Introduction

The Zionist movement created a Jewish state in four basic steps: purchasing land within the Palestine Mandate, using immigration to people that land, establishing a state to govern those people, and waging war to defend that state.  Conventional wisdom holds that socialism was Israel’s founding ideology, that socialist philosophy molded Zionist means and ends, and that East European Jews with strong communist and socialist credentials spearheaded the project of reestablishing a Jewish state.[1]  Yet despite the alleged hegemony of Socialist Zionism over that nationalist movement, capitalist precepts determined how Zionist institutions prosecuted all four of the core policies which underlay Israeli independence, in violation of socialist principles.

This may have been inevitable; Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) – a Ukrainian-born Jew who entered the Zionist movement at the turn of the century and was “probably [Zionism’s] only real political writer”[2] – largely rejected collectivism in favor of classical liberal and capitalist philosophies.  He incorporated his thinking into Revisionist Zionism, the primary ideological counterpart to Socialist Zionism.  Revisionism was a prominent movement within Zionism – its successor political party, the Likud, dominated Israeli politics for the past three decades – but throughout the Mandatory era (indeed, up to the 1977 Likud electoral victory), “Revisionism remained in a subordinate position compared with Socialist Zionism.”[3]  Yet the fact that capitalist and Revisionist principles guided Israel (and its institutional predecessors) in its four major founding experiences reveals that Zionism was a profoundly capitalist form of nationalism.

I. The Revisionist Case for Land Purchases

Historical Background

The last century of Ottoman rule over the Levant found a Palestinian Arab peasantry “in a chronic state of poverty and indebtedness,” the result of adverse agricultural and climatic circumstances, inadequate infrastructure, and “rapacious tax collectors and landowning interests.”[4]  The first half of the twentieth century, in particular, witnessed “two separate cycles of [agricultural] devastation.”[5]  Concomitantly – and in addition to other “cultivation habits that limited output”[6] – the musha’ system of periodic land redistribution, applied to 45 to 60 percent of Mandatory Palestine’s cultivated lands,[7] distorted incentives for land improvements and exhausted the soil.[8]  

Rather than equalizing land holdings, Ottoman land reforms of the late nineteenth century – in particular the “introduction of land registration in Palestine…after 1871” – formalized the economic hegemony of “a relatively small, urban, landowning elite” by streamlining its legal access to lands historically farmed by the rural peasantry.  Most peasants opted to forego registering family farmlands in their own names, both loathe to incur the accompanying fees and fearful of being placed on the Ottoman conscription roster.  These lands were registered instead in the names of local notables, who let the peasants continue farming as tenants.  Other peasants obtained and utilized their title deeds to finance the high-interest loans which were then common in rural Palestine.  Still others avoided the land registration process altogether.  In the long run, these behaviors allowed the Palestinian notable elite to amass “large landed estates,” and by the First World War, “Palestinian village peasants had become feeble wards of notable urban and landowning classes.”[9]

A third historical trend further worsened the peasantry’s plight: although Palestine’s non-Jewish population remained level at slightly under 300,000 from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, it doubled from 1882 to 1918, and doubled again[10] over the three decades of the Mandate.[11]  As the ratio of peasants to cultivable lands increased, land holdings – musha’ shares especially, due to their communal nature – were continually divided to support this burgeoning rural population, “making the plots so small or narrow that they were not worth farming.”[12]

Against this background, Zionist associations – in particular the Jewish National Fund (JNF), founded in 1901 under the World Zionist Organization’s aegis – “utilized contributions of Jews all over the world to purchase land on behalf of the Jewish people and to coordinate its development.”[13]  Up to 1930, “Jewish settlement” supplanted largely those Arabs who had become tenants on their own lands; afterwards, the Jews bought mainly from “individual Arab small property holders.”[14]

Jewish land acquisitions were – and remain – a controversial historical affair.  While some contemporary historians focus on the socioeconomic impact of the three historical trends detailed above, others highlight Zionist purchases’ “devastating effect on the Palestinian peasantry.”  The latter even compare Zionism to “a project of settler colonialism undertaken at the expense of the local Arab population,” claiming that its aims “represented a threat to [the Arabs’] existence.”[15]

