Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish Dilemma, 1898–1948

195 Pages·1997·3.26 MB·English

by  Rafael Medoff

ZIONISM
AND
THE ARABS
An American Jewish
Dilemma, 1898-1948
Rafael M edojf
Westport, Connecticut
London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Medoff, Rafael 1959-
Zionism and the Arabs : an American Jewish dilemma/1898-1948
Rafael Medoff.
p. cm. \
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-95824-8 (alk. paper)
1. Zionism—United States—History. 2. Jewish-Arab
relations—1917-1949. 3. Jews—United States—Identity. 4. United
States—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS149.5.U6M33 1997
320.54'095694—DC21 96-47482
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1997 by Rafael Medoff
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-47482
ISBN: 0-275-95824-8
First published in 1997
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1. The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church 1
2. The Arabs of Palestine: What Early
American Zionist Leaders Believed 9
3. Delaying Democracy for the Sake of Zionism 21
4. Playgrounds and Universities: Early American
Zionist Attempts to Improve Arab-Jewish Relations 33
5. Zionism and Democracy in the Wake of
the 1929 Riots: The View from America 51
6. JusticeJBrandeis' Scholarship Fund 75
7. The Rise and Fall of Hadassah's
Committee on Arab-Jewish Relations 95
8. American Zionist Leaders and the
Palestinian Arabs During World War II 113
9. From Demographic Dilemma to Refugee Problem 139
10. Between Survival and Assimilation 161
Selected Bibliography 167
Index 183

Acknowledgments
This study has benefited greatly from the advice of my teacher,
colleague, and friend, Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock, whose suggestions
helped guide the manuscript as it evolved from a Ph.D. dissertation to
its present form. Professors Marc Lee Raphael and Monty Noam
Penkower, as members of the dissertation committee, likewise offered
numerous helpful insights.
I am indebted to the gracious staff members of the many archival
institutions whose collections were examined during the research for
this book, including: Jack Sutters of the American Friends Service
Comniittee Archives; Dr. Abraham Peck, Kevin Proffitt, and Fannie
Zelcer o£ the American Jewish Archives; Holly Snyder and Gina Hsin
of the American Jewish Historical Society; Michele Anish of the
American Jewish Committee Archives; Denise Gluck of the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives; Jonathan Kraus and
Aviva Ostrinsky of the Annenberg Research Institute; the staff of the
Archives of Religious Zionism; Yoram Mayorek of the Central Zionist
Archives; John Aubry and Linda Wright of the Columbia University
Library; Deborah Marrone of the Special Collections Division of the
Georgetown University Library; Ira Daly of the Hadassah Archives;
Dwight Miller and Dale Mayer of the Herbert Hoover Presidential
Library; the staff of the Jabotinsky Institute (Metzudat Ze'ev);
researcher Eliot Kramer at the Jewish National Library (Hebrew
University); the staff of the Jewish Theological Seminary Archives;
John Mark Lambertson of the Kansas State Historical Society; David
Wigdor of the Library of Congress; Thomas L. Owen of the University
viii Acknowledgments
Archives and Records Center at the University of Louisville; William
Walsh and Judith Thorne of the National Archives; Andrew Norman,
who graciously permitted me to examine his father's papers; the staff
of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives; the staff of the Firestone
Library at Princeton University; Dr. Meryl Foster of the Public Record
Office (London); Ray Teichman of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library;
Claudia Z. Fechter of The Temple Library; Seth Kasten of the Union
Theological Seminary Library and Archives; M. Latrique of the United
Nations Archives; Nehama Chalom and Thelma Jaffee of the
Weizmann Archives; the staff of the Yale University Library; the
staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; and Esther Togman of
the Zionist Archives and Library. Mordechai Haller, attorney and
scholar, provided invaluable research assistance at several of these
institutions.
Portions of the research for this book were facilitated by the
generous assistance of the American Jewish Archives, where I served as
a Marguerite R. Jacobs Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellow in American
Jewish Studies during 1993-1994; the Melton Center for Jewish Studies
at Ohio State University, which provided a research grant during
1991-1992; the Herbert Hoover Presidential Association, under whose
auspices I served as a Hoover Scholar during 1988-1989; and the Lady
Davis Fellowship Trust, which granted me a Graduate Fellowship at
Hebrew University during 1986-1987.
