The Jewish Community Under the Mandate
(1922 - 1948)
The greatest asset brought by the Zionists settling Palestine
was their organizational acumen, which allowed for the
institutionalization of the movement despite deep ideological
cleavages. The WZO established an executive office in Palestine, thus implementing
the language of the Mandate prescribing such an agency. In August 1929, the formalized
Jewish Agency was established with a council, administrative
committee, and executive. Each of these bodies consisted
of an equal number of Zionist and nominally non-Zionist
Jews. The president of the WZO was, however, ex officio
president of the agency. Thereafter, the WZO continued
to conduct external diplomatic, informational, and cultural
activities, and the operational Jewish Agency took over
fundraising, activities in Palestine, and local relations
with the British Mandate Authority (administered by
the colonial secretary). In time, the World Zionist
Organization and the Jewish Agency became two different
names for virtually the same organization.
Other landmark developments by the WZO and the Jewish
Agency under the Mandate included creation of the Asefat
Hanivharim (Elected Assembly) and the Vaad
Leumi (National Council) in 1920 to promote religious,
educational, and welfare services; establishment of
the chief rabbinate in 1921; centralized Zionist control
of the Hebrew school system in 1919, opening of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa in 1924, and dedication of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem in 1925; and continued acquisition of land--largely
via purchases by the Jewish
National Fund--increasing from 60,120 hectares in
1922 to about 155,140 hectares in 1939, and the concurrent
growth of Jewish urban and village centers.
The architect of the centralized
organizational structure that dominated
the Yishuv throughout the Mandate and afterward
was Ben-Gurion.
To achieve a centralized Jewish economic
infrastructure in Palestine, he set out
to form a large-scale organized Jewish labor
movement including both urban and agricultural
laborers. In 1919 he founded the first united Labor
Zionist party, Ahdut HaAvodah (Unity
of Labor), which included Poalei Tziyyon
and affiliated socialist groups. This achievement
was followed in 1920 by the formation of
the Histadrut,
or HaHistadrut HaKlalit shel HaOvdim B'Eretz
Yisrael (General Federation of Laborers
in the Land of Israel).
The Histadrut was the linchpin of Ben-Gurion's reorganization
of the Yishuv. He designed the Histadrut to form a tightly
controlled autonomous Jewish economic state within the
Palestinian economy. It functioned as much more than
a traditional labor union, providing the Yishuv with
social services and security, setting up training centers,
helping absorb new immigrants, and instructing them
in Hebrew. Its membership was all-inclusive: any Jewish
laborer was entitled to belong and to obtain shares
in the organization's assets. It established a general
fund supported by workers' dues that provided all members
with social services previously provided by individual
political parties. The Histadrut also set up Hevrat
HaOvdim (Society of Workers) to fund and manage large-scale
agricultural and industrial enterprises. Within a year
of its establishment in 1921, Hevrat HaOvdim had set
up Tenuvah, the agriculture marketing cooperative; Bank
HaPoalim, the workers' bank; and Soleh Boneh, the construction
firm. Originally established by Ahdut HaAvodah after
the Arab riots in 1920, the Haganah under the Histadrut rapidly became the major Jewish
defense force.
From the beginning, Ben-Gurion and Ahdut HaAvodah dominated
the Histadrut and through it the Yishuv. As secretary
general of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion oversaw the development
of the Jewish economy and defense forces in the Yishuv.
This centralized control enabled the Yishuv to endure
both severe economic hardship and frequent skirmishes
with the Arabs and British in the late 1920s. The resilience
of the Histadrut in the face of economic depression
enabled Ben-Gurion to consolidate his control over the
Yishuv. In 1929 many private entrepreneurs were forced
to look to Ahdut HaAvodah to pull them through hard
economic times. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvodah was powerful
enough to absorb its old ideological rival, HaPoel HaTzair.
They merged to form Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael (better
known by its acronym Mapai),
which would dominate political life of the State of
Israel for the next two generations.
The hegemony of Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionism in the Yishuv
did not go unchallenged. The other major contenders
for power were the Revisionist
Zionists led by Vladimir
Jabotinsky, who espoused a more liberal economic
structure and a more zealous defense policy than the
Labor movement. Jabotinsky, who had become a hero to
the Yishuv because of his role in the defense of the
Jews of Jerusalem during the riots of April 1920, believed
that there was an inherent conflict between Zionist
objectives and the aspirations of Palestinian Arabs.
He called for the establishment of a strong Jewish military
force capable of compelling the Arabs to accept Zionist
claims to Palestine. Jabotinsky also thought that Ben-Gurion's
focus on building a socialist Jewish economy in Palestine
needlessly diverted the Zionist movement from its true
goal: the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The appeal of Revisionist Zionism grew between 1924
and 1930 as a result of an influx of Polish immigrants and the escalating conflict with the Arabs.
