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One of the Jewish proposals for the resolution of the escalating Jewish–Palestinian conflict during Mandatory times was a binationalist constitutional framework. In contrast to Zionist approaches that acknowledged only Jewish national rights, binationalists postulated the equality of Jews and Palestinians—a principle to which, however, they gave a singular twist. By claiming that being a majority—whether Arab or Jewish—was not to be viewed as a precondition for possessing national rights, they sought to overturn the classical tenet of modern democratic politics according to which majorities were sovereign. Instead, they championed a binational state in which the Jewish and Arab communities, regardless of their demographic ratio, were to share political sovereignty while remaining autonomous in the management of their internal affairs.
There were two prominent efforts on the part of Jewish organizations to settle the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a binationalist fashion. The first, by Brith Shalom, was formed in 1925, faded by 1933, and was rekindled between 1942 and 1948 under the name Ichud (Unity). Brith Shalom was a coterie of liberal humanist intellectuals.Footnote 1 Its members were primarily German Zionists who dominated the World Zionist Organization (WZO) until World War I and also included like-minded intellectuals from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular Prague.Footnote 2 The second well-known binationalist effort was led by the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation, which began operating in 1939 and disintegrated around 1945. The League was an alliance of political parties with a mass base led by the parties of the left, in particular ha-Shomer ha-Tzaʿir and Poalei Zion Left, and also included individual members of Mapai, Aliyah Hadasha, Kedma Mizracha, and General Zionists B.Footnote 3
The activities of Brith Shalom and the League are reasonably well documented. But there was a third, short-lived, capitalist-inspired, ad-hoc binationalist effort at the beginning of the Arab Revolt in 1936 that remains unexamined. It is identified in the historical record simply as the undertaking of “The Five” and will be the focus of this study.
Binationalists, then, had many constituencies and multiple configurations; they were liberals, capitalists, and socialists in turn and were organized as small groups and as mass movements. Many of the prominent leaders of the Labor Settlement Movement (LSM) and the General Zionist, or liberal, wing of Zionism, also espoused binationalist goals at one time or another. Offering a political doctrine that would have obviated the need for imperialist support and the use of anti-democratic measures to create a Jewish majority in Palestine gave binationalists an unequal ethical grounding. For this reason, binationalists became an intellectual and moral force to reckon with but, at the same time, never acquired real political influence among Jews in Mandatory times (and their program remained even less attractive to Palestinians).
A study of the binationalist program of the Five will not only complete the historical record of Jewish binationalism by highlighting some of its important differences from the other two versions but will also, significantly, shed valuable light on the rationale of binationalism itself. Focusing on the Five will demonstrate that the other Jewish binationalist organizations remained a marginal element in the Yishuv because they were wedded to a top-heavy political or constitutional program of state-building and were unable to offer a workable socioeconomic alternative to the Zionist LSM's separatist strategy of state-building.
I will present this argument in five steps. In Section I, I sketch the contours of the Yishuv's economy and illuminate the features of the LSM's separatist model. In Section II, I survey the two main Jewish binationalist organizations, the liberal Brith Shalom and the socialist League for Rapprochement, with the aim of demonstrating the programmatic imbalance between their political and economic goals. In Section III, I examine the Five's June 1936 blueprint, which would have complemented political parity with economic integration. In Section IV, I examine the proposal's reception by both Mapai's Central Committee and the Jewish Agency's Executive. In the conclusion I ask whether the Five's 1936 proposal could have been a turning point in the Palestinian–Jewish conflict and, based on my comprehensive survey of Jewish binationalism, inquire into the structural preconditions for an effective binationalist program.
COOPERATIVE AND CAPITALIST ECONOMIC MODELS IN THE YISHUV
In the National Income of Palestine report for 1944, P. J. Loftus, the Mandate's official statistician, concluded:
It is of fundamental importance to note that for all important economic purposes, Palestine contains two distinct economies. The distribution of incomes in the Arab economy is radically different from that in the Jewish economy. Branches of economic activities called by the same name have yet such profound differences as between the two communities that it is necessary to carry into the economic field the distinction between the two races which, in the past, has been avoided as an apparent denial of the common citizenship of Jew and Arab.Footnote 4
Loftus' readiness to recognize the discomforting economic division of Palestine was based on the Peel Commission's earlier admission that the British Mandate had failed to create a single political framework for the Arabs and Jews of Palestine. It was this very framework that binationalists sought to fashion.
Loftus’ conclusion in the waning years of the Mandate, however, might lead us to conflate two very different features that led to the outcome he describes. The first feature is the obvious difference between the Jewish and Palestinian communities’ human capital, production factor endowments, skill composition, access to mobile capital, and urban/rural mix. The most notable of these differences was the portion of the rural population, which in the Arab economy amounted to 79 percent in 1880 and 64 percent in 1935, while peaking at only 27 percent in the Jewish economy. The largest output of the Jewish economy throughout the Mandate was produced by manufacturing, and after the Arab Revolt its share of employment surpassed that of agriculture; manufacturing created only about 10 percent of Arab employment and output. Although productivity increased significantly within both the Arab and Jewish Mandatory economies, the latter also benefited from very high rates of capital (11.6% per annum) and labor (8.8% per annum) imports. In 1931, the median schooling of Arab men and women over 21 years was less than a single school year, while it was 7.6 years for Jewish men and 5.1 years for Jewish women. The combination of these factors goes a long way toward accounting for the 3:1 ratio of Jewish and Arab per capita income.Footnote 5
The different levels of Jewish and Arab development, as Owen warned us, do not mean that their economic interaction was negligible and, as Zachary Lockman has demonstrated, Palestine was not a full-fledged “dual society.”Footnote 6 There was considerable Jewish–Arab trade: Jews acquired land, construction, and quarried materials from Arab owners and rented homes in mixed cities; Arabs bought mostly Jewish manufactured goods and services. In 1935, sales to Jews (excluding land transactions) was 14 percent of the Arab national product and amounted to 56 percent of its export revenues; the smaller but still significant size of Jewish sales to Arabs was 7 percent of Jewish product and as much as 27 percent of its exports.Footnote 7
The main Arab export commodity was labor. In 1935, 5 percent of the Palestinian Arab labor force was employed by Jews, 70 percent of them in citriculture. Though the share of Arab laborers declined from 14 percent of the Jewish economy's employees in the 1920s to 8.5 percent by 1935, these 12,000 workers in the latter year still represented the highest number ever, constituting 60 percent of employees in the privately owned citrus groves—the most capital- and labor-intensive and the most export-oriented sector—and as much as 42 percent in all of Jewish agriculture.Footnote 8
Colonial economies are typically unitary frameworks in which the landowning class benefits from the services of low-paid or unpaid workers. Similarly, the differentiation of resources surveyed above should have led to the formation of a single plantation-type economy in Palestine. The absence of such a unified colonial economy was the direct result of the second feature of the Palestinian story: the Jewish LSM's deliberate plan of action to create a distinct and separate Jewish economy. The impetus was the LSM's demographic aim of procuring employment for unskilled Jewish workers—that is, those who had no advantage in human capital over Palestinian Arab competitors—which resulted in a willingness to bypass the open market when it would not abide.
