewry maintained its contacts both with world Jewry and with the Mandatory authorities and foreign governments. At the time of the ratification of the British Mandate, there were 83,790 Jews living in Palestine, just over 11 per cent of the population. The Arabs numbered three-quarters of a million. Through immigration, the Jews hoped gradually to reach and then surpass the Arab numbers. But while the Jewish population was to reach 30 per cent of the total by 1940, it came to face two obstacles: Arab immigration from countries throughout the Arab world, and British restrictions on Jewish immigration, imposed as a result of strong Arab opposition both from inside Palestine and from the Arab countries around.
Many Jews had difficulties in reaching Palestine which were not related to immigration procedures. Russian Jews, under a harsh Soviet regime, found it increasingly difficult to obtain permission to leave. One of those who wished to do so was the Hebrew writer Chaim Nahman Bialik, one of the most creative and inspiring figures in modern Hebrew literature, who became the national poet of the redemption of Israel. He had to intercede directly with a fellow-writer, Lenin's friend Maxim Gorky, before he was allowed to leave. Bialik went first to Berlin and then, after three years, to Palestine, making his home in Tel Aviv of which he wrote:
I see a Hebrew creation such as Tel Aviv as decisive, as against the creations of hundreds of years in the Exile. I wonder whether there is a corner like this for Israel anywhere in the entire world. Such house-building, purely and solely by Jews, from top to bottom, this is a spectacular sight.
This creation of an entire Hebrew city is sufficient to fill the hearts of the sceptics and doubters with faith that Israel's renaissance is an undeniable fact.
Here in Tel Aviv, with all my senses I feel that I have not, nor could I have any other homeland but this place. And blessed be all the builders who have embarked on our eternal building in this corner, the only one in the world.
In the first years of the Mandate, Jewish immigration was virtually unimpeded. Between 1924 and 1927 more than 65,000 Polish Jews reached Palestine. A few of the new arrivals were farmers and labourers, like the previous waves of immigrants, but most were middle-class shopkeepers, businessmen, intellectuals and students. Many of these were prepared, and indeed eager, to turn to farming, as were the pioneers from Germany who set up a kibbutz called Beit Zera (House of Seed), just south of the Sea of Galilee, in 1927.
Also established in 1927 was the Ben Shemen youth village on the site of the children's village which had been destroyed in the First World War, the brainchild of Berlin-born Dr Siegfried Lehmann, who had taken on the responsibility for the rehabilitation of Jewish orphans in Lithuania after 1918. Lehmann brought many of these youngsters with him to Palestine. Lehmann's concept of work on the soil included the total creativity of rural living with folk music, folk dance and folk art, education for peace and tolerance—especially with the Arabs—a traditional Jewish, but non-Orthodox education, and a non-dogmatic outlook on life. He also encouraged student self-government as a preparation for future life on a kibbutz. The attraction of Ben Shemen for immigrant youth was considerable. But so substantial was the most recent immigration that the Fourteenth (1925) and Fifteenth (1927) Zionist Congresses decided that priority should be given to urban as opposed to rural settlements.
Urban settlements meant an increase in the demand for Jewish labour, thereby enhancing the strength of the Histadrut workers' organizations, among them the Solel Boneh (The Paver and the Builder) construction company and contracting firm, founded in 1924. One of the founders of Solel Boneh was Dov Hos, a veteran of both the Turkish army and the Jewish legion, who also represented the Jewish community of Palestine with the Mandate authorities. Other Histadrut organizations that grew in size and importance were the Hamashbir retail cooperative, the Tnuva marketing outlet and cooperative building societies through which residential workers' quarters were built in all the towns. Other workers' institutions which sought to provide a basis for economic security, knowledge and leisure were the Hasneh (Burning Bush) insurance company, the daily newspaper Davar (which was first published in June 1926), and the workers' sports organization, Hapoel (The Worker).
