What We Can Learn By Studying the Lives of the Jews Who Went to Palestine in the 1920s

Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine, examines the immigration of Zionists to Palestine during the 1920s in years when their experiences were turned into myth and when their personal struggles to make the land of Israel their home were ignored. The Zionist project I survey in this book concentrates on the period when Jews believed that moving to Palestine lifted them up to a new kind of solidarity, moral development and social coherence. I have chosen the first decade of British rule [1919–1929] as the temporal borders for this study because it was a formative time for developing a Jewish national home and can hold up a mirror to Israel’s conventional nation-building narratives. Thus, I am able to show not only how Zionists settled into Palestine when resources were severely limited but also how much they relied on their visionary hopes and expectations when circumstances provided no cause for optimism. The 1920s—a coherent period from the point of view of British colonial policy and the development of Palestine’s Jewish community—affords an ideal opportunity to examine whether the encounter of Zionists with what they understood as the land of Israel lived up to their expectations and to reflect on both the accomplishments and shortcomings of the Zionist effort to mold a new national identity and to transform the Jewish people.

A scholarly engagement with the desires, values, decisions, and reflections of the early generations who created the economic and political structures for the Jewish state means following the individual men and women who crossed continents and seas to make Palestine their home. Immigration was a decisive element in the national life of Palestine’s Jews even though its nature and significance continue to puzzle scholars who seek to know it well. Immigration to the land of Israel was deemed, even by secular Zionists, a quasi-sacred act and was vaunted as a powerful idiom for legitimating the Zionist idea that Jews properly belonged in this ancient land. Migrations to the country followed patterns, and each cycle seemed to be touched with special significance and specific characteristics—labor Zionist idealism for the Third Wave or Aliyah (1919–23) and petty capitalism for the Fourth (1924–9). Conventional renditions of Israel’s pre-state history are typically organized around eras that supposedly accord not only with immigration cycles but also with the flow of the country’s history. When immigration was halted for one reason or another, recorded Zionist history, itself, seemed to be on ‘pause.’

The British Mandate, which provided Palestine with a geography, also supplied Jews with an incentive to project an image of a polity so stable and unified as to be worthy of sovereignty. But the immigrants most energized by Zionist visions were also those with the deepest engagement in Diaspora-based Zionist movements, and they often arrived in Palestine committed to diverse ideologies and more importantly, infused with quite different political cultures. These immigrants had more than a passing acquaintance with change as the organizations with which many were affiliated had often unleashed challenges to the inherited structures of authority in their Diaspora hometowns. Surprised, perhaps, by the range of “Zionisms,” immigrants had to be shocked by how much freer they were to imagine radical change than to produce it.

For many immigrants, Palestine presented a strange if not hostile environment far different from what they expected. Interaction among people and cultures was intense and fraught with the potential for suspicion and misunderstanding. Immigrants had to learn Hebrew and find work. In these quests, prospects would sometimes hinge on contacts established in hometown youth movements or with extended kin. Drawing a disproportionately large number of males, the Zionist community’s social structure in Palestine was not, initially at least, dominated by family units. A person’s passage to Palestine was sometimes made possible by parents left behind in the Diaspora. Respected movement leaders typically arrived with their friends or classmates rather than with parents or siblings. Where immigration necessarily dissolved the warm embrace of families, Zionist terminology extended the intimacy of kinship to networks of comrades, friends, and neighbors.  But unlike families, these ties depended heavily on continuing to endorse a common set of political principles and to conform to a prescribed list of regulations. Deviation in thought or behavior could dissolve relationships or turn comrades into enemies. No wonder that leaving the country—even if provoked by starvation and illness—grew to be interpreted as an act of treason. Even when viewed with sympathy, emigration was often felt as a form of personal betrayal.

Finally, British sovereignty over Palestine meant that mandatory policies set the course of nation-building in Palestine for Jews as well as for Arabs. Failing to bring Jews and Arabs together in a unified countrywide legislative framework, mandate rulers authorized the creation of institutions with limited autonomy by downgrading the two communities from national to religious entities. Although Zionists originally intended Jewish nation-building to supply the passion and experience to detach Jews from their religious roots, they were impeded in their battle for a secular public realm by the very structure of mandatory rule in Palestine. Zionists could operate their institutions only because, on some level, they accepted the classification of Jews as one of Palestine’s recognized religious groupings although that rubric contradicted the founding principles of their movement. Throughout this book, I try to make visible the differences between Zionist prescriptions and Zionist policies while indicating how the development of a Jewish National Home both complicated and changed that relationship.

In one sense, the people whose lives I examine are not ordinary; they left a written record of their ideas, feelings, and experiences in memoirs, essays, and newspaper articles. But in another sense, these were the ordinary people living in Palestine’s Jewish community whose thoughts and actions shaped and consolidated the Jewish national home while their lives offered up selective material used to sustain Zionism’s progressive narrative. By examining the gap between the expectations and experiences of Zionists in what they deemed their rightful homeland, I am deliberately taking an unconventional approach. Instead of replicating the conventional wisdom and thinking about Zionist immigrants in purely sequential terms, I want to discuss their lives as a series of graded examples on a visionary spectrum moving from those possessed of the ambition for radical personal and national transformation to those motivated by the dream of simply finding a better life.

Both the Zionist discourse on immigration and the actual immigrant experiences shaped Palestine’s Jewish community and prepared it for statehood. Exiled in the Homeland explores these often contradictory state-making and nation-building trends and explains how movements of Jews could be viewed as both agents of renewal and sources of instability. The double-edged meaning of crossing borders did not begin in our age of globalization, but Palestine is a good place to examine the tensions unleashed by changes in population and by populations trying to change their understanding of where they truly belonged.