The LSM's separatist state-building strategy evolved out of the exigencies of the split labor market struggles during the first two waves of immigration to Palestine.Footnote 9 Split labor market theory,Footnote 10 first employed by Shafir to understand the LSM and further refined by Michael Shalev, Lev Grinberg, and Deborah Bernstein,Footnote 11 remains one of our most potent tools for explaining the LSM's preferences and policies throughout the Mandate period. The theory locates one important type of ethnic or national antagonism in social processes that hurl together, through settlement or importation, distinct labor forces that originate from unevenly developed regions of the world economy. As capitalist entrepreneurs gravitate toward the employment of cheaper labor, they threaten the higher-paid workers with displacement, thus initiating a triangular conflict. In order to protect themselves, higher-paid workers are likely to launch a struggle not against the capitalists, who usually appear too formidable an opponent, but against the lower-paid workers. As part of this struggle, higher-paid workers couch their opposition to lower-paid workers in ethnic or national terms. The two major manifestations of this conflict in the labor market appear antithetical: exclusion movements and caste systems. In the former, members of one ethnic group are prevented from entering the labor market or are forced out of it; in the latter, they are confined to the lower rungs of the occupational structure. Both strategies, however, signal the success of the higher-paid workers. A third strategy is conceivable: equalization of pay may do away with both the threat of displacement and ethnic conflict. This solution, however, is rarely attempted by the higher-paid workers since it may demand sacrifices that contradict their short-term interests.
Though the LSM's class analysis led it to contemplate joint organization with Palestinian Arab workers with the aim of preventing the undercutting of Jewish workers, it chose to engage in an exclusionary Jewish labor market strategy. Starting in 1905, the organized agricultural workers of the Second Aliyah (1904–14) embarked on a self-conscious ideological campaign for “Hebrew Labor” in the vineyards and groves of the Jewish planters of the First Aliyah (1882–1903). The planters preferred to employ lower-paid and unorganized Palestinian Arab workers rather than their higher-priced and organized Jewish counterparts. The LSM strategy was only moderately successful.Footnote 12 As a consequence, private Jewish agriculture always employed a mixed Jewish–Arab labor force, and the ensuing “Jewish wages” were insufficient to support Jewish family life on a European standard of living.
The LSM by itself could exercise no more than moral authority over the planters in Palestine. Only its alliance with and subsidization by the WZO led to the creation of a separate Jewish economic sector. The LSM's Histadrut and the WZO's Jewish National Fund (JNF), operating in the labor and land markets, respectively, became the two pillars of the separatist method of Zionist state-building.Footnote 13 A significant factor behind the LSM's success in creating an exclusively Jewish economy was that it bypassed the labor market and its uneven competition by focusing on the “conquest of land” through the establishment of kibbutzim and moshavim on JNF land and the creation of a network of cooperative institutions. Not surprisingly, in the early 1930s, not less than 75 percent of Jewish wage earners belonged to the Histadrut.Footnote 14
Although the “national capital” imports that supported and subsidized the separate Jewish economy amounted to only one-third of all private imports during the Mandate, and the share of the LSM's cooperative economy hovered around no more than 20 percent of Jewish NDP and employment,Footnote 15 the LSM was the driver of the Zionist state-building project. And as long as the LSM received the lion's share of WZO subsidies, it remained a thorn in the side of the middle-class (ha-ḥugim ha-ezrakhiyim) interests that by and large viewed its subsidization as economic waste.
Support for capitalist or market-driven colonization and opposition to the LSM's separatism percolated in both the Yishuv and the WZO. At the 1920 interim Zionist Conference in London, a titanic clash took place between Weizmann and the American delegation, led by Justice Brandeis, on this issue. The latter demanded the creation of a self-supporting Jewish community in Palestine by ending the comingling of investment and donation funds and thus separating business from politics.Footnote 16 Weizmann's supporters prevailed and Brandeis withdrew from the WZO. With the arrival of the middle-class immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah who spurred rapid urban and private investment-based development from 1924 to 1928, the LSM again found itself on the defensive within the WZO. It responded by organizing Jewish workers in urban kibbutzim, a project that met with total failureFootnote 17; the Histadrut's hold in the urban sector always remained weaker than in the rural areas. But the worldwide economic downturn again restored its fortunes. In sum, the creation of a separate Jewish economy in Palestine was not a foregone conclusion that reflected original differences between the members of the Jewish and Arab communities but was rather the result of an intra-Jewish struggle. In this mêlée the reverses suffered by the LSM proved temporary, and it ended up triumphant.
The choice between caste and exclusivist split labor markets had far-reaching consequences for the social order of settlement colonies around the world and accounts in large part for the differences between them. In well-documented deliberations, South Africa decided in favor of a single economy based on the color-based caste system, which led to a plantation-type society,Footnote 18 while Australia resolved to have a white working class in order to promote the ethnic homogeneity of its future population in accordance with European nationalist ideologies.Footnote 19 The LSM chose a solution similar to the Australian model. It organized and agitated for an exclusive Jewish economy in which Jews would perform both skilled and unskilled work and be assured a European standard of living. Economic separatism—that is, a “closed-shop” of national proportions—was a radical strategy based on nationalist exclusion but, significantly, also left open the possibility of territorial compromise.Footnote 20 In Anita Shapira's words:
The ideology of Hebrew Labor . . . brought about the reduction of the settlement area in Palestine. In the long run, the establishment of separate Jewish areas of settlement entailed the relinquishment of those areas that did not possess a Jewish majority. This decision was the first step toward Palestine's partition.Footnote 21
The partition plans—by the Peel Commission in 1937, UNSCOP in 1947, and the Oslo Declaration of Principles in 1993—to which foreign observers and the parties to the conflict have repeatedly gravitated are the prominent manifestations of this option. An important alternative to the partition of Palestine between two nations was binationalism, the partitioning of political sovereignty within a single territorial state. We will now turn to the binationalist organizations and their blueprints.
LIBERAL AND SOCIALIST BINATIONALISM IN THE YISHUV
While liberal and socialist Jewish binationalists supported the modernization of the Arab economy and, on occasion, were willing to declare their support for practical measures to enhance greater Jewish–Arab economic interaction, they treaded carefully around the LSM's projects and remained wary of challenging either its separatist or its rural state-building strategy.
Founded in 1925, Brith Shalom became truly active only after the outbreak of the 1929 “riots.” Its goals were laid out in three documents from 1930: “Brith Shalom's Plan for Jewish–Arab Cooperation”Footnote 22; “Memorandum on an Arab Policy for the Jewish Agency,” prepared by Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, Edwin Samuel, Avraham Katznelson, and Gershom Scholem; and “Practical Proposals by the Brith Shalom Society for Cooperation Between Jews and Arabs,” written by Edwin Samuel, Werner Senator, and Haim Kalvarisky.Footnote 23 In all three documents, the political proposals for Jewish–Arab cooperation both preceded and overshadowed proposals for economic cooperation. Even so, the political plans also remained declaratory in style and vague in content.
