ZIONISM AND THE ARABS An American Jewish Dilemma, 1898-1948 Rafael M edojf Westport, Connecticut London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Medoff, Rafael 1959- Zionism and the Arabs : an American Jewish dilemma/1898-1948 Rafael Medoff. p. cm. \ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-95824-8 (alk. paper) 1. Zionism—United States—History. 2. Jewish-Arab relations—1917-1949. 3. Jews—United States—Identity. 4. United States—Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS149.5.U6M33 1997 320.54'095694—DC21 96-47482 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1997 by Rafael Medoff All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-47482 ISBN: 0-275-95824-8 First published in 1997 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church 1 2. The Arabs of Palestine: What Early American Zionist Leaders Believed 9 3. Delaying Democracy for the Sake of Zionism 21 4. Playgrounds and Universities: Early American Zionist Attempts to Improve Arab-Jewish Relations 33 5. Zionism and Democracy in the Wake of the 1929 Riots: The View from America 51 6. JusticeJBrandeis' Scholarship Fund 75 7. The Rise and Fall of Hadassah's Committee on Arab-Jewish Relations 95 8. American Zionist Leaders and the Palestinian Arabs During World War II 113 9. From Demographic Dilemma to Refugee Problem 139 10. Between Survival and Assimilation 161 Selected Bibliography 167 Index 183 Acknowledgments This study has benefited greatly from the advice of my teacher, colleague, and friend, Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock, whose suggestions helped guide the manuscript as it evolved from a Ph.D. dissertation to its present form. Professors Marc Lee Raphael and Monty Noam Penkower, as members of the dissertation committee, likewise offered numerous helpful insights. I am indebted to the gracious staff members of the many archival institutions whose collections were examined during the research for this book, including: Jack Sutters of the American Friends Service Comniittee Archives; Dr. Abraham Peck, Kevin Proffitt, and Fannie Zelcer o£ the American Jewish Archives; Holly Snyder and Gina Hsin of the American Jewish Historical Society; Michele Anish of the American Jewish Committee Archives; Denise Gluck of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives; Jonathan Kraus and Aviva Ostrinsky of the Annenberg Research Institute; the staff of the Archives of Religious Zionism; Yoram Mayorek of the Central Zionist Archives; John Aubry and Linda Wright of the Columbia University Library; Deborah Marrone of the Special Collections Division of the Georgetown University Library; Ira Daly of the Hadassah Archives; Dwight Miller and Dale Mayer of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library; the staff of the Jabotinsky Institute (Metzudat Ze'ev); researcher Eliot Kramer at the Jewish National Library (Hebrew University); the staff of the Jewish Theological Seminary Archives; John Mark Lambertson of the Kansas State Historical Society; David Wigdor of the Library of Congress; Thomas L. Owen of the University viii Acknowledgments Archives and Records Center at the University of Louisville; William Walsh and Judith Thorne of the National Archives; Andrew Norman, who graciously permitted me to examine his father's papers; the staff of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives; the staff of the Firestone Library at Princeton University; Dr. Meryl Foster of the Public Record Office (London); Ray Teichman of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Claudia Z. Fechter of The Temple Library; Seth Kasten of the Union Theological Seminary Library and Archives; M. Latrique of the United Nations Archives; Nehama Chalom and Thelma Jaffee of the Weizmann Archives; the staff of the Yale University Library; the staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; and Esther Togman of the Zionist Archives and Library. Mordechai Haller, attorney and scholar, provided invaluable research assistance at several of these institutions. Portions of the research for this book were facilitated by the generous assistance of the American Jewish Archives, where I served as a Marguerite R. Jacobs Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellow in American Jewish Studies during 1993-1994; the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University, which provided a research grant during 1991-1992; the Herbert Hoover Presidential Association, under whose auspices I served as a Hoover Scholar during 1988-1989; and the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, which granted me a Graduate Fellowship at Hebrew University during 1986-1987. I am also grateful to Nina Pearlstein and Matthew Christianson of Praeger Publishers for their assistance. This book is dedicated to my wife, Carin; in the words of Ayshet Hayil, "Many women have excelled, but you are above them all." Chapter 1 The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church There were many places that a prominent American Jewish philanthropist might find himself on a brilliant Sunday morning in the spring