Revisionist Ideological Considerations

Here Revisionist political philosophy becomes relevant.  First, Vladimir Jabotinsky was a devout individualist – rewriting Genesis, he asserted that “[in] the beginning God created the individual.  Every individual is king, equal to his fellow – and that fellow too is king.”  He therefore denounced communism for yoking the individual to the state, while he championed classical liberalism for upholding the individual’s sway over politics and economics.  Moreover, he defended “free enterprise” and emphasized the bourgeoisie’s role in effecting a “free circulation of goods, an indispensable condition for the wealth of nations” – defending the concentration of European Jews within the Continent’s middle classes, unlike the Socialist Zionists, who aimed at creating a Jewish agricultural and industrial proletariat.[16]

The state has no responsibility, Jabotinsky believed, to “rectify social inequality” – a task which contradicts the right to private property and “civic liberty.”  Indeed, Jabotinsky wrote that “[it] is of no concern to the state that Mr [sic] X dwells in a palatial mansion and Mr [sic] Y is grumbling why he too cannot occupy an equally luxurious place.  Who cares about that…?”  Although Jabotinsky backed minor redistributions of wealth, he justified these on the basis of a minimally interventionist Biblical philosophy, rather than through socialist or Marxist arguments for egalitarianism or a command economy.[17]

This perspective approximates an especially libertarian strain of capitalism, as advocated by such philosophers as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, rather than a capitalism which incorporates egalitarian considerations (as advanced by John Rawls) or an actual capitalist polity streaked with collectivist cultural influences (as in East Asia and Western Europe).  Unlike the latter two systems, libertarian philosophy can focus solely on core capitalist tenets (individual rights, including that of private property) to the exclusion of other considerations (egalitarianism or collectivist cultural norms) and thereby maximize internal consistency.  Accordingly, and because this paper delves deeply into an array of complicated historical trends and developments, it uses Jabotinsky’s particularly libertarian view of capitalism in order to preclude reasoning that a capitalist perspective would prescribe self-contradictory economic or political policies.

Returning to the matter of Jewish land purchases, this Revisionist perspective would see Arab small land holders as well within their legal rights to sell inherited family lands to Jews.  However, it would be arguable that the Arab elite – which had accumulated massive land holdings by taking advantage of Ottoman land reforms – contradicted capitalist precepts by disregarding its tenants’ interests in economic dealings with the Jews, given the informal nature of ownership understandings among notables and peasants.  Following Locke, an ideological capitalist could contend that such lands first belonged to the peasants who farmed them,[18] and therefore that notables could not assume legal possession over them – unless these peasants consented to elite ownership of their fields, whether to evade extra taxes, escape conscription, or pay off loans.

Even more nebulous, from this viewpoint, was the Arab notable’s permission to dispose of lands that he did not yet legally own.  In several letters to the JNF and Jewish Agency in 1930-1931, Heinrich Marguiles, of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, described a common mercantile stratagem employed by the Arab elite: “the Effendi [Arab notable]…makes a sales contract with the Jews without first owning the land and afterwards pieces together the property” by both “[exerting] pressure upon the Fellah [Arab peasant]” and offering “a lump sum” in exchange for the peasant’s “problematic musha claim.”[19]  The elite thus obtained from “the musha-Fellaheen…lands for prices that were a tiny fraction of the price for which they were resold” – even Arab tenants received heftier reimbursements from Jewish purchasers whenever the former were forced to relinquish their farmlands.[20]  Yet Arab notables did not contradict capitalist principles by paying no more than peasants were willing to accept in exchange for their musha’ shares.  Rather, they violated capitalist precepts only insofar as they applied violence – the “pressure” of which Marguiles wrote, in violation of the property rights which Jabotinsky so deeply valued – to finalize these transactions.

Although Marguiles warned that “Zionism has at least furthered this development,” he admitted that the trend “has gone on for a long time and without any connection with Zionism,” but rather grew out of the Fellaheen’s disadvantageous economic status under Ottoman rule.[21]  In any event, the class identities of Arab land sellers are of minor consequence to a Revisionist outlook in establishing Jewish legal culpability for these Arab displacements – the Jews were willing to pay inflated prices to both notables and peasants.  As Marguiles wrote in another letter, “[the] Fellachen [sic]…have recently grasped these connections and begun to sell directly to the Jews….In this way they obtain the high prices which the Jews are accustomed to paying and become rich as a result,” [22] and as noted above, the Jews began to deal primarily with Arab small landowners.  