In the political sphere, Brith Shalom declared its commitment to the Zionist program recognized in the Balfour Declaration but saw its end goal as the formation of a binational state. Its Plan and Memorandum called on the Mandatory government to establish a binational Legislative Council but, at the same time, cautioned against moving hastily to any new regime.Footnote 24 Both documents repeated the boilerplate modernizationist Zionist argument that Jews and Arabs had a common interest in the flow and absorption of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, since Jews arrived with the intention “to reconstruct their homeland and not for colonial exploitation or political domination.”Footnote 25 The Memorandum's “main idea was more advancement of the Arab sector than integration of the more primitive economy into the Jewish one.”Footnote 26
Brith Shalom's Memorandum also noted that “the employment of Arabs by Jews should not be completely abandoned” and that “the political advantages of the employment of Arabs,” especially in big Jewish factories and public utility undertakings, “should not be forgotten.”Footnote 27 Similarly, the Plan stated its opposition to “closing Arab enterprises to Jewish workers and Jewish enterprises to Arab workers” and proposed “the establishment of a minimum average wage that will protect organized labor, Jewish and Arab, from competition by unorganized labor,” in effect suggesting the wage-equalization alternative to the LSM's exclusive “Hebrew Labor” solution.Footnote 28 Even so, none of its language suggests encroachment on the separate economic sector of the LSM.
The Practical Proposals document seems to stand out by its “stress . . . on as much ‘mixing’ as was possible in the spheres of education, social affairs, and medicine” and in the economic sphere by its support “for the integration of the various economic bodies, chambers of commerce, trade unions, etc.”Footnote 29 But even this document, which was composed by a motley group on the margins of ZionismFootnote 30 and addressed not to the Histadrut but to the Shaw Commission of Inquiry, only sought to integrate economic bodies on the organizational level and had little to say on the mixing of the labor forces. In effect, even Brith Shalom's conclusion that Zionism was not a colonial movement was based on the LSM's view that separatism precluded colonial exploitation.
Neither Ichud, the intellectual successor of Brith Shalom, nor the socialist and mass-based League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation produced a social or economic binationalist program. The League's goals were mostly educational, and we find in its program only a nebulous commitment to the notion that “the Palestine question be solved on the basis of economic advancement and freedom of national culture and social development of both nations together.”Footnote 31 A memorandum sent by the League to its supporters in December 1940 offered that “there will be a great cultural effort [and] endeavor to improve the deplorable conditions of the fellah and will offer the Arab workman employment where he had none before” and added that “in the future Jewish organisations will have to be established with a view to enhancing the indirect interests of the Arabs in Jewish activity.”Footnote 32 But these goals were not translated into concrete language; the memorandum did not, for example, explain what kinds of cultural endeavors were capable of improving the fellah's circumstances, in which part of the economy he would be offered employment, why only indirect Arab interests would be promoted, and, finally, why all this had to wait for an unspecified future. Nor do we get the sense that these indirect benefits implied even a modicum of economic or social integration.
In June 1941, the League's Political Committee on Constitutional Development in Palestine switched its support from political parity to a competing plan that sought the creation of two compact cantons, one Jewish and one Arab. The League's report insightfully suggested that “mixed” voting be encouraged on the basis of “political creed or economic and social interests,” but instead of proposing ways such shared interests could be brought about it merely recommended an electoral combination of double constituencies with canton-based proportional representation.Footnote 33 In fact, the report's requirement that every citizen have residence and employment in only one region, and that the burning issues of the conflict—control over immigration and land—be left in regional hands, amounted, for all practical purposes, to a partition plan.
The June 1942 joint League/ha-Shomer ha-Tzaʿir program demonstrated the inability or unwillingness of either liberal or socialist binationalism to challenge the LSM's separatist project based on a split labor market. Its sociopolitical program proposed that:
The activities of the League shall be conducted in the recognition that the Jews have the right to immigrate to and settle in Palestine in accordance with the full economic absorptive capacity of the country and to an extent that shall assure the growth and development of the Yishuv towards a complete and autonomous economic, cultural, social, and political life in cooperation with the Arab people.Footnote 34
This joint program effectively reaffirmed the separatist Zionist program while piously suggesting that it be carried out “in cooperation with the Arab people” even though binationalism was born out of the very discovery that Palestine's Arabs would not cooperate with untrammeled Zionism. None of these Jewish binationalist proposals, even in their terminology, challenged the split labor market on which the LSM's separatist state-building rested. The imbalance in these blueprints between political and economic cooperation was recognized with unusual clarity by the head of the Jewish Agency's Executive and director of its Political Department between 1923 and 1931, Col. Kisch. In Kisch's cogent formulation: “It is entirely futile to seek today any agreement based upon a political formula.”Footnote 35
Among the binationalist publications of this time, few queried explicitly the relationship between economic and political cooperation. An outstanding exception is an August 1939 article by Nachum Nir (Rafalkes), which appeared in the League's journal, Darkenu. Nir was a lawyer who served as the secretary of the World Union of Poalei Zionist Left and was involved in its failed negotiations to join the Comintern. In 1925, he immigrated to Palestine and served as one of the leaders of Poalei Zion Left and, later, of Mapam when the two parties merged in 1949. It is worth describing the thrust of his article in some detail.
Nir shared the binationalist conviction of the necessity of a Jewish–Arab accord in Palestine but took aim at those who both expected this to be a political accord and assumed that its success depended foremost on the quality of the accord itself. He counterposed his conviction that any future Jewish–Arab political alliance would rise out of long-term joint economic activity.Footnote 36 Nir argued that Jews and Arabs shared a long list of economic interests vis-à-vis the world economy and the Mandatory government: the capacity to compete effectively with foreign producers in the export of Palestinian produce, especially oranges; customs barriers to protect native product from imports; cooperative purchasing and marketing frameworks and more favorable mandatory taxation; the distribution of uncultivated land; and joint unionization.
Nir was one of the few socialists to take the LSM's “Hebrew Labor” strategy, as well as its rural emphasis, to task through a comparison of the levels of ethnic conflict in agricultural and urban labor markets. He argued that
in the labor market two wage levels for workers will not persist for long. The campaign for one hundred percent Hebrew Labor causes political damage and brings no economic benefit. The failure of the thirty-year-long attempt to impose pure Hebrew Labor in the moshavot that preceded the bloody events of 1936–1939 is proof enough. Joint trade unionization will ensure the worker's wage and his access to a just division of labor.Footnote 37
In contrast to the failure of the “Hebrew Labor” rural strategy, Nir contended that as a result of economic development in Haifa, a city of heavy industry where there was joint Arab and Jewish employment in the port, railroad, and minerals industries, “peace was preserved until 1938 by binding the population into a single urban unit in spite of their national differences.”Footnote 38 He concluded that the order of cooperation should be as follows: “First of all we need to create a Jewish–Arab movement based on shared economic and social interests which, as it continues evolving, will attain a higher level—the formulation of a shared political program.”Footnote 39 Nir's approach was shared by neither liberal nor socialist binationalists.
