Published by Americans for The Link Middle East Understanding, Inc.

Volume 48, Issue 1 Link Archives: www.ameu.org January-March 2015

The Window Dressers:

The Signatories of ’s Proclamation of Independence

By Ilan Pappe

On Friday, May 14, 1948, the members of the “People’s Council,” the makeshift parliament of the Jewish community in Palestine, convened in Tel-Aviv to listen to David Ben- Gurion read aloud Israel’s Proclamation of Independence.

The reading was broadcast on local radio and heard around the world. In years to come, it would be treated in Israel as an unwritten constitution that had no binding legal powers but provided moral guidance for the Israeli parliament, the .

Its model was the American Constitution and in order to adapt it to

(Continued on Page 3.) The Link Page 2

AMEU Board of Directors About This Issue

Jane Adas (Vice President) Elizabeth D. Barlow In discussing Israel’s upcoming demnation in the Knesset, Israel’s Edward Dillon elections this March, Amos parliament, and to several death Rod Driver Yadlin, Israel’s former chief of threats. John Goelet defense intelligence, was quoted This is Pappe’s third article for in The New York Times as saying David Grimland The Link. His first, our Jan.-March, that Israel’s political center needs 1998 issue “What Really Happened Richard Hobson (Treasurer) to run on the core values of its Anne R. Joyce Fifty Years Ago?,” was followed by founding prime minister, David our April-May, Hon. Robert V. Keeley Ben-Gurion. That 2008 issue “State of Kendall Landis is, it needs to run Denial: Israel, 1948- Robert L. Norberg (President) on building “a 2008.” state that has a Hon. Edward L. Peck Donald L. Snook Jewish majority, a state that is dem- On page 15, we Rosmarie Sunderland ocratic where all list several books James M. Wall its citizens are and videos rele-

equal.” vant to our present AMEU National topic, including Ah, but there’s Council Pappe’s signature the rub: Can the Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. work “The Ethnic Jewish state be William R. Chandler Cleansing of Pales- both Jewish and Kathleen Christison tine.” democratic? Paul Findley Ilan Pappe For the answer Moorhead Kennedy to that question, our feature writ- We also invite our readers to Ann Kerr er Ilan Pappe goes back to May visit our redesigned website: Nancy Lapp 14, 1948, back to David Ben- www.ameu.org. There you will George E. Mendenhall Gurion, and back to the signers of find every Link issue going back to Mary Norton Israel’s Declaration of Independ- 1968, as well as rare monographs, Don W. Wagner ence. such as Dr. Fayez Sayegh’s critical analysis of the Camp David Ac- Pappe, an Israeli historian, cur- Executive Director cords. All are easily downloadable rently teaches at Exeter Universi- John F. Mahoney in pdf format. The site also con- ty in England, where he directs tains a listing of books for sale at the European Center for Palestine discount prices, many now out-of- AMEU (ISSN 0024-4007) Studies, and co-directs the Center grants permission to print. Also, there is a short, ani- for Ethno-Political Studies. reproduce material from The mated video presentation of the Link in part or in whole. Before he went to Exeter in 2008, Palestinian-Israeli question, pre- AMEU must be credited and he had been teaching at the Uni- pared by Jewish Voice for Peace. one copy forwarded to our versity of Haifa, where his en- office at 475 Riverside Drive, Room 245, New York, New dorsement of the boycott of Israeli York 10115-0245. Tel. 212- universities led to the call for his John F. Mahoney 870-2053; Fax 212-870- resignation by the university’s Executive Director 2050; E-mail: president. It also led to his con- [email protected]; Website: www.ameu.org. The Link Page 3

