The Link: January-March 2015

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January-March 2015

The Link Published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Inc.

Volume 48, Issue 1 Link Archives: www.ameu.org

The Window ressers:

The Signatories of Israel’s Proclamation of Independence

By Ilan Pappe

(Continued on Page 3.)

On Friday, May 14, 1948, the members of the “People’s Council,”

the makeshift parliament of the Jewish community in Palestine,

convened in Tel-Aviv to listen to David Ben- Gurion read aloud

Israel’s Proclamation of Independence.

The reading was broadcast on local radio and heard around the

world. In years to come, it would be treated in Israel as an unwrittenconstitution that had no binding legal powers but provided moral

guidance for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

Its model was the American Constitution and in order to adapt it to



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AMEU Boardof Directors

Jane Adas (Vice President )

Elizabeth D. Barlow

Edward Dillon

Rod Driver

John Goelet

David Grimland

Richard Hobson ( Treasurer )

Anne R. Joyce

Hon. Robert V. Keeley

Kendall Landis

Robert L. Norberg (President )

Hon. Edward L. Peck

Donald L. SnookRosmarie Sunderland

James M. Wall

AMEU NationalCouncil

Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr.

William R. Chandler

Kathleen Christison

Paul Findley

Moorhead Kennedy

Ann KerrNancy Lapp

George E. Mendenhall

Mary Norton

Don W. Wagner

Executive DirectorJohn F. Mahoney

In discussing Israel’s upcomingelections this March, AmosYadlin, Israel’s former chief ofdefense intelligence, was quotedin The New York Times as sayingthat Israel’s political center needsto run on the core values of itsfounding prime minister, DavidBen-Gurion. Thatis, it needs to runon building “astate that has a

Jewish majority, astate that is dem-ocratic where allits citizens areequal.”

Ah, but there’sthe rub: Can the

Jewish state beboth Jewish anddemocratic?

For the answerto that question, our feature writ-er Ilan Pappe goes back to May14, 1948, back to David Ben-Gurion, and back to the signers ofIsrael’s Declaration of Independ-ence.

Pappe, an Israeli historian, cur-rently teaches at Exeter Universi-ty in England, where he directsthe European Center for PalestineStudies, and co-directs the Center

for Ethno-Political Studies.Before he went to Exeter in 2008,he had been teaching at the Uni-versity of Haifa, where his en-dorsement of the boycott of Israeliuniversities led to the call for hisresignation by the university’spresident. It also led to his con-

About This Issue

demnation in the Knesset, Israel’s

parliament, and to several deaththreats.This is Pappe’s third article for

The Link. His first, our Jan.-March,1998 issue “ What ReallyHappenedFifty Years Ago?,” was followed by

our April-May,2008 issue “State ofDenial: Israel, 1948-2008.”

On page 15, welist several booksand videos rele-vant to our presenttopic, includingPappe’s signaturework “The EthnicCleansing of Pales-tine.”

We also invite our readers tovisit our redesigned website:www.ameu.org. There you willfind every Link issue going back to1968, as well as rare monographs,such as Dr. Fayez Sayegh’s criticalanalysis of the Camp David Ac-cords. All are easily downloadablein pdf format. The site also con-tains a listing of books for sale atdiscount prices, many now out-of-print. Also, there is a short, ani-mated video presentation of thePalestinian-Israeli question, pre-pared by Jewish Voice for Peace.

John F. MahoneyExecutive Director

Ilan Pappe



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that document an American Jew, an academicscholar and a rabbi, Shalom Zvi Davidowitz, joined the team that articulated the final draft of

the proclamation.The proclamation summarizes the consensu-al Zionist narrative of the day, with all its princi-pal fabrications, historical distortions and totaldenial of the native population and its fate. Andyet miraculously, without any explanation,twice in the proclamation the natives are men-tioned, as if they appeared out of the blue. Firstthey are referred to as the people who benefitedfrom the Zionist endeavour in Palestine that

made the desert bloom and modernized theprimitive land beyond recognition. More im-portantly, they are alluded to as future citizensof the Jewish State whose treatment in the futurewould prove that the Zionist movement found-ed the only democracy in the Middle East.

Here is the relevant paragraph:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingatheringof the Exiles; it will foster the development

of the country for the benefit of all its in-habitants; it will be based on freedom, jus-tice and peace as envisaged by the prophetsof Israel; it will ensure complete equality ofsocial and political rights to all its inhabit-ants irrespective of religion, race or sex; itwill guarantee freedom of religion, con-science, language, education and culture; itwill safeguard the Holy Places of all reli-

gions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

This particular paragraph was the windowdressing aimed at safeguarding Israel’s futureinternational image and status. While the histor-ical narrative in the proclamation described ac-curately the international complacency in thedispossession of Palestine, it also incurred thepromise that this colonialist act would be re-deemed by the foundation of the only democra-cy in the Middle East.

