In its third appearance, this new department, devoted to informal comment on cultural and social events and trends, presents a report by Nathan Glazer on a mass meeting recently run by one of the lesser-known, though significant, Zionist parties; and a discussion by Alfred Werner of The Trial, a film recently made by the famous director G. W. Pabst in Vienna, and based on a ritual murder trial in Hungary in the 1880’s. Not yet released in this country, the film has already aroused wide comment and controversy in Europe. Nathan Glazer is an assistant editor of COMMENTARY. Mr. Werner’s reports on the cultural and literary scene in Central Europe have appeared recently in the New York Times Book Review.
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The most careful observer might have been thrown off recently by an announcement of a mass meeting on Palestine at the St. Nicholas Arena, in New York, to be sponsored by Hashomer Hatzair and the Progressive Zionist League. This section of the Zionist movement, it had been whispered, was the channel by which Soviet influences hoped to play a role in Eretz Yisrael.
The principal speaker at the meeting was to be no less than Moshe Sneh, ex-chief of the Haganah and reputed exponent of an “Eastern” (pro-Russian) orientation in Zionism, and also featured was Leo Isacson—American Labor party congressman from the Bronx who, last February, had won a sensational victory (only to lose ignominiously in the recent elections) and had recently made a trip to Palestine.
Helping the easy jumper to conclusions was the known fact that a week later Dr. Sneh was to speak at an “Israel Independence Dinner” sponsored by the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists, at which the Ambassadors of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Albert C. Kahn, were to speak, and which was without question being run by at least fellow-travelers.
To be sure, it was well known that neither Hashomer Hatzair nor the Progressive Zionist League had ever been Communist fronts. Hashomer Hatzair is the American branch of a world-wide youth organization which recruits young Jews for pioneering and collective living in Palestinian agricultural communes.
In Palestine, Hashomer Hatzair had been an independent political party, made up almost entirely of collective colonies, and emphasizing socialist principles in general and Arab-Jewish cooperation and a bi-national state in Palestine in particular. As such, it had for many years been identified with the “moderate” wing of Zionism—with those elements, from the Ihud to Chaim Weizmann, who did not demand a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
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However, not long ago, Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine had merged with another socialist group—a split-off from the majority labor party, Mapai—which had vigorously supported a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Hashomer Hatzair completely abandoned its bi-national line, and even stopped talking, in anything more than a whisper, about the need for Arab-Jewish cooperation.
More serious, the new joint group, the United Workers party (Mapam), plumped for an “Eastern orientation” for Israel, and attacked England and America. If Mapam was really Stalinist, this was most ominous: it would mark the first time the Communists had achieved any influence in Palestine, where their dogmatic anti-Zionism had insured that they would remain a rather anomalous sect.
This meeting, it took little research to find out, was actually the American debut of Mapam, and it seemed likely that it could throw some light on the extent of the infiltration of Communist thinking and personnel into a rather large and important Palestinian party. This writer had known many members of Hashomer Hatzair; some were now in kibbutzim in Palestine, more were now ex-members, and the meeting seemed a good opportunity to find out just what was happening.
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At the subway exit at 66th Street, one expected to find a mob, but there was only a shy young Shomer who asked if I wanted the Arena, and pointed it out to me behind a big “Bowling” sign. Last November 29, the Labor Zionists had run a meeting here, and the streets had been packed with thousands celebrating the partition decision. Tonight’s calm was a reminder that, regardless of the “temper of the masses,” it is no simple matter to run a big meeting: and despite the sizable newspaper announcements, only little Hashomer Hatzair was behind this meeting.
The meeting began an hour late, and the hall was not quite full—there were perhaps a thousand: but even this created difficulties, since the singing of the enthusiastic Shomrim was lost in this crowd of largely middle-aged people, and even when someone tried to encourage mass singing from the stage with the aid of a public-address system, the response was very weak.