(Continued from Page 1.) That promise of a democracy is not the rea- son why members of the international commu- that document an American Jew, an academic nity still support Israel today or at least turn a scholar and a rabbi, Shalom Zvi Davidowitz, blind eye to its criminal policies vis-à-vis the joined the team that articulated the final draft of Palestinians. Their reasons for doing so are the proclamation. complex and this is not the place to explore The proclamation summarizes the consensu- them. But this pledge to democracy is the con- al Zionist narrative of the day, with all its princi- venient pretext for Jews around the world, liber- pal fabrications, historical distortions and total als, socialists and democrats in the West and denial of the native population and its fate. And their counterparts inside Israel, for providing yet miraculously, without any explanation, the immunity other states would never enjoy twice in the proclamation the natives are men- had they pursued similar policies. tioned, as if they appeared out of the blue. First The main litmus test, as offered by the proc- they are referred to as the people who benefited lamation itself, for examining the democratic na- from the Zionist endeavour in Palestine that ture of the future state is the treatment of the made the desert bloom and modernized the non-Jewish minority in its midst. primitive land beyond recognition. More im- portantly, they are alluded to as future citizens By itself this was a problematic notion in of the Jewish State whose treatment in the future that, even as the final draft was being written, would prove that the Zionist movement found- that minority was being subjected to an ethnic ed the only democracy in the Middle East. cleansing operation that had begun three months earlier. And quite a few of those signing Here is the relevant paragraph: the proclamation were privy to the plans to THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for complete the ethnic cleansing operation in such Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering a way that it would be very easy to grant rights of the Exiles; it will foster the development to a minority that would not be there. of the country for the benefit of all its in- habitants; it will be based on freedom, jus- In any event, the document proved more im- tice and peace as envisaged by the prophets portant than intended as a small minority did of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of remain in the Jewish state. Much larger than ex- social and political rights to all its inhabit- pected probably because the locals showed ants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it steadfastness, were partially protected by Arab will guarantee freedom of religion, con- troops, and benefitted at the end of the day science, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all reli- from the fatigue of an army that was by the end gions; and it will be faithful to the princi- of 1948 too stretched and too exhausted to com- ples of the Charter of the United Nations. plete the job. As we shall see some of the signatories want- This particular paragraph was the window ed to rectify this by further ethnic cleansing op- dressing aimed at safeguarding Israel’s future erations, but the majority reconciled to the pres- international image and status. While the histor- ence of a Palestinian minority and imposed a ical narrative in the proclamation described ac- harsh military rule on it so as to ensure that its curately the international complacency in the “rights” do not clash with the ethnic identity dispossession of Palestine, it also incurred the and ideology of the Jewish state. promise that this colonialist act would be re- deemed by the foundation of the only democra- Thus in many ways the proclamation was cy in the Middle East. born in sin. It was drafted while Jewish forces The Link Page 4 were ethnically cleansing most of Palestine’s or ethnicity did not play a major role in the way towns but before they had to face troops from you treated your neighbor or the land itself. One the Arab world sent by an enraged public opin- Arab Jew came from Yemen. ion in the region demanding its reluctant gov- Four of the signatories, at least on paper, ernments put an end to the onslaught that had were not Zionists—one a member of the com- already caused hundreds of thousands of refu- munist party and three of the ultra orthodox gees and hundreds of massacred Palestinians parties. In the end, the proclamation, written as if an It is hard to know whether any of these sign- ethnic state can be a democratic one, was the ers were cognizant of the charade they were per- biggest exercise ever in squaring the circle on forming, and harder still to believe they were paper. It can of course be done with words. genuinely convinced they could square the cir- There is a Hebrew adage: “the paper tolerates cle. anything.” The reality, however, is that even be- fore the ink dried on the paper, up until today, I would like to look at their actions before the circle cannot be squared and a project such and after the proclamation in order to examine as the Jewish state is either democratic or ethnic their relationship with democracy and its values. —it cannot be both. They were invited to sign not as individuals but as representatives of the various political fac- This article focuses on the 35 men and two tions and parties in the Zionist community and women who signed this document. Most came therefore, even if they were quite insignificant from Eastern Europe, from cultures and coun- personalities, and some of them were, they em- tries that had no democratic tradition and from a bodied the many Zionist attempts to square the secluded Jewish life, religious in nature, full of circle of a Jewish democratic state. suspicion of the gentiles. Their presence in Pal- estine was also a rebellion against this form of The proclamation was hailed as a democratic life and therefore, by the time they signed the document but it is only recently and with the document, they were far more secular, more self benefit of historical hindsight that we appreciate -assertive and self-sufficient than their parents. how similar it is to another document that was proclaimed in the very same year and prepared But they regarded all these traits as far more by a similar settler colonialist community at the important than being democratic. Long before Southern tip of Africa. There the Afrikaner na- the proclamation was declared, most of them tionalist party publicized an election platform depicted the native Palestinians as a physical ob- that was the basis for the apartheid legislation stacle that had to be conquered and removed and official proclamation of South Africa as an like the rocks and swamps of the land. apartheid state. Both settler societies believed Three of them came from and Swit- that only a supremacist apartheid state would zerland and reflected a more genuine interest in enable a community of white Europeans to con- democracy but succumbed easily to the convic- tinue the dispossession of the native population tion of their Eastern European counterparts that and take over what the land had to offer. The it was best to have the first democratic election one in Palestine felt it had to disguise this ambi- after the parts of the electorate that were not tion with a democratic window dressing and, Jewish were removed from the new state. until recently, it seemed to do the trick—but for There was one American Jew among them how long? and two Jews who were born in Palestine. The So, how genuine was their effort to reconcile latter represented the harmonic and peaceful re- the irreconcilable and how much was it a PR ex- ality of pre-Zionist Palestine where your religion The Link Page 5 ercise, aimed mainly at an international audi- One should say that this ence? Some of them did not live long enough to phobic and hysterical vi- see what Israel became and their impact after sion was not fully shared 1948 was limited; others played a crucial role in by his other colleagues, how the state was shaped in relation to the proc- although they subscribed lamation’s promise of democracy. It is possible, to the same racist ideology with very few exceptions, to surmise what their that robbed the Palestini- future attitudes would be when these people ans of any right to their were judged according to their roles in the past. homeland and regarded These past biographies are also taken into ac- their presence at best as count in this prosopographic analysis of Israel’s David Ben-Gurion tolerable and at worst as a founding fathers and mothers. potential danger. Most of I have not included all of them. I left out the the Israeli leaders could tolerate the Palestinians ultra-Orthodox Jews as they were less relevant left inside Israel as second rate citizens. But not to the issue at hand, and skipped some of the David Ben-Gurion; he was obsessed with the less significant apparatchiks of , the rul- fact that the country was not free of Arabs and ing Labour movement. But most of them are therefore insisted that the Palestinians inside Is- here. rael be put under military rule, one that not only robbed them of all elementary civil rights, but The Leader: David Ben-Gurion also incarcerated them in the places they lived in—not allowing them to move was the second If anyone epitomized, almost in a brutal way, best option for the ethnic cleanser of Palestine. the newspeak of the Proclamation of Independ- Only after his term as a prime minister ended in ence and its impossible vision of a Jewish de- 1963 was the road open for the abolition of the mocracy, it was this man who led the Zionist military rule in 1966 and its transfer a year later movement to that historical moment on May 14, to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where to- 1948. His name tops the list on the original docu- day it is practiced in a more sophisticated, but ment. equally brutal, way. In many ways the past was behind him and His demographic paranoia informed Ben- his political future was a downhill road from the Gurion’s ideas of democracy. That is why, while center to the periphery. But the edifice he built, he was in office until 1963, he resisted all pres- in terms of his, and his movement’s geograph- sures to occupy the West Bank, and why, after ical and demographic ambitions, was solid. The 1967, he urged the government to leave the West Zionist movement took over nearly eighty per- Bank as soon as it could (apart from Jerusalem). cent of Palestine, kicking out almost one million He wanted to maintain an Israel which is disloy- Palestinians and ending up with almost an ex- al to genuine democracy but can still be deemed clusive majority in the new state. as such by the world at large. He asserted that From Ben Gurion’s perspective, however, the charade could only be sustained as long as in 1948 was only on solid geographical, the Jews retain a significant majority in the state. not demographic grounds. The movement in- Ben-Gurion also wished for a less corrupt, deed took over Palestine, be it without the West more modest and yet predominantly European Bank and the Gaza Strip, but was still in his Jewish state. One assumes he would have con- view caught in a nightmarish demographic real- sidered the leaders who followed him did not fit ity because of the presence of about 150,000 Pal- the bill. Their life style was not his. Those who estinians within the Jewish State. The Link Page 6 followed lived as super millionaires, adding per- Those homes were among the ones that used sonal corruption to the moral one. to host the political, cul- And he would have welcomed the almost tural and financial elites complete de-Arabization of the Arab Jews of the Palestinians who whom, due to his racist and orientalist view, he now found themselves at first saw as Arabs; in this respect his legacy dispersed during the Nak- was kept and implemented. ba, the Palestinian Catas- trophe of 1948. So as our first case study, Ben-Gurion‘s ac- tions, and those of most of his co-signatories, are Their descendants were the principal yardstick through which we exam- able to rebuild some sort of a center during the Jor- ine the claim made in the proclamation that in Daniel Auster 1948 a Jewish democratic state was declared and danian rule over the East- built on the ruins of Palestine. Scholars in this ern city, and even a Palestinian center under Is- century tend to deconstruct texts in order to ex- raeli occupation in the late 1980s and early pose the real motives and viewpoints behind no- 1990s, with the activity of Orient House under ble ideas when they suspect the authenticity and Faysal al-Husayni, as its locus. sincerity of the authors of these texts. In our Today that center has been totally emptied case, we can safely say that there is no need for a by the physical separation of East Jerusalem complex and subtle reading of texts but rather a from the West Bank and the intensive Judaiza- close scrutiny of the actions taken on the ground tion of the Eastern parts of the city. to cast doubt about Zionist candor when it comes to democratic values in the new state of The Socialists: Mordechai Bentov, Zvi Israel. Luria, Nahum Nir Rafalkes and Aharon Zisling The Mayor: Daniel Auster These four were members of the Zionist left As the mayor of Jerusalem during the last party Mapam, the second biggest party in the days of the Mandate, Daniel Auster watched first 1949 elections. how potential Palestinian citizens of the demo- The party had a youth movement, Hashomer cratic Jewish state were expelled from the West- Hazair, based in the Kibbutzim, and a paramili- ern neighborhoods of the city and the surround- tary force, the PALMACH (acronym for storm ing villages—including his deputy Husyan al- troopers), who were the commando units of the Khalidi who served under him in an Arab- Jewish force in 1948 Palestine, taking on a cru- Jewish city that, in comparison to our times, cial role in the ethnic cleansing of the country was a haven of tolerance, multiculturalism and from its native Palestinian population. coexistence. Bentov epitomized the trials and tribulations Auster served once more as mayor until of a political movement that was hard core so- 1950, and in his last term in office he was partic- cialist, and at times even Stalinist, in its socioeco- ularly instrumental in erasing the memory of the nomic worldview. Palestinians from neighbourhoods in the West- ern city, mainly through the destruction of But it became brutally nationalist when buildings, renaming of streets, and the encour- asked to practice these ideologies in the demo- agement for Jewish immigrants to take over Pal- graphic reality of Palestine, where Jews were estinians’ homes. the settlers and the minority in the land. Like so many Zionist leaders, Bentov He-