That promise of a democracy is not the rea-son why members of the international commu-nity still support Israel today or at least turn ablind eye to its criminal policies vis-à-vis thePalestinians. Their reasons for doing so are

complex and this is not the place to explorethem. But this pledge to democracy is the con-venient pretext for Jews around the world, liber-als, socialists and democrats in the West andtheir counterparts inside Israel, for providingthe immunity other states would never enjoyhad they pursued similar policies.

The main litmus test, as offered by the proc-lamation itself, for examining the democratic na-ture of the future state is the treatment of thenon-Jewish minority in its midst.

By itself this was a problematic notion inthat, even as the final draft was being written,that minority was being subjected to an ethniccleansing operation that had begun threemonths earlier. And quite a few of those signingthe proclamation were privy to the plans tocomplete the ethnic cleansing operation in sucha way that it would be very easy to grant rightsto a minority that would not be there.

In any event, the document proved more im-portant than intended as a small minority didremain in the Jewish state. Much larger than ex-pected probably because the locals showedsteadfastness, were partially protected by Arabtroops, and benefitted at the end of the dayfrom the fatigue of an army that was by the endof 1948 too stretched and too exhausted to com-plete the job.

As we shall see some of the signatories want-ed to rectify this by further ethnic cleansing op-erations, but the majority reconciled to the pres-ence of a Palestinian minority and imposed aharsh military rule on it so as to ensure that its“rights” do not clash with the ethnic identityand ideology of the Jewish state.

Thus in many ways the proclamation wasborn in sin. It was drafted while Jewish forces

(Continued from Page 1.)



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were ethnically cleansing most of Palestine’stowns but before they had to face troops fromthe Arab world sent by an enraged public opin-ion in the region demanding its reluctant gov-ernments put an end to the onslaught that had

already caused hundreds of thousands of refu-gees and hundreds of massacred PalestiniansIn the end, the proclamation, written as if an

ethnic state can be a democratic one, was thebiggest exercise ever in squaring the circle onpaper. It can of course be done with words.There is a Hebrew adage: “the paper toleratesanything.” The reality, however, is that even be-fore the ink dried on the paper, up until today,the circle cannot be squared and a project such

as the Jewish state is either democratic or ethnic—it cannot be both.This article focuses on the 35 men and two

women who signed this document. Most camefrom Eastern Europe, from cultures and coun-tries that had no democratic tradition and from asecluded Jewish life, religious in nature, full ofsuspicion of the gentiles. Their presence in Pal-estine was also a rebellion against this form oflife and therefore, by the time they signed the

document, they were far more secular, more self-assertive and self-sufficient than their parents.But they regarded all these traits as far more

important than being democratic. Long beforethe proclamation was declared, most of themdepicted the native Palestinians as a physical ob-stacle that had to be conquered and removedlike the rocks and swamps of the land.

Three of them came from Germany and Swit-zerland and reflected a more genuine interest in

democracy but succumbed easily to the convic-tion of their Eastern European counterparts thatit was best to have the first democratic electionafter the parts of the electorate that were not Jewish were removed from the new state.

There was one American Jew among themand two Jews who were born in Palestine. Thelatter represented the harmonic and peaceful re-ality of pre-Zionist Palestine where your religion

or ethnicity did not play a major role in the wayyou treated your neighbor or the land itself. OneArab Jew came from Yemen.

Four of the signatories, at least on paper,were not Zionists —one a member of the com-munist party and three of the ultra orthodoxparties.

It is hard to know whether any of these sign-ers were cognizant of the charade they were per-forming, and harder still to believe they weregenuinely convinced they could square the cir-cle.

I would like to look at their actions beforeand after the proclamation in order to examinetheir relationship with democracy and its values.They were invited to sign not as individuals butas representatives of the various political fac-tions and parties in the Zionist community andtherefore, even if they were quite insignificantpersonalities, and some of them were, they em-bodied the many Zionist attempts to square thecircle of a Jewish democratic state.

The proclamation was hailed as a democraticdocument but it is only recently and with thebenefit of historical hindsight that we appreciatehow similar it is to another document that wasproclaimed in the very same year and preparedby a similar settler colonialist community at theSouthern tip of Africa. There the Afrikaner na-tionalist party publicized an election platformthat was the basis for the apartheid legislationand official proclamation of South Africa as anapartheid state. Both settler societies believedthat only a supremacist apartheid state wouldenable a community of white Europeans to con-tinue the dispossession of the native populationand take over what the land had to offer. Theone in Palestine felt it had to disguise this ambi-tion with a democratic window dressing and,until recently, it seemed to do the trick —but forhow long?

So, how genuine was their effort to reconcilethe irreconcilable and how much was it a PR ex-



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ercise, aimed mainly at an international audi-ence? Some of them did not live long enough tosee what Israel became and their impact after1948 was limited; others played a crucial role inhow the state was shaped in relation to the proc-

lamation’s promise of democracy. It is possible,with very few exceptions, to surmise what theirfuture attitudes would be when these peoplewere judged according to their roles in the past.These past biographies are also taken into ac-count in this prosopographic analysis of Israel’sfounding fathers and mothers.