of 1929, and church was the least likely of them. Yet there in the stately pews of lower Manhattan's Community Church, on Sunday, April 7, sat the dapper, 81-year old Nathan Straus and his wife, Lina. The son of a German Jewish immigrant who eked out a living as a peddler, Nathan Straus had worked his way up the socioeconomic ladder to make a fortune as part-owner of the Macy's and Abraham & Straus department stores. Along the way, he became a passionate advocate of health care issues, particularly the cause of pasteurized milk, and in the aftermath of World War I, Straus exported his health care agenda to the Middle East, establishing a Louis Pasteur Institute in Palestine along with a string of health centers. In gratitude for his philanthropic efforts, a new Jewish settlement—today a bustling Israeli city—Netanya, was named in Straus' honor. How did Straus end up in church that spring morning in 1929? American Jewish leaders saw Straus' prominence, wealth, and interest in the Holy Land as assets in their effort to win public support for the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)—the leading American Jewish group favoring a Palestine homeland—urged the Strauses to sponsor a visit to Palestine by the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York's Community Church and one of the leading Protestant ministers of the time. Holmes "will come home and 2 ZIONISM AND THE ARABS be the next best ambassador of Palestine after you," Wise assured them.1 The Strauses consented. In February 1929, the Reverend Holmes arrived in the Holy Land, where he marveled at the rise of new Jewish cities like Tel Aviv. "This vigorous young city of the Jewish renaissance" is "nearer 100 percent Jewish than Ivory Soap is 100 percent pure," he wrote.2 Naturally he visited Netanya and several of the Straus health centers. He also surveyed a number of the pioneering Jewish agricultural settlements around the country and the new Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not to mention the various Christian religious sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. Judging by Holmes' letters from Palestine, it seemed to the Strauses that the minister had been deeply impressed by the Jewish colonization efforts. They returned to New York secure in the belief that they had helped win an important new convert to the Zionist dream of a Jewish national home. Then came the bad news. The Strauses were relaxing at home on Saturday afternoon, April 6, when their friend, the veteran Zionist leader Julian Mack, stopped by unexpectedly. He had just come from a meeting with the Reverend Holmes, where he had been shocked to discover that Holmes had returned from his Mideast junket with some unnerving ideas about the future of the Holy Land. Holmes had confided to Mack that while he was favorably impressed by the Zionist development efforts, he was also concerned about the position of the Arabs in Palestine. During his visit, Holmes had met with a delegation of Palestinian Arab leaders who complained about "the lack of representative institutions in the country." Holmes' democratic sensibilities were rattled. There were (according to the 1929 census) nearly 800,000 Arabs in Palestine and only 156,000 Jews; shouldn't the majority have a right to decide the country's fate? The question of democracy in Palestine was, however, more than a matter of simply counting Arabs and Jews. It was tangled in a web of historical, religious, and ethnic rights and claims, ancient and modern. The Holy Land had been the Jewish national homeland for more than a thousand years until the Jews had been expelled by Rome in the first century CE. Jews around the world had prayed, hoped, and dreamed to return to Zion throughout nearly two thousand years of dispersion. Anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s drove modest numbers of Jewish immigrants to resettle Palestine, which was then a desolate comer of the Turkish Empire. Jewish development of the country in turn attracted Arab immigrants in search of employment opportunities. In the midst of World War I, as British troops advanced on Turkish positions in the Levant, the young Zionist movement, seeking international support for the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, persuaded London to issue the Balfour The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church 3 Declaration, which pledged that England would facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land. After the British won Palestine from the Turks, the League of Nations, in 1920 officially conferred the Palestine Mandate upon England, entrusting it with the development of the country until its residents were capable of self- government. The British, convinced that the Arabs were not politically or culturally ready for democratic self-rule, hunkered down for a long stay in a territory that they perceived as vital to England's strategic interests in the Mediterranean. The Reverend Holmes would not countenance London's insistence that the Palestinian Arabs were not ready for democratic institutions. As an American, Holmes