An uncredited photo of Jewish farmers in Mandate Palestine, early twentieth century.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part five of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
POGROMS and PROTOCOLs
As the twentieth century dawned, life in the Russian Empire was growing increasingly dire. The exuberance of expansion in the nineteenth century, mostly at the hands of the waning Turkish Ottoman Empire, was suddenly crushed by a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1903-04), in which as many as 70,000 Russian soldiers died of wounds or disease. The loss shocked the world as Asia’s first military victory over a European power in centuries. The Russian monarchy, seen as increasingly autocratic and detached from a population of mostly impoverished serfs, entered into a crisis. Radical parties, such as the Marxist Bolsheviks, began to gain a foothold. Peasant revolts broke out across the Empire, with the educated class calling for limits on the tsars in a new system of constitutional monarchy. In 1905, Tsar Nicholas II issued what became known as the October Manifesto, establishing an elected congressional body in the empire. But rather than assuaging the radical parties, gaining a voice in the new Duma only emboldened them, and the revolution only simmered.
It was often the case in Europe that social, economic and political upheaval required a convenient scapegoat, and European Jews always presented an easy target. Tsarists, businessmen and others who stood to benefit from Jewish disenfranchisement pointed to the participation of Jews in radical movements such as the Communists and anarchists, painting all Jews with the broad strokes of disloyalty and greed. Although Jewish representation in such groups was proportional to the overall population (or even less so), any amount of Jewish sympathy for these groups, or sense of Jewish benefit from them, was taken as proof that they were created and directed by Russian Jews for the purpose of taking over the Russian Empire.
A pamphlet named “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was first published in Russia in 1903, claiming to be the tenets of a secretive and powerful Jewish cabal for world domination. It was obviously a hoax, having been plagiarized from several earlier sources. Nonetheless, the document was widely disseminated and accepted as fact by Antisemites in Russia and beyond, circulated throughout Europe and the Middle East, and even the United States. It is still cited as justification for Jewish discrimination and persecution throughout the world to this day.
An English translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A massive wave of pogroms broke out across the Pale once again between 1903-1906, even larger and bloodier than the ones that raged after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. It is estimated that over 60 cities and 6000 towns and villages were engulfed in the violence across modern Ukraine and Moldova, in which thousands of Jews were killed, thousands more wounded, and their homes, businesses and synagogues looted and burned. The New York Times described one such pogrom after Easter, 1903 in the city of Kishinev (modern-day Chisinau, Moldova):
“The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken-up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”
Jewish communities in Europe and the United States reacted in horror as news of the pogroms in the Pale continued to reach them. Wealthier Jews laid plans to facilitate the mass emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire. At the Sixth World Zionist Congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl proposed an appeal to British authorities for immediate mass Jewish resettlement from Russia to British colonial territory in East Africa, a move which became known as the Uganda Proposal. Although British authorities signaled their willingness to grant the request, and although Hertzl saw the movement as only a stepping-stone to autonomy in Eretz Yisrael, the plan was opposed by a majority of Jewish delegates to the seventh congress in 1905, who believed it was a distraction from the Zionist goal.
The Gathering
Meanwhile, millions of Jews were fleeing from the Russian Empire between 1904-05. Almost a million emigrated to the United States through Ellis Island, where the greatest hopes for freedom and economic opportunity awaited. Hundreds of thousands more found new homes in South America and South Africa. But around 35,000 Jews decided to trade one set of hardships for another by beginning a new life in their ancestral homeland. These pioneers became the Yishuv of the Second Aliyah.
The Jewish immigrants who landed in Jaffa in the decade between 1904-1914 differed from their predecessors who had landed there two decades before, and the circumstances of their Aliyah were vastly different as well. Although still pushed by the flames of pogrom, they were also undergirded by an increasingly organized Zionist political movement, and motivated by socialistic ideals. At the first World Zionist Congress in 1897, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) had been proposed as the fundraising arm for the purchase of land in Palestine. As tens of thousands of Jews began to flock to Eretz Yisrael in 1904, the JNF purchased swaths of land along the coast near Jaffa, near the Sea of Galilee, and in the fertile Jezreel Valley of the lower Galilee, totaling almost 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares).
The land acquired by Jewish immigrants was immediately put to use for farming, industry and the construction of new towns for the New Yishuv. Groups of socialist emigres, holding to the utopian ideals of collectivism, founded a kibbutz, or collective agricultural community, in the Lower Galilee in 1909. Known as Degania (from degan, Hebrew for grain), it became the first of thousands of such kibbutzim that were established across the Land of Promise. Through decades of trial and error, the kibbutzim pioneered many advanced agricultural methods in the production of various crops before eventually branching out into other industries. There are about 270 kibbutzim in Israel today, populated by communal families numbering over 130,000, or 2.5% of Israel’s population.