I have not included all of them. I left out theultra-Orthodox Jews as they were less relevantto the issue at hand, and skipped some of the

less significant apparatchiks of MAPAI, the rul-ing Labour movement. But most of them arehere.

The Leader: David Ben-GurionIf anyone epitomized, almost in a brutal way,

the newspeak of the Proclamation of Independ-ence and its impossible vision of a Jewish de-mocracy, it was this man who led the Zionistmovement to that historical moment on May 14,

1948. His name tops the list on the original docu-ment.In many ways the past was behind him and

his political future was a downhill road from thecenter to the periphery. But the edifice he built,in terms of his, and his movement’s geograph-ical and demographic ambitions, was solid. TheZionist movement took over nearly eighty per-cent of Palestine, kicking out almost one millionPalestinians and ending up with almost an ex-

clusive majority in the new state.From Ben Gurion’s perspective, however,

Zionism in 1948 was only on solid geographical,not demographic grounds. The movement in-deed took over Palestine, be it without the WestBank and the Gaza Strip, but was still in hisview caught in a nightmarish demographic real-ity because of the presence of about 150,000 Pal-estinians within the Jewish State.

One should say that thisphobic and hysterical vi-sion was not fully sharedby his other colleagues,although they subscribed

to the same racist ideologythat robbed the Palestini-ans of any right to theirhomeland and regardedtheir presence at best astolerable and at worst as apotential danger. Most of

the Israeli leaders could tolerate the Palestiniansleft inside Israel as second rate citizens. But notDavid Ben-Gurion; he was obsessed with the

fact that the country was not free of Arabs andtherefore insisted that the Palestinians inside Is-rael be put under military rule, one that not onlyrobbed them of all elementary civil rights, butalso incarcerated them in the places they livedin—not allowing them to move was the secondbest option for the ethnic cleanser of Palestine.Only after his term as a prime minister ended in1963 was the road open for the abolition of themilitary rule in 1966 and its transfer a year laterto the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where to-day it is practiced in a more sophisticated, butequally brutal, way.

His demographic paranoia informed Ben-Gurion’s ideas of democracy. That is why, whilehe was in office until 1963, he resisted all pres-sures to occupy the West Bank, and why, after1967, he urged the government to leave the WestBank as soon as it could (apart from Jerusalem).He wanted to maintain an Israel which is disloy-al to genuine democracy but can still be deemedas such by the world at large. He asserted thatthe charade could only be sustained as long asthe Jews retain a significant majority in the state.

Ben-Gurion also wished for a less corrupt,more modest and yet predominantly European Jewish state. One assumes he would have con-sidered the leaders who followed him did not fitthe bill. Their life style was not his. Those who

David Ben-Gurion



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followed lived as super millionaires, adding per-sonal corruption to the moral one.

And he would have welcomed the almostcomplete de-Arabization of the Arab Jewswhom, due to his racist and orientalist view, heat first saw as Arabs; in this respect his legacywas kept and implemented.

So as our first case study, Ben- Gurion‘s ac-tions, and those of most of his co-signatories, arethe principal yardstick through which we exam-ine the claim made in the proclamation that in1948 a Jewish democratic state was declared andbuilt on the ruins of Palestine. Scholars in thiscentury tend to deconstruct texts in order to ex-pose the real motives and viewpoints behind no-ble ideas when they suspect the authenticity andsincerity of the authors of these texts. In ourcase, we can safely say that there is no need for acomplex and subtle reading of texts but rather aclose scrutiny of the actions taken on the groundto cast doubt about Zionist candor when itcomes to democratic values in the new state ofIsrael.

The Mayor: Daniel Auster

As the mayor of Jerusalem during the lastdays of the Mandate, Daniel Auster watchedhow potential Palestinian citizens of the demo-cratic Jewish state were expelled from the West-ern neighborhoods of the city and the surround-ing villages —including his deputy Husyan al-Khalidi who served under him in an Arab- Jewish city that, in comparison to our times,was a haven of tolerance, multiculturalism andcoexistence.

Auster served once more as mayor until1950, and in his last term in office he was partic-ularly instrumental in erasing the memory of thePalestinians from neighbourhoods in the West-ern city, mainly through the destruction ofbuildings, renaming of streets, and the encour-agement for Jewish immigrants to take over Pal-estinians’ homes.

Those homes were among the ones that usedto host the political, cul-tural and financial elitesof the Palestinians whonow found themselves

dispersed during the Nak-ba, the Palestinian Catas-trophe of 1948.

Their descendants wereable to rebuild some sortof a center during the Jor-danian rule over the East-ern city, and even a Palestinian center under Is-raeli occupation in the late 1980s and early1990s, with the activity of Orient House under

Faysal al-Husayni, as its locus.Today that center has been totally emptied

by the physical separation of East Jerusalemfrom the West Bank and the intensive Judaiza-tion of the Eastern parts of the city.

The Socialists: Mordechai Bentov, Zvi Luria, Nahum Nir Rafalkes and AharonZisling

These four were members of the Zionist leftparty Mapam, the second biggest party in thefirst 1949 elections.