THE FIVE AND THEIR CAPITALIST BINATIONALISM
A little known and never carefully analyzed response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in April 1936 was a binationalist blueprint offered by a small coterie of Jewish leaders in Palestine. They are mentioned in Ben-Gurion's memoirs and in a cursory fashion in a few historical accounts of the conflict.Footnote 40 In all these instances, they are referred to simply as “The Five” (ha-ḥamishah), as if the fact that they acted in their individual capacity precludes insight into the larger issues and interests that might have motivated them.
The Five were Pinchas Rutenberg, Mordechai Novomeysky, Moshe Smilansky, Gad Frumkin, and Judah Magnes. Rutenberg was the director of the Palestine Electrical CompanyFootnote 41; Novomeysky was the director of the Palestine Potash Company, which engaged in phosphate extraction in the Dead Sea; and Smilansky served as the head of the Farmers’ Federation (Hitahdut ha-Ikarim). The remaining two participants were important civic leaders. Gad Frumkin was the first Jewish member of the Mandatory Supreme Court in Palestine and as such experienced the growing tug of war between the British Mandatory government and the Zionist movement. He seems to have played the major role in the formation of the Five, though not necessarily in their deliberations. Magnes, the president of The Hebrew University, had been closely associated with Brith Shalom.Footnote 42 Now, in 1936, Magnes' binationalist ideas were espoused, if for a brief period, by leading Jewish capitalists.
Rutenberg, Novomeysky, and Smilansky were the most prominent capitalist entrepreneurs of the Yishuv; I will argue that as a group, along with Frumkin, who held similar views, they were the architects of a capitalist binationalist program.Footnote 43 Their enterprises heavily implicated them in the Jewish–Palestinian conflict; none of them supported, and Smilansky actively opposed, the LSM's insistence on the exclusive use of “Hebrew Labor” by Jewish employers. The citrus growers, led by Smilansky, were among the most heavily capitalized Jewish agricultural producers; usually large employers, they were keen on employing unskilled and low-paid Arab workers in their groves. Theirs was the largest export branch of the Jewish economy and was held mostly in private hands. The story of the ongoing enmity, picketing, and occasional clashes between citrus growers and the LSM has been splendidly told in Anita Shapira's seminal The Futile Struggle.Footnote 44 The Palestine Potash Company, a concession awarded by the British government, was “the largest Jewish-owned private company during most of the Mandate period.”Footnote 45 Though Novomeysky customarily presented the Potash Works as yet another example of Zionist pioneering, the terms of the company's charter stipulated that it employ an equal number of Jewish and Arab laborers. The Arab half was always unskilled, and the company used Arab employment as an implicit, and sometimes explicit, ceiling on Jewish wages.Footnote 46 Novomeysky was caught between the rock of the LSM's demand to expand Jewish employment and pay higher wages and the hard place of the Mandatory government's threat to revoke the concession if the employment of Arab workers fell off or their conditions of employment did not improve.Footnote 47 The Palestine Electrical Company, which opened its hydroelectric power station at Naharayim on the Jordan River in 1930, was directed by Rutenberg. It was the second largest concession given to Jewish owners, and it also employed both Jewish and Arab workers. Both the Palestine Electrical Company and the Palestine Potash Company sold their products to Jews and Arabs in Palestine and to Arab customers outside the country, seeking to become not just Palestinian but also Middle Eastern enterprises. None of the companies or industries represented by these three members of the Five was dominated by local considerations nor did they fit into the self-enclosed economic sector of the Histadrut and the LSM. Unsurprisingly, the Five's proposal viewed Palestine and Trans-Jordan as a single domain.
The initiative germinated at the start of the Arab Revolt in separate meetings between Judge Gad Frumkin and Musa al-ʿAlami, the deputy attorney general in the British Administration, who was also a relative of the mufti, and between Frumkin and Mustafa al-Khalidi, another Supreme Court Justice. The impetus for the revolt in April 1936, as well as for al-ʿAlami's own search for a modus vivendi with Zionism, was the massive migration of Jewish refugees in the wake of the Nazi rise to power in Germany. This wave led the British Mandatory government to approve the largest ever “immigration schedule”—62,000 immigrants—for 1935. The immigration schedule was based on an annual assessment of the country's “absorptive capacity,” a fairly static notion that was calculated according to the percentage of the unemployed in the labor force. The influx of highly skilled German Jewish immigrants and their capital enhanced Palestine's economic development and lowered its level of unemployment, thus favoring higher immigration schedules and causing deep concern within the Palestinian Arab population.Footnote 48
The blueprint prepared by the coterie of Five was a joint effort that combined individual drafts of several members. The earliest was written by Rutenberg, who met with High Commissioner Sir Arthur G. Wauchope about a week before the group's formation and received the latter's blessing to pursue the possibility of a Jewish–Arab accord. The high commissioner was particularly eager to know whether David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, and Moshe Sharett (Shertok), his co-chairman at its Political Department, both of whom he considered inflexible, were amenable to compromise.Footnote 49 Rutenberg submitted his proposal to the Executive of the Jewish Agency on 22 May 1936.Footnote 50 The first meeting of the Five took place on 24 May in Novomeysky's house, where they discussed drafts proposed by the host and by Magnes. In their second meeting, at the Palestine Electric Company on 29 May 1936, the Five discussed drafts written by Magnes, Smilansky, and Frumkin.Footnote 51 Magnes’ plan was based on his initial conversation with Musa al-ʿAlami. Thus all members of the coterie prepared individual drafts.
The members of the coterie met again on 31 May 1936 at the King David Hotel to finalize their joint blueprint, titled “The Concord,” and then on 1 June in Novemeysky's office at the Palestine Potash Company, where it was typed up.Footnote 52 During the next six weeks, coterie members, either individually or in small groups, met on four separate occasions with members of the Jewish Agency's Executive to discuss the latter group's response to their proposal and begged it, with an ever growing sense of urgency, to proceed with alacrity. On 14 July, the Five prepared their second and last joint document, a detailed “Memorandum” addressed to the Executive, in which they recounted the genesis of the initiative. They also provided the chronology of their negotiations with the Executive and protested against its stonewalling. The reason given for the composition of the “Memorandum,” with a nod to the future historian, was to create a record (likhtov ba-sefer) of the coterie's initiative.Footnote 53
My analysis of the Five's initiative is based on the extensive documentation in the archival record and on participants’ memoirs. There are several extant copies of the original Concord from 1 June 1936, and it is also referenced and cited in multiple memoirs.Footnote 54 There are minor, mainly stylistic, differences between them, but their contents are sufficiently close to each other and to the 14 July 1936 “Memorandum” to be treated as a single plan. The Concord is a bare-bones blueprint, only two pages long and written at times in an almost telegraphic style. In contrast, the Memorandum and individual members’ drafts are longer and flesh out the details. I will thus complement an analysis of the Concord with the more detailed suggestions in the Memorandum and in the draft proposals prepared by individual members of the coterie—in particular Rutenberg,Footnote 55 Frumkin,Footnote 56 and SmilanskyFootnote 57—when these differ significantly or add ideas not found in the two collectively composed documents.