The Link Page 7 brewized his name which literally meant good of this idea as an alternative to the Zionist main- money in German, Gutgeld, and turned it into stream insistence on partitioning Palestine. He good son (Ben Tov). Like Auster he was born in and his friends submitted such a proposal to the Eastern Europe and was one of the Anglo-American committee of 1946, leaders of Hashomer Hazair in Eastern whose recommendations have long Europe. The idea that socialism could been forgotten apart from the fatal not be universal but had to be Zionist blow it dealt the Palestinian communi- was another attempt at squaring a cir- ty by insisting that the fate of the Jews cle. Critical communists already noted in Europe was closely linked to the Zi- in the beginning of the 20th century onist project in Palestine. Because of that the insistence of having a particu- that the vast majority enjoyed by the lar Jewish angle to a universalist native Palestinians, which should have movement was a paradoxical claim. been the basis for a democracy in Pal- Either you were a universalist —and Mordechai Bentov estine, was totally ignored by the in- believed in the equality of all workers ternational community that opted for and human beings regardless of their national, an impossible partition plan that resulted in the ethnic or religious identity, or you were con- creation of an ethnic Jewish state over much of cerned with the wellbeing of your group alone Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of half its (as nationalists are). Even Zionist Jews demand- population. ing a particular Jewish angle to international so- Bentov was a low key politician after 1948 cialism, the Bund, were regarded by hardcore who, until his death in 1985, tried hard as a writ- communists as Zionists who feared sea sickness er to square the circle of socialism and Zionism. and thus stayed in Europe and did not immi- Aharon Zisling underwent a different trajec- grate to Palestine. Critical sociology later on tory before joining MAPAM. He was a veteran showed how socialists in the Zionist movement of one of the old kibbutzim, Ein Harod, where became more Zionist than socialist to the point his family is still today. where eventually their socialism was emptied of any genuine content and allowed the Israeli The Kibbutz conveyed a bizarre mixture of economy to become one of the extreme exam- socialist nationalism. To this day, it acts as a for- ples of capitalism in our time. tress challenging Israel’s neo-liberal economy, while at the same time it is a hotbed of hawkish But before that happened, Bentov was lead- nationalist ideology that envisages a greater Is- ing a group of thinkers in his movement who rael over the whole of as attempted to settle some of the contradictions the only solution to the conflict. inherited in creating a Jewish Socialist Democratic state, by calling for the This mixture of extreme settler colo- foundation of a bi-national state in nialism with a puritan way of collec- Palestine. tive life reminds us of other settler col- onies in the world where humble, This idea has been revived of late modest and very tough people were at and seems to be more relevant after the forefront of a project which aimed the dispossession of Palestine has been at the destruction of the native popula- half completed and there is now a tion. And it always brings home a bit- third generation of Jewish settlers on ter truth when history is viewed from the land. Bentov tried to persuade the the victim’s point of view: when the international community of the logic Aharon Zisling boot of the settler is on the native’s The Link Page 8 face, he does not care whether the settler is car- without a people.” This narrative is included rying the bible or the book of Marx. When you almost word for word in the proclamation itself. are at the receiving end of the settler colonialist Ben Zvi’s public activity as a president, on project aimed at your destruction, the ideologi- the other hand, showed a wish to ease the harsh cal justification can hardly be of any real interest conditions under which the Palestinian minority for you; your only concern is removing the boot lived in Israel. And although an Eastern Europe- from your face. an Jew, like most of the other signatories, he The President: Yitzhak Ben Zvi showed an exceptional interest in the history of the Jewish communities in the Arab world, an Ben Zvi, the second president of Israel, was interest reflected in the activity of the institute a leading figure in the Zionist movement until he founded. Today that institute divorces these 1948. With such a prominent position his impact Jews from their cultural environment and Arab was vast on many aspects of life in the Jewish identity and sees their immigration to Palestine state. But when viewed from the perspective of as their ultimate destiny and way for salvation. this article, it is best to assess his impact through This would form an important part of the de- the activities today of the scholarly institute that Arabization of the Arab Jews in a way that did carries his name, the Yad Ben Zvi Institute. not benefit them socially or economically, and He founded the institute as an orientalist re- left them bereft of their rich cultural heritage. In search center in 1947. After his death in 1979, its reality, the impressive Jewish communities of focus changed to Zionist studies. Today it pub- the Arab world were reduced to marginality lishes several of the leading academic journals in within the new Jewish state and had to suffer a Hebrew on the history of Palestine throughout degrading process of integration into the East the ages. As such, it is European settler colonialist state found in 1948, devoted to providing the where the main ticket to equality was proving scholarly scaffolding to how un-Arab they succeeded in becoming in the the Zionist narrative, an new state. exercise much appreciat- The Liberals: Eliahu Berlinger, Fritz ed in the West until the 1980s, but one which in Bernstein, Avraham Granovsky (Granot), recent years is regarded Moshe Kol and Felix Rosenblüth with greater scepticism as (Pinchas Rosen) a parochial scholarly ef- These were the representatives of the liberal fort at best and as pure parties of Israel (as distinct from the socialist Zionist propaganda at Yitzhak Ben Zvi parties) who would later join forces with the Re- worst. visionists in 1977 to create the Likud. Many of Ben Zvi himself, apart from his political ac- their members were German Jews as were Bern- tivity, devoted much of his time to proving the stein and Rosenblüth, but there was also a sig- same points that his institute is looking to sub- nificant number of central and eastern European stantiate. Jews such as Kol and Granovsky. The gist of this effort is to blow out of all pro- The German Jews in the main were not very portion the importance of the Jewish presence in political. When they were involved in politics it Palestine in the last two thousand years and to was usually as avowed capitalists who succeed- reduce the Palestinian community to a group of ed in steering the economic system away from nomads with little, if any, impact on the “land The Link Page 9 socialist principles. But apart from that they had most of their civil and human rights. little impact on the real issues ailing the “Jewish The prime achievement of the group Rosen democracy,” namely the Palestinian question. represented was the Israeli Supreme Court that Bernstein was a minister of commerce and has succeeded in being depicted domestically industry in several governments, which en- and internationally as the dowed him with streets named after him in vari- only institution of the Zion- ous cities. His more significant work was done ist state that is purely dem- while he was still in Germany in the 1920s ocratic and therefore never where he preached for the immigration of Jews easily tarnished. There is, to Palestine. Like other German Jews who were however, explicit and clear Zionists, and who did not believe in universal evidence that this very solutions to the problem of anti-Semitism, they court has given the govern- found themselves in an unholy alliance with the ment its full blessing for its Nazis as both wished to see the Jews leave Ger- systematic violation of hu- many. What they helped to build instead in Pal- man and civil rights in the estine may have saved the Jews who left Germa- West Bank and the Gaza Pinchas Rosen ny like Bernstein in the 1930s, but the price paid Strip. It hides behind the by the native population was a bitter reminder fact that the occupied people have the right to that one cannot rectify one evil by inflicting an- approach it whenever they feel their rights are other one. being violated but, alas, on every occasion that