The party had a youth movement, HashomeHazair , based in the Kibbutzim, and a paramili-tary force, the PALMACH (acronym for stormtroopers), who were the commando units of the Jewish force in 1948 Palestine, taking on a cru-cial role in the ethnic cleansing of the countryfrom its native Palestinian population.

Bentov epitomized the trials and tribulationsof a political movement that was hard core so-cialist, and at times even Stalinist, in its socioeco-nomic worldview.

But it became brutally nationalist whenasked to practice these ideologies in the demo-graphic reality of Palestine, where Jews werethe settlers and the minority in the land.

Like so many Zionist leaders, Bentov He-

Daniel Auster



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brewized his name which literally meant goodmoney in German, Gutgeld, and turned it intogood son (Ben Tov). Like Auster he was born inEastern Europe and was one of theleaders of Hashomer Hazair in Eastern

Europe. The idea that socialism couldnot be universal but had to be Zionistwas another attempt at squaring a cir-cle. Critical communists already notedin the beginning of the 20 th centurythat the insistence of having a particu-lar Jewish angle to a universalistmovement was a paradoxical claim.Either you were a universalist —andbelieved in the equality of all workers

and human beings regardless of their national,ethnic or religious identity, or you were con-cerned with the wellbeing of your group alone(as nationalists are). Even Zionist Jews demand-ing a particular Jewish angle to international so-cialism, the Bund, were regarded by hardcorecommunists as Zionists who feared sea sicknessand thus stayed in Europe and did not immi-grate to Palestine. Critical sociology later onshowed how socialists in the Zionist movementbecame more Zionist than socialist to the pointwhere eventually their socialism was emptied ofany genuine content and allowed the Israelieconomy to become one of the extreme exam-ples of capitalism in our time.

But before that happened, Bentov was lead-ing a group of thinkers in his movement whoattempted to settle some of the contradictionsinherited in creating a Jewish SocialistDemocratic state, by calling for thefoundation of a bi-national state inPalestine.

This idea has been revived of lateand seems to be more relevant afterthe dispossession of Palestine has beenhalf completed and there is now athird generation of Jewish settlers onthe land. Bentov tried to persuade theinternational community of the logic

of this idea as an alternative to the Zionist main-stream insistence on partitioning Palestine. Heand his friends submitted such a proposal to the

Anglo-American committee of 1946,whose recommendations have long

been forgotten apart from the fatalblow it dealt the Palestinian communi-ty by insisting that the fate of the Jewsin Europe was closely linked to the Zi-onist project in Palestine. Because ofthat the vast majority enjoyed by thenative Palestinians, which should havebeen the basis for a democracy in Pal-estine, was totally ignored by the in-ternational community that opted for

an impossible partition plan that resulted in thecreation of an ethnic Jewish state over much ofPalestine and the ethnic cleansing of half itspopulation.

Bentov was a low key politician after 1948who, until his death in 1985, tried hard as a writ-er to square the circle of socialism and Zionism.

Aharon Zisling underwent a different trajec-tory before joining MAPAM. He was a veteranof one of the old kibbutzim, Ein Harod, where

his family is still today.The Kibbutz conveyed a bizarre mixture of

socialist nationalism. To this day, it acts as a for-tress challenging Israel’s neo -liberal economy,while at the same time it is a hotbed of hawkishnationalist ideology that envisages a greater Is-rael over the whole of mandatory Palestine as

the only solution to the conflict.This mixture of extreme settler colo-

nialism with a puritan way of collec-tive life reminds us of other settler col-onies in the world where humble,modest and very tough people were atthe forefront of a project which aimedat the destruction of the native popula-tion. And it always brings home a bit-ter truth when history is viewed fromthe victim’s point of view: when theboot of the settler is on the native’s

Mordechai Bentov

Aharon Zisling



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face, he does not care whether the settler is car-rying the bible or the book of Marx. When youare at the receiving end of the settler colonialistproject aimed at your destruction, the ideologi-cal justification can hardly be of any real interest

for you; your only concern is removing the bootfrom your face.

The President: Yitzhak Ben ZviBen Zvi, the second president of Israel, was

a leading figure in the Zionist movement until1948. With such a prominent position his impactwas vast on many aspects of life in the Jewishstate. But when viewed from the perspective ofthis article, it is best to assess his impact through

the activities today of the scholarly institute thatcarries his name, the Yad Ben Zvi Institute.He founded the institute as an orientalist re-

search center in 1947. After his death in 1979, itsfocus changed to Zionist studies. Today it pub-lishes several of the leading academic journals inHebrew on the history of Palestine throughoutthe ages. As such, it isdevoted to providing thescholarly scaffolding to

the Zionist narrative, anexercise much appreciat-ed in the West until the1980s, but one which inrecent years is regardedwith greater scepticism asa parochial scholarly ef-fort at best and as pureZionist propaganda atworst.

Ben Zvi himself, apart from his political ac-tivity, devoted much of his time to proving thesame points that his institute is looking to sub-stantiate.

