Hashomer Hatza‘ir and the End of the Binationalist Dream

Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists involved with Arab affairs had come to the conclusion that the PLL was not just useless but a serious obstacle to developing good relations with the Arab labor movement as early as 1945. One Hashomer Hatza‘ir activist in the Jewish railway workers' union in Haifa would later go so far as to declare that in that city, the PLL's historic base, it was regarded by the Arabs as a “quisling” organization to which no self-respecting Arab would belong.^[35] However, for all its criticisms of the PLL, the Histadrut leadership and MAPAI, and its sincere efforts to develop friendly relations with Arab unionists and leftists, Hashomer Hatza‘ir shared some of labor Zionism's key premises regarding Palestine's indigenous population. It too believed in the self-evidently progressive, emancipatory, and beneficial character of the Zionist enterprise's impact on Palestine's Arab majority, and even some of Cohen's coworkers in the Hakibbutz Ha’artzi Arab Department could sometimes express skepticism about the strength and authenticity of a distinct Palestinian Arab national identity.^[36] Moreover, Hashomer Hatza‘ir's political (and psychological) need to reconcile its faith in Zionism with its recognition of Arab national rights in Palestine sometimes led even those activists most passionately and sincerely concerned about Arab-Jewish relations into self-delusion.

We have already seen one instance of the self-delusion which Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir's ideological stance facilitated (and perhaps required) in Aharon Cohen's lengthy courtship of ‘Abd Allah al-Bandaq, the veteran communist whom Cohen—Hakibbutz Ha’artzi's leading expert on Arab affairs and a man of no small political sophistication—cast in 1942–43 as the potential leader of a pro-Zionist Palestinian Arab left. In its political struggles within the Yishuv and the world Zionist movement in 1945–47, Hashomer Hatza‘ir's advocacy of a binational state as an alternative to partition required it to find elements in the Arab community willing to take a similar stance. Though the movement and the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation in which it played a leading role devoted considerable time and energy to this search, it proved futile: such elements hardly existed, and those few Palestinian Arabs ready to break with their community's consensus in this way were quickly marginalized, if not liquidated.^[37] Nonetheless, until the fall of 1947, Hashomer Hatza‘ir strove mightily to find grounds for optimism about the prospects of Arab-Jewish compromise and friendship. When, for example, units of the Arab Legion, a force composed of Transjordanians but under British command, were stationed in Palestine in 1946 to help the authorities maintain order and suppress the Zionist insurgency, the Yishuv's leadership protested and proclaimed a policy of nonfraternization with its officers and soldiers. Some members of Hashomer Hatza‘ir kibbutzim located near Arab Legion camps defied this policy and sought to befriend the Transjordanians, who (much to the displeasure of their British commanders) were said to have responded warmly to this hospitality.^[38]

The handful of Hashomer Hatza‘ir members concerned about Arab-Jewish cooperation knew that they had to overcome considerable apathy, skepticism, and hostility even within their own movement. Zyoma Ben-Artzi, a member of Kibbutz Mazra‘, reported that when he developed friendly relations with the Arab Legionnaires stationed nearby, some of his fellow kibbutz members warned him against fraternizing with “these blacks” (hashehorim ha’ele), a derogatory term he was sure they would never have used to refer to Indians or Englishmen. The kibbutz youth (to whom Ben-Artzi referred by the Arabic term shabab) were, he went on, a rather wild bunch who were not properly educated about Arab-Jewish relations and were capable, just for the fun of it, of ganging up on “some poor Arab shepherd” and stealing a goat from him. Yosef Vashitz, who worked with Cohen in the movement's Arab Department, noted sadly (and with much idealization) that

there is more of a simple human attitude in the Arab's attitude toward the Jew than in the Jew's attitude toward the Arab. For the Arab, the Jew is first of all a human being, and only then a Jew; for the Jew, the Arab is an Arab and only after that a human being. In our kibbutzim as well, only a few have the proper human attitude toward their Arab neighbors. We have to remove the national and political clothing from day-to-day relations and worry about normal human relations. We should not strive to be missionaries or political preacher-activists, but seek relations among people who though different from one another are nonetheless human beings.^[39]

But more important than individual attitudes was the fact that rapidly changing political circumstances were eliminating the ground on which Hashomer Hatza‘ir had hoped to build Arab-Jewish friendship and develop support for a binational solution to the Palestine problem. The binational idea enjoyed only weak support in the Yishuv and the international Zionist movement, which in its great majority had embraced the demand for a sovereign Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible, and it was coming to seem ever more unrealistic. For one, all organized political forces in the Palestinian Arab community rejected it, since it entailed political parity between Arabs and Jews even though the former outnumbered the latter two to one, and in the version Hashomer Hatza‘ir espoused would also allow for continued Jewish immigration, eventually producing a Jewish majority. Like most Zionists, Arab nationalists wanted a state of their own in all of Palestine. But even those external forces on which Hashomer Hatza‘ir had pinned its hopes of preventing partition and securing some sort of binational solution in an undivided Palestine now abandoned this option. As we have seen, in May 1947 the Soviet Union began moving away from its historic support for a united Palestine and toward acceptance of partition if Arabs and Jews could not find a way to live together within a single state. The formal Soviet endorsement of UNSCOP's majority report in October 1947 meant that the world communist movement, toward which Hashomer Hatza‘ir oriented itself despite the obvious ideological difference over the question of Zionism, had abandoned a binational solution.

Unlike their Arab counterparts, the Jewish communists in Palestine were quick to embrace the new Soviet line. The entirely Jewish PCP not only abandoned the binational stance it had adopted after the collapse of the Arab-Jewish PCP and endorsed partition; before the end of November 1947 it went so far as to drop the word “Palestine” from its name and begin calling itself the Communist Party of Eretz Yisra’el, thereby reconciling itself to the ancient Jewish (and modern Zionist) name for this land, one which communists had always rejected.^[40] And when, on November 29, 1947, after intensive lobbying and considerable arm-twisting, the General Assembly voted by the necessary two-thirds majority to endorse partition, the binational option for which Hashomer Hatza‘ir and its allies had long fought was rendered entirely moot.

By that time Hashomer Hatza‘ir was already moving to adapt to changing realities. In the autumn of 1947 it was conducting merger negotiations with another left-Zionist party, Ahdut Ha‘avoda, which as I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 7 split off from MAPAI in 1944 and two years later absorbed most of the remnants of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol. Despite these parties' very different origins and political trajectories, they shared much common ideological ground. But Ahdut Ha‘avoda strongly rejected Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir's advocacy of a binational regime for the country, favoring instead the creation in all of Palestine of a socialist Jewish state in which Arabs would have equal rights. Ahdut Ha‘avoda members played leading roles in the top ranks of the Yishuv's strongest militia, the Hagana, and of the Hagana's elite military formation, the PALMAH. Moreover, that party was infused with a rather aggressive, even militaristic (“activist”) ethos, in sharp contrast to Hashomer Hatza‘ir's historic aversion to violence and its emphasis on peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews. However, the UN's endorsement of partition allowed Hashomer Hatza‘ir to abandon binationalism and opened the way for unity with Ahdut Ha‘avoda. Early in 1948 the two parties merged to form MAPAM (the Hebrew acronym of “United Workers' Party”), which would serve as one of MAPAI's junior partners in the provisional government of the new State of Israel proclaimed on May 14, 1948, and which provided a highly disproportionate share of the commanders of the new Israeli army. In Israel's first parliamentary elections, held in January 1949, MAPAM emerged as the country's second-largest party, after MAPAI. By then, of course, the contours of the Palestine conflict had changed dramatically and irrevocably.^[41]