I am also grateful to Nina Pearlstein and Matthew Christianson of
Praeger Publishers for their assistance.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Carin; in the words of Ayshet
Hayil, "Many women have excelled, but you are above them all."
Chapter 1
The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church
There were many places that a prominent American Jewish
philanthropist might find himself on a brilliant Sunday morning in the
spring of 1929, and church was the least likely of them. Yet there in
the stately pews of lower Manhattan's Community Church, on Sunday,
April 7, sat the dapper, 81-year old Nathan Straus and his wife, Lina.
The son of a German Jewish immigrant who eked out a living as a
peddler, Nathan Straus had worked his way up the socioeconomic
ladder to make a fortune as part-owner of the Macy's and Abraham &
Straus department stores. Along the way, he became a passionate
advocate of health care issues, particularly the cause of pasteurized
milk, and in the aftermath of World War I, Straus exported his health
care agenda to the Middle East, establishing a Louis Pasteur Institute
in Palestine along with a string of health centers. In gratitude for his
philanthropic efforts, a new Jewish settlement—today a bustling
Israeli city—Netanya, was named in Straus' honor.
How did Straus end up in church that spring morning in 1929?
American Jewish leaders saw Straus' prominence, wealth, and interest
in the Holy Land as assets in their effort to win public support for the
idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Rabbi Stephen
Wise of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)—the leading
American Jewish group favoring a Palestine homeland—urged the
Strauses to sponsor a visit to Palestine by the Reverend John Haynes
Holmes, pastor of New York's Community Church and one of the
leading Protestant ministers of the time. Holmes "will come home and
2 ZIONISM AND THE ARABS
be the next best ambassador of Palestine after you," Wise assured
them.1
The Strauses consented. In February 1929, the Reverend Holmes
arrived in the Holy Land, where he marveled at the rise of new Jewish
cities like Tel Aviv. "This vigorous young city of the Jewish
renaissance" is "nearer 100 percent Jewish than Ivory Soap is 100
percent pure," he wrote.2 Naturally he visited Netanya and several of
the Straus health centers. He also surveyed a number of the pioneering
Jewish agricultural settlements around the country and the new Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, not to mention the various Christian religious
sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. Judging by Holmes'
letters from Palestine, it seemed to the Strauses that the minister had
been deeply impressed by the Jewish colonization efforts. They
returned to New York secure in the belief that they had helped win an
important new convert to the Zionist dream of a Jewish national home.
Then came the bad news. The Strauses were relaxing at home on
Saturday afternoon, April 6, when their friend, the veteran Zionist
leader Julian Mack, stopped by unexpectedly. He had just come from a
meeting with the Reverend Holmes, where he had been shocked to
discover that Holmes had returned from his Mideast junket with some
unnerving ideas about the future of the Holy Land.
Holmes had confided to Mack that while he was favorably
impressed by the Zionist development efforts, he was also concerned
about the position of the Arabs in Palestine. During his visit, Holmes
had met with a delegation of Palestinian Arab leaders who
complained about "the lack of representative institutions in the
country." Holmes' democratic sensibilities were rattled. There were
(according to the 1929 census) nearly 800,000 Arabs in Palestine and only
156,000 Jews; shouldn't the majority have a right to decide the
country's fate? The question of democracy in Palestine was, however,
more than a matter of simply counting Arabs and Jews. It was tangled in
a web of historical, religious, and ethnic rights and claims, ancient and
modern. The Holy Land had been the Jewish national homeland for
more than a thousand years until the Jews had been expelled by Rome
in the first century CE. Jews around the world had prayed, hoped, and
dreamed to return to Zion throughout nearly two thousand years of
dispersion. Anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s
drove modest numbers of Jewish immigrants to resettle Palestine, which
was then a desolate comer of the Turkish Empire. Jewish development
of the country in turn attracted Arab immigrants in search of
employment opportunities. In the midst of World War I, as British
troops advanced on Turkish positions in the Levant, the young Zionist
movement, seeking international support for the idea of creating a
Jewish homeland in Palestine, persuaded London to issue the Balfour
The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church 3
Declaration, which pledged that England would facilitate the
creation of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land. After the British
won Palestine from the Turks, the League of Nations, in 1920 officially
conferred the Palestine Mandate upon England, entrusting it with the
development of the country until its residents were capable of self-
government. The British, convinced that the Arabs were not politically
or culturally ready for democratic self-rule, hunkered down for a long
stay in a territory that they perceived as vital to England's strategic
interests in the Mediterranean.