The gist of this effort is to blow out of all pro-portion the importance of the Jewish presence inPalestine in the last two thousand years and toreduce the Palestinian community to a group ofnomads with little, if any, impact on the “land

without a people.” This narrative is includedalmost word for word in the proclamation itself.

Ben Zvi’s public activity as a president, onthe other hand, showed a wish to ease the harshconditions under which the Palestinian minoritylived in Israel. And although an Eastern Europe-an Jew, like most of the other signatories, heshowed an exceptional interest in the history ofthe Jewish communities in the Arab world, aninterest reflected in the activity of the institutehe founded. Today that institute divorces these Jews from their cultural environment and Arabidentity and sees their immigration to Palestineas their ultimate destiny and way for salvation.This would form an important part of the de-

Arabization of the Arab Jews in a way that didnot benefit them socially or economically, andleft them bereft of their rich cultural heritage. Inreality, the impressive Jewish communities ofthe Arab world were reduced to marginalitywithin the new Jewish state and had to suffer adegrading process of integration into the EastEuropean settler colonialist state found in 1948,where the main ticket to equality was provinghow un-Arab they succeeded in becoming in the

new state.The Liberals: Eliahu Berlinger, FritzBernstein, Avraham Granovsky (Granot), Moshe Kol and Felix Rosenblüth(Pinchas Rosen)

These were the representatives of the liberalparties of Israel (as distinct from the socialistparties) who would later join forces with the Re-visionists in 1977 to create the Likud. Many of

their members were German Jews as were Bern-stein and Rosenblüth, but there was also a sig-nificant number of central and eastern European Jews such as Kol and Granovsky.

The German Jews in the main were not verypolitical. When they were involved in politics itwas usually as avowed capitalists who succeed-ed in steering the economic system away from

Yitzhak Ben Zvi



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socialist principles. But apart from that they hadlittle impact on the real issues ailing the “Jewishdemocracy,” namely the Palestinian question.

Bernstein was a minister of commerce andindustry in several governments, which en-dowed him with streets named after him in vari-ous cities. His more significant work was donewhile he was still in Germany in the 1920swhere he preached for the immigration of Jewsto Palestine. Like other German Jews who wereZionists, and who did not believe in universalsolutions to the problem of anti-Semitism, theyfound themselves in an unholy alliance with theNazis as both wished to see the Jews leave Ger-many. What they helped to build instead in Pal-

estine may have saved the Jews who left Germa-ny like Bernstein in the 1930s, but the price paidby the native population was a bitter reminderthat one cannot rectify one evil by inflicting an-

other one.All four had to He-

brewize their first andfamily names as a show ofloyalty to the Zionist project. Rosenblüth, who be-

came Rosen, founded theprogressive party to whichall of the four belonged atone time or another. Heepitomized the German Jewish role in the charadethe proclamation authored

in 1948, and provided the legal framework forthe settler colonialist state, disguised as a de-mocracy. Many of his compatriots studied and

practiced law in Germany before coming to Pal-estine and would become scholars of interna-tional repute in the field of law. Rosen himselfbecame a minister of justice and as such didshow every now and then uneasiness with themilitary rule imposed on the Palestinian citizensbetween 1948 to 1966, but it was his office, withothers, that supervised this inhuman and bar-baric structure that robbed the Palestinians of

most of their civil and human rights.The prime achievement of the group Rosen

represented was the Israeli Supreme Court thathas succeeded in being depicted domesticallyand internationally as theonly institution of the Zion-ist state that is purely dem-ocratic and therefore nevereasily tarnished. There is,however, explicit and clearevidence that this verycourt has given the govern-ment its full blessing for itssystematic violation of hu-man and civil rights in the

West Bank and the GazaStrip. It hides behind thefact that the occupied people have the right toapproach it whenever they feel their rights arebeing violated but, alas, on every occasion thatthey have done so, the court has ruled againstthem. Thus the court sanctioned the state’s poli-cies of deportation, demolition of houses, confis-cation of land and occasionally the assassinationof civilians.

Among these four Granovsky was a veteranZionist in Palestine. He was a Moldovan Jewwho was one of the directors, and for a whilechief director, of the Jewish National Fund in the1940s. With his boss, Menachem Usishkin, heoversaw the first stages of the Zionist coloniza-tion in Palestine through the purchase of land,more often than not from absentee landlordswho lived outside Palestine, and which endedwith the eviction of the Palestinian tenants from

their homes and livelihoods. The JNF resortedto more explicit expulsion during the 1948 war.After the foundation of the state he became

the director of Mekorot, the national water com-pany. In his capacity both as a senior executiveof the JNF and later of Mekorot, he must haveknown better than anyone else on the 14 th ofMay, 1948, that equality in front of the law andequality in practice are two different matters.

Fritz Bernstein

Pinchas Rosen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pinchas_Rosen.jpg

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The main activity of the JNF and Mekorot with re-gard to the native popula-tion was a systematic act ofdispossessing them of land

and water, without which apopulation that was mostlyrural and lived in the coun-tryside did not have achance for reasonable exist-ence no matter what the let-ter of the Proclamation or subsequent laws hadto say about equality and democracy.