Among those who found work with Solel Boneh was Golda Meir's husband Morris Meyerson. His pay was in the form, not of cash, but of credit slips. The landlord, the milkman and their children's nursery school teacher would far rather have been paid in cash. 'On "pay day",' Golda later wrote, 'I used to dash to the little grocery store on the corner to try to talk the grocer into taking a chit worth one pound (100 piastres) for 80 piastres, which I knew was all he would give me for it. But even those 80 piastres were given not, God forbid, in cash but in a handful of more credit slips. With these I would then run to the woman who sold chickens, argue with her for twenty minutes or so and finally, on a good day, persuade her to take my slips (after she had deducted 10 or 15 per cent of their value) in exchange for a small piece of chicken with which I could make soup for the children.'
Golda Meir also remembered one of the stories circulating at that time about the economic hardship of life in Palestine. A Jew was heard to say that if he only had a good feather pillow to start off with, he could build himself a house. How? 'Very simple,' he said. 'Look, you can sell a good pillow for a pound. With this pound you can pay the membership fee of a loan society, which will entitle you to borrow up to ten pounds. With ten pounds in hand you can begin looking around for a nice little plot of land. Once you've found a plot, you can approach the owner with your ten pounds in cash, and naturally he will agree to take the rest in promissory notes. Now you are a landowner and you can look for a contractor. To him you say, "I have the land—now you build a house on it. All I want is a flat for myself and the family".'
***
In 1924 the Zionists were perturbed by an ultra-Orthodox leader, Israel de Haan, who was working to establish the Orthodox community as a separate entity distinct from the Zionists, and who seemed to be willing to enlist the support of non-Jews hostile to Zionism in order to advance the cause of ultra-Orthodoxy. He had travelled to Transjordan—British Mandated eastern Palestine—and held talks with the Emir Hussein, who was visiting his son, the Emir Abdullah, in Amman. That summer, de Haan prepared to visit Britain on behalf of the anti-Zionists, to try to persuade the British government that the Orthodox Jewish community in Palestine should not be under the authority of the secular Jewish institutions headed by the Jewish National Council. On the evening of June 24, three days before he was to depart on his mission, de Haan was assassinated on Haganah orders.
Many Zionist leaders and thinkers condemned de Haan's assassination. When the full facts were revealed fifty years later, a noted Zionist historian, A. J. Brawer, wrote that whether the murder 'was something necessitated by the times, or a tragic error, I, for one, am afraid that the stain of murder will not be eradicated from the judgement made by future historians'.
As the Haganah had continued to grow, arms caches were set up at several locations near Tel Aviv and in Galilee. In 1925 a Haganah officers' course was held on Mount Carmel, near Haifa.
***
Defence and education were two sides of the Zionist coin. Despite initial problems with funding, an Institute of Jewish Studies was set up on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in 1924, on the site for a Hebrew University purchased by the Zionists just before the First World War. The money for the Institute came from an American philanthropist, Felix Warburg. Within a year, the Hebrew University was opened. Arthur Balfour came from London to be present. Weizmann watched with pride as his dream of a quarter of a century came into being. Jews from all over Palestine made the journey across the country, often by horse and cart, in order to be there. Christian and Muslim leaders graced the ceremony with their presence, and their goodwill. During his remarks at the opening, Chaim Nahman Bialik spoke with enthusiasm of the Zionist pioneers who were making their way to Palestine from Central Europe, and of how Jewish secular and religious values would be linked and enhanced:
Thousands of our young sons, responding to the call of their heart, stream to this land from all corners of the earth to redeem it from its desolation and ruin. They are ready to spill out their longing and strength into the bosom of this dry land in order to bring it to life. They plough through rocks, drain swamps, pave roads, singing with joy.
These youngsters elevate crude physical labour to the level of supreme holiness, to the status of a religion. We must now light this holy flame within the walls of the building which is now being opened on Mount Scopus.