Further, as evidenced by both these transactions and Marguiles’ letters, both groups were willing to sell their lands to the Jews, who could not even afford to purchase all the holdings they were offered.  In April 1945, the Palestine Administration’s Director of Land Registrations wrote that “[the] JNF were being inundated with offers from Arab sellers,”[23] and in November 1946, the JNF’s Joseph Weitz stated that “the potential for land purchase has not decreased.  The potential remains each year at 200-250 thousand dunams,” hence “the will to sell in the Arab camp hasn’t decreased.”[24]

Therefore, from Jabotinsky’s Revisionist outlook, Jewish land purchases merely overlooked – or at most disregarded – a contradiction of capitalist precepts, in that the resulting revenues accrued to the Arab elite rather than to peasants.  Yet insofar as the former applied violence or the threat of violence to pressure the latter to sell its musha’ shares, and insofar as the latter lost legal ownership of its land holdings through economic transactions in which it did not participate, the former actively violated capitalist principles in obtaining lands from the latter – holdings which both groups were willing and able to liquidate at the hands of Jewish purchasers.  Accordingly, the Jews who bought these lands neither upheld nor breached capitalist tenets, because they paid for “all the land purchased in the mandate period”[25] at prices acceptable to both notables and peasants.  In short, the Jews merely translated lands that had been obtained in violation of capitalist precepts, into revenues which accrued to the individuals who had breached these precepts.  That these revenues were distributed in a manner inconsistent with pure capitalism, was the doing of the Arab notables who had contradicted capitalist precepts in the first place.

Yet Zionist policies contributed to the transformation of the Palestinian Arabs into a relatively deracinated, needy, and distressed populace.[26]  This would have little relevance to a Revisionist perspective which starts its analysis with the individual – to whom it awards political and property rights which are absolute when compared with society as a whole.  Socialism, however, gives social considerations relatively more weight than individual rights.[27]

It then becomes pertinent that the Jews of Mandatory Palestine constituted a much wealthier, urban, and literate population than did the Arab community,[28] whose condition, as seen above, was increasingly miserable.  The disparity between these two peoples was enormous, and accordingly, a socialist perspective would rank Arab needs before Jewish desires: Arab small landowners did not contradict socialist tenets by selling their land, though powerful landlords did violate these precepts when they evicted tenants from the lands upon which their livelihoods depended – the peasantry needed monetary relief (and psychological security).  Jewish purchasers, however, used their abilities (monetary wealth) not to satisfy this need by bettering the welfare of the Arab population in whose midst they were settling, but rather to fulfill their own selfish desire for a Jewish national homeland.  In so doing, not only did the Jews not remedy the peasantry’s predicament, it actually exacerbated the Arab plight, magnifying Mandatory socioeconomic inequalities.  In short, the property rights of the Jewish minority clashed with the welfare of the Arab majority.  At this juncture, a pure socialist outlook would conclude that whether or not Zionist land purchases transpired legally, they caused socially undesirable consequences, and therefore went against socialist philosophy.

There was indeed a “Diaspora nationalism” separate from Zionist territorial nationalism, as exemplified by such organizations as the Bund, whose goal was a democratic East Europe and Russia “that would give the Jews national cultural autonomy appertaining to them as persons and not depending on a territory.”[29]  With a “dual social and national theme,”[30] it was much more consistent with pure socialism.  It was only the Holocaust that “finished off Bundism,” by providing Jews an impetus to put their own long-term self-interest first[31] – but self-interest is a very personal, selfish concern, hardly central to any pure socialist philosophy.  It is, instead, the keystone of Revisionism’s individualist and capitalist philosophy.  In short, Socialist Zionism may have dominated the Jewish nationalist movement – but only to the extent to which it adopted such Revisionist tenets.

II. Immigration

Jewish Immigration

The first aliyah, or wave of Jewish immigration to the Palestine region, began in 1881,[32] and in combination with a second aliyah, doubled the Jewish population of that region by the end of the First World War, to some 60,000.  This community had nearly tripled in size by 1931, and in the mid-1930s, as the Nazi specter began to overwhelm Germany and central Europe, a fifth aliyah doubled the Jewish population once more.  After Britain’s 1939 White Paper imposed stringent immigration restrictions, illegal entries into the Mandate failed to maintain this explosive growth rate – although by 1946, the Jewish population had risen to over 540,000.[33]

The Arab population of Palestine bitterly contested Jewish immigration.  “The Arab Case for Palestine,” submitted to an Anglo-American committee on “the problem of Palestine,” claimed that because “[the] Arabs of Palestine…form the majority of the population…they cannot submit to a policy of immigration which is [sic] pursued for long will turn them from a majority into a minority in an alien state; and they claim the democratic right of majority to make its decisions in matters of urgent national concern.”[34]  On democratic grounds, then, they called for a Mandatory intervention in the flow of immigration.