It is in his early writings back in the 1920s,when he discussed what he called land and na-

tion, where one can see why the best and mostappropriate paradigm for analyzing Zionism issettler colonialism. The mindset in the 1920s wasthat in order to nationalize the land you neededto de-Arabize it. The state founded in 1948 con-tinues to adhere to this principle to this day; themeans at its disposal, however, are now muchmore substantial and lethal and, unlike in the1920s, funded by American taxpayer money.

Granovsky personified this desire also after

1948, overseeing the pillage of Palestinian villag-es and writing passionately of the need to keepthem —many reduced to dust and rubble — inthe hands of the Jewish nation, never to be soldor given to Arabs.

He insisted on legislation that would regu-late this robbery, which led to a ceremonial pur-chase of the abandoned fields, villages, houses,and other properties for a ridiculous sum ofmoney from a state custodian that waited for

two years to see if anyone would reclaim them,then ruled that now they could be sold to thepublic. This legalistic pillage and dispossessionwould be at the heart of the Judaization processin the Galilee and the Negev inside Israel and ofcourse in the settlements’ project in the WestBank and the Gaza Strip. This is the face of Is-rael’s 21 st—century settler state, using the guiseof democracy to legalise ethnic cleansing and

dispossession.

The National Religious Group: Zeev(Wolf) Gold, Zerah Varhaftig , DavidZvi Pinkas, Moshe Shapira and, Yehuda

Leib Hacohen FishmanA significant cohort of signatories came from

the religious national movement, which in thepre-1948 era evolved around the movementHapoel Hamizrahi. (Mizrahi here did not meanoriental as it would in Israel today but rather asynonym for spirituality.)

The movement they belonged to on the dayof the proclamation was very different from itssuccessor today and they themselves underwenta significant ideological transformation after1967 from being a relatively dovish force on thelocal political scene to a signifier of extremeright wing messianic ideology.

The first signatory among them was ZeevGold who was born in Russia but was educatedin the United States and therefore was an im-portant emissary, before 1948 and until his deathin 1956, in recruiting the Conservative syna-gogues in the United State to become embassiesof Israel.

Specifically, his main role was to develop Je-rusalem with the help of Jewish communities inthe United States. So he symbolized in manyways the role American Jews played in ridicul-ing the democratic values articulated in the

proclamation.The easiest targets were

American Jewish commu-

nities, which probably feltthat religion was notenough to identify their Judaism and American cit-izenship not sufficient todefine their nationality.More secular and liberal Jews within the American Jewish community would

Avraham Granovsky

Zeev (Wolf) Gold

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notice as the years went by the impossibility ofcreating a democratic Jewish state.

On the other hand, a vociferous minorityamong them would undergo the same transfor-mation that occurred within the religious nation-al movement in Israel. These individuals immi-grated to Israel after 1967 and became settlers inthe West Bank and the Gaza Strip —an importthat would include Rabbi Meir Kahane, Dr. Ba-ruch Goldstein and other less known American Jewish settlers that to this very day terrorize Pal-estinians in the West Bank, while the army turnsa blind eye when they set fire to fields, uprootolives trees or occasionally shoot Palestinianteenagers.

This trend was already personified in theworks and actions of another one of this cohortof five, Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman. He wasa disciple of Rabbi Cook, the chief ideologue ofmessianic Zionism, and already demanded in1947 the creation of a Jewish state over all ofmandatory Palestine in the name of Judaism not just Zionism. At the time this was a minorityview, but today it is mainstream among reli-gious national Jews.

Moshe Shapira was a more typical repre-sentative of national religious politics before1948. Like his counterparts in the ruling Labour(MAPAI) party, he focused on deeds and less onrhetoric. He oversaw as minister of the interiorthe takeover of what thePalestinians left behindthem after their expulsion:bank accounts, fields,businesses, houses, books

and art —the pillagedspoils of the dispossessed.Although the life of

the Palestinians inside Is-rael was governed by theSecret Service and less bythe Ministry of Interior, itspolicies of discriminationand its share in the op-

pression indicated very early on that in practicethe proclamation’s promise to guard the rightsof the minority would remain on paper. It wasShapira’s office that oversaw the confiscation ofland that denied the basic right Americans have,

for instance to live where they want on landthey own, a right that is denied until this veryday by law and practice in the Jewish state.

The Communist: Meir Vilner

Vilner, the youngest and longest survivingsignatory, represented the Israeli communistparty and was invited to sign both because ofthe party’s support of the U.N. partition resolu-tion and to maintain good relationship with the

USSR. His political biography before and after1948 exposes the complex story of the Jewishmembers in the Palestine Communist party thatbecame the Israeli communist party and thensplit into an Arab and a Jewish one, before reu-niting again under the title of the DemocraticFront for Peace and Equality. His call to end theoccupation and recognize the right of Palestini-ans to a homeland of their own alongside Israelnearly cost him his life in 1967 when a member

of Herut, a right-wing political movement thatevolved into today’s Likud party, tried to assas-sinate him.

