By this account, Steven, who needs to look at the actual history of Israel? The French in Vietnam, the British in India, what the hey, it's all racism and colonialism.
Sometimes I wonder if you even read what I write. The reference to other incarnations of colonialism was peripheral, and invoked merely to explain why I thought that an account – from a prominent Zionist – of Jewish immigrant behavior toward the local residents was credible. If you really believe that an abstract commitment to a socialist creed that theoretically repudiates racism is any obstacle to the actual expression of racism, I can only blush at your naivete.
Then why did the Arab population of Haifa triple from 1920 - 1947, while the Arab population of Nazareth only rose 50%? Whatever the theories of hiring Jews only, both eyewitness accounts and population figures say that Arabs were also being hired.
Haifa is a port, and Britain, unlike Turkey, was a maritime power. Naturally both Arabs and Jews would accumulate there, and naturally many of the Arabs that had been evicted from their tenanted land would have moved there looking for work. Many of them, of course, moved there and didn’t find work. I don’t dispute that many Arabs worked for Jews. What I said was that the number was smaller than it is often assumed to have been, and that the Zionist leadership was openly and vocally committed to reducing it further. Arab workers would naturally have been a bit suspicious of their role in a Jewish State that openly declared its intention to rely exclusively on Jewish Labor.
If the point you are trying to make is that Zionist immigration created tensions, which flared into violence, that's fine.
That’s exactly the point I was trying to make, with the added ingredient that in my belief the flareup was inevitable (Herzl, as I cited previously, used that word as well).
It sounded like you were saying that the way the last 70 years of the Arab-Israeli played out was all "inherent in Zionism".
Again, did you read what I wrote? This entire exchange is a response to my comment that the scale of Zionist immigration and the open commitment to the establishment of a Jewish State made violent confrontation with the local populace inevitable. How on earth could you read that as an assertion that “the way the last 70 years of the Arab-Israeli played out was all inherent in Zionism”?
Who is being naive, not to notice that political commisions frame their conclusions to fit certain political considerations of "evenhandedness"? Your very conclusion, "If you create a situation ripe for demagoguery, a demagogue will arise to exploit them" was the precise conclusion that the Hayes commision was trying to avoid. If you don't notice the demagogue, you can't be expected to do anything about him. Much safer to call everything spontaneous.
You seem to see evenhandedness as some form of grave disability. Isn’t evenhandedness something to be desired in what is supposed to be an impartial inquiry into the causes of violence? The Haycraft (not Hayes; Thomas Haycraft was Chief Justice for Palestine at the time) Commission found, and I see no reason to dispute the findings, that, quoting from the report’s summary:
“The fundamental cause of the Jaffa riots and the subsequent acts of violence was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration, and with their conception of Zionist policy as derived from Jewish exponents.
The immediate cause of the Jaffa riots on the 1st May was an unauthorized demonstration of Bolshevik Jews, followed by its clash with an authorized demonstration of the Jewish Labour Party.
The racial strife was begun by the Arabs, and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties.
The outbreak was not premeditated or expected, nor was either side prepared for it; but the state of popular feeling made a conflict likely to occur on any provocation by any Jews.
The general body of Jews is opposed to Bolshevism, and was not responsible for the Bolshevik demonstration.
When the disturbance had once begun an already acute anti-Jewish feeling extended it into an anti-Jewish riot. A large part of the Moslem and Christian communities condoned it, although they did not encourage violence. While certain of the educated Arabs appear to have incited the mob, the notables on both sides, whatever their feelings may have been, aided the authorities to allay the trouble.”
In short, the findings of those best place to investigate were that the violence was provoked by a Jewish disturbance, that it was primarily due to simmering anti-Jewish sentiment, and that the Arab leadership did not play a significant role in starting the violence. In short, they found that while the conditions that create demagoguery existed, demagoguery had not yet emerged in any significant form. In these circumstances, what makes more sense? Trying to resolve the conditions that create demagogues or trying, to use your phrase, to do something about the leaders. (I wonder what you would have had them do? “Take them out”, I assume.) In any event, as the British had learned the hard way in many other places, trying to resolve a situation that’s heating up toward violence by removing leaders is ultimately fruitless; all you get is a more radical leader. The long-term answer is to address the situation, and that’s what Haycraft was trying to do. The Commission’s findings are not acceptable to you because they are not what you want to hear. That does not have any negative reflection on the Commission or its findings. |
