Jabotinsky Asks Palestine New Deal

In the following article prepared for the Jewish Daily Bulletin, Mr. Jabotinsky explains the objects of his forthcoming visit to this country.

We Revisionist Zionists want a New Deal for Palestine, so it is natural to try to enlist sympathies in America.

A New Deal is necessary because the whole face of Zionism has radically changed. It still is a national enterprise backed by much idealism, but it now has the traditional backing of several million individual Jews who must, personally must go to Palestine or perish. It is no longer a “movement”—it is a frozen Exodus; frozen because the gates are closed and only a fraction of those who “must” are permitted to enter.

This is why a New Deal has become imperative, both on the part of England as the mandatory power, and the Jews themselves.

From England, we demand a thorough revision of the ideas and methods she has been applying to Palestine. First to be revised is the true meaning of her favorite catchword that “immigration should keep within the country’s economic absorptive capacity.” Of course it should, why argue such a bromide of a truism? But the absorptive capacity of a country cannot be measured just by its acres: it depends above all on the kind of immigrants. It is the human factor, not soil and moisture, which determines whether a country is to become a beehive or to stay a desert. For immigrants such as the Jews, with our stubborn urge, our technical and financial resources and our colonizing skill so brilliantly proved, Palestine holds possibilities of absorption practically unlimited; and the English know it themselves.

STATE MUST COOPERATE

But there is one condition: the State must cooperate, not just watch (when not busy putting direct obstacles in our way). All the laws and the whole administrative practice need revision to cope with the new phase of Zionism. Waste lands which form over two-thirds of Palestine must be surveyed, and proclaimed State Reserve for colonization: a water policy planned: a loan issued for reclamation and irrigation of the Reserve; the local market secured for local industries, and exports ensured on a basis of reciprocity (for at present Palestine imports five times the value of her export). Taxation must favor the new settler; revenue from Jewish sources, which by now is far above sixty per cent of the Treasury’s whole income, must be spent in the interest of those who provide it, not of the Arabs as now.

It is foolish to say that these demands are “anti-British.” Of course we denounce and will go on denouncing blunders and injustice, and that home-brewed brand of political flippancy of which some British statesmen still pretend to be proud—the aversion to “planning in beforehand,” the reliance on “muddling through.” Of course the Jews will boycott the elections if the mandatory carries out its project of a Legislative Council before there is a Jewish majority in the country. Of course we will never agree that any Jewish settler may be treated as an “illegal” immigrant, no matter whether he has or hasn’t a visa for entering his own National Home. Of course we will not stand the present flooding of Palestine by Arabs from the neighboring territories. Of course we resent being forced to pay a million dollars baksheesh for the Huleh marshes to a former Syrian concessionnaire who has held that concession for twenty years without carrying out any drainage work, and a further baksheesh of a couple million dollars on draining at our expense the portion of the area reserved exclusively for the Arabs — while the Treasury boasts a surplus of some fifteen million cash, all derived from Jewish contribution to revenue.

BEST SORT OF PARTNER

But England should know that a hard-bargaining partner is the best sort of partner. The sooner Palestine becomes a Jewish State able to protect its own security within and without; the sooner Transjordan, now always on the verge of starvation, gets redeemed by a big Jewish settlement — all the better for England, and she knows it and that is why she will, in her own interest, grant us the New Deal. There is one excellent thing about England: she can see reason—if you know how to insist.

Our method of “insisting” has recently taken the form of a worldwide petition movement. The petition is signed not just by “ideological” Zionists but by those who, apart from any “ideology,” actually and personally want and must migrate to Palestine. It is addressed both to the mandatory government and Parliament and to the governments of those countries where Jewish distress has become a grave problem for the State itself. Six hundred thousand signatures have already been collected, and it will be several millions before we are through.

As to the Jews themselves, their New Deal for Palestine will have to consist, above all, in putting a stop to the practice and propaganda of the “class war” idea applied to Palestine. Class war may or may not be a good thing for countries already “made”: but Palestine is only in the making. When every new enterprise is a pioneering experiment; when you want “capitalists” to go on founding such enterprises so that you might bring in more workers from abroad; when even the “national” funds have to be collected from bourgeois—then the obsession to “fight” that very bourgeoisie becomes not only preposterous but immoral. We do not preach identity of economic interests between workers and employers: let them drive as hard a bargain as they only can; but we want them to settle all their disputes by compulsory national arbitration, and to forget the very names of strike and lockout.

OBJECTS OF VISIT

These are the two main objects of my impending visit to America. I do not intend to start a petition movement in America: I do not believe that an European can “start” anything in America, which is a different world. But I am sure that American Jewry, and perhaps a part of Gentile America, too, will find their own way to back the desperate outcry of such a multitude.

The second object with which my trip is connected—to rebuild our Palestinian economy on arbitration instead of “class war”—is embodied in the “National Workers Union” which was founded in Palestine nine months ago. We want to make of it the most powerful social factor in the country, and American Jewry must be made to realize that this is the only reasonable way of keeping together a pioneering community.

Some Jewish papers in America say that this is “Fascism”; nonsense — deliberate word-jugglery which has no meaning at all. Should any of my generation among the Revisionists live long enough to be present at the shaping of Palestine’s constitution as the Jewish State, we shall insist on a constitution based on the most old-fashioned principles of liberalism and democracy; probably simple copy the best part of Great Britain’s constitution, or America’s; and in that Jewish State we shall probably not even bother about stopping “class war,” for a national economy already complete and built-up can stand it. But a “national economy” which does not yet exist, which is only being created, cannot; and no threat of being called names will stop us from insisting on this simple and obvious truth.

Apart from all that, I am glad of this opportunity to visit America just because it is America, and just now. I belong to that generation of Russianized intelligentsia which, in its early teens, was brought up on Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, and in its maturer youth on that French symbolism which claimed Edgar Allen Poe for its ancestor (by the way, one of my dearest boasts is having translated his poems into Hebrew and Russian). We used to find a philosophical affinity between these two American influences: bold “pioneering” beyond established frontiers, geographical frontiers in one case, spiritual frontiers in the other. I now go farther and extend the affinity also to the most modern phenomena of America’s life of today: is not President Roosevelt’s policy another bold departure beyond the borders of social precedent? Present day America is a university and a laboratory; and I want to learn.