The Reverend Holmes would not countenance London's insistence
that the Palestinian Arabs were not ready for democratic institutions.
As an American, Holmes told Mack, he could not accept Palestine's lack
of democracy; he had decided to raise the issue both in a book he was
writing about Palestine and in a series of sermons he was planning to
deliver on the subject.3 Mack was horrified: Arabs constituted more
than 80 percent of Palestine's population, and if a democratic system of
government were introduced in the near future, they would be able to
smother Zionism at the ballot box. He hurried to relay the news to the
Strauses that Saturday, and they immediately resolved to confront
Holmes face-to-face. It would be a serious embarrassment if an
American minister were to publicly challenge the Zionist movement's
position on the matter of democracy in Palestine. It could even raise
invidious questions about whether or not American Zionists were loyal
to the American concept of democracy. The Strauses were determined to
"set Holmes straight," even if that meant sitting through Sunday
morning services at the Community Church.
But the Strauses were to be disappointed. Holmes had taken that
Sunday off, and the Strauses soon discovered that "unluckily, a stranger
occupied the pulpit." They left the church dejected, and traveled
uptown to Stephen Wise's home, only to find that Wise, too, was away.
Lina left him a note. "It is obvious to us what the consequences would be
[in Palestine] with the Arabs outnumbering the Jews with such a vast
majority of votes," she explained. "But it evidently does not occur to Dr.
Holmes." She urged Wise to "straighten out this matter and set Dr.
Holmes right on this one point" before Holmes' forthcoming lecture
series about Palestine. Otherwise, a public relations debacle might
ensue, with Jews under attack for not supporting democracy. "[W]e have
to be careful not to give our enemies a chance for criticism," she
stressed.4
Neither Wise nor Mack took the principle of democracy lightly.
Wise was an outspoken champion of minority rights and democratic
freedoms. Mack was a United States district judge. As Americans, they
cherished democracy; but as Jews and Zionists, they cherished the
dream of recreating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Like Nathan and
4 ZIONISM AND THE ARABS
Lina Straus, they were not prepared to see Zionism sacrificed on the
altar of democracy. In a series of letters and private conversations
during the days to follow, he and Mack tried hard to persuade Holmes
that democracy should not be implemented too quickly in Palestine.
"[Parliamentary government is of the very essence of democracy," Wise
told Holmes, and "the day must come, as it will come in Palestine,
when Jew, Arab, and Christian will sit side by side in Parliament, in a
constituent assembly." But exactly when that day would come was
another matter. "[A]s much as I value both" the special goals of
Zionism and the general "principle of self-determination," Mack
bluntly declared, "in this instance, the special . . . should have the
preference over the general;" Zionism must come first.5
Wise and Mack insisted that the Palestinian Arabs were neither
sincerely interested in democracy nor ready for its responsibilities.
"[T]hey do not desire anything particularly except food," Wise
asserted. "They are . . . in the depths of primitive life." The only
Palestinian Arabs who were clamoring for democracy were "a group of
agitators who have the most attenuated relation to the Arab peasantry
of the land." Even if some ordinary Arabs were interested in a
representative government, surely they should be "brought to the
beginnings of literacy before there be such a thing as a Parliament."
The issue of Jewish rights, too, was more complex than it appeared
on the surface, Wise and Mack contended. The Jewish population of
Palestine "is not made up of those who actually live there, but of those
who would live there, of the great numbers who some day will live
there, and these vastly outnumber the Arab-Syriac population of
Palestine." Once Zionist claims transcended ordinary demographic
considerations, democracy no longer conflicted with Zionism. A
fundamental premise of the Zionist movement was that the Holy Land
was not the property of whomever happened to inhabit the land during
any particular period of time, but rather it belonged to the Jewish
people, collectively, despite their involuntary absence from the land
since the Roman era. If the Jewish population of the country was to be
counted not according to how many Jewish inhabited it in 1929, but
according to how many might someday reside there, then certainly it
would be unfair to grant self-government to Palestine—thereby perhaps
altering the country in ways that were irreversible—before all would-
be immigrants had a chance to arrive.
In their talks with Holmes, Wise and Mack denied that American
Zionists wanted to delay democracy "until Jews are in the majority."
Yet at the same time, the Zionist leaders insisted "that the Jewish
people be permitted to develop numerically and in every way" prior to
the implementation of democracy. The most they could offer Holmes
was that Jews and Arabs might each establish "their own constituent