The proposed Concord starts out with the recognition that the classic Zionist approach of promising indirect economic benefits and concessions lost its effectiveness with the rise of Arab nationalism. It is harder, the Memorandum states, to reach an accord now that a new generation of Arabs “raised in a nationalist spirit” has emerged, but it is still within reach. Rutenberg is most explicit on this score: “Economic concessions per se will no longer suffice to quiet down the Arab national movement. The concessions have to be in both the domains of statesmanship and of economics.”Footnote 58 Nevertheless, what makes this blueprint unique are its concrete economic suggestions.
The Five's binationalist propositions were not created out of whole cloth but benefited from the thinking of Brith Shalom and from debates within the Yishuv after the 1929 “riots.” They also served as a response to the demands of the Palestinian national movement for the election of a national government and for an end to both Jewish immigration and land purchases in the country, and to British willingness to go some way toward accepting these demands. The Concord touches upon five topics, devoted respectively to government, immigration, land, labor, and the negotiating procedure.
Government
In its other colonial and mandated territories, Britain sought to supplement the rule of its officials with local representatives in a system of indirect rule, but that had not been the case in Palestine. The Concord proposed the formation of a Jewish–Arab Legislative Council based on the principle of parity, with the goal of demonstrating that neither people would come to rule the other. To prevent either Jews or Arabs from becoming dominated, it was proposed that the constitutional structure would not be affected by fluctuations in the size of the two populations. The Concord also recommended that Jews and Arabs assume a greater role in the Mandatory administration as members of the Executive Committee and as department heads.
The Frumkin, Rutenberg, and Novomeysky drafts fill in the details of the Concord in ways that seek to shield this binational framework from obstruction and changes unpalatable to Zionism. Frumkin suggested that the Council's “duties and functions be the subject matter of a separate agreement,” and only after the framework agreement on immigration, labor, and land was fully observed would the Jewish side agree to the formation of the Council. Rutenberg not only suggested that the Legislative Council be endowed with the full power to make laws but also demanded that immigration, land purchase, and employment issues be brought to the Council only “after a concord has been reached . . . between the Jews and Arabs.” The additional conditions with which they saddled the political portion of the Concord would have provided the Council with only limited authority and, in fact, emptied it of major functions. Finally, none of the drafts stated explicitly that the Legislative Council would replace the British Mandatory authority, and, in fact, Rutenberg made it clear that the high commissioner would remain but be appointed after consultations with and the approval of the two communities, while Novomeysky expected self-government to coexist with the Mandatory government.
Immigration
The crux of the disagreement between Jews and the Arabs of Palestine in 1936, as the Five stated in the Memorandum, was the rapidly growing rate of Jewish immigration. The Five reported that their Arab interlocutors demanded that the Jewish Agency either agree to end Jewish immigration for the duration of the talks or, if that was not possible, agree as part of a binationalist accord to the replacement of the absorptive-capacity criterion with a fixed demographic quota. The limit sought by the Arab partners would require the reduction of the annual number of Jewish immigrants to 30,000 per year for up to ten years, which at the end of the decade would lead to a Jewish population of 800,000 out of two million, raising the percentage of Jews in Palestine to no more than 40 percent of the population. The Concord expressed a preference for the continued determination of the number of future immigrants on the basis of the country's absorptive capacity. If this approach, however, would preclude the possibility of a Jewish–Arab agreement, the Five were explicit in recommending the acceptance of the Arab demand for reduced immigration as long as it was guaranteed that Jews become approximately forty percent of Palestine's population at the end of the period.
The Concord and the drafts by Smilansky, Rutenberg, and Frumkin all concurred that no restrictions would be placed on the immigration of “capitalists” or “owners of capital” or on relatives of those already in Palestine. In addition, the Concord, along with the drafts of Frumkin and Novomeysky, proposed that Arabs from neighboring countries not be permitted to enter Palestine.
Land
The Concord proposed restrictions on the purchase of Arab-owned land. Arab peasants were to be allowed to sell no more than 75 percent of their land and were to receive Mandatory and Jewish scientific and financial assistance developing their remaining plot. Frumkin specified that until the Palestinian tenants adopted intensive farming on the portion of land they retained and it reached full bearing capacity, they should be employed in the new Jewish settlement established on the rest of their parcel. He was equally adamant that purchase of Arab-owned land for urban and industrial purposes not be restricted. These two suggestions emphasize both greater integration of Jewish and Arab resources and the promotion of urban and industrial development; herein we notice the first example of a significant challenge to the LSM's separatist economic development model.
Labor
The prominence of capitalist interests behind the Five's 1936 initiative is thrown into sharp relief when we examine the conditions related to labor and employment. The reference to labor in the Concord is relatively short, but, given its innovative character, I will explore the subject as it is discussed there and in related documents at some length. Arab consent to the continued use of Palestine's absorptive capacity as the criteria for determining the immigration schedule would be conditional, according to the Concord, on “the employment of a certain and agreed-upon number of Arabs,” and, in the Memorandum's formulation, on “the employment of Arabs in [manual] work and administration in the Jewish economy.”Footnote 59
This quid pro quo is elaborated in Rutenberg's and Frumkin's drafts. Both exclude the colonies and enterprises funded and managed by the Zionist institutions (such as the JNF, Palestine Foundation Fund, and the Jewish Agency) from the purview of the mixed-labor program. The bulk of Arab workers, therefore, was to be employed in privately owned Jewish colonies and enterprises; in Rutenberg's proposal their share was to be 25 percent within Palestine and higher in Transjordan, while Frumkin would have been satisfied with 20 percent. Frumkin also expected the Tel Aviv Municipality to hire 5 to 10 percent of its labor force from among the Arab population during the duration of the Concord. Finally, he promised that “the Jews will also open their doors to the Arab employee in trade, commerce, and industry and other economic and financial institutions . . . according to their qualifications . . .” While Frumkin's suggestions were still on the vague side, Rutenberg devoted the longest section of his draft to suggestions for increasing the employment of Arab workers in industry and commerce. In particular, he was eager to have Arabs involved in highly capitalized enterprises. Rutenberg called for allowing Arabs to invest and participate in the management of new companies that had starting capital of 25,000£ or of existing companies that raised new capital and for appointing Arab members to their boards of directors even in the absence of Arab investment.
While proposing the reduction of Jewish employment in the private Jewish sector, both drafts suggested shifting part of Jewish employment onto the Mandatory government. Frumkin's draft specified that more Jews should be employed in public works, and Rutenberg expected all governmental departments, from public works to railroads to customs, to hire Jews and Arabs in proportion to their share in the population, a proposal that would have raised the percentage of Jewish employees.
The Five, and especially Rutenberg and Frumkin, were suggesting a sea change in the Yishuv's economic profile. While not opposing the continuation of the exclusivist split labor market of the LSM's own economic sector, they wished, for all practical purposes, to end the “Hebrew Labor” strategy by encouraging and even mandating the employment of Palestinian Arabs in the private Jewish economy as workers, clerks, and, probably less realistically, entrepreneurs. Some of these goals were consistent with the existing practices of the Electrical and Potash companies and the Jewish orange growers. Their extension would have required the modification of Palestine's urban and industrial economies along capitalist lines and would have linked the Jewish and Arab middle classes through shared interests.