All four had to He- they have done so, the court has ruled against brewize their first and them. Thus the court sanctioned the state’s poli- family names as a show of cies of deportation, demolition of houses, confis- loyalty to the Zionist pro- cation of land and occasionally the assassination ject. Rosenblüth, who be- of civilians. came Rosen, founded the Among these four Granovsky was a veteran progressive party to which Zionist in Palestine. He was a Moldovan Jew all of the four belonged at who was one of the directors, and for a while one time or another. He chief director, of the Jewish National Fund in the epitomized the German 1940s. With his boss, Menachem Usishkin, he Fritz Bernstein Jewish role in the charade oversaw the first stages of the Zionist coloniza- the proclamation authored tion in Palestine through the purchase of land, in 1948, and provided the legal framework for more often than not from absentee landlords the settler colonialist state, disguised as a de- who lived outside Palestine, and which ended mocracy. Many of his compatriots studied and with the eviction of the Palestinian tenants from practiced law in Germany before coming to Pal- their homes and livelihoods. The JNF resorted estine and would become scholars of interna- to more explicit expulsion during the 1948 war. tional repute in the field of law. Rosen himself After the foundation of the state he became became a minister of justice and as such did the director of Mekorot, the national water com- show every now and then uneasiness with the pany. In his capacity both as a senior executive military rule imposed on the Palestinian citizens of the JNF and later of Mekorot, he must have between 1948 to 1966, but it was his office, with known better than anyone else on the 14th of others, that supervised this inhuman and bar- May, 1948, that equality in front of the law and baric structure that robbed the Palestinians of equality in practice are two different matters. The Link Page 10

