This is the first of a series of three articles by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist leader, written specially for the Jewish Daily Bulletin. The second of the series will appear in tomorrow’s Bulletin.
So it probably will have to be accepted as inevitable - that the largest and most powerful of Jewish communities should remain in a state of just sympathetic aloofness while the zone of distress across the ocean is traversing a period of acutest mass agony.
Some readers may here feel shocked by the term “sympathetic aloofness,” they may find it unjust, may claim that theirs is much more than mere “sympathy,” and the claim may be true: but I cannot help it - compared with the tremendous immediacy of that painful “certificate-hunger” out there the American attitude strikes me as condolence by remote well-wishers, rather skeptical as to all those stories about a “frozen stampede” to Palestine.
This is probably also why American Jews can play with pink leftism just at a moment when all the Jewish “middle class” in the zone of distress is up in revolt against the present left wing hegemony in Zionism. What is fanning that revolt into real white heat is, naturally, the monopoly over “certificates.” The “mittelstand” (eighty per cent of the whole ghetto) can no longer afford to renounce them for the benefit of “halutzim;” it needs them for itself, too.
No Jew of the “mittelstand” imagines that Palestine can absorb shopkeepers or luftmenschen: he knows that, apart from people with money, only laborers are wanted; but he is himself, in many cases, an artisan, and in any case believes himself fully capable of becoming a laborer, and quite rightly so in most cases. Yet he is debarred from even asking for a “certificate” because he does not belong to the monopolist party and (being a man above 25, probably already married) cannot go to a “hachsharah” place (where, as everybody by now admits, they learn nothing of any use). He realizes, moreover, that there are too few “certificates” to go round, that it is a lottery with hardly one lot for 10,000 applicants - but for him there is even no lottery ticket, and resents it bitterly; and as conditions grow worse his bitterness threatens to degenerate into hate.
There is, of course, also the ideological controversy about “class war;” even without the “certificates” complication it has ever been an irritant. The ordinary poor shul-goer who, as long as he could spare a cent, has been feeding the funds that fed the Halutzim and has made the Histadruth what it now financially is, feels profoundly insulted being treated as white trash by those very Halutzim. The small and medium capitalist whose initiative, since 1925, has endowed Palestine with hundreds of factories providing work for 20,000 Jewish workers, stands bewildered in discovering that even in Zion he is nothing else but a class enemy, an exploiter, and altogether a social nuisance. All that has long been causing a great deal of resentment; but now, added to the non-admission of the “mittelstand” to that “lottery,” it makes people see red.
American Jewry is also mittelstand, but their life is paradise in comparison, they do not feel that searing pain, and sears can never be “explained.” So they have chosen just this moment for getting infatuated with the party whose domination is gall and wormwood to four-fifths of distressed European Jewry, chosen this moment for no other reason, I fear, than a purely local coincidence - the fact that just now “Labor” catchwords happen to be popular in America.
American Zionists are under the impression that this is a very noble and very liberal spiritual departure. I see in it something quite different. There was no trace of such infatuation when Palestinian labor was poor and helpless, in those days of the “stone breakers” when Halutzim were really “pioneers” in the heroic sense of the term, suffering untold material privations and ready to stand even more the glory of Zion. Yet in those days American Zionism, though generous with its money for the improvement of their position, never dreamed of accepting their ideological leadership. Today Palestinian left wing labor gets wages that would make English working men envious; they have abandoned en masse the agricultural colonies, partly even the Dead Sea, because they are better paid in towns; a quarter of the membership of the left-wing Histadruth either live in neat little houses of their own, or else are already listed to get such houses as soon as donations from the bourgeoisie will permit it.
The Histadruth cooperatives employ hired Jewish labor just like capitalist enterprises do: at last year’s Histadruth convention a special report on this painful subject was read by a Mr. Garfinkel from which we learned some really piquant facts, e.g., that more than 50 per cent of those Histadruth members working for Histadruth employers get wages of “from one to six pounds” a month (the Trade Union minimum in Palestine is seven pounds a month); or that some of those cooperatives, whose shares originally cost 100 to 200 dollars, now refuse to sell them, owing to the boom, for less than “two to three thousand dollars.”
Individual members of the left wing Histadruth also employ hired labor - the proletarian “boss” working for high wages in town, but letting his vegetable plot in a nearby colony to be tended by another proletarian for a lower wage; after which, of course, he will sell those vegetables to the bourgeoisie and pocket the profit. In short, belonging to the left wing Histadruth is nowadays rather a comfortable social position.