Negotiating Procedure
The Five asked the Jewish Agency's Executive to authorize them as a group and as individuals to meet and seek to reach an accord with unofficial Arab representatives and to discuss proposals with them concerning immigration, land purchasing, and the Legislative Council. If the two sides’ positions became close enough, the Five would continue working with an unofficial Arab committee to finalize an official agreement, which then would be debated in both the Jewish Agency and the Higher Arab Committee. If these two bodies were in agreement on the major issues, they would jointly inform the public that official negotiations would continue and that for their duration the Arab Higher Committee would end the strike and the Jewish Agency would suspend immigration under the new schedule.
DEBATING THE FIVE'S PROPOSAL
The Five's blueprint, the Concord, was debated in the two paramount political bodies of the Yishuv: Mapai's Central Committee (Merkaz), the dominant political party and the LSM's mainstream, and the Jewish Agency's Executive, the main Zionist decision-making body in the Yishuv. There was some overlap between the membership of the two bodies: three leaders of Mapai—Moshe Sharett, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, and Eliezer Kaplan—also served on the Executive. The thorough and comprehensive debate shows the intellectual and moral pull of binationalists within Zionism but its results highlight the limits of their influence. I will survey the arguments and positions taken in both bodies and the decisions adopted by the Jewish Agency's Executive.
The Debate within Mapai
By winning 45 percent of the seats at the 1933 World Zionist Congress, Mapai became its largest party—leaving Weizmann's General Zionists with 23 percent, the Revisionists with 14 percent, and the national-religious Mizrachi with 12 percent of the remaining seats—and was catapulted into the leadership of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. The Central Committee of Mapai debated the Five's plan exhaustively on six separate occasions in June 1936, and its minutes were forwarded to all party branches. In this lengthy debate, seemingly scant attention was given to the suggestions made by the Five to integrate parts of the private Jewish and Arab economies. But while the discussants in the Mapai forum preferred to concentrate on the topic of immigration, they did not overlook the agricultural labor issue. After all, Jewish immigration was integrally linked with the potential to expand “Hebrew Labor.” Tabenkin pointed out that a smaller influx of Jewish immigrants would also undermine the growth of the LSM by allowing “foreign [that is, Arab] workers” to conquer the “basic positions” in the local economy.Footnote 60 Haim Shorer elaborated on this threat by explaining that if only 50,000 Jewish immigrants arrived per year, then they would prefer to find employment with better pay in the towns, as they had in the past, and the struggle for “Hebrew Labor” in the agricultural colonies would have to be abandoned altogether.Footnote 61 As far as the majority of the Mapai leadership was concerned, the rural focus of the LSM's program could not be compromised, and by demanding to maintain current levels of immigration they also signaled their opposition to the Five's labor-market proposals.
The positions of the participants in regard to immigration fell roughly into three clusters. Those in the first cluster were eager to reach a Jewish–Arab accord, which they professed to view as a significant accomplishment. Shlomo Kaplansky, the former leader of the Austrian Poalei Zion, acknowledged that, notwithstanding the required concessions, an Arab–Jewish accord would give the Yishuv “much more than the continuation of the present situation.”Footnote 62 Levi Eshkol (Skolnik) went further in arguing that Arab consent to either the Mandate or to a Legislative Council based on parity “would be a great accomplishment.”Footnote 63 Berl Locker stated that Arab assent to large Jewish immigration and to Jews constituting 40 percent of the country's population within a short period “would have tremendous value.”Footnote 64 Most sanguine in assessing the Concord's significance was Joseph Shprintzak, for whom an accord based on the Five's blueprint would have amounted to Arab recognition of “the right of Jewish immigration to Palestine, their right to purchase land . . . to parity in the Legislative Council, and eo ipso to admitting that we and they are two equal nations in Palestine.” Such an accord would “strengthen the moral backbone of the Balfour Declaration” and constitute “a big victory reached after 55 years of [Zionist] work in Palestine.”Footnote 65 This cluster, cognizant that Jews were still in the minority in Palestine, would have welcomed an accord that would have nevertheless recognized them as equal partners with the Arabs of Palestine.
The second, and by far the largest, cluster also favored an accord but highlighted and emphasized its temporary nature and viewed it as covering no more than a “transitional period” or “cease fire.” Berl Katznelson, Mapai's main ideologue, set the terms of reference for the majority's view and for the Jewish Agency Executive's response to the Five—and through them to Musa al-ʿAlami—by suggesting that the Jewish side raise the acceptable volume of Jewish immigrants from the 30,000 suggested in the Concord to 60,000 (which it already reached in the 1935 schedule) and reduce the Concord's duration from ten to five years. If the Arabs were to agree to these terms at a time when the newly risen Hitler was a threat to Jews, then the “besieged Yishuv” would continue enjoying “rapid development.” In this cluster's view, the Concord was not to be viewed as the basis for a binational state or for the resolution of the conflict. Rather, as Katznelson put it, it did not require “either side to relinquish its aspirations” or “to make concessions in defining its goals.”Footnote 66 Sharett concurred with Katznelson and explained that he viewed the Concord as a “phase” and rejected the notion that a five-year plan constituted a concession to forgo a Jewish majority in Palestine.Footnote 67
Finally, a third, small but still sizable, cluster was opposed to any accord as long as it required a reduction in Jewish immigration. In this view, Zionists were entitled to free immigration, and immigration based on economic absorptive capacity was already a concession not to be further reduced by a system of politically fixed immigration numbers. Eliyahu Golomb, the leader of the nascent Haganah, had no objection to the proposed political regime and believed in the possibility of finding a modus vivendi in regard to land purchases but vehemently opposed any compromise on the size of Jewish immigration. In logic reminiscent of Jabotinsky, he argued that no negotiations were possible as long as the Arab side believed that it could force Zionism into surrender.Footnote 68 Most stringent in his opposition was Itzhak Tabenkin, a maximalist, who viewed any accord to reduce immigration a “catastrophe” and the end of Zionism itself and regarded the Five as traitors.Footnote 69
Though no official resolution was adopted, the views of the middle group and its main spokesperson, Berl Katznelson, were most representative of the Central Committee and, as we shall see, greatly influenced the Jewish Agency's decisions.
Debate in the Jewish Agency's Executive
Whereas Mapai primarily examined the Concord's local implications, the Jewish Agency also paid considerable attention to its ramifications for the Jewish people at the time of the ascent of the Nazis to power in Germany and the overall rise in anti-Semitism in Europe. The Five's main interlocutor in the Jewish Agency was Moshe Sharett, Mapai's rising star. Sharett, who placed fourth on the Mapai list, was elected to the Jewish Agency's Executive and appointed the co-chairman of its Political Department. The other co-chairman, David Ben-Gurion, served as the Histadrut's general secretary and after 1935 as the chairman of the Jewish Agency's Executive.
