Empire State of Mind

The goal of the founders of Zionism was collective self-emancipation, but they never imagined that they could achieve it by themselves. They knew that they needed the active support of an empire, preferably the one in which the Land of Israel was then located. Before World War I, however, the Ottomans resisted the Zionists’ appeals, while Great Powers like the British and the Germans never paid them anything more than fleeting attention. When the war was over, however, the political landscape had changed completely. The Turks had been ejected from Palestine; the British were in control and were committed to facilitating the construction of a Jewish National Home within its borders.

Historians of the progress of Zionism from that point onward have mainly focused on successive waves of aliyah, socioeconomic and political developments within the Yishuv, conflict with the local Arabs, and the struggle against the British. Looking back, it is only natural to regard all of this as the prelude to the establishment of Israel as an independent Jewish state. But viewed from the perspective of many important Zionists between the end of World War I and Israel’s War of Independence, the scene was much more complicated. They were focused on functioning within the British Empire.

In her deeply researched new book, Elizabeth  Imber explores the outlooks of Jews throughout the British Empire, from Great Britain to South Africa to India, mostly in the light of their relationship to and involvement in the Zionist enterprise. In doing so, Imber skillfully shows how they thought and operated within “a broad, shared horizon of uncertainty,” which she elaborates as:

Uncertainty over Jewish national futures (varied and malleable as those visions were), uncertainty over the future of Jewish life in Europe, and uncertainty over British imperial futures amid the rise of anticolonial nationalisms.

Norman Bentwich was the second-highest-ranking Jew in the administration of Mandate Palestine during the 1920s. He had become a cultural Zionist under the influence of Ahad Ha’am, whom he had met as a young man in London, and never thought independent statehood was necessary for Jewish cultural renewal. His talented wife, Helen, was the niece of Herbert Samuel, the high commissioner and Norman’s boss, but she herself only became a Zionist in Palestine, and less through theoretical reflection than through interactions with colonial officials who barely concealed their antisemitism. Still, she felt most comfortable not among the feisty Jews from Eastern Europe but among refined Anglo-Saxons like herself. That didn’t mean, however, that her cultivated friends needed always to be on their best behavior. Imber regales us with the tale of a “‘Jewish’ Christmas party” in Jerusalem in 1923, where Judah Magnes, the American rabbi heading the newborn Hebrew University, sat with the partygoers “in a ring on the floor,” teaching the Bentwiches and other dignitaries how to play poker (though for matchsticks, not money).

Magnes taught Norman Bentwich more than that. Between 1925 and 1928, Imber writes:

Norman’s Zionist vision fully matured, his ideas about Jewish nationhood based on British dominion models and his commitment to Jewish-Arab cooperation finding expression in the binationalist program supported by Judah Magnes and members of Brit Shalom.

Bentwich wanted Palestine to become for the Jews what Scotland was for the Scottish, a dominion that was their homeland even though they lacked political sovereignty and might not necessarily constitute a majority.

Chaim Arlosoroff, whom Imber aptly describes as the 1920s “wunderkind of the Zionist movement,” a young German-
 educated intellectual and rising Labor leader, was highly critical of the binationalists, but he didn’t see complete independence as a necessary goal of Zionism either. It is in connection with Arlosoroff and not the Bentwiches (who became his friends despite their political disagreements) that Imber introduces Colonel Josiah C. Wedgwood, the British officer who conceived the idea of including Palestine as “the seventh dominion” in the newly established British Commonwealth. For this, Arlosoroff was game. Imber writes:

Zionist-British cooperation was not a temporary aim but rather “a political aim that defines the nature of our national existence,” both in the present and in a planned future when Jews would be the majority in Palestine. In other words, a partnership between the Yishuv and the British was not a means to an end, not a way to an independent state, but a fundamental and enduring ideal of the Jewish national home.

Even after the riots of 1929, the Bentwiches remained committed to a binationalist program under British auspices. But Arlosoroff, who had become the head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, began to “question the fundamental tenability of Zionist futures in the British Empire.” Despite his cordial engagement with the British authorities on the spot, he recognized their acquiescence to the growing influence of Pan-Islamism and concluded that there was no “British future for the Yishuv.”

In a confidential letter to Chaim Weizmann in June 1932, Arlosoroff “became the first mainstream Zionist leader to propose a radical departure from the policy of evolutionary Zionism.” His private conclusion that the time had come to revolt against the British did not prevent him, however, from continuing “to build relationships with influential (and often wealthy) Jewish elites from both the metropole and the empire in the hope that their intervention could improve Zionism’s situation.”