Jabotinsky’s individualist and capitalist tendencies, however, logically must lead to a diametrically opposite conclusion, even on this extra-economic issue.  Revisionism favored stringent restrictions on government powers to “avoid any excessive encroachment on civil society,” advocating a “separation of powers” and “political representation through a parliament.”[35]  Although Socialist Zionists labeled him a fascist, and Ben-Gurion himself called Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler,”[36] the father of Revisionism saw the state as “above all…protecting the rights of the individual,” and avoiding corporatism by “dealing with citizens and not interest groups, associations or classes.”[37]  

Despite his democratic views, therefore, his fear of totalitarianism fostered an aversion to a “tyranny of the majority.”[38]  Instead, Revisionism’s preoccupation with liberal individual rights would lead it to advocate a two-tiered immigration policy.  First, and most importantly, it would insist on the protection of Mandatory citizens’ rights to do as they desire with their own private property – for example, selling it to foreigners, or hiring or hosting them within its confines.  Second, in its capacity as a policeman, a future Jewish state would need to restrict immigration that poses a military or criminal threat to its citizens.

Accordingly, Revisionism would be locked – philosophically – into criticizing the 1939 White Paper so long as Palestinian Jews were willing to support immigrating Jews with their own resources (whether by providing them jobs, homes, or welfare) rather than putting them on the public dole.  The White Paper revealed that such was the case, admitting that “it is not difficult to contend that the large number of Jewish immigrants who have been admitted so far have been absorbed economically.”[39]  As discussed above, Jewish organizations purchased land holdings, while “external Jewish groups” also provided “a great part of industrial capital” so as to “[create] employment” and “[provide] the necessities for the new immigrants;” moreover, the Jewish community also provided its own “educational, medical, and welfare facilities.”  Yet the Palestinian Jewish community’s willingness to support its immigrating coreligionists was not based solely upon charity: by the time of the fourth aliyah in the 1920s, “a new type of industry emerged that was based on capital import and previous industrial skills of the immigrants themselves…immigration was itself creating a market;” indeed, “Jewish immigrants were largely responsible for the industrialization of Palestine.”[40]  

In sum, immigrating Jews were voluntarily welcomed by the same population which economically supported them in Palestine; therefore their migration violated no capitalist tenets.  The individuals of the Jewish community may have engaged in socialist practices, but as long as they were not forced to do so by the Mandatory administration, such was their right, as even Jabotinsky acknowledged; he emphasized voluntary cooperation and the reaching of consensus on such issues.  The Yishuv – “a voluntary rather than a compulsory association of the Jews of Palestine” – actually approximated this ideal.[41]

The larger Palestine Mandate, however, did not.  The Palestinian Arabs were correct in claiming majority status throughout the Mandatory era, yet the petition cited above marked a fundamentally divergent position on Jewish immigration.[42]  In the absence of any potential for consensus, then, Jabotinsky ruled out a tyranny of the Arab majority – in contrast to the “hypocritical silence” of Socialist Zionism on the subject.[43]  The Left’s philosophy could not possibly resolve (in favor of the Jews) this pure clash between individual rights and the preferences of the Mandate’s majority population.  Yet despite Socialist control of the Zionist movement, Jewish immigration continued – Socialist Zionism, therefore, had chosen implicitly in favor of the Revisionist stance.[44]

Judean Immigration

Why, then, does Israel grant citizenship to all Jewish immigrants, while applying a more rigorous policy to non-Jewish migrants?  Is this not simply a manifestation of the will of the Jewish demographic majority which exists in Israel today?  It is true that even a liberal Zionist like Jabotinsky had a “concept of the nation” which clashed with his “idea of an impersonal state managing a universalist citizenship” – poorly reconciling “the collective identity of the nation” with “the supreme value of the individual, his freedom, and his rights.”[45]  Yet these notions were more complex than mere collectivism, an ideology that better approximates Socialist Zionist thinking.  Here the ancient history of Jewish sovereignty over Palestine acquires ideological significance.  Modern Zionism advocates not a beginning, but rather a resumption, of Jewish statehood there – whose previous incarnation was the state of Judea, destroyed by the Roman Empire early in the first millennium CE:

The Judean government ruled over a citizenry which worked and held property in Judea, its authority invested in the Davidic and Hasmonean dynasties during intermittent periods of independence, and in the Persian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman Empires at other times.  Yet its population was tied to its religion and geography to a degree uncommon among other states at the time – to such an extent that Rome, unable to assimilate it into its Empire as a semi-independent province, opted to destroy it through several Roman-Jewish wars, chief among them the First Jewish Revolt (66-70 CE), in which Jerusalem and its Second Temple were razed, and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion (132-135 CE), in which the Romans inflicted casualties of “up to a million,” including refugees, thereby cutting “the Jewish population in the country” by roughly “fifty percent,” and turning the Jews into a minority in the region, which the Romans renamed “[the] Syrian province of Palestine.”  Although Jews continued to live in present-day Galilee, the Judean heartland – centered on Jerusalem – was emptied of “almost every settlement,” Jewish holdings there were confiscated, Jews were “[forbidden] to enter the area,” and so many Judeans were taken captive that the market price of slaves dropped “throughout the Roman Empire.”[46]  Although their religion survived, the Jews of Judea failed to recover demographically after Bar Kokhba.[47]  Eventually, almost the entire Judean citizenry migrated or was expelled from the region over which its state once ruled.  Many lost their property at the hands of invading forces; all lost the benefits of formal citizenship in their dismantled state.  

In fact, the only surviving trace of that uprooted citizenship was the Judean religion (Judaism) – its adherents largely descended from ancient Judeans, and its conversion regulations taking the place of a naturalization policy.  For Jews – and especially for Jewish nationalists – religion “is more than just a faith;” for the “thousands of years of dispersion, [it] has been the national symbol of Judaism.[48]  An irreligious Jew condemns apostasy almost as much as an orthodox Jew.”[49]  Moses Hess, the nineteenth-century “father of German Social Democracy and pioneer of Socialist Zionism,” denounced Reform Judaism on the grounds that it “[sought] to make Judaism just a religious group” – in other words, “to deprive it of its raison d’etre, which was the preservation of the Jewish nation.”[50]

Similarly, religion was an important component of the Jewish nation as conceived by Jabotinsky, not as a primary element – Jabotinsky only seriously considered the role of Judaism within Zionism in his last decade of life – but rather as a means of unifying “the body politic” and inculcating it with moral standards, giving it the “unshakeable” character needed to achieve other Zionist aims.  Tellingly, Jabotinsky focused on personal and informal forms of religion, types “resistant to the straitjacket of ecclesiastical structures” and similar to the religiosity “of the [Jewish] Zealots who fought in the name of their faith against the Roman invader.”[51]

It would be nearly impossible to trace economic transactions back two millennia in order to recover the properties taken from the Judeans by force.  The loss of their state, however, was different – unlike the ownership of tangible assets, citizenship – as religion – could be retained and inherited very easily; throughout their long exile, the Judeans and their descendants were identifiable as Jews.  However, it was only in the years leading up to the reestablishment of Israel that they attained both the international backing and internal motivation necessary to reconstitute their state.

Accordingly, Israeli citizens and immigrants are not individually awarded reparations for their ancestors’ economic losses.  Yet Judeans (Jews) worldwide are offered a formal renewal of Judean (Israeli) citizenship.  From a capitalist outlook, the significance of this tender is that it includes, not specific economic assets, but rather the right to pursue happiness – a capitalist notion[52] enshrined in America’s Declaration of Independence – which would have been their birthright, had the Judean state not been dismantled nearly two millennia ago.  What is the meaning of this right?

Jabotinsky’s Conception of the State

Rather than the “instrumental and pragmatic use of armed coercion defended by Socialist Zionism,” Jabotinsky espoused “a more idealised [sic] and political role of force.”  On the one hand, he realized that the state could be created only “by some force, more or less brutal, more or less disciplined, that overturned the existing social and political setup.”  This was, however, an empirical more than a philosophical conclusion.  On the other hand, therefore, Jabotinsky took – from the political theory of his time – the idea of “force as the essential element of the political sphere,” as embodied in (among other notions) “the Weberian view” of the state as holder of a “monopoly of legitimate violence.”[53]

With such a totality of power, if the state is “unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights,” it becomes “men’s deadliest enemy.”[54]  The ideal capitalist state, then, is one which acts solely to defend individual rights – or in Jabotinsky’s words, its “sole duty” is “[defending] its members in danger.”[55]  Citizenship in such a state confers simply the protection of the military, police force, and law courts – as financed by taxation.  It is the resultant security which guarantees citizens “the right to take the actions [they deem] necessary to achieve [their] happiness.”[56]  Therefore Israel’s policy of offering Jews citizenship – regardless of whether these potential immigrants are welcomed by any individual existing citizens – amounts to proffering them nothing more than automatic military and legal protection.