Unlike Vilner, however, other members ofthe Communist party were more connected toreality after 1948 and recognized that the partybecame the only home, for a while, for a legiti-mate Palestinian political force within Israel.Palestinians were not allowed to express theirnational identity in pure Palestinian parties or

bodies, but they could do this within a com-munist discourse that was regarded as lessthreatening by the Zionist state after 1948.

The Front today fuses the legacies of Vilnerin an updated manner as a party whose mainelectorate is Palestinian but believes strongly inArab-Jewish cooperation and coexistence as theonly way forward and still puts its faith in hu-man economy as the only way of dealing with

Moshe Shapira

http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAgQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FHaim-Moshe_Shapira&ei=2qeUVOugNbeSsQTUgoDICQ&psig=AFQjCNF-nr9_srzdy0Sbd-ciqOTr-jOq0w&ust=1419114843002862



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the ills of the extreme capitalist system that hasdeveloped in the state.

More importantly, its parliamentary activityis still a questionable achievement in the light ofhow the Jewish state has progressed. The pres-ence of Palestinians inside the Israeli Knessetstill seems to beautify the racist state rather thanbenefit the oppressed minority.

The Revisionists: Herzel Vardi(Rosenblum) Zvi Segal and Ben ZionSternberg

These men represented the Revisionist move-ment that would rule Israel after 1977 until to-

day.Vardi was the most significant among them.He was a Lithuanian Jew, whose claim to famewas his role as Zeev Jabotinsky’s aide in Lon-don. Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist move-ment that regarded not only Palestine but also Jordan as part of a future Jewish state. Vardi,which was a pen name Ben-Gurion gave Rosen-blum, influenced the reality in Israel lessthrough politics and much more through the

printed media. He published the first Hebrewtabloid, Yediot Achronot, before publishing amore serious, and far more right-wing version inthe daily Maariv.

He was the old guard of the revisionist party.This meant almost a fascist love for the state andits symbols, but also a kind of confidence that Jewish moral superiority and genius is so strongthat he and his colleagues were far less obsessedwith demographic balances between Jews and

Arabs, which produced the ethnic cleansing pol-icies of the Labour movement. Israel ’s currentPresident, Reuven Rivlin, is the last vestige ofthis ilk and not surprisingly, supports the ideaof one state which will grant equal citizenshipbut is confident that these citizens, regardless oftheir nationality, will be content to live in a Jew-ish state. This form of romantic nationalism wasaccompanied by a disregard of international

opinion and, in a bizarre way, was less threaten-ing to the native population than the policies ofLabor Zionism that did not talk the talk of de-struction but did walk the walk. Israel of 2015 isrun by a political elite which is a frightening

mixture of both: it talks the racist talk of apart-heid, ethnic cleansing and dispossession andloyally implements it through legislation andbrutal policies, verging on genocide in the caseof the Gaza Strip.

The “Orientals”: Saadia Kovshi

and Bechor Shitrit

In a way these were two Mizrahi Jews in themix, but very different from one another.

Kovshi’s family came from Yemen in the ear-ly 20th century when the Eastern European Jewswere looking for Arabs who were Jews to re-place the cheap Arab laborers who were Mus-lims in the Zionist project. When they arrived,enthusiastically, as religious pilgrims, they werenot allowed to live in the Eastern European Kib-butzim and were treatedas Arabs who had to beseparated from the Euro-pean community. Theirlot had improved by 1948and Kovshi represented aYemenite party in theKnesset and was, withBechor Shitrit, the Miz-rahi fig leaf in this Ash-kenazi project of a Jewishstate.

Shitrit was actually aPalestinian Jew. His family immigrated to Pales-tine from Morocco in the mid-nineteenth centu-ry and settled in Tiberias, where he was born.He typified what can be called the “orientalists”and not just the “orientals” of the Jewish State.He was supposed to help the Eastern Europeansettlers decipher the alien Arab culture sur-rounding them, a role he assumed gladly.

Bechor Shitrit



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One wonders whether he saw the irony that,as gratitude for his “orientalist” knowledge, hewas appointed a minister of the minorities,closely associated with the ministry of police,and he held both positions. Imagine if the af-

fairs of Hispanic, Jewish or African Americanswere officially and exclusively the responsibilityof Homeland Security.

Whatever aspect of life they were dealingwith, the non-Jewish citizens of Israel had totake their business to the Secret Service, the po-lice, or the Minority Ministry. They were the po-tential fifth column and the enemy from within,and because Bechor Shitrit was born as a Pales-tinian Jew who spoke Arabic he was the su-

preme adviser and manager of their affairs. Thepractices he oversaw were probably the worstviolation of any promise or half-promises madein the proclamation and, in fact, they annulledany of its democratic ambitions in a very brutaland forthright manner.

The British were far more appreciative of thisPalestinian Jew and appointed him to be a re-gional judge. But the role of judges in the newstate was reserved for German Jews; Arab Jews

in government were the ones entrusted withrunning the affairs of other Arabs.