Let these youngsters build with fire the lower Jerusalem while we build the higher Jerusalem. Our existence will be recreated and made secure by means of both ways together.
The Hebrew University drew its teachers and scholars from all over the Jewish world. One of those who contributed substantially to an understanding of the topographical and historical roots of the National Home was the historian and geographer Samuel Klein. Born in Hungary, he had become a rabbi—first in Hungary, then Bosnia and finally Slovakia—and served in the First World War as a military chaplain with the Austro-Hungarian forces. He had visited Palestine in 1908 and become fascinated by its geography. For five years he both taught in Jerusalem and continued with his rabbinical duties in Slovakia, an early example of the commuting between Israel and Europe, and even the United States, which became common in academic circles half a century later. But Klein taught full time at the Hebrew University from 1929. His main contribution was his research into the Holy Books, especially the Talmud and Midrash, as primary sources for both the topography of the country and its early settlements. Before his death in 1940 he had trained a generation of scholars in the topography of Palestine and in the use of biblical and Hellenistic sources.
Another of the educational pioneers that year was Saul Aaron Adler, who at the age of five had been brought to England from Russia by his parents, and as a student had specialized in tropical medicine. During the First World War he served as a doctor and pathologist with the British and Indian troops on the Mesopotamia Front. In 1924 he left Britain for Palestine, joining the staff of the Medical School in Jerusalem, and becoming professor of the Parasitological Institute there four years later. He was best known to scholars as the translator of Darwin's Origin of Species into Hebrew. His chief scientific work was in the search for immunizations for malaria, cattle fever, leprosy and dysentery, all of which were features of the harshness of rural life in Palestine at that time.
Also in 1924, progress was made in the establishment of yet more agricultural settlements in the Jezreel Valley, where, on behalf of the Jewish National Fund, Akiva Ettinger was taking a leading part in both buying land and introducing mixed farming, mostly dairy farming and orchards. Ettinger was also a pioneer in afforestation. The variety of settlers spanned the whole spectrum of Jewish experience. That same year a moshav was established in the valley by a group of Polish Hasidic immigrants, led by their rabbis, the rabbis of Kozienice and Jablonow, who had persuaded their flocks to go with them to Palestine. The site was so poor, however, that after three years they moved to a site further west, less than 7 miles from Haifa, Kfar Hassidim. There, they had first to drain the malarial swamps; ten years later they established an agricultural school nearby.
As the number of settlements increased, the Jewish national institutions supporting them also grew, as did new projects designed to cater for their various needs. In 1925 a Jewish town was founded in the Jezreel Valley. Named Afula (The Town of Jezreel) its construction was made possible by American Zionists, members of the American Zion Commonwealth, who wanted the settlements in the valley to have an urban centre. It was located at what hitherto had been nothing more than a way station of the Haifa–Damascus narrow-gauge railway. But despite the hopes of the Americans, the kibbutzniks of the Jezreel Valley were not drawn to the town; their way of life was far too self-contained and demanding, and when pleasures called, it was to the more bustling urban Haifa that most of them preferred to go. One institution in Afula whose facilities they did use, however, and welcome, was the regional hospital, the first to be set up in Palestine.
Among the moshavim founded in the Jezreel Valley in the 1920s was Kfar Baruch. Established in 1926, it was named after Baruch Kahana of Ploesti, in Roumania, who had given his wealth to the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of settlement in Palestine. Kfar Baruch was unusual in that its first farmers came from a variety of lands, not only from Poland, Germany and Roumania, but also from Kurdistan and Iraq. Even more unusual, some of the first settlers were 'Mountain Jews' from the Caucasus, a Jewish group whose ancestors had lived in the Caucasus for well over a thousand years, and who spoke an ancient Persian dialect, Judaeo-Tat.