This may seem to be a rather trivial aspect of citizenship, yet its overriding importance was learnt by the Judeans during the millennia of persecution they experienced after the dismantling of their state – when they came under the rule of other “legal [monopolies] on the use of physical force,” in which they were “legally disarmed victims.”  Without a state, Jabotinsky wrote, the eternally persecuted Jews “[had] no name, no voice, no rights” – and would receive “neither trust nor protection; [their] security will be zero.”[57]  Zionism was required, then, to reestablish the Jewish state as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, “a special state” to restore to the Jew “at last the elementary right to peace and security.”[58]  

Capitalist philosophy holds that “no man, or group of men, may seek to gain values from others by the imposition of physical force upon them.”[59]  As such, the Roman conquest of Judea was anti-capitalist – it sought to subjugate the Judeans by destroying the state committed to protecting them.  Likewise, Jewish immigration to Israel helps uphold capitalist tenets by reversing this effect of Roman governance – it seeks to restore to the Judeans’ descendants the security which would have been theirs, had the Roman conquest not occurred.  In short, and in Jabotinsky’s own words – which assign a positive moral value to the enforcement of capitalist precepts – “…now when the whole of the civilised [sic] world has recognised [sic] that Jews have a right to return to Palestine, which means that the Jews are, in principle, also ‘citizens’ and ‘inhabitants’ of Palestine,[60] only they were driven out, and their return must be a lengthy process, it is wrong to contend that meanwhile the local population has the right to refuse to allow them to come back.”[61]

III. Israeli Independence

Under Revisionism, as under capitalism, government has two main components.  First, from a strictly functionalist viewpoint, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force must pertain to “a certain geographic territory;” this was not particularly problematic for Zionist aims.[62]  Second, more significantly, and as noted throughout this paper, government is “a social agency…whose purpose it is to protect each man’s rights against infringement by others.”[63]  The Revisionist argument for Israeli independence, then, would run along the following lines:

On the one hand, a core aim of Zionism was the protection of its adherents’ individual rights: Theodor Herzl wrote in 1897 that “[the] nations in whose midst Jews live are all either covertly or openly anti-Semitic,” to such an extent that “the princes and peoples of this earth” would only arouse “popular hatred” by granting the Jews “less than is claimed as a right by every ordinary citizen.”  In this context, Herzl advocated a Jewish state to secure Jews’ individual rights against traditional anti-Semitism,[64] as did Jabotinsky in his quotation in the previous section.

On the other hand, as early as 1919, the American King-Crane Commission indicated that “nearly nine-tenths of the [non-Jewish population of Palestine]” were “emphatically against the entire Zionist program,” and thus condemned “unlimited Jewish immigration” and “steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land”[65] – thereby signifying that the lack of a Jewish state in Palestine would endanger Jewish capitalist rights to immigrate and purchase land, a threat which was realized in the 1939 White Paper.  The 1929 riots and 1936-1939 rebellion signified a violent aspect of this peril,[66] one which resurfaced in the communal fighting in the months before Israeli independence.[67]  These threats to their individual rights permitted Jews – from a Revisionist perspective – to declare statehood in order to assert these rights, militarily if necessary.[68]  That Israel formally undertook not to violate the rights of its non-Jewish citizens only reinforces this claim to independence.[69]  In this sense, the case for Israeli independence follows from the Revisionist arguments for Jewish land purchases and immigration as discussed above – it is the argument that Zionists should implement specific policies to protect these rights, such as their prosecution of the War of Independence, as discussed below.

