Promise and Fulfilment - Palestine 1917-1949

PROMISE AND FULFILMENT Palestine TO ABRAM AND JASHA WEINSHALL CITIZENS OF ISRAEL AS A TOKEN OF A QUARTER-CENTURY OF FRIENDSHIP ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MY sincere thanks are due to R. H. S. Grossman, M. P., and Messrs. Hamish Hamilton, for permission to use the long extract pp. 102-7 from Grossmans Palestine Mission to a member of the Israeli Foreign Office, who wishes to remain anonymous, for per mission to print his Report from Jerusalem pp. 234-8 to Mr. George Pape, Librarian of the Public Information Office in Tel Aviv, and Dr. G. Pollack of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, for valuable research work and to Miss Daphne Wood ward, for helping with the proofs. A. K. PREFACE THIS book consists of three parts, Background, Close-up and Perspective . The first part is a survey of the develop ments which led to the foundation of the State of Israel. It lays no claim to historical completeness, and is written from a specific angle which stresses the part played by irrational forces and emotive bias in history. I am not sure whether this emphasis has not occasionally resulted in over-emphasis as is almost in evitable when one tries to redress a balance by spot-lighting aspects which are currently neglected. But it was certainly not my intention, by underlining the psychological factor, to deny or minimize the importance of the politico-economic forces. My aim was rather to present, if I may borrow a current medical term, a psycho-somatic view of one of the most curious episodes in modern history. The second part, Close-up, is meant to give the reader a close and coloured, but not I hope technicoloured, view of the Jewish war and of everyday life in the new State. It opens and ends with extracts fromthe diary of my last sojourn as a war correspondent in Israel. The emphasis here is on life in the towns, with only occasional glimpses of the collective settlements, since I have given a detailed description of these in an earlier book. The third part, Perspective, is an attempt to present to the reader a comprehensive survey of the social and political structure, the cultural trends and future prospects of the Jewish State. I have tried to show elsewhere that the creative processes of the artist and the scientist follow the same mental pattern, and that the sciences may legitimately be called neutral arts, separated from the emotive arts not by any distinct barrier but merely by the quality of our emotive reactions. In this sense vii Viii PROMISE AND FULFILMENT history, too, is a neutral art with mythology and bardic folklore as connecting links to the emotive arts of drama and fiction. But the emotive neutrality which should characterize the chronicler is not the same thing as indifference, and his object ivity can only be the result of a subjective passion for the pursuit of truth. It is a poor sort of impartiality which stands outside the parties, untouched by their emotions the good judge, like the playwright and historian, absorbs the subjective truth con tained in each of the conflicting pleas, and his verdict is a syn thesis of their part-truths, not their denial. In other words, r objectivity is a state of balanced emotions, not an emotive vacuum. This book, then, should be regarded as a subjective pursuit of the objective truth. I lived in Palestine from my twentieth to my twenty-third year, as a farmer, tramp, and on various odd jobs finally as a foreign correspondent. Ihave since revisited the country at fairly regular intervals, and each of these visits provided an occasion not only to study developments in the country, but also my personal attitude to it. The last phase of this pilgrims progress through a thicket of emotive and ideo logical entanglements is summed up in the Epilogue. It may also be read as a prologue, and serve as an indication of the point of view from which certain controversial problems are treated in this book...