The Future Leader: Golda Meir

Golda Meir’s journey into the paradoxes thata Jewish democracy created was best illuminat-ed in her infamous remark when she was theprime minister of Israel that there is no suchthing as the Palestinian people.

She saw with her own eyes the attempt towipe out the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948and then, in 1972, tried to convince the worldthat the deed indeed had been done.

Her real disastrous actions were actually lesson the Palestine front directly and more relatedto Israel’s relationship with Egypt.

Meir dragged Israel unnecessarily into thefiasco of the 1973 war. She was approached

again and again by the Egyptian president,Anwar Sadat, who suggested an Israeli with-drawal from the Sinai Peninsula for either a non-aggression pact or even peace. She did not sharethis information with a wider circle and there-fore knowingly went into the avoidable 1973war which cost the lives of 3,000 Israeli soldiers.And in the war itself, when it was possible toend it earlier, she was looking for a photo finishon proper Egyptian soil — a pointless maneuver

that cost many lives.Later on, she would beremembered as the lastAshkenazi bastionagainst the unwel-comed influence on Is-rael of Arab, and inparticular, North Afri-can Jews.When she encounteredfor the first time theBlack Panther move-

ment of disenchanted, second generation Moroc-can Jews in Jerusalem demanding social justice,emulating the same movement in the U.S.A., shedeclared “They are not nice people.”

Well, alas, many of them are still deprivedsocially and economically and, when they doventure into politics, it is still mostly in anti-Arab and anti-democratic movements.

The Executioner: Mordechai Shatner

Not an impressive figure but one that has tobe mentioned in this context very briefly. Hewas a technocrat in the service of the ruling par-ty. Two of his legacies stand out.

He was the custodian of the Palestinian refu-gees’ property which was sold for a pittance tothe state, the Jewish National Fund and individ-uals. This sale was the final act in the disposses-sion of the Palestinians in the democratic Jewishstate in the 1950s.

His second achievement was the foundingof Upper Nazareth, one of many exclusive Jew-ish towns meant to strangulate the Palestinian

Golda Meir

http://www.biography.com/people/golda-meir-9404859



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citizens in the Galilee by colonizing the areasaround their towns and villages and by Judaiz-ing the space through land confiscation andpressure on Palestinians to leave.

His actions on the ground explain better

than any other of the signatories’ activity whythe proclamation in practice created an apart-heid state inside pre-1967 Israel and why a twostate solution at best would indeed end the mili-tary occupation of the West Bank and the GazaStrip but sanction a racist apartheid state in therest of Palestine.

The Failed Alternative: Moshe SharettFor many years now Moshe Sharett has

symbolized the alternative to David Ben-Gurionas someone who could have steered Israel into adifferent direction. He did toil longer and hard-er than anyone else among the signatories, apartfrom Vilner, to balance the ethnic nature of thestate with a minimal appearance of a democra-cy.

But he lacked Ben- Gurion’s charisma andthose who met him found him quite tediousand at times boring. His dullness explains hisfailure to defeat Ben-Gurion in domestic poli-tics. Even when he became prime minister for ayear and a half, he was not ruling the kingdom.Ben-Gurion maintained an alternative govern-ment in Sdeh Boker, his Kibbutz in the Negev,making sure his hawkish policies that led to theSuez crisis of 1956 would govern the JewishState.

He was the more decent among the LaborZionists, not so much for what he had done un-til 1948, but because of his loyalty to the more

democratic aspirations included in the procla-mation of independence.Had he played a major role, maybe this ar-

ticle would have had a different tone and appre-ciation. But his demise was the demise of anypretence and hope for democracy in the Jewishstate as expressed in the proclamation of inde-pendence.

Ending the CharadeBefore the Knesset dissolved itself in De-

cember 2014, three different versions of a newNationality Law were discussed by this parlia-ment. The three do not differ much from eachother. They define Israel as a Jewish state andexplicate what that means for the non-Jewishpopulation living in the state. The law de-mands Jewish exclusivity in the state’s sym-bols, judicial systems, educational programs,overall values and identity. It does not definewhat is “Jewish” but it is clear that the rightwing’s definition of modern day Zionism isequivalent to “Jewish.” The law has not as yetpassed, but has a good chance of passing after

the May 2015 elections (depending on the re-sults of these elections).The law is meant to deny any non-Jewish

group (the Palestinians are one fifth of thepopulation and once the West Bank, or part ofit, will be annexed, their percentage will bemuch higher) any representation, impact orfull collective rights in the Jewish State. It alsoadds more weight to the racist laws alreadypassed since 2010 which discriminate againstPalestinians in the state on an individual basis:land ownership, living spaces, occupationalinfrastructure, education, health, freedom ofmovement and freedom of expression; toname but few.

All three drafts refer to the Proclamationof Independence as its source of inspiration. Inthe spirit of this article, it is these legislatorswho got it right when they deemed the sub-text of the proclamation as calling on the fu-ture leaders of the state of Israel to regard de-

mocracy, human and civil rights as a charadeand the foundation of an ethnic, racist, Jewishstate as the only reasonable and inevitableoutcome of the Zionist colonization of Pales-tine. ■



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