Improvements were indeed coming, though Arlosoroff did not live to see them (he was shot on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933 in a murder that was never conclusively solved). Nonetheless, others in the Zionist movement remained wary of Pan-Islamism. Their fear was that the British would betray Zionism to placate the Muslims of British India (which then included contemporary Pakistan and Bangladesh), the largest Muslim population in the world. Already in 1931, Selig Brodetsky, a London-based Zionist official, consequently sought to recruit Mahatma Gandhi to the Zionist cause. This seemed like a stretch after an interview with the Jewish Chronicle in which Gandhi had voiced his disapproval of the Jewish immigration as the “re-occupation of Palestine” while declaring his hearty liking of “very nice and crisp” matzos. Undaunted, Brodetsky enlisted the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow to accompany him to meet Gandhi when he was visiting London. They seem to have made a decent impression, but nothing much came of it.

The real effort to win over Gandhi came five years later, when the growth of the Jewish population in Palestine, along with Zionist institution building, led to an Arab revolt that garnered the vocal support of many Indian Muslims and even some Hindus. Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), Arlosoroff’s successor, reached out to Hermann Kallenbach, a Jewish architect and old friend of Gandhi’s from his prewar days in South Africa. “The general tendency among Hindu politicians,” Shertok wrote to Kallenbach, “appears to be to regard us Jews in Palestine as intruders coming from the west.” Would he join the Sanskrit scholar Immanuel Olsvanger on a trip to India to help persuade his old friend that matters were much more complex than that?

Olsvanger went first and met not only with Gandhi but with Jawaharlal Nehru, but he had little success. When Kallenbach finally arrived in March 1937, he and Gandhi were happy to see each other after a quarter century of separation, and Gandhi softened a little. But he still insisted that Jewish immigration to Palestine, while admittedly justifiable in itself, should not take place without Arab consent—and even this small concession he made Kallenbach promise to keep to himself.

When Gandhi finally did issue a public statement on Zionism, ten days after Kristallnacht, it was stunningly disappointing:

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. . . . Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

Adding insult to injury, Gandhi recommended that Jews replace Zionism with nonviolent resistance, satyagraha, alienating even his most devoted Jewish disciples, who understood the difference between the British Raj and the Third Reich.

In most accounts of Zionist policies from 1939 onward, the focus has been on the mobilization behind the 1942 Biltmore Program calling for the establishment of Palestine as an independent Jewish commonwealth and the effort to win support for the plan in the United States. Imber focuses her attention instead on the ways in which Shertok and others “continued to invest deeply—though often with immense frustration—in British solutions not solely to the war effort but to the Yishuv’s future beyond the war.”

Recognizing that the British were making policy in the context of “a broader imperial dynamic,” Shertok tried to convince them that they were exaggerating the likely impact of what happened in Palestine on the Arab world in general and on the Muslim population of their own empire in particular. Shertok’s own outreach efforts in India indicated, as Imber notes, that he knew better. He also stressed the degree to which the British had “underestimated the Yishuv’s actual and potential power, especially its military capability,” encouraging them to think of it as an ally in the struggles that lay on the horizon.

Even after these arguments failed, Shertok continued to see the need for continued cooperation with the British, first to maximize the number of immigrants who could still enter Palestine under the new draconian rules, and second to promote the creation of a Jewish fighting force, which finally came into being in 1944. As the war drew to a close, he still “insisted that Zionists could not simply cut ties with Britain, despite what more activist and anti-British wings of the movement desired,” even as he called for the establishment of a Jewish state.

In March of 1947, however, when the relationship with Britain had completely collapsed and the Zionists stood in desperate need of allies, Shertok dispatched a distinguished delegation to the Asian Relations Conference in India, which Indian Muslims boycotted and from which the Arab states, except for Egypt, stood their distance. The Yishuv delegates felt somewhat out of place but were comforted to some extent by the fact that the “special Eastern ring” of their Hebrew made them seem “almost Asian, despite their European garb and the ‘light color’ of their skin.” One member of the delegation, the philosopher Hugo Bergmann, even described the Jews as “an old Asian people,” but it didn’t help. After the Arab League observer and an Egyptian delegate denounced Zionism from the dais, Bergmann sought to reply to them but was denied the platform by none other than Nehru himself.

The Zionist delegation staged a walkout and was subsequently welcomed back, and Nehru even apologized for any pain he might have caused Bergmann, but he didn’t retract his view that Palestine was “essentially an Arab country.” Nor did anyone else rise to the Zionists’ defense. Imber concludes her deft description of  both West and East.

Uncertain Empire is not only about the Zionist movement, but it never strays far. Zionism is more than tangentially involved even in Imber’s interesting chapters about such matters as the identity politics of Baghdadi Jews in India and the efforts of Norman and Helen Bentwich to settle European Jewish refugees in England and other parts of the British Empire. As focused as her book is on Zionism, Imber refrains from comparing the situation of the movement during the last decades of the British Empire to current circumstances. But this is unavoidable.

There is a vast difference, of course, between an era in which Zionism revolved around a growing but still smallish Jewish minority in British-ruled Palestine and one in which there is a powerful, if small, Jewish state. But now, as in the period Imber examines, Zionism continues to operate under the umbrella of a Great Power, which is currently embroiled, together with Israel, in earthshaking actions in the Middle East whose long-term outcome is impossible to predict. There is still a “horizon of uncertainty.”