Conversely, a socialist perspective – holding government to be purely a matter of societal self-determination – could not justify Israeli independence without viewing both the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine to be wholly separate nations or societies, each possessing the right to self-determination.  Yet, as explained above, a purely socialist outlook would consider the entire region of Palestine to be a single unit, belonging to the Palestinian Arabs collectively – Jewish immigration and land purchases could not be taken into consideration, because these Zionist activities violated socialist tenets in the first place.  As such, it would be the Arabs – not the Jews – who would hold the legal right to grant self-determination to, or withhold it from, the Jews.  Because the Arab population overwhelmingly favored the latter choice – even ignoring the fact that they still constituted a two-thirds majority in the Mandate on the eve of Israeli statehood – Jews would have contradicted socialist precepts by exercising this self-determination.  That Israel nevertheless proclaimed independence under a socialist-dominated provisional government was an implicit – at the very least – endorsement of Revisionist liberal philosophy.

IV. Arab Refugees

From 1947 to 1949 – initially during fighting between Palestinian Jews and Arabs, and later in the midst of war between Israel and invading Arab regular armies – some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left the territories which became the state of Israel.[70]  In an article on The Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Benny Morris described a multitude of factors which contributed to the refugees’ flight, including the Arab community’s “structural weaknesses,”[71] its members’ fears of the Jewish military or of living under Jewish rule, especially in the wake of the Deir Yassin massacre,[72] Arab encouragement – and lack of discouragement – of escape,[73] and Zionist policies.[74]  Israel’s role in generating the Palestinian refugee predicament, then, contradicted socialist philosophy for the same reason that Jewish land purchases and immigration did: it benefited the relatively affluent Jewish community at the expense of the Arab majority.  Yet Israel assumed that role under a Socialist Zionist regime.  Why?

Jabotinsky’s philosophical focus on the role of force did not entail an “exaltation of war.”  Although other contemporaneous right-wing nationalists “celebrated war as ‘the only way to cleanse the world,’” he mourned that “[every] war is only a fratricide, every unknown soldier is merely the holy victim of that worldwide, senseless and cruelly savage absurdity.”[75]  It was, however, necessary to uphold Jews’ rights: “deprived of military means of defence [sic] during their diaspora existence, [Jews] were at the mercy of the powerful, and to survive they had no alternative to dissimulation and servility.”  Only an army would enable them “to fight to defend their Jewish authenticity against all corners.”[76]  To fight the Palestinian Arabs – whom Jabotinsky recognized as a separate “nationality” which would not readily accede to Jewish statehood in the region – the Jews had no option but “to build an ‘iron wall,’” to create “a political fait accompli” to which the Arabs would have to “resign themselves, little by little.”[77]

This was the philosophy which even the socialist Israeli provisional government eventually embraced.  In another article, Morris investigated a decade of Zionist thinking about transferring the Arabs from the geography of a future Jewish state.  He concluded with the observation that Israeli leaders and officials “all arrived at 1948, in no small measure owing to the continuous anti-Zionist Arab violence which played out against the growing persecution of Diaspora Jewry in…Europe, with a mindset which was open to…transfer.”  Further, “almost all came to understand, after the Arabs of Palestine had initiated the war and after the Arab states invaded Palestine, that transfer was what the Jewish state’s survival and future well-being demanded.”[78] 

The Arabs had initiated the use of force, and the Israeli state – whose independence was justified, from a capitalist perspective, by its commitment to protect its citizens’ rights – strove to defend these rights.  It may be impossible to counterfactually determine which military strategy would have guaranteed Israel’s survival while minimizing the harm done to Palestinian Arab civilians – yet it seems that some drastic approach was necessary: in wartime, even Labor Zionist officers who were “ideologically committed to coexistence with the Arabs” were swayed by “conditions in the field, tactically and strategically” – including pressing military necessities and fears of a future “large, potential Fifth Column” – to assume “a mentality of immediate survival over the long-term desirability of coexistence.”[79]

V. Conclusions

Zionist institutions followed capitalist precepts in all four of the major policies which brought about the state of Israel: Zionists legally bought part of the lands that would come under Israeli governance, acquired the rest in a defensive war which it fought on behalf of its citizens’ individual rights, and populated these territories through uncoerced immigration.  However, this required a de facto repudiation of the socialist ideology which the Zionist leadership embraced de jure: Zionists actively and passively inflicted both socioeconomic and military harm on the Palestinian Arab peasantry, and moreover failed to respect the political wishes of the regional Arab majority.  History, it would seem, calls for a profound reevaluation of the extent to which Zionist nationalism was shaped by Jabotinsky’s Revisionism and the deeper influences of classical liberal philosophy.