The Histadruth itself, and the “Mapai” (the Socialist Party) which dominates it, are also very “comfortable:” in proportion to membership, probably one of the richest trade unions throughout the world. Beside the ordinary Keren Hayesod sources, and the “Gewerkschaft” campaigns, the Histadruth now also enjoys a nice steady clean income from the Transfer Agreement between some of its organs and Hitler’s government, helping Germany to import her wares into our Holy Land. This is why left wing labor has at its disposal such a mighty war chest for sending delegations across all the oceans, and for election campaigns to Zionist Congresses.
This is the moment when America’s middle class intelligentsia has chosen to . . . to jump on the band wagon.
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Foreign words should be used with a bona fide knowledge of what they really mean. Fasces was the Latin term for a bunch of rods with an axe in the middle. Roman “lictors” used to carry them ostentatiously, to remind the citizens that if they don’t obey orders they will be beaten, or their heads chopped off. Fasces was the symbol of coercive discipline, of the State’s resolve and power to enforce obedience on all dissenters, no matter whether wicked criminals or honest conscientious objectors. Italian Fascism is an attempt to reaffirm the principle that the State has the right and the duty to "coerce” and the actual power, too.
Right or wrong, all this can have no application to Jewish social phenomena. There is no Jewish government, and no Jew can be administratively “coerced” to obey orders issued by any Jewish leader or committee of leaders. Jewish political organizations are voluntary associations and can be nothing else. Should one of them conceive the whim of imposing on its membership the strictest kind of “compulsory” discipline, that would simply mean that all its members choose to agree to this kind of game: all of them, for if you or I suddenly cease to agree we can simply walk out of that organization and cannot be “coerced.” When a minority of that membership say “We submit to the will of the majority,” they simply mean that they voluntarily condescend to submit. The doctrine of Fascism is rooted in the opposite principle; the individual will be made to agree whether he agrees or not. In Jewish life this doctrine is simply unreal, as unreal as “depth” in a two-dimensional oil painting.
As to the very old principle that the interests of a nation should supersede those of an individual, a family, or a “class” - to describe this idea as “Fascism” is silly. This is everyman’s view, including ninety-nine per cent of all Socialists, probably also of all Communists if ever put to the test.
The really “Fascist” addition to this world-old idea is, again, only that thoroughness of coercion which Fascism applies to social relations. It refuses to rely on the workers or the employers’ own patriotism: it simply commandeers all the workers and all the employers, treats them as battalions of the State, orders, forbids and punishes. This again, cannot be initiated in our Jewish life. When we Jews speak of “compulsory” arbitration in Palestine, what we mean is a free pledge by all concerned to renounce voluntarily any other method of settling industrial disputes and to accept (voluntarily) the arbitrators’ judgment however unpalatable.
Whether such a covenant is a possibility (as I believe) or a dream (as pessimists affirm) is beside the point: the point is that this program is the reverse of Fascism. Fascism says to both Labor and capital: “I don’t ask you to be patriotic, you may go on feeling selfish: but you will have to accept the State’s ruling or go to jail - and even if you do go to jail, it won’t help you, for the State’s ruling will be enforced in your enterprise all the same.”
There is, on the other hand, also this difference - that, while in Fascism any concrete form of “class war” is only verboten, in Zionism (where nothing can actually be “verboten”) the very idea of “class war” is immoral. The national funds which support the proletarian Halutzim are being provided by the. bourgeoisie. That bourgeoisie is being daily urged to leave the Galuth and come and build factories in Palestine, because there “you can be among your brethren. When a bourgeois starts a workshop in Palestine, he is being urged to employ expensive Jewish labor instead of cheap Arab labor - because “the Jewish workmen are his brethren.”
All this is absolutely fair: they are brethren, and partners in the great enterprise of building the Homeland, and comrades in Zionist ideology: brethren, partners, comrades in a sense incomparably more intense and more concrete than it can be said of capital and labor in any other country. That is why it is unfair and immoral to import “class war” ideas into Palestine - even though it cannot be “verboten.”
Fascism is wholly and organically inapplicable to any aspect of Jewish lfe; it is therefore simply dishonest to call any Jewish party “Fascist.” In many cases, it is even akin to hitting under the belt. In liberal or democratic countries Fascism is looked upon as politically subversive, governments have been known to take active measures for suppressing it by police action, and may have to do so in the nearest future with considerable severity. In view of all this, decent opponents should be very chary of stamping a Zionist party as “Fascist.” It is just as indecent as calling Socialists “Communists,” and likely to lead to the same kind of outside interference.