The main activity of the dispossession. JNF and Mekorot with re- gard to the native popula- The National Religious Group: Zeev tion was a systematic act of (Wolf) Gold, Zerah Varhaftig , David dispossessing them of land Zvi Pinkas, Moshe Shapira and, Yehuda and water, without which a Leib Hacohen Fishman population that was mostly rural and lived in the coun- A significant cohort of signatories came from tryside did not have a the religious national movement, which in the pre-1948 era evolved around the movement chance for reasonable exist- ence no matter what the let- Avraham Granovsky Hapoel Hamizrahi. (Mizrahi here did not mean ter of the Proclamation or subsequent laws had oriental as it would in Israel today but rather a to say about equality and democracy. synonym for spirituality.) It is in his early writings back in the 1920s, The movement they belonged to on the day when he discussed what he called land and na- of the proclamation was very different from its tion, where one can see why the best and most successor today and they themselves underwent appropriate paradigm for analyzing Zionism is a significant ideological transformation after settler colonialism. The mindset in the 1920s was 1967 from being a relatively dovish force on the that in order to nationalize the land you needed local political scene to a signifier of extreme to de-Arabize it. The state founded in 1948 con- right wing messianic ideology. tinues to adhere to this principle to this day; the The first signatory among them was Zeev means at its disposal, however, are now much Gold who was born in Russia but was educated more substantial and lethal and, unlike in the in the United States and therefore was an im- 1920s, funded by American taxpayer money. portant emissary, before 1948 and until his death Granovsky personified this desire also after in 1956, in recruiting the Conservative syna- 1948, overseeing the pillage of Palestinian villag- gogues in the United State to become embassies es and writing passionately of the need to keep of Israel. them—many reduced to dust and rubble— in Specifically, his main role was to develop Je- the hands of the Jewish nation, never to be sold rusalem with the help of Jewish communities in or given to Arabs. the United States. So he symbolized in many He insisted on legislation that would regu- ways the role American Jews played in ridicul- late this robbery, which led to a ceremonial pur- ing the democratic values articulated in the chase of the abandoned fields, villages, houses, proclamation. and other properties for a ridiculous sum of The easiest targets were money from a state custodian that waited for American Jewish commu- two years to see if anyone would reclaim them, nities, which probably felt then ruled that now they could be sold to the that religion was not public. This legalistic pillage and dispossession enough to identify their would be at the heart of the Judaization process Judaism and American cit- in the Galilee and the Negev inside Israel and of izenship not sufficient to course in the settlements’ project in the West define their nationality. Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is the face of Is- More secular and liberal rael’s 21st—century settler state, using the guise Jews within the American of democracy to legalise ethnic cleansing and Zeev (Wolf) Gold Jewish community would The Link Page 11 notice as the years went by the impossibility of pression indicated very early on that in practice creating a democratic Jewish state. the proclamation’s promise to guard the rights On the other hand, a vociferous minority of the minority would remain on paper. It was among them would undergo the same transfor- Shapira’s office that oversaw the confiscation of mation that occurred within the religious nation- land that denied the basic right Americans have, al movement in Israel. These individuals immi- for instance to live where they want on land grated to Israel after 1967 and became settlers in they own, a right that is denied until this very the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—an import day by law and practice in the Jewish state. that would include Rabbi Meir Kahane, Dr. Ba- ruch Goldstein and other less known American The Communist: Meir Vilner Jewish settlers that to this very day terrorize Pal- Vilner, the youngest and longest surviving estinians in the West Bank, while the army turns signatory, represented the Israeli communist a blind eye when they set fire to fields, uproot party and was invited to sign both because of olives trees or occasionally shoot Palestinian the party’s support of the U.N. partition resolu- teenagers. tion and to maintain good relationship with the This trend was already personified in the USSR. His political biography before and after works and actions of another one of this cohort 1948 exposes the complex story of the Jewish of five, Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman. He was members in the Palestine Communist party that a disciple of Rabbi Cook, the chief ideologue of became the Israeli communist party and then messianic Zionism, and already demanded in split into an Arab and a Jewish one, before reu- 1947 the creation of a Jewish state over all of niting again under the title of the Democratic mandatory Palestine in the name of Judaism not Front for Peace and Equality. His call to end the just Zionism. At the time this was a minority occupation and recognize the right of Palestini- view, but today it is mainstream among reli- ans to a homeland of their own alongside Israel gious national Jews. nearly cost him his life in 1967 when a member Moshe Shapira was a more typical repre- of , a right-wing political movement that sentative of national religious politics before evolved into today’s Likud party, tried to assas- 1948. Like his counterparts in the ruling Labour sinate him. (MAPAI) party, he focused on deeds and less on Unlike Vilner, however, other members of rhetoric. He oversaw as minister of the interior the Communist party were more connected to the takeover of what the reality after 1948 and recognized that the party