Sharett was described by Gabriel Sheffer, his biographer, as a “political moderate,” namely, someone whose “basic philosophical assumption was that politics constituted a continuous process of incremental change” and, therefore, that “continued contact with Arab dignitaries was the Yishuv's only choice for reducing the intensity of the inter-communal conflict.”Footnote 70 An examination of Sharett's role in the talks with the Five strongly indicates that Sheffer mistakenly projects Sharett's well-known dovishness in the 1950s into an earlier period. In fact, the leaders of Mapai, including Ben-Gurion and Sharett, were suspicious of the much more moderate president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, who gave indications of a willingness to stop immigration during the work of the Royal Commission and limit it afterwards, and they took turns keeping an eye on Weizmann in London.Footnote 71 Sharett, though naturally cautious and without Ben-Gurion's activist temperament, was nevertheless a staunch defender of the LSM's state-building strategy. The information he received from Ben-Gurion in London that the British government had decided to suppress the Arab Revolt by force if negotiations failed, and then dispatch a Royal Commission to investigate its causes, might have also tempered his interest in the kind of accord the Five sought.Footnote 72
Although Sharett, like the rest of the Jewish Agency's Executive, was worried about the adverse affects of the Arab Revolt on the Zionist project, he was not in the mood to compromise on essential Zionist demands. By 1935, as Yehoyada Haim correctly observed, “the situation [had] changed: the rapid rise in immigration had raised the possibility of a Jewish majority in the near future”Footnote 73 and thus emboldened many Zionists. Furthermore, with Hitler's appointment as Germany's Reichskanzler, the status of German Jews was rapidly becoming intolerable. Given their dire circumstances, they were expected to want to come to Palestine in large numbers even in the face of the Arab Revolt's hostility and violence. The main aim of the Zionist leadership was to keep the door open to becoming the demographic majority—in other words, to ensure the fewest restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. At the same time, they were fearful of restrictions on immigration contemplated by the Mandatory government and the Colonial Office in response to the Arab Revolt and thus willing to consider both negotiations with Arab dignitaries and a temporary compromise on a range of lesser topics.
The Jewish Agency's Executive held an extensive and heartfelt discussion of the Five's proposal on 2 June 1936, the day after its submission, and continued the deliberations on 16 June.Footnote 74 In addition to the minutes of these meetings, we can gain insight into the participants’ views and aims from the letters and telegrams exchanged between Sharett and Ben-Gurion, who was in London at the time.
The Executive, like Mapai's Central Committee, was fixated on the topic of the hour: immigration. Even so, attention was paid to the other issues as well. Sharett reported to the Executive that Berl Katznelson accepted the Concord's recommendations in regard to Palestine's political system but “rejected the proposal in regard to immigration and the promise of Arab labor,” namely, the Five's suggestions to provide employment to Palestinian Arabs in the privately owned sector of the Jewish economy. Katznelson was willing to agree to buy only a portion of land offered for sale by Palestinian owners but opposed spending Jewish money on the development of their remaining plot.Footnote 75
The only one who openly opposed both the Five's proposal and Katznelson's views was Itzhak Gruenbaum, a representative of the General Zionist Party and the urban middle class. Gruenbaum stated that he did not believe in the feasibility of successful negotiations with the Palestinian interlocutors and, in his view, the Yishuv should pressure the high commissioner to suppress the “riots.” While Gruenbaum rejected negotiations with the Arab side, he expressed his support for a unilateral suspension of the fight for “Hebrew Labor” and for limits on Jewish land purchases. In his view, such a posture would strengthen the Jewish position while also calming Arab hostility.Footnote 76
In their first meeting, the nine members of the Executive agreed unanimously to continue the talks with the Five's Arab partners but split in regard to the demand for limiting Jewish immigration and decided to consult the two absent members, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. After its second deliberation, however, the Executive informed the Five that if there was to be an upper limit on the number of certificates given to Jewish immigrants in the future as part of an Arab–Jewish accord, it should remain at the 62,000 level allocated by the Mandatory government for 1935: in other words, more than double the volume sought by al-ʿAlami. The Executive, in effect, adopted Mapai's approach, which, as we have seen, emerged in its Central Committee's deliberations. Furthermore, the Five were informed that the Jewish Agency was the only body authorized to negotiate on behalf of the Yishuv and asked the Five to desist from further efforts.Footnote 77 In a meeting between representatives of the Executive and Novomeysky, however, the latter was told that while the Jewish Agency still rejected reductions to the certificate schedule below the 1935 level, it relented and agreed to permit the Five to continue meeting with its Arab partners as long as this was done in consultation with the Executive. At the conclusion of the meeting, Novomeysky asked Sharett for further instructions on how to proceed, presumably now that the limits on immigration were taken off the table as a negotiating item, but neither Sharett nor Ben-Gurion, who had returned in the meantime from London, ever got back to him. In fact, we know from Sharett's letter to Ben-Gurion that he viewed the Five's initiative as a “sore evil” (raʿah ḥolah) that, he added, “I do not know how to overcome” (le-hitgaber ʿaleyah).
While holding the Five at arms’ length, Sharett met with al-ʿAlami himself to find out the extent to which the latter's views represented the Arab High Committee's position.Footnote 78 When asked by Sharett whether he was in contact with or representing the mufti or other Arab leaders, al-ʿAlami answered that “he was talking solely on his own behalf.” Al-ʿAlami described himself essentially as a political guinea pig, namely, “the most moderate among his people.” If an accord acceptable to him could be reached, then it would have a chance of being accepted by the rest of the Palestinian leadership. Sharett, an official representative of the Zionist movement, demurred and asked al-ʿAlami to seek authorization from the mufti and from Jamal al-Husayni.Footnote 79 There are no further indications that al-ʿAlami did so. But maybe the circumstances of the talks’ collapse are less important than that there was unwillingness on the part of the official Zionist and LSM leadership to agree to al-ʿAlami's demands, and even had there been such readiness there was practically no interest in a binationalist resolution to the conflict within the leadership of Palestine's Arabs in 1936.
CONCLUSION
The analysis of the Five's 1936 Concord, of the circumstances of its formulation, and of the lack of any movement toward its implementation point to the need to shift the analysis of (as well as attempts to foster) binationalism from blueprints of political-constitutional and electoral frameworks to socioeconomic circumstances and preconditions. The Five made it clear that an agreement on limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine was the key to reaching a Jewish–Arab accord in 1936 but that other conditions relating to land purchase, the employment of Arabs in the Jewish economy, and political parity were required to bring about a “permanent peace between the two people.”Footnote 80
It was not possible, as implied by the approach of the proposed Concord and Memorandum and further elaborated in the drafts by Rutenberg and Frumkin, to have a binational political system based on an exclusivist split labor market and its consequent separate national economies. No constitutional system could be expected to temper the economic separation that drove the two communities apart. An economic system in which Palestinian Arab tenants were not threatened with dispossession and agricultural workers and administrators found employment in the Jewish economy was needed to fashion the type of shared interests that would assuage national divisions. Two national communities cannot be connected solely at their political apex; socioeconomic integration has to be part of their members’ everyday lives and give each a stake in the prosperity and further development of both by forming spheres of overlapping interests and aspirations. It is in ha-Shomer ha-Tzaʿir's submission to the Anglo-American Committee in 1946 that we find the following fateful, but unavoidable, conclusion: “The road of economic separation lead[s] to political calamity.”Footnote 81
A brief contrast with South Africa, where the resolution of the split labor market was so different, will help clarify this point. In South Africa, the allocation of employment according to a color bar created two racial castes of employees who nevertheless formed a single economy. Apartheid erected its residential and social segregation atop this unified economy. In the South African economy, as Heribert Adam and others have explained, the races remained interdependent.Footnote 82 The ultimate elimination of the color bar and apartheid left in place a single framework for economic and political life and allowed for the handover of political power from a race-based party to a non-racialist one. In contrast, the LSM's separatist state-building strategy created two economies and, consequently, two separate political architectures. A race-based caste system that emerges from a split labor market, it seems, is potentially conducive to one-state solutions, whether of a civic, binational, or other consociational type, whereas an exclusivist split labor market leading to national separation is not.