Jews from Iraq were the main settlers at a kibbutz founded 14 miles south of Jerusalem in the last months of 1926. It was named Migdal Eder (The Tower of Eder), after a nearby site mentioned in the Bible. In 1929 it was one of several Jewish settlements that were attacked by Arab rioters, and had to be abandoned. Kfar Malal, which had been destroyed in the riots of 1921, and rebuilt a year later, successfully repelled several attacks.
Another kibbutz established in 1926 was Mishmar Ha-Emek (Guard of the Valley) on the western rim of the Jezreel Valley. Its first settlers were from Poland. Although Jewish immigration to Palestine came predominantly from Poland in the mid and late 1920s, immigrants came from every country in which Jews lived. In 1927, seventy-one-year-old Mullah Murad arrived from Persia. He had been for many years the secret leader of those Persian Jews from Meshed, in north-eastern Persia, who, almost a century earlier in 1839, had been forcibly converted to Islam. Under his Jewish name, Mordecai ben Raphael Aklar, he became the spiritual leader of the Meshed and Bucharan communities in Jerusalem.
As the number of immigrants rose, calling for a considerable increase in the tasks being carried out by Jewish workers, the Histadrut looked to the Jewish Agency to help finance its building and construction activities, and its social welfare institutions. But the Jewish Agency was itself entering a period of crisis. The cost of building up the Jewish National Home could not be met from its productive enterprises. Zionists overseas seemed to be losing their zeal. In 1927, as economic conditions worsened, twice as many Jews left Palestine as reached it. Seven thousand Jewish workers had no work: 5 per cent of the total Jewish population. That year there was a net gain in population, through natural increase, of only 289 people, while over the two-year period 1926–8 the ratio of Jews to Arabs actually fell, from 16.6 per cent to 16.2 per cent. This was disastrous from the perspective of those who looked towards an eventual Jewish majority in Palestine. 'With the means at our disposal,' Arthur Ruppin wrote in his diary on 1 January 1927, 'it may be possible to provide a livelihood for 2,000–3,000 immigrants a year, but we want to bring in 25,000–30,000! I cannot see how Zionism can make any progress with no more than its present financial resources.'
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The diversity of the kibbutz movement during the Mandate period was considerable, and was to influence the political evolution of Jewish and later Israeli life. In 1927 Kibbutz Hameuhad (The United Kibbutz) movement was founded. Its members believed that every kibbutz must constitute an independent economic entity. Its founding fathers were Yitzhak Tabenkin and Shlomo Lavi. Tabenkin had worked as a farm labourer in Palestine before the First World War, when Lavi had also been a labourer (later he was a watchman). Both Lavi's sons were killed in the War of Independence. A writer and essayist, as well as a Labour political leader, he served after independence in both the first and second Knessets.
The Kibbutz Hameuhad movement favoured a large kibbutz; it was Marxist-oriented and advocated 'the wholeness of Israel'. By contrast, the Hever Hakvutzot (Collective Association) movement founded in 1927 considered itself non-Marxist and non-Socialist, and was in favour of a small, intimate kibbutz. Kibbutz Artzi (My Land), also founded that year, was entirely Marxist in thought; its members regarded Soviet Russia as the world of tomorrow. The religious Hakibbutz Hadati, founded eight years later, and also the moshavim, were cooperative rather than collective: unlike the kibbutz, members of the moshav lived with their children, did not eat collectively but in their own homes, and received a financial share of any profits made by the collective farming.
In search of funds with which to buy more land and build settlements and towns, and absorb those who came to live in them, in 1928 the Jewish Agency approached the British government for a substantial loan. It would be used, Chaim Weizmann explained in a note for the British Cabinet on 28 January 1928, 'for the sole purpose of promoting and expediting close settlement of Jews on the land, as contemplated by the Mandate'. When the request came before the Cabinet, it was supported by Lord Balfour, who informed his Cabinet colleagues on March 5 that he was 'not so sure' that Britain had in fact carried out its obligations to the Jews 'in a very generous spirit' since the Mandate was established. It was not Britain, he wrote, which had as yet provided either money or immigrants: 'The supply of money is due to Jewish idealism; the supply of immigrants is due to Jewish idealism combined with Jewish misery.'