Palestinians left behind became the only home, for a while, for a legiti- them after their expulsion: mate Palestinian political force within Israel. bank accounts, fields, Palestinians were not allowed to express their businesses, houses, books national identity in pure Palestinian parties or and art—the pillaged bodies, but they could do this within a com- spoils of the dispossessed. munist discourse that was regarded as less Although the life of threatening by the Zionist state after 1948. the Palestinians inside Is- The Front today fuses the legacies of Vilner rael was governed by the in an updated manner as a party whose main Secret Service and less by electorate is Palestinian but believes strongly in the Ministry of Interior, its Arab-Jewish cooperation and coexistence as the only way forward and still puts its faith in hu- policies of discrimination Moshe Shapira and its share in the op- man economy as the only way of dealing with The Link Page 12 the ills of the extreme capitalist system that has opinion and, in a bizarre way, was less threaten- developed in the state. ing to the native population than the policies of More importantly, its parliamentary activity Labor Zionism that did not talk the talk of de- is still a questionable achievement in the light of struction but did walk the walk. Israel of 2015 is how the Jewish state has progressed. The pres- run by a political elite which is a frightening ence of Palestinians inside the Israeli Knesset mixture of both: it talks the racist talk of apart- still seems to beautify the racist state rather than heid, ethnic cleansing and dispossession and benefit the oppressed minority. loyally implements it through legislation and brutal policies, verging on genocide in the case The Revisionists: Herzel Vardi of the Gaza Strip. (Rosenblum) Zvi Segal and Ben Zion The “Orientals”: Saadia Kovshi Sternberg and Bechor Shitrit These men represented the Revisionist move- ment that would rule Israel after 1977 until to- In a way these were two Mizrahi Jews in the day. mix, but very different from one another. Vardi was the most significant among them. Kovshi’s family came from Yemen in the ear- th He was a Lithuanian Jew, whose claim to fame ly 20 century when the Eastern European Jews was his role as Zeev Jabotinsky’s aide in Lon- were looking for Arabs who were Jews to re- don. Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist move- place the cheap Arab laborers who were Mus- lims in the Zionist project. When they arrived, ment that regarded not only Palestine but also Jordan as part of a future Jewish state. Vardi, enthusiastically, as religious pilgrims, they were which was a pen name Ben-Gurion gave Rosen- not allowed to live in the Eastern European Kib- butzim and were treated blum, influenced the reality in Israel less through politics and much more through the as Arabs who had to be printed media. He published the first Hebrew separated from the Euro- tabloid, Yediot Achronot, before publishing a pean community. Their more serious, and far more right-wing version in lot had improved by 1948 the daily Maariv. and Kovshi represented a Yemenite party in the He was the old guard of the revisionist party. Knesset and was, with This meant almost a fascist love for the state and Bechor Shitrit, the Miz- its symbols, but also a kind of confidence that rahi fig leaf in this Ash- Jewish moral superiority and genius is so strong kenazi project of a Jewish that he and his colleagues were far less obsessed state. Bechor Shitrit with demographic balances between Jews and Arabs, which produced the ethnic cleansing pol- Shitrit was actually a icies of the Labour movement. Israel’s current Palestinian Jew. His family immigrated to Pales- President, Reuven Rivlin, is the last vestige of tine from Morocco in the mid-nineteenth centu- this ilk and not surprisingly, supports the idea ry and settled in Tiberias, where he was born. of one state which will grant equal citizenship He typified what can be called the “orientalists” but is confident that these citizens, regardless of and not just the “orientals” of the Jewish State. their nationality, will be content to live in a Jew- He was supposed to help the Eastern European settlers decipher the alien Arab culture sur- ish state. This form of romantic nationalism was accompanied by a disregard of international rounding them, a role he assumed gladly. The Link Page 13

