Maurice Samuel
We learn in elementary mathematics that half the solution of a problem lies
in the right formulation of it; get your known and unknown factors rightly stated,
and the answer often suggests itself. This is a truth which applies to most
human problems, to -- social, political and psychological.
Half the confusion in popular discussion of what is called the “Arab-Jewish
problem in Palestine” arises from faulty formulation, from inaccurate
juxtaposition of factors, or from omission of relevant factors. Unfortunately,
human problems are not, like mathematical problems, static; they have a history.
You cannot, after having failed in the first attempt, say, “Let's start
all over again,” for the error has been incorporated in the problem as
a new factor, and the history of the problem has become part of the problem.
Let us see how the Arab-Jewish problem presented itself at the beginning of
the new era in Palestinian history. The Allied and Associated Powers had agreed
that there should be established in Palestine “a National Home for the
Jewish People.” They had agreed further that “nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities
in Palestine.” This policy was incorporated five years later (1922) in
the Mandate for Palestine granted by the League of Nations to Great Britain.
Now let us clarify the content of these first factors. What was meant by the
words “a National Home”? Did the statesmen who used those words
intend to convey the idea of a sort of Andorra Republic, a miniature enclave
of a small number of Jews surrounded by an eternal majority of Arabs on the
soil of Palestine? If so, why all the fuss, why all the international negotiations,
why the appeal to history, Jewish need, the Bible, historic restitution, and
the rest of it? Why should the Mandate, in its preamble, have contained this
statement: “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection
of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their
national home in that country...”? This is altogether disproportionate
to a plan for settling a few hundred thousand Jews in Palestine, with minority
rights such as were being granted to the Jews of Poland, Lithuania and Rumania.
But the utterances of the heads of the two English-speaking Powers, of President
Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George, are even more specific ...:
In 1918 President Wilson said: “I am persuaded at the Allied Nations,
with the fullest concurrence of Our government and our people, are agreed that
in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.”
And Lloyd George, in his memoirs, wrote: “It was not their [the British
Cabinet's] intention that a Jewish State should be set up immediately by the
Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
On the other hand it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according
representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded
to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become
a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish
Commonwealth. The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially
restricted in order to ensure that the Jews should be a permanent minority never
entered into the head of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have
been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing.”
How does this jibe with the qualifying clause of the Balfour Declaration: “Nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine”?[*] Are we faced here with an irreconcilable
contradiction? In other words, do “the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine” include the right to vote away the
Balfour Declaration? If that is so, the Balfour Declaration is, in the words
of Lloyd George, “a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing,”
i.e., the Jewish people. But that is not all. If the Declaration is thus made
meaningless, it is made so in all its parts, and the guarantee of civil and
religious rights to the non-Jewish communities disappears together with the
project of the Jewish Homeland. For the guarantee derives its purpose and significance
from the very fact that a Jewish Commonwealth is contemplated.
So much for the letter and spirit of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate
which was unanimously ratified by the League of Nations and the government of
the United States. If we extend the area of inquiry into the world significance
of the new policy, we are confronted by the following picture:
A Jewish problem exists and calls for solution. It affects, on the one hand,
at least several million Jews who are homeless in the sense that they are not
permitted to regard themselves as a natural, integral part of the local population
in the countries of their residence, and in the sense that a longing exists
among many of them to resume a Jewish national life, in Jewish surroundings,
on the Jewish ancestral soil. It affects, on the other hand, the world at large,
which is perpetually exposed to the dangerous effects of the Jewish problem
-- an ancient problem immemorially exploited by destructive forces. The reconstitution
of the Jewish Homeland is at the very least, then, an integral contribution
to the regularization of the Jewish position and the mitigation of the evils
of anti-Semitism. All of this is indicated in the preamble to the Mandate for
Palestine: “Whereas recognition has hereby been given to the ... grounds
for reconstituting their [the Jewish] national home in that country [Palestine].”
Against this Jewish problem, which is the concern of the entire civilized world,
is posed, as if it were a counter-weight and more, the “Arab problem.”
