Envoi to Zion
Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine, 1917-1949. By Arthur Koesdcr. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.)
MR. Kt:mm.1.ER believes that the establishment of the State of Israel must be the occasion among Jews of the diaspora for a parting of the ways. " They are free at last to do what they could not do before: to wish it [Israel] good luck and go their own way, with an occasional friendly glance back and a helpful gesture. But, nevertheless, to go their own way, with the nation whose life and culture they share, without reservations or split loyalties." This book may therefore be interpreted as the first of Mr. Koestler's friendly gestures to Israel or as his last positive contribution in the capacity of an active Zionist. In fact it is a bit of both: it is a mixture of sympathetic criticism and propaganda ; of painstaking analysis and unresolved prejudice. It is fair to assume that Mr. Koestler has not found easy the formal separation from the impetuous stream of official Zionism, and in this latest book he spins out his departure, like Captain Bildad on the deck of the Pequod ' in Nantucket harbour, as the hour of sailing drew near, "loath to say goodbye to a thing so every way brimful of interest to him."
This uncompleted effort at detachment makes Promise and Fulfil- ment a work of uneven merit. More than half of it is taken up with a historical survey of the Zionist experiment in Palestine from its earliest days until the end of the mandate ; then follow some pages of diary-reporting which are to a large extent an expanded version of his newspaper despatches which were interesting to read when they first appeared a year ago ; and finally we come to four short chapters of shrewd comment and prophecy on the probable lines of develop- ment for the young State.
The historical section of the book is much the least valuable. Nobody doubts that there is a Zionist case against British policy in Palestine, just as there is an Arab case against it—or a British case, for the matter of that. But the Zionist case has had the longest, widest and loudest hearing of the three, and at thi; stage of affairs, too late for propaganda to be useful and too early for history to be possible, something fresher is needed than the raking over of old
grievances, and the rehashing of old arguments. Not that :his latest of many conducted tours from Hcrzl to Bevin with a Zionist guide
is ever dull. Mr. Koestler is too intelligent a writer for that, and much of his interpretation is stimulating. But as a propagandist Mr. Koestler must be reckoned an amateur since he so frequently does not bother to get his facts right. Small points of detail, such as calling King Feisal and King Abdullah " sons of the Caliph," or Sarona an " eighteenth-century colony of German Templars," or referring to Rashid Ali as " Prince " or Sephardic as a language, might be excused as slips if it were not that there are so many more of them. It is more serious when he asserts, for example, that early in 5948 the mandatory government made " last-minute grants to Moslem `religious funds' administered by the Mufti's Higher Arab Com- mittee" (whereas Wag/ funds never had anything to do with the Arab Higher Committee and hack been removed from the control of the Mufti in 1937), or that, at the same time, the flow of oil from the Kirkuk pipeline " was diverted to Amman "—when Mr. Koestler must know that Amman is as innocent of pipelines as Tel Aviv. The cumulative effect of these errors is to give the impression that Mr. Koestler has taken much of his information, and with it many of his arguments, at second-hand from sources which were not so impartial as he himself struggles to be.
For Mr. Koestler is fully aware of the paradoxical conflicts between faith and reason which necessarily agitated the intelligence of any Western-minded Socialist who embraced Zionist doctrines, though the particular paradoxes of his own approach emerge unresolved on page after page of this book. He admits that most of Whitehall's early shortcomings were the result et muddled thinking, but, when he comes to 1948, he makes the wholly unjustified assertion that Britain deliberately created in Palestine " a state of chaos in matters of physical security and an administrative vacuum." He can blame " the Lawrence-cult of a certain type of British Colonial official " for the absence of governmental sympathy towards Zionism, but seems not to recognise in his own Beigin-cult of admiration for the I.Z.L. an equally dangerous and uncritical form of romanticism. He is scornful of what he calls " the Arab myth," by which he means the belief cherished by the Foreign Office that the Arabs were worth cultivating as allies, but in doing so he repeats one of the most popular Zionist myths that " the British Foreign Office backed the Mufti."
Mr. Koestler's argument seems to be that Jewish military successes in the Palestine fighting after May I5th, 1948, proved that we ought all along to have adopted a full-blooded Zionist policy and discounted Arab objections. True, to make this doctrine of expediency more palatable, he is obliged to fall victim to another myth, which is contradicted by all the contemporary evidence, that" the only forces opposed to this solution [partition) were the Mufti and the effendis of the Husseini Party, with the village priests [sic] who owed allegiance to them." At the same time, in his generally very fair exposition of the Arab point of view, he concludes that : "History carries a whip in its hand, and in this case the Jews, its traditional victims, were the whip. . . . No effort, on the part of the Jews could have induced the Arabs voluntarily to acquiesce in their fate." At heart Mr. Kdestler is enough of an imperialist not to be able to understand why the British, with a whip lying conveniently to hand, were reluctant to crack it.
Turning to the future, Mr. Koestler (who, however, omits all consideration of economic and financial problems) is cautiously optimistic. He sees the enormous psychological difficulties under which the new State labours, with its " lost 2,000 years," its stunted cultural life, hamstrung by the resurrection of Hebrew as the national language and by the absence of social classes (" the greengrocer's wife and the Cabinet Minister's wife speak with the same accent, use the same vocabulary, share the same tastes, values and outlook on life ") ; he admits the danger of a split between the Western and Eastern streams of immigrants, but he finds some comfort in the rising generation of indigenous Israelis, the sabras, and predicts, with a courage which is calculated to make him extremely unpopular in Tel Aviv, that " within a generation or two Israel will have become an entirely un-Jewish' country."
Prediction is free: facts arc (or ought to be) sacred. Every writer on modern Palestine has blind spots of prejudice or anger which vitiate his analysis. Mr. Koestler has his full share, but he tries hard to be dispassionate, and one can only hope that he will often return to Israel to assess and prophesy. But it would be a good thing if in future he left the hack-work of propaganda to less able pens
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