One wonders whether he saw the irony that, again and again by the Egyptian president, as gratitude for his “orientalist” knowledge, he Anwar Sadat, who suggested an Israeli with- was appointed a minister of the minorities, drawal from the Sinai Peninsula for either a non- closely associated with the ministry of police, aggression pact or even peace. She did not share and he held both positions. Imagine if the af- this information with a wider circle and there- fairs of Hispanic, Jewish or African Americans fore knowingly went into the avoidable 1973 were officially and exclusively the responsibility war which cost the lives of 3,000 Israeli soldiers. of Homeland Security. And in the war itself, when it was possible to end it earlier, she was looking for a photo finish Whatever aspect of life they were dealing on proper Egyptian soil — a pointless maneuver with, the non-Jewish citizens of Israel had to that cost many lives. take their business to the Secret Service, the po- Later on, she would be lice, or the Minority Ministry. They were the po- remembered as the last tential fifth column and the enemy from within, Ashkenazi bastion and because Bechor Shitrit was born as a Pales- against the unwel- tinian Jew who spoke Arabic he was the su- comed influence on Is- preme adviser and manager of their affairs. The rael of Arab, and in practices he oversaw were probably the worst particular, North Afri- violation of any promise or half-promises made can Jews. in the proclamation and, in fact, they annulled When she encountered any of its democratic ambitions in a very brutal for the first time the and forthright manner. Black Panther move- The British were far more appreciative of this ment of disenchanted, second generation Moroc- Palestinian Jew and appointed him to be a re- can Jews in Jerusalem demanding social justice, gional judge. But the role of judges in the new emulating the same movement in the U.S.A., she state was reserved for German Jews; Arab Jews declared “They are not nice people.” in government were the ones entrusted with Well, alas, many of them are still deprived running the affairs of other Arabs. socially and economically and, when they do venture into politics, it is still mostly in anti- The Future Leader: Golda Meir Arab and anti-democratic movements.