But what is the Arab problem? Is it that of the Arab world, or at any rate of
the 11,000,000 Arabs of Asia Minor?[**] Is the building of the Jewish National
Home, a recognized prerequisite for the stabilization of the world, an injustice
to the Arab people, so much so, in fact, that for the removal of one evil a
second, and a greater, proposed? On this point it is enough to quote the words
of the Chairman of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, Mr. Orts:
“Was not consent to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine
the price -- and a relatively small one -- which the Arabs had paid for the
liberation of lands extending from the Red Sea to the borders of Cilicia on
the one hand, Iran and the Mediterranean on the other, for the independence
they were now winning or had already won, none of which they would ever have
gained by their own efforts, and for all of which they had to thank the Allied
Powers and particularly the British forces in the Near East?”
Is the Arab world [which occupies one-eighth of the land surface of earth (ed.)]
pent up in a tiny area in which it is suffocating for want of room? By no means.
A whole subcontinent waits for development and for increased population! Subtracting
from Asia Minor its deserts and mountains, there is room, in Syria, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, the Hadramauth, etc., for a hundred million inhabitants. Arabia suffers
from under-population, among other things. Therefore to talk of an Arab problem
in this sense, as created by a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, is to talk gibberish.
If the “Arab problem” is restricted to Palestine, its Arabs, and
the Jewish people, we have before us the question of millions of Jews threatened
with extermination [Hitler’s “Final Solution” was still in
progress (ed.)], or at least with the continuation of the torments of their
long exile, in western lands, and their desperate need, as contrasted with the
question of half a million Arabs (as they were when the Balfour Declaration
was issued) or a million (as they are today) to whom, as we shall see, the Jewish
Homeland has brought a degree of prosperity unknown in any other Arab country.
What sort of juxtaposition of problems is this?
Certainly there are many Arabs in Palestine who say: “We just do not want
to become a minority in our own country.” Passing over the propriety of
the words “our own country” --words which the civilized world has
refused to accept in this application -- we must ask ourselves whether, in a
world so complex and intertwined, racially and nationally as this is, we can
unscramble minorities, and whether we should even try. Minorities are forever
a part of the world's populational pattern. Our task is to protect them. That
an Arab minority would have to be created in Palestine as the price of the solution
of the major part of the Jewish problem was universally foreseen. Would that
all minorities could derive from the majority such advantages as the Arabs of
Palestine have derived from the Jews!
Would that the lot of Jewish minorities in a score of countries that come at
once to the mind had resembled that of the Arab putative minority in Palestine!
The right statement of the Arab-Jewish problem as thus far considered is approximately
this: given a world policy which calls for a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine,
on the threefold basis of an acknowledged Jewish historical claim, present Jewish
need, and general world need, has the Arab world outside of Palestine a valid
counter-claim to that piece of territory, to the exclusion of a Jewish Commonwealth?
And have the Arabs of Palestine a valid counter-claim to permanent majority
status, again to the exclusion of a Jewish Commonwealth? A formulation which
omits any of these factors, or places them in any other relation, must lead
to a fallacious answer.
This is by no means all of the problem.... [T]he above formulation explains
the state of mind which induced practically all of the early Jewish settlers,
and a great part of the later settlers, to undertake the desperate task of the
reconstruction. If we think back to the Halutzim [pioneers] of the Third Wave
[of immigration, 1919-1924], to the heroic and passionate road-builders, drainers
of swamps, founders of colonies, we recall that nothing but the prospect of
a Jewish Homeland could have inspired them to endure their trials. The offer
of a Jewish settlement in Palestine, of ordinary immigrational facilities, would
have drawn, of course, quite a number of Jews; it would not have drawn those
that actually came, and the history of Palestine would have been quite another
than it is.
And now, confining ourselves as far as we can to the Palestinian picture itself,
we must ask: “If we take as our premise the Balfour Declaration and the
Mandate, and the creation of a Jewish Commonwealth, what are the factors of
the Arab-Jewish problem?” ...