In countries like Austria, where the term “Marxist” is equally dangerous, we Revisionists have instructed our followers never to apply that term to left-wing Zionists, quite regardless of whether that would be scientifically true or untrue; and, though we officially disbanded our German branches when we decided to join the boycott movement, that wing of Zionists in Germany who share our Herzlian views also know that “Marxist” is a word never to be used in Polemics.
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And I finally figured out to find the third section, here.
When a man in America says, “I am not a Republican,” it means that he is an adherent of some other party, probably a Democrat. When a man says the same thing in England, it means that he is a Monarchist. Which is a reminder that the same term can often cover quite different phenomena: another example is the word “petition.”
The officially prescribed way in which a private group or individual in Palestine can approach the Permanent Mandate Commission in Geneva, is by sending their request or memorandum through the High Commissioner: and the document thus forwarded is called “petition.” It may bear many signatures or one only: the Revisionist memorandum was signed by Mr. A. Weinshal on behalf of the Palestinian Revisionists.
This has nothing to do with the “Petition Movement” initiated by the Revisionists a year ago. That movement demands signatures en masse: between April and June, 600,000 signatures were collected, and this year we intend to raise the number up to several millions. The mass petition is not addressed to the Mandate Commission or to the League of Nations: its four different texts are explicibly addressed (a) to his British Majesty, (b) to the British Parliament, (c) and (d) to the government and parliament of the country where the petitioners reside. And, in fine, this mass petition has not yet been “presented” either in London or in any other capital, but will only be presented after many preliminary manifestations, culminating probably in a World Congress of the petitioners themselves.
Those who are genuinely interested should, therefore, remember that anything that may have happened in Geneva to Dr. Weinshal’s memorandum, officially described as “petition,” or may subsequently happen to his next memorandum to Geneva, has no bearing whatsoever on the progress of the real petition - the mass movement petition.
The two have also different aims. The mass petition is primarily meant to register all those who actually and personally want and need repatriation to Palestine. Secondly, - to impress upon the governments of those countries where the Jewish distress has become a grave local problem that it is in those governments’ interest to start a friendly talk with the British Mandatory about facilitating Jewish immigration. Thirdly, - to bring home to British Jews’ suffering, and to British public conscience the discrepancy between a pledge and a reality.
The memorandum to the Mandates Commission had another aim, to “draw” that body into a discussion on that all-important subject: what is the true meaning of a “national home” - is it a Jewish State or just a new Jewish minority?
I know, of course, that there are people who consider such a discussion undesirable. We Revisionists consider it necessary and intend to go on promoting it until we obtain the inevitable final result: an admission, on the part of the League’s organ supervising the Mandates, that “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine” means Palestine transformed into a self-governing commonwealth with a Jewish majority; that this was the intent of the Balfour Declaration and of the Mandate. As I said, such an admission is inevitable provided there is a discussion: wherefore, we will see to it that the discussion should continue.
In forwarding to Geneva Mr. Weinshal’s memorandum we knew, of course, that the first reaction of the Mandates Commission would be negative. For the last seven years or more I have been quoting in my public addresses a proverb current in one of the Mediterranean countries: “In politics, just as in true love, it is only after the seventh ‘no’ that you can hope to hear the bashful ‘yes.’ No important political advance has ever been reached in any other way but via several preliminary refusals: the first very dry and curt, the second probably angry. This is how the Jewish Legion was formed: the story began with Kitchener’s “no.” The same applies to the story of the Balfour Declaration, or to any political story worth telling. Whoever fears that preliminary cold drop had better renounce all hope of ever getting anywhere.
The Mandates Commission has said its first “no.” That important body must forgive me for pointing out that this answer clashes with the Commission’s own attitude with regard to all the problems implied in our question. Logically, the present situation in Palestine can only end in one of the following three ways: (a) the Mandatory withdraws, leaving Palestine a State with an Arab majority; (b) the Mandatory stays on forever and ever; (c) a State with a Jewish majority.
As to the first eventuality - the Permanent Mandates Commission at half a dozen of its sessions, when dealing with the question of a Legislative Council for Palestine has always stubbornly maintained that any kind of majority rule by the Arabs would endanger the Jewish national home, would therefore be contrary to the Mandate, and was therefore inadmissible - which all, and a fortiori, applies to an Arab State.
As to the second eventuality (“the Mandatory strays on forever”) - that would be tantamount to annexation, therefore contrary to the very letter and essence of the League of Nations’ Covenant. Some people in England may desire it, but there is at least one body under the sun which simply cannot admit such a perversion of the Covenant - and that body is (last part couldn't copy text, so here:)
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