Golda Meir’s journey into the paradoxes that The Executioner: Mordechai Shatner a Jewish democracy created was best illuminat- ed in her infamous remark when she was the Not an impressive figure but one that has to prime minister of Israel that there is no such be mentioned in this context very briefly. He thing as the Palestinian people. was a technocrat in the service of the ruling par- ty. Two of his legacies stand out. She saw with her own eyes the attempt to wipe out the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948 He was the custodian of the Palestinian refu- and then, in 1972, tried to convince the world gees’ property which was sold for a pittance to that the deed indeed had been done. the state, the Jewish National Fund and individ- Her real disastrous actions were actually less uals. This sale was the final act in the disposses- on the Palestine front directly and more related sion of the Palestinians in the democratic Jewish to Israel’s relationship with . state in the 1950s. Meir dragged Israel unnecessarily into the His second achievement was the founding fiasco of the 1973 war. She was approached of Upper Nazareth, one of many exclusive Jew- ish towns meant to strangulate the Palestinian The Link Page 14 citizens in the Galilee by colonizing the areas Ending the Charade around their towns and villages and by Judaiz- ing the space through land confiscation and Before the Knesset dissolved itself in De- pressure on Palestinians to leave. cember 2014, three different versions of a new Nationality Law were discussed by this parlia- His actions on the ground explain better ment. The three do not differ much from each than any other of the signatories’ activity why other. They define Israel as a Jewish state and the proclamation in practice created an apart- explicate what that means for the non-Jewish heid state inside pre-1967 Israel and why a two population living in the state. The law de- state solution at best would indeed end the mili- mands Jewish exclusivity in the state’s sym- tary occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza bols, judicial systems, educational programs, Strip but sanction a racist apartheid state in the overall values and identity. It does not define rest of Palestine. what is “Jewish” but it is clear that the right The Failed Alternative: Moshe Sharett wing’s definition of modern day Zionism is equivalent to “Jewish.” The law has not as yet For many years now Moshe Sharett has passed, but has a good chance of passing after symbolized the alternative to David Ben-Gurion the May 2015 elections (depending on the re- as someone who could have steered Israel into a sults of these elections). different direction. He did toil longer and hard- The law is meant to deny any non-Jewish er than anyone else among the signatories, apart group (the Palestinians are one fifth of the from Vilner, to balance the ethnic nature of the population and once the West Bank, or part of state with a minimal appearance of a democra- it, will be annexed, their percentage will be cy. much higher) any representation, impact or But he lacked Ben-Gurion’s charisma and full collective rights in the Jewish State. It also those who met him found him quite tedious adds more weight to the racist laws already and at times boring. His dullness explains his passed since 2010 which discriminate against failure to defeat Ben-Gurion in domestic poli- Palestinians in the state on an individual basis: tics. Even when he became prime minister for a land ownership, living spaces, occupational year and a half, he was not ruling the kingdom. infrastructure, education, health, freedom of Ben-Gurion maintained an alternative govern- movement and freedom of expression; to ment in Sdeh Boker, his Kibbutz in the Negev, name but few. making sure his hawkish policies that led to the All three drafts refer to the Proclamation Suez crisis of 1956 would govern the Jewish of Independence as its source of inspiration. In State. the spirit of this article, it is these legislators He was the more decent among the Labor who got it right when they deemed the sub- Zionists, not so much for what he had done un- text of the proclamation as calling on the fu- til 1948, but because of his loyalty to the more ture leaders of the state of Israel to regard de- democratic aspirations included in the procla- mocracy, human and civil rights as a charade mation of independence. and the foundation of an ethnic, racist, Jewish Had he played a major role, maybe this ar- state as the only reasonable and inevitable ticle would have had a different tone and appre- outcome of the Zionist colonization of Pales- ciation. But his demise was the demise of any tine. ■ pretence and hope for democracy in the Jewish state as expressed in the proclamation of inde- pendence. The Link Page 15 AMEU’s Book &Video Selections

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