The problem has at least three terms, for we shall have to include the British
Administration; and it is for this reason that I have chosen to consider British
policy in Palestine in the total setting of the Arab-Jewish-British complex.
We begin with the first simplification which is generally offered in this connection:
“The Jewish attitude toward the Arabs should have been such that the Arabs
would have been won over to the idea of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”
The moment we ask, “which Arabs?” the question falls apart, because
it is an instance of false formulation. Are we talking about the fellaheen,
the handworkers and sharecroppers, who make up, together with the minority in
the cities, the great majority of the Palestinian Arab population? Or are we
talking about the landowners, moneylenders, priests and professionals? As to
the former, they have no say, and have never had any, in the direction of Arab
policy. They have received nothing but benefits from the development of Palestine
by the Jews. As to the latter, it is nonsense to talk about winning them over
to the idea of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, when their ruling passion
is-to rule. What can they have in common with a modernizing and democratizing
force like the Jewish National Fund, or the Histadruth, the dominating elements
in the Jewish reconstruction? The landowners, too, have benefited financially
from the development of the country. They have never ceased, even in the midst
of their agitation against the Jewish Homeland, to sell land to the Jews, at
enormous profits. But the prospect of their displacement from power is perpetually
at war with their acquisitive instincts. They would like it both ways: to profit
by the presence of the Jews, to retain the position of power.
In 1937 the most thoroughgoing commission of investigation which England ever
sent to Palestine, that headed by Lord Peel, reported: “It is difficult
to detect any deterioration in the economic position of the Arab upper class.
Landowners have sold substantial pieces of land at a figure far above the price
it would have fetched before the war... In recent transactions mainly Palestinian
Arabs have been concerned, and these transactions have been considerable...
Partly, no doubt, as the result of land sales the effendi class has been able
to make substantial investments of capital ... At least six times more Arab-owned
land is now planted with citrus than in 1920... Some of the capital has been
directed to building houses for lease or sale to industrial enterprise... In
the light of these facts we have no doubt that many Arab landowners have benefited
financially from Jewish immigration... A member of the Higher Arab Committee
admitted to us that ‘nowhere in the world were such uneconomic land-prices
paid as by Jews in Palestine.’”
Undoubtedly it is a great pity that so much money should have flowed into the
pockets of men who had no interest in the welfare of the mass of their own people,
of men who were ready to sell out their country to Mussolini and Hitler so that
they might, as they hoped, become its rulers even if under foreign dominion.
But the land -- great stretches of it -- belonged to these old families. The
government was not prepared to expropriate them, or even force them to sell
at reasonable prices, for the benefit of either Jew or Arab. It should be borne
in mind, further, that while the landowners were leading the “rebellion”
against the Jewish Homeland they continued to sell land to the Jews.
But what of the Arab masses? Was it reasonable to expect that an Asiatic peasantry,
exploited to the limit of human endurance, could be organized in a decade or
two by newcomers into a self-conscious, self-reliant national movement capable
of throwing off the yoke of the leading families? Concerning the manner in which
the Arab peasants fared under the Mandate, the Peel Report says:
“The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is
illustrated by the fact that the increase in Arab population is most marked
in urban areas affected by Jewish development ... We are also of the opinion
that up till now the Arab cultivator has benefitted on the whole from the work
of the British administration and from the presence of the Jews in the country.
Wages have gone up; the standard of living has improved ...”
And again: “Jewish example has done much to improve Arab cultivation,
especially citrus.”
The Arab population of Palestine has doubled in less than a generation. It has
been almost stationary in all other Arab countries. The reason lies not only
in the raising of the standard of living; it is in part due directly to Jewish
improvement of the land. The Peel Report goes on:
“The reclamation and anti-malaria work undertaken in Jewish colonies have
benefitted all Arabs in the neighborhood. Institutions founded with Jewish funds
primarily to serve the National Home have also served the Arab population ...
The Arab charge that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land
cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes
or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.”