THE OLD NEW CITY
Other newly-purchased land was allocated for the construction of new cities, as the burgeoning communities of the ancient port city of Jaffa continued to expand outward along the Mediterranean coast into settlement such as Neve Shalom, Achva and Yafa Nof. In 1906, wealthy Jewish residents of Jaffa banded together to form Ahuzat Bayit, or the Homestead Society. Their aim was to establish a new “Hebrew urban centre” near Jaffa, modeled after the modern European cities from which they emigrated, as they described in their own words, “a healthy environment, planned according to the rules of aesthetics and modern hygiene.” The group was led by Zionist architect and city planner Akiva Aryeh Weiss, and set its sights on 60 plots of land purchased just north of Jaffa by Jewish businessman Jacobus Kann, whose Dutch name allowed him to circumvent Turkish Ottoman restrictions against the purchase of land by Jews.
Approximately 100 people gather on the Mediterranean beach near Jaffa to participate in a lottery for land allotment in 1909. Their parcels of land would eventually grow into the city of Tel Aviv.
On April 11, 1909, a congregation Jewish families gathered near the shore of the sea north of Jaffa. With family names written on 60 white seashells and plot numbers written on 60 grey shells, children drew to match each family to its new homestead. Together they founded a community which would eventually be named after the title of Theodor Herzl’s 1902 utopian novel Altneuland, or "Old New Land,” taken from a passage in the Hebrew Bible describing the Jewish captivity in Babylon. It was translated into Hebrew using the words for “ancient mound” and “spring” to signify old and new, or Tel Aviv.
Eventually, the Old New city grew to annex all of the sprawling settlements north of Jaffa, becoming the most populated city in Israel and the city with the largest Jewish population in the world before New York City. The greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area, known as Gush Dan, encompasses only 8% of Israeli territory today but is home to almost half of Israel’s citizenry. Built upon the ancient coastal communities of the Philistines and Israelites, it is today one of the most socially progressive cities in the world, and a global hub for technological development. Although 90% of its modern inhabitants are Jews, Tel Aviv is also home to one of the most diverse minority communities in Israel, including Muslims, Christians and other Asiatic religions and people groups, fulfilling the vision of its founding families as a place where Jews and Arabs might live side-by-side in peace. Today, Tel Aviv lives up to its name as the symbol of modern Israel —the new land upon the old.
BLOOD AND FIRE
As 35,000 Jewish immigrants continued to settle across ever-expanding tracts of land between 1904-1914, they began to draw greater attention from the surrounding Arab communities. Thousands of Arabs migrated to Jewish settlements from Transjordan and Syria during the Second Aliyah, not as aggressors, but as laborers who sought better working conditions and standards of living than they had under the yoke of Ottoman serfdom. According to Turkish authorities, the Arab population of Palestine almost doubled between 1860 and 1914, keeping pace with the influx of Jewish olim (or immigrants of aliyah). This means that roughly half of the Arab population in the State of Israel and Palestinian territories today are descendants of those who immigrated concurrently with Jewish settlers in just the last 120 years.
Although most Jews and Arabs of this period coexisted peacefully and symbiotically in the Land (as many still do today), there were nonetheless indigenous Arab clans who viewed the settlement of Jews as a threat to their influence. Arab raiding parties were a continual threat to Jewish settlements, especially along the frontiers of the Yishuv. Young Jewish olim such as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi had managed to survive the pogroms of their childhood in Poland and were determined to prevent a recurrence of those bloody days in their ancestral homeland. A veteran of the socialist activist group Poalei Zion, Ben-Zvi met with a group of 10 “watchmen” in Jaffa in 1907 and founded a society of Jewish self-defense named Bar Giora, after the legendary Jewish general who had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Roman army at the Battle of Beth-Horon in AD 66.
Poalei Zion group “Ezra” in Plonsk, Poland. Future Israeli Prime Minister David ben-Gurion is shown third from right in the front row.
Bar Giora was defined by a line in its founding principle, “In blood and fire Judah fell, and in blood and fire Judah will arise.” The small militia force was based in Sejera (today Ilaniyah), the first Jewish settlement in the Lower Galilee, where it defended its Jewish occupants from malcontents in nearby Arab communities. Gradually, the watchmen began expanding their operations as Jewish settlement in the Galilee increased, charging local residents a fee in return for protection. In 1909, the group absorbed additional members and was renamed Hashomer, or “Guild of Watchmen,” eventually defending Jewish communities across the Galilee, Samaria and Judea. After Ben-Zvi was deported from Palestine by Ottoman authorities along with his fellow watchman, David Ben-Gurion, the pair traveled to the United States for the remainder of the Second Aliyah. In America, they formed the HeHalutz. or “Pioneer” movement before their return to the Land in 1918.
Although almost half of the Second Aliyah’s 35,000 immigrants eventually abandoned the enterprise due to hardship, the movement was nonetheless successful in laying the foundation of what would become the future State of Israel. In the arenas of politics, agriculture, urbanization, language, and self-defense, a distinct Israeli culture began to emerge among the New Yishuv. But Eretz Yisrael was still in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and the majority of their fellow Jews were still in Europe. It would require two world wars and a devastating “Whirlwind” before their dreams of nationhood could be realized.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.