Arthur Koestler

We have discussed at some length the positive aspects of the Jewish colonizatory enterprise in its repercussions on the Arab population. The negative aspects are more difficult to substantiate by statistics or concrete facts. Once again we have to switch from one historical plane to another, from a system of values expressed in health statistics and economic standards to a different system defined by psychological relations and cultural patterns.

We said before that, unlike other colonists, the Jews brought no glass beads or rum; but they brought no missionary Bibles either. This absence of the missionary approach is a characteristic of Zionist colonization. It bestowed considerable benefits on the Arabs; but these benefits were not intentional, and thereby lost much of their moral value and their convincingness as a political argument. The patronizing tone of Zionist propaganda produced an effect contrary to its aim and psychologically neutralized any material advantage which the Arabs derived from the advent of the Jews. The Jews argued and proved that by developing the country's derelict wastes and industrial potential they were not taking the Arabs' house away but adding a new storey to it, as it were. The Arabs answered that this may or may not be so, but that in any case they refused to have an alien nation living "on top of them". The Jews argued and proved that by their building up and moving in the Arabs were much better off than before. The Arabs answered that this may or may not be so, but that in any case they hadn't asked the Jews to bestow benefits on them; and that all they wanted was to be left alone. I have tried to sum up elsewhere this very strong and natural reaction of the average educated Arab to Zionist arguments; it boils down to this:

"We don't care whether you pay and we don't care for your hospitals and schools. You must understand that this is our country. We want no foreign benefactors. We don't want to be patronized. We want to live in our own way, and we want no foreign teachers and no foreign money and no foreign habits and no smiles of condescension and no pats on the shoulder and no arrogance and none of your shameless women wriggling their buttocks in our holy places. We don't, want your honey and we don't want your sting, get that straight. Neither your honey nor your sting...."

The novel from which this speech of a member of the Arab intelligentsia is quoted was written in 1945. A short time later, Azzam Pasha, Secretary of the Arab League, put the Arab case in the following words before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry:

"The Zionist, the new Jew, wants to dominate, and he pretends that he has got a particular civilizing mission with which he returns to a backward, degenerate race in order to put the elements of progress into an area which has no progress. Well, that has been the pretension of every power that wanted to colonize and aimed at domination. The excuse has always been that the people are backward and that he has got a human mission to put them forward.... The Arabs simply stand and say ‘NO’. We are not reactionary and we are not backward. Even if we are ignorant, the difference between ignorance and knowledge is ten years in school. We are a living, vitally strong nation, we are in our renaissance; we are producing as many children as any nation in the world. We still have our brains. We have a great heritage of civilization and of spiritual life. We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled either by great nations or small nations or dispersed nations."

On its own level the argument is unanswerable. It is based on the premise that every people has a right to live in its own way, even if it is a primitive, anachronistic way which carries its own doom. To ask whether this premise is "right" or "wrong" is meaningless. History carries a whip in its hand, and in this case the Jews, its traditional victim, were the whip. No effort of humanity and understanding on their part could have possibly hidden this fact from the native Arabs. As it happens, the operation was less painful than in other cases, and in a crudely material sense even beneficial to the victim. But only in this crudely material sense. No effort on the part of the Jews could have induced the Arabs voluntarily to acquiesce in their fate.

But the point is that the Jews hardly made any effort in that direction at all. "The Arabs" represented for them a political headache, not a human and moral problem. They paid lip-service to the necessity of a mutual rapprochement, but in practice did little about it. Palestine was their promised land, doubly promised from Mount Sinai and Downing Street, and they came to take possession of it as its masters. The presence of the Arabs was a mere accident like the presence of some forgotten pieces of furniture in a house which has been temporarily let to strangers. They had no intention of removing them unless they got in their way. They meant no harm to the Arabs; all they expected of them was to sit still and watch them taking the country over and running it in their own efficient way to everybody's benefit.

Unlike other colonizers, they did not exploit cheap native labour; they simply excluded the Arabs from their own hermetically sealed economy. This was hardly to be avoided, because one of the fundamental aims of Zionism was to reverse the top-heavy social pyramid of the Jews in the Diaspora; the Jews, as a nation, must have their own solid base of farmers and manual workers in all spheres of production. Only the planters of the pre-Zionist Jewish immigration employed Arab labour in their orange groves; but this was regarded as a betrayal of the national ideal, and the old planters, too, were gradually forced to replace Arab by Jewish labour. Theoretically, the Jewish trade unions were open to Jew and Arab alike; practically, little effort was made to attract Arab members. Theoretically, the extreme Zionist left preached a united front of the Arab and Jewish proletariat to liberate the fellaheen from their feudal exploiters. In fact, however, each Jew, Marxist or not, regarded himself as a member of the chosen race, and the Arab as his inferior.

Except for Jewish doctors and health service personnel, who played a considerable part in the improvement of Arab health standards, particularly in the rural areas, the Jews took no active steps to bring modern culture and civilization to the native population and to narrow the gap between the two races. The material benefits which came to the Arabs were an accidental by-product of Jewish economic expansion. The language of the Jewish schools and university, of books and newspapers, was Hebrew and hence inaccessible to the Arabs. The Jews published no books or periodicals in Arabic. The cultural life of the two communities was confined to watertight compartments, as their respective economies were.

The Jews made no effort to bring European culture to the Arab masses, nor to adapt themselves to those aspects of oriental life which would have enriched their own cultural pattern and at the same time made them appear less provocatively alien to the country. They did not learn from the Arabs to build cool and spacious houses which would fit the climate and landscape; they brought with them their architecture of the Polish small town and of German functionalism of the 'twenties. Their dress, food, manners and general way of life were transplanted like a prefabricated pattern from their lands of origin. Some of these were improvements in the country's way of life; others unfitting and in bad taste. There was no cultural symbiosis between the two races. The Jews came as conquerors. It was a fair and humane conquest, but a conquest nevertheless.

Most of these things were objectively inevitable. The illiterate Arab masses, living under the complete spiritual sway of the village priest, were impervious to the voice of the twentieth century. They had no desire to organize themselves into trade unions, nor to study Marxist pamphlets and fight feudalism. The Jews were a minority, and to assert themselves against a hostile and backward majority they had to show their physical strength or perish. Their Marxist phrases and their talk of mutual understanding were bound to remain lip-service, for had they conceded the subjective justice of the Arab case they would have had to renounce their aim. Short of that, they could in fact do very little to alter the course of events.

Nevertheless, had they shown a little more discretion and less self-righteousness, more adaptability and a broader interpretation of their pioneer mission the effort, even if rejected, even if ultimately hopeless, would have made a great difference, particularly for the later internal development of the State of Israel. For the narrow and self-satisfied cultural isolationism with which Israel became imbued during this period of pre-natal conditioning has left a strong mark on its character and spirit as will be seen later in more detail.