What more, then, could the Jews have done “to win over the Arabs”?
Presumably they could have increased these benefits. They could have brought
more money into the land, founded more colonies, extended their institutions,
drained more swamps, provided an even larger market for Arab cultivators. But
this implies greater, not smaller, Jewish immigration. The argument cannot be
worked both ways; it does not make sense to assert that the Jews should have
refrained from coming into the country in considerable numbers, but should nevertheless
have lifted the country out of its condition of backwardness and neglect.
Perhaps the Jews might have done more than they did in organizing the Arab workers.
But the little they did -- it included the formation of Arab unions and the
publication of the first Arab labor newspaper in the Near East, the Itahad el
Amal -- only infuriated the Arab ruling class the more. Further, it should be
remembered that the Arabs are predominantly peasants and shepherds, and even
a comparatively strong urban labor movement would represent only a small fraction
of the general Arab population.
... The [Arab] revolt against the Jewish Homeland has remained the affair of
an unrepresentative though stubborn and ruthless minority. But even this minority
cannot be considered exclusively as an Arab phenomenon. The history of the problem
takes us into a study of the British role in Palestine and, later, of the interplay
between the British, the Arabs and the totalitarian-democratic world struggle.
[Samuel concludes by showing how the British Government reneged on the Balfour
Declaration and, in the process, violated the League of Nations Mandate. Thus,
in 1922 Britain, animated by its imperial interests in the Middle East, created
the client state of Trans-Jordan (now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), thereby
reducing the Jewish Homeland to 25 percent of Mandate Palestine. In the 1930s,
Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, the effect of which was
to consign countless Jews to Hitler’s crematoria.
Today the Arab-Jewish problem, misleadingly focussed on the Palestinian Arabs,
is exacerbated by democracies which have subordinated their political principles
and moral values to their economic interests in the autocratic Middle East.
By adopting a pro-Arab policy, these democracies perpetuate Arab rejection of
Israel. The solution to the Arab-Jewish problem requires basic changes in American
foreign policy and in Israel’s political institutions:
The United States must terminate its “even-handed” diplomacy, which
actually favors Arab despotism vis-à-vis Israel, by forcefully pursuing,
in the name of promoting democracy in the Middle East, a pro-Israel policy.
No less important, Israel must adopt a Jewish Constitution consistent with the
Balfour Declaration! As indicated above, that document, by stating that “Nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” logically rejects the notion that
these rights include the (Arab) right to vote away the one and only Jewish homeland,
now the State of Israel (ed.)].*
_________________________
*For an elaboration of this conclusion, see Paul Eidelberg, “The Keys
to Peace in the Middle East,” Jerusalem Foundation Papers (New York: Foundation
for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East), No. 13, October 1997.
* From Harvest in the Desert (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945), pp. 244-254. Maurice
Samuel (1895-1972), a prolific author, was born in Rumania. He spent his boyhood
in Manchester, England and migrated to the U.S in 1914. Samuel spent ten years
in Palestine and was thoroughly familiar with its economic growth and demographic
development. His scholarly analysis of the Arab-Jewish problem, which has hardly
been surpassed in lucidity and persuasiveness, remains essential reading for
secular as well as religious Jews.
* Italics added. Note the absence of any reference to any political rights for
non-Jewish communities. The reason should be obvious. The granting of political
rights to the non-Jewish communities of a Jewish commonwealth would be a contradiction
in terms. To be more specific: currently, the democratic principle of one adult/one
vote will enable Israel’s prolific Arab citizens to transform Israel into
an Arab-Islamic dictatorship within a few decades through perfectly legal means.
Viewed in this light, Israel’s 1952 Nationality Law, which enables non-Jews
to become citizens, contradicts the Balfour Declaration! Today the Balfour Declaration
would be deemed racist (ed.)!
** The population of the Arab-Islamic states now numbers approximately 250,000,000;
and these states occupy an area of more than five million square miles. The
area of Israel is a bit more than 10,000 square miles (including Judea, Samaria,
and Gaza)..