The Maccabaean

IN previous articles of this series I have recorded impressions associated with each of the different centres of Jewish life in southern Palestine—Jaffa, Jerusalem, Hebron, the Judaean colonies. This geographical method of treatment is convenient, but it has the disadvantage that it does not bring into relief the features that are common to the life of the new Yishub wherever it has found a footing. A few of those general features will be indicated in this and the following article.

One of the most striking things about the new Palestinian life is the capacity for organization shown by all sections of the settlers. This capacity was strongly in evidence before the war, but it expressed itself mostly in sectional or professional associations. The agricultural workmen had two organizations to look after their interests and to further their ideal of “Jewish labour”; the wine-growers and the orange-growers had each their organization to sell their produce; the craftsmen and small employers of Jaffa had a union of their own; the Teachers’ Union strove for improvement both in educational methods and in the position of the teachers. During the war, and more particularly since the British occupation, what may be called communal as distinct from sectional organization has made great headway. When the Commission arrived in Palestine, it found in existence an organized Jewish Community of Jaffa, with a democratically elected committee having its headquarters at Tel Aviv, but distinct from the Committee of Tel Aviv itself, and also a Federation of the Judaean Colonies, with a committee consisting of representatives of each colony, and having its headquarters at Rishon. Further, both Jaffa and the Colonies were represented by a body known as Va’ad Haz’mani (“Temporary Committee”), which had been elected by a General Assembly held early this year, and was so called because it was of a provisional character, the idea being that it should give place as soon as possible to a committee representing the whole Jewry of southern Palestine. The Va’ad Haz’mani, containing as it did representatives of all sections and institutions as well as of all the different communities, was recognized by the Commission as the body best qualified to speak in the name of the whole Jewish population—apart from Jerusalem and Hebron—and before long a number of joint committees of the Commission and the Va’ad Haz’mani were formed to deal with the various practical problems of the Yishub —land policy, education, relief and so forth. Even at Jerusalem, where circumstances made communal organization peculiarly difficult, an attempt had been made to form a Va’ad Ha’ir representing all sections of Jerusalem Jewry; and though all did not go smoothly at first, the internal difficulties were smoothed over after a time, and Jerusalem was able to send representatives to the General Assembly which met in July last. This General Assembly marked the successful beginning of an attempt to organize the whole of Palestinian Jewry and to provide it with a single representative body. Now that General Allenby has extended his work of liberation, the Jewish settlements in northern Palestine will naturally come into this organization, and the Jews of all Palestine will be a united body

in a sense in which they never were before. Too much must not, of course, be expected of this organization in the early stages. Differences of outlook between the new Yishub and the old cannot be harmonized in a moment, and a great deal of hard work will have to be done, and much tact exercised, before a single elected body can speak in the name of Palestinian Jewry as a whole with the confidence that no disgruntled section will raise a discordant voice. But the first and most difficult step has been accomplished.

-.-- 9 This tendency to organize, of course, presupposes a strong feeling of solidarity. That is not in itself a feature of Jewish life peculiar to Palestine. Jews everywhere show a tendency to “stick together,” which is no doubt traceable at bottom to race kinship and the requirements of Jewish observance, but receives a powerful stimulus from the fact that a Jewish community almost anywhere in the world is exposed to disruptive forces, whether of persecution or of assimilation, and has in some sense to fight for its existence. And the external conditions which promote a certain Jewish solidarity in the galuth are not entirely absent in Palestine itself. There, too, the Jews are still a minority, and, so far at any rate as the new Yishub is concerned, they have been very much compelled to “stick together” out of elementary considerations of safety. But there the comparison of galuth and Palestinian conditions ends. The more positive factors making for Jewish solidarity in Palestine are peculiar to Palestine, and give to Jewish solidarity there a character of its own. In the first place, the Jews of Palestine stand in a different relation to their neighbours from that of the Jewish communities in the Diaspora. They are neither excluded from participation in the life of their neighbours by force ox prejudice, nor admitted to it on condition of adopting its standards and language. They have their own life, complete in all its institutions, and they know it to be superior to any Palestinian type of life into which they might win their way if they cared to sacrifice their own individuality. They know that the réle of imitator belongs much more properly to their neighbours than to themselves. That is a condition of things very different from what obtains in western countries, where the Jews assimilate so soon as they get a chance because they feel (despite a certain underlying sense of superiority) that their neighbours are in some important respects more advanced than themselves, and that they have everything to learn and (for the time being) nothing to teach. And in the second place, the Jewish sense of solidarity in Palestine is unique because it is a national sense, being intimately bound up with the national homeland and the national language, and bound up with them both not artificially or abstractly, but through the actual contact of daily life, through the things that are seen and heard and experienced in the ordinary course of the day’s work or play. Hence the Jewish consciousness in Palestine is akin to and yet different from the Jewish consciousness in the galuth. There are Jews in the galuth who deny the national quality of the sentiment which impels a Jew to maintain in one form or another his associa-