In the mid-1920s, a political and economic crisis in
Poland and the Johnson-Lodge Immigration Act passed
by the United States Congress, which curtailed mass
immigration to America, spurred Polish-Jewish immigration
to Israel. Between 1924 and 1931, approximately 80,000
Jews arrived in Palestine from Central
Europe. The Fourth Aliyah, as it was called, differed
from previous waves of Jewish immigration. The new Polish
immigrants, unlike the Bolshevik-minded immigrants of
the Second Aliyah, were primarily petty merchants and
small-time industrialists with their own capital to
invest. Not attracted to the Labor Party's collective
settlements, they migrated to the cities where they
established the first semblance of an industrialized
urban Jewish economy in Palestine. Within five years,
the Jewish populations of Jerusalem and Haifa doubled,
and the city of Tel
Aviv emerged. These new immigrants disdained the
socialism of the Histadrut and increasingly identified
with the laissez-faire economics espoused by Jabotinsky.
Another reason for Jabotinsky's increasing appeal was
the escalation of Jewish-Arab violence. Jabotinsky's
belief in the inevitable conflict between Jews and Arabs
and his call for the establishment of an "iron
wall" that would force the Arabs to accept Zionism
were vindicated in the minds of many Jews after a confrontation
over Jewish access to the Wailing
Wall in August 1929 turned into a violent Arab attack
on Jews in Hebron and Jerusalem. By the time the fighting
ended, 133 Jews had been killed and 339 wounded. The
causes of the disturbances were varied: an inter- Palestinian
power struggle, a significant cutback in British military
presence in Palestine, and a more conciliatory posture
by the new British authorities toward the Arab position.
The inability of the Haganah to protect Jewish civilians
during the 1929 riots led Jewish Polish immigrants who
supported Jabotinsky to break away from the Labor-dominated
Haganah. They were members of Betar,
an activist Zionist movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, under
the influence of Jabotinsky. The first Betar congress
met at Danzig in 1931 and elected Jabotinsky as its leader. In 1937,
a group of Haganah members left the organization in
protest against its "defensive" orientation
and joined forces with Betar to set up a new and more
militant armed underground organization, known as the Irgun.
The formal name of the Irgun was the Irgun Zvai Leumi
(National Military Organization), sometimes also called
by the acronym, Etzel, from the initial letters of the
Hebrew name. The more extreme terrorist group, known
to the British as the Stern
Gang, split off from the
Irgun in 1939. The Stern Gang was formally known as
the Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for Israel's Freedom),
sometimes identified by the acronym Lehi. Betar (which
later formed a nucleus for Herut) and Irgun rejected
the Histadrut/Haganah doctrine of havlaga (self-restraint)
and favored retaliation.
Although the 1929 riots
intensified the Labor-Revisionist split
over the tactics necessary to attain Jewish
sovereignty in Palestine, their respective
visions of the indigenous Arab population
coalesced. Ben-Gurion, like Jabotinsky,
came to realize that the conflict between
Arab and Jewish nationalisms was irreconcilable
and therefore that the Yishuv needed to
prepare for an eventual military confrontation
with the Arabs. He differed with Jabotinsky,
however, on the need to make tactical compromises
in the short term to attain Jewish statehood
at a more propitious time. Whereas Jabotinsky
adamantly put forth maximalist demands,
such as the immediate proclamation of statehood
in all of historic Palestine — on both banks
of the Jordan River — Ben-Gurion operated
within the confines of the Mandate. He understood
better than Jabotinsky that timing was the
key to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.
The Yishuv in the 1930s lacked the necessary
military or economic power to carry out
Jabotinsky's vision in the face of Arab
and British opposition.
Another development resulting from the 1929 riots was
the growing animosity between the British Mandate Authority
and the Yishuv. The inactivity of the British while
Arab bands were attacking Jewish settlers strengthened
Zionist anti-British forces. Following the riots, the
British set up the Shaw
Commission to determine the cause of the disturbances.
The commission report, dated March 30, 1930, refrained
from blaming either community but focused on Arab apprehensions
about Jewish labor practices and land purchases. The
commission's allegations were investigated by an agrarian
expert, Sir John Hope Simpson, who concluded that about
30 percent of the Arab population was already landless
and that the amount of land remaining in Arab hands
would be insufficient to divide among their offspring.
This led to the Passfield
White Paper (October 1930), which recommended that
Jewish immigration be stopped if it prevented Arabs
from obtaining employment and that Jewish land purchases
be curtailed. Although the Passfield White Paper was
publicly repudiated by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald
in 1931, it served to alienate further the Yishuv from
the British.
The year 1929 also saw the beginning of a severe economic
crisis in Germany that launched the rise of Adolf
Hitler. Although both Germany and Austria had long histories of anti-Semitism,
the genocide policies preached by Hitler were unprecedented.
When in January 1930 he became chancellor of the Reich,
a massive wave of mostly German Jewish immigration to
Palestine ensued. Recorded Jewish immigration was 37,000
in 1933, 45,000 in 1934, and an all- time record for
the Yishuv of 61,000 in 1935. In addition, the British
estimated that a total of 40,000 Jews had entered Palestine
without legal certificates during the period from 1920
to 1939. Between 1929, the year of the Wailing Wall
disturbances, and 1936, the year the Palestinian Revolt
began, the Jewish population of Palestine increased
from 170,000 or 17 percent of the population, to 400,000,
or approximately 31 percent of the total. The immigration
of thousands of German Jews accelerated the pace of
industrialization and made the concept of a Jewish state
in Palestine a more formidable reality.
Sources: Library of Congress |