Karsh - Israel: the First Hundred Years VOL 1 Israels Transition from Community to State

Providing a multidisciplinary examination in all aspects, this series serves as a means of communication between the various communities interested in Israel: academics, policy-makers, practitioners, journalists and the informed public.

Other books in the series:

Peace in the Middle East: The Challenge for Israel
edited by Efraim Karsh

The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma
edited by Robert Wistrich and David Ohana

Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security
edited by Efraim Karsh

U.S.Israeli Relations at the Crossroads
edited by Gabriel Sheffer

From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel's Troubled Agenda
edited by Efraim Karsh

Israel at the Polls 1996
edited by Daniel J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler

In Search of Identity: Jewish Aspects in Israeli Culture
edited by Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh

Israel: The Dynamics of Change and Continuity
edited by David Levi-Faur, Gabriel Sheffer and David Vogel

Revisiting the Yom Kippur War
edited by P.R. Kumaraswamy

Peacemaking in Israel after Rabin
edited by Sasson Sofer

Israel: The First Hundred Years

Volume I
Israel's Transition from Community to State

Editor

Efraim Karsh

First published 2000 by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd

Published 2013 by Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2000 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Israel: the first hundred years
Vol. 1: Israel's transition from community to state.
(Israeli history, politics and society; v. 9)
1. Nationalism Israel 2. Israel Politics and government
I. Karsh, Efraim
320.5'4'095694

ISBN: 978-0-714-68024-8 (pbk)
ISSN 1368-4795

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on
Israel's Transition from Community to State of Israel Affairs 5/4 (Summer 1999)

EFRAIM KARSH

At Basle I founded the Jewish State, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on 3 September 1897, following the First Zionist Congress which he had convened in the Swiss town. If I said this aloud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it. Precisely fifty years later, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations' General Assembly passed a special resolution on the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two independent states one Jewish and one Arab. On 14 May 1948, as the last British forces were leaving the country, David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

This achievement is all the more remarkable given the environment in which the Jewish national movement had to operate. This included, inter alia, obstacles raised by the reigning imperial power, be it the Ottoman or the British empires; political and armed resistance by the Palestinians and the Arab states; creation of nationwide social, political and economic institutions; transforming the demographic balance within both Mandatory Palestine and the Jewish People at large through a steady growth; overcoming the devastating consequences of the Holocaust; pushing the British out of Palestine and obtaining international acceptance for the creation of a Jewish State; and, last but not least, protecting this state from the concerted Palestinian and Arab attempt to abort it at birth.

The importance of restating these facts, especially at this particular point in time, cannot be overstated. A century after Herzl's prophetic words, with Israel celebrating its fiftieth year of independence and Middle Eastern peace seemingly closer than ever, the Zionist saga has been turned upside down by its detractors, with aggressors turned into hapless victims and vice versa. The Jewish acceptance of Palestinian statehood, as stipulated by the UN Partition Resolution, is completely ignored or dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; the violent Palestinian and Arab attempt to kill this resolution overlooked. It has even been suggested that the Palestinians, rather than the Israelis, were the target of this concerted Arab attack. More incredibly, Israel has been cast as the unlawful beneficiary of the Holocaust, and the Palestinians as its real victims for allegedly footing the bill for the West's presumed desire to atone for this genocidal act through the establishment of a Jewish State.

The truth, of course, was quite different. Israel was established despite the Holocaust and not because of it. The destruction of Central and East European Jewry not only inflicted a devastating blow upon the Jewish People: it also deprived the Zionist Movement of its foremost human reservoir, not to speak of the vibrant Zionist activity and extensive infrastructure operating there prior to the Second World War. Even by the most conservative estimates Israel's population would now be several times its present size had the extermination of six million European Jews not taken place something which would have entailed far-reaching consequences for the development of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

On the other hand, those were the days of global decolonization. The last of Europe's traditional overseas empires, Britain and France, were losing their possessions in rapid succession to resurgent Afro-Asian nationalism. And there is no conceivable reason why Britain would have been able to resist Arab and Jewish nationalism in Palestine, or for that matter in the wider Middle East, better than it did in any other part of the world, not least since this region was a temporary rather than an integral part of the British Empire. This in turn would have led to the creation of a Jewish State as part of the worldwide decolonization process, even if the Holocaust had never happened.