Balfour pointed out to his colleagues that the Jews had already put money into Palestine to benefit all its inhabitants. He gave, as an example, the ￡100,000 a year spent on sanitation by the Jewish National Fund, 'though the whole community (and not the Jews only) benefit by it'. In other British colonial and dependent territories, such work was either not done, or was paid for out of taxes levied on all the inhabitants. Both Leopold Amery—the Colonial Secretary—and Winston Churchill—then Chancellor of the Exchequer—supported the proposed Zionist loan. But, despite Balfour's advocacy, the Cabinet rejected it; and, in doing so, marked a step away from what had earlier been regarded as one of Britain's obligations under the National Home provisions of the Mandate.
In Palestine itself there was a serious increase in Arab hostility against the Jews during 1928. Under the influence of the Mufti it was being put about that the Jews had designs on the main mosque on the Temple Mount. On September 8 the Mufti submitted a memorandum to the Palestine government warning of 'the unlimited greedy aspirations of the Jews', whose aim, he declared, was 'to take possession of the Mosque al-Aksa gradually'. Three weeks later the Mufti presided over a Moslem Conference which urged restrictions on Jewish worship at the Wailing Wall. These included preventing the Jews 'from raising their voices or making speeches'.
The combination of economic problems, and a fall in immigration—news of the difficult economic situation in Palestine circulated widely in Poland was hard enough for the Zionist institutions to bear. But when the Arab protests against any continuation of Jewish immigration broke out into physical violence, a period of grave danger ensued for the safety and morale of the Jews of Palestine. Other aspects of life in Palestine were potentially uplifting. Rich archaeological remains awaited excavation, and with them, the identification of ancient biblical sites with modern towns and settlements.
In 1926 the Hebrew University had created the post of Archaeologist in its faculty of Humanities. The man chosen was Lipa (who had changed his name to the Hebrew-sounding Eliezer) Sukenik, the former mathematics teacher from Poland whose wife was in charge of training kindergarten teachers. Sukenik had begun to identify the ruins of synagogues dating back 2,000 years, to the period of the last Jewish independence in Palestine. In July 1928 he wrote in his diary, 'The important work that lies before me is the creation of Jewish Archaeology.' Five months later the settlers at kibbutz Beit Alpha in the Jezreel Valley were digging a drainage ditch when they came across an extraordinary mosaic. On it they could make out the signs of the Zodiac and Hebrew letters. They hastened to contact Sukenik—who had lectured to them seven years earlier on the importance of archaeological finds—and sent a young kibbutznik to Jerusalem to inform him of their discovery. In January 1929 Sukenik travelled north, accompanied by his eleven-year-old son, Yigael, to excavate what he realized was an ancient synagogue.
As the members of the kibbutz helped Sukenik with the excavations, a new dimension was added to Jewish life in the National Home. 'Suddenly,' he later wrote, 'these people saw things that were never so tangible before. There was suddenly a feeling that this very parcel of land—for which they had suffered so much—wasn't just any piece of land but the place where their fathers and grandfathers had lived and died fifteen hundred or two thousand years before. All their work now had a different significance. Their history had been uncovered, and they could see it with their own eyes.'
The archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman, who half a century later worked for the Israel Department of Antiquities—and who studied under Sukenik's son—has written of the discovery of the Beit Alpha synagogue in those first months of 1929: 'For the settlers of the Jezreel Valley, it was validation of their physical presence; for the non-religious Jews of the country, it revealed a lively Judaism that freely borrowed motifs from other cultures; for the religious, it demonstrated the continuity of their religious rituals over millennia; and for the politically minded, it evoked a period in which the Jewish community of Palestine had maintained at least nominal autonomy.'
A single, dramatic, episode had linked the Jews of modern Palestine with those of antiquity.