Ultimately, the Five's proposal suggested far-reaching changes not only in the Yishuv's economic structure but, indirectly, also in the distribution of its political power, which the LSM found threatening. The Five's capitalist binationalism was fundamentally at loggerheads with the split labor market on which separatist state-building was based and which was the LSM's hallmark. Since the Five's binationalist state could only be fostered by and from within the private sector, influence in a binationalist Yishuv would per force shift from the Histadrut and the LSM in the direction of the civic and middle-class circles. Furthermore, by envisioning that the urban and, especially, the industrial sector would provide the opportunity for an integrated Jewish–Arab economy, the blueprint also challenged the rural focus of the LSM's state-building strategy.
By the time of the Five's initiative, the window for binationalism was just about closed. Within thirteen months, the Royal Peel Commission submitted its recommendation for partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state—effectively favoring the partitioning of territory to the partitioning of sovereignty within a single state. The commission expected the two communities to maintain close economic ties, but the intercommunal violence that originated with the Arab Revolt had already unraveled the threads of the Jewish–Arab socioeconomic fabric that existed in the private Jewish sector at the time of its outbreak.
The long-running Arab strike emptied Jewish enterprises and offices of their Arab employees. The Jewish citrus growers who wanted cheap Arab workers and the industrialists who sought larger markets suffered, while the separate economic sector of the LSM was strengthened. Jewish employers seeking to replace their Arab with Jewish workers had to rely more and more on the labor bureaus of the LSM. But since the import of private capital declined while immigration continued at a rapid pace they had to compete with the Histadrut, which provided more and more employment. The construction industry, a significant part of which used to be in private hands, also began relying on public capital. The clearest indication of the Histadrut's strengthening was the recovery of its flagship company Solel Boneh, which had almost collapsed in the late 1920s.Footnote 83 For the first time, the Haganah was invited to guard Jewish rural settlements that did not belong to the LSM, and it thus became a national security organization.Footnote 84 Continued Jewish colonization through the “Stockade and Watchtower” type settlement in the teeth of Palestinian Arab opposition further enhanced the LSM's national standing by demonstrating that its type of separatist colonization still offered an effective state-building method.
In sum, after 1936 the control over labor, capital, settlement, and security enjoyed by the LSM and its public institutions expanded into the private sector and assumed truly national dimensions. The Arab Revolt, the mounting boycotts, and violent intercommunal attacks polarized the Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities and enhanced their separation, thus indirectly favoring the LSM's state-building strategy. Beyond the economic divisions, separatist state-building had generated another characteristic: deep-seated mistrust. Albert Hourani, a representative of the Arab Office to the Anglo-American Commission, highlighted this lacuna in his March 1946 testimony: “A binational state of the kind that Dr Magnes suggests can only work if a certain spirit of cooperation and trust exists and if there is an underlying sense of unity to neutralize communal differences. But that spirit does not exist in Palestine . . .”Footnote 85 This lack of trust was already evident in the divergent interpretations of the Five's Concord by the Jewish and Arab sides.
The largest faction of Mapai's Central Committee, as we have seen, considered binationalism to be not a permanent resolution of the national conflict but rather a lull in it. Katznelson viewed the Five's Concord as a “cease fire”; Sharett considered it a “phase” rather than the architecture of future Jewish–Arab relations. They interpreted binationalism as a five-year concession, and even the moderate Shprintzak concurred that the proposed blueprint did not require the Zionist movement to forego its goal of creating a Jewish majority in Palestine.Footnote 86 Their response strongly suggests that the LSM remained wedded to the exclusivist national goal of Jewish sovereignty based on a Jewish majority. But al-ʿAlami was no different. His support for parity in the Legislative Council was predicated on reducing Jewish immigration and keeping Jews at no more than 40 percent of Palestine's population. Al-ʿAlami's position as a binationalist was self-contradictory, as Rutenberg pointed out at the time; after all, Jewish immigration needed to be limited only in the absence of binationalism, but if a binationalist approach was adopted by both sides, then the number of the immigrants and majority/minority relations became immaterial.Footnote 87 Al-ʿAlami, in fact, wanted both binationalism and a Palestinian majority.
While the Five were binationalists, the Zionist leadership's mixed response and refusal to follow the course the Concord sought to chart shows that it was not. But the fact that even al-ʿAlami, the most moderate Palestinian Arab by his own declaration, was not a bona fide binationalist should not surprise us. There was little, if any, binationalist sentiment among the Arabs of Palestine at the time. The reason for their indifference to binationalism was, simply put, that during the Mandatory era Palestinian Arabs were favored by their majority status. Under democratic political doctrine they were the legitimate claimants to sovereignty as the majority, and seeking to hold on to majority status was what territorial nations per force do. Binationalism, in short, is the credo of the minority. This was well recognized by the Zionist side, as cogently expressed in Katznelson's words that “an average young Arab will not follow the path to a binational state, as long as he has a one-national one.”Footnote 88
Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, at the head of the Arab High Committee, rejected even the MacDonald White Paper, which set a quota of 100,000 immigrants for the years from 1940 to 1944—that is, only 20,000 per annum for five years—and replaced the partition plan with an independent Palestine governed by Arabs and Jews in proportion to their numbers in 1949. The Arab High Committee demanded the repudiation of the Jewish National Home policy altogether and a complete and final prohibition of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Al-Husayni's views, as we know, were not shared by the entire Palestinian leadership, but such reservations did not indicate an interest in a Palestinian version of binationalism. The White Paper coincidentally was made public on the day of Kristalnacht. The tragedy of the debate over immigration was that just when Jews desperately needed a place of refuge, Palestine's Arab population became fearful of losing its majority status in the country. The words of Arthur Ruppin, the sole sociologist and probably the most careful analyst of the coterie of the humanist binationalist intellectuals, summarized the critical weakness at the heart of binationalism: “What we can obtain [from the Arabs] we do not need, and what we need we shall not be able to obtain.”Footnote 89
Binationalism was haunted by a paradox that is manifested in the havoc its two-stage program wreaks on the potential of building trust between the contending communities. In the first stage, the majority is asked to treat the minority as its equal in return for which, in the second stage, the erstwhile minority's truest promise is not to exploit its newly created demographic majority and to treat the once-majority and the now-minority equally. But the continued attempt of the minority to transform itself into the majority within the binationalist framework it proposed generates understandable anxiety in the majority, as large-scale Jewish immigration after Hitler's rise to power did among Palestinian Arabs. Binationalism, born out of the economic separation in Mandatory Palestine and the profound mistrust it bred, could not foster the integration and the ensuing trust that should have been present as the prerequisites for its flourishing.