told Mack, he could not accept Palestine's lack of democracy; he had decided to raise the issue both in a book he was writing about Palestine and in a series of sermons he was planning to deliver on the subject.3 Mack was horrified: Arabs constituted more than 80 percent of Palestine's population, and if a democratic system of government were introduced in the near future, they would be able to smother Zionism at the ballot box. He hurried to relay the news to the Strauses that Saturday, and they immediately resolved to confront Holmes face-to-face. It would be a serious embarrassment if an American minister were to publicly challenge the Zionist movement's position on the matter of democracy in Palestine. It could even raise invidious questions about whether or not American Zionists were loyal to the American concept of democracy. The Strauses were determined to "set Holmes straight," even if that meant sitting through Sunday morning services at the Community Church. But the Strauses were to be disappointed. Holmes had taken that Sunday off, and the Strauses soon discovered that "unluckily, a stranger occupied the pulpit." They left the church dejected, and traveled uptown to Stephen Wise's home, only to find that Wise, too, was away. Lina left him a note. "It is obvious to us what the consequences would be [in Palestine] with the Arabs outnumbering the Jews with such a vast majority of votes," she explained. "But it evidently does not occur to Dr. Holmes." She urged Wise to "straighten out this matter and set Dr. Holmes right on this one point" before Holmes' forthcoming lecture series about Palestine. Otherwise, a public relations debacle might ensue, with Jews under attack for not supporting democracy. "[W]e have to be careful not to give our enemies a chance for criticism," she stressed.4 Neither Wise nor Mack took the principle of democracy lightly. Wise was an outspoken champion of minority rights and democratic freedoms. Mack was a United States district judge. As Americans, they cherished democracy; but as Jews and Zionists, they cherished the dream of recreating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Like Nathan and 4 ZIONISM AND THE ARABS Lina Straus, they were not prepared to see Zionism sacrificed on the altar of democracy. In a series of letters and private conversations during the days to follow, he and Mack tried hard to persuade Holmes that democracy should not be implemented too quickly in Palestine. "[Parliamentary government is of the very essence of democracy," Wise told Holmes, and "the day must come, as it will come in Palestine, when Jew, Arab, and Christian will sit side by side in Parliament, in a constituent assembly." But exactly when that day would come was another matter. "[A]s much as I value both" the special goals of Zionism and the general "principle of self-determination," Mack bluntly declared, "in this instance, the special . . . should have the preference over the general;" Zionism must come first.5 Wise and Mack insisted that the Palestinian Arabs were neither sincerely interested in democracy nor ready for its responsibilities. "[T]hey do not desire anything particularly except food," Wise asserted. "They are . . . in the depths of primitive life." The only Palestinian Arabs who were clamoring for democracy were "a group of agitators who have the most attenuated relation to the Arab peasantry of the land." Even if some ordinary Arabs were interested in a representative government, surely they should be "brought to the beginnings of literacy before there be such a thing as a Parliament." The issue of Jewish rights, too, was more complex than it appeared on the surface, Wise and Mack contended. The Jewish population of Palestine "is not made up of those who actually live there, but of those who would live there, of the great numbers who some day will live there, and these vastly outnumber the Arab-Syriac population of Palestine." Once Zionist claims transcended ordinary demographic considerations, democracy no longer conflicted with Zionism. A fundamental premise of the Zionist movement was that the Holy Land was not the property of whomever happened to inhabit the land during any particular period of time, but rather it belonged to the Jewish people, collectively, despite their involuntary absence from the land since the Roman era. If the Jewish population of the country was to be counted not according to how many Jewish inhabited it in 1929, but according to how many might someday reside there, then certainly it would be unfair to grant self-government to Palestine—thereby perhaps altering the country in ways that were irreversible—before all would- be immigrants had a chance to arrive. In their talks with Holmes, Wise and Mack denied that American Zionists wanted to delay democracy "until Jews are in the majority." Yet at the same time, the Zionist leaders insisted "that the Jewish people be permitted to develop numerically and in every way" prior to the implementation of democracy. The most they could offer Holmes was that Jews and Arabs might each establish "their own constituent