The chairman’s opening words were: “Chaverim, friends, fellow-Zionists, fellow progressives.” He went on to say, “We are going to present speakers who represent progressive forces in Jewish life in Israel and the United States,” and ended with the assertion that Israel would be built “as a bastion of progressive democracy.” He then introduced the president of the Progressive Zionist League, who ended the unbearable tension about whether we were talking about progressives or Progressives (Wallaceite persuasion) by telling us that the Progressive Zionist League had, after a referendum of its membership, decided some months before to affiliate with Wallace’s Progressive party.
Now the Progressive Zionist League, formed a few years ago as an adult affiliate of Hashomer Hatzair not pledged to halutziut (personal participation in pioneering in Palestine), picked its name long before there was any hint that Wallace would form a third party, let alone a “Progressive” party. Yet this accident may have had some influence in making Progressives out of the progressives in the Progressive Zionist League. Shomrim have always had a slightly magical attitude toward language in general and a suspicious attitude toward English in particular. In speech and writing, they hasten to substitute Hebrew equivalents for English terms as soon as possible, having “sichot” instead of discussions, going to “moshava” instead of camp, and writing to the “lishka” instead of the office. One wondered whether, if Henry Wallace had been successful in getting his party called the New party, he might not thereby have forfeited the support of the Progressive Zionist League.
The next speaker, a young girl who will probably be in Palestine in a year or two, spoke of youth desirous of self-realization, of escaping the need to live off “profits made from the slave class”; she told of youth in Palestine today, “with a book in one hand, a hoe in the other,” now unfortunately dropped for a rifle; she asked rhetorically whether “the city-dweller, the pale clerk” would arise again in Palestine. She spoke with sincerity and emotion, and in the flowery and sentimental style that is the bane of Hashomer Hatzair writing, and which I am sure has been no help in its efforts at a clear and consistent political line. She spoke in an earlier, bucolic Hashomer Hatzair tradition, expressing dislike of the city—Shomrin neither smoke nor drink, and the girl members use no cosmetics and pay a determined lack of attention to their appearance. She emphasized the passionate involvement with Aretz (“The Land”), rather than the newer link with “progressive forces.”
But this pastoral mood was swiftly broken by Congressman Isacson.
He began softly, hoarsely, and apologetically: “I’m sorry if you can’t hear too well in back,” he said, “but I’ve been on the sound trucks for a month.” But before we knew it he was shouting and straining at the top of his lungs. Israel was being betrayed; and this was “the worst of all betrayals. I speak of course of that infamous perfidy known as the ‘Bernadotty’ plan, which would deprive Israel of twothirds of its territory. I charge that that plan was not written by Bernadotty, but it is the plan of the American State Department working in cooperation with the cohorts of Bevin!” Cheers and applause. Congressman Isacson then calmed down just a bit and said that when he was in Palestine he had told “Bernadotty” that the Jews were entitled to all of Palestine. Partition however, “was at least a final plan. But Bernadotty was not there to enforce partition! He was there to partition partition! He was there as the agent of the American oil interests who are now trying to destroy Israel!” This last charge was not applauded. Congressman Isacson apparently forgot that, however close the outward appearance, he was not talking to a Stalinist audience, and the defamation of a murdered man as an “agent” was not considered fair game among them even when carried out by so magnificent an orator as Congressman Isacson.
After a brief lyrical interlude about his visit to Mishmar Ha-emek, a Hashomer Hatzair collective which had made a heroic stand against the Arabs, Congressman Isacson wound up for a sensational close: “I have tonight called on the President of the United States to call Congress into special session to investigate the maneuvers behind the Bernadotty Plan.” This got tremendous applause, and, riding high, he concluded: “We must understand that in the Marshall plan of sixteen billion dollars, four and a half billion are set aside for the purchase of Middle Eastern oil, oil equipment, oil tankers, and so on. Think of it! Four and a half billion dollars! That is why the embargo still remains on Israel! That is why Israel is not recognized!” The line of argument was obscure, but Congressman Isacson spoke triumphantly, as if the figure of four and a half billion was decisive proof for anything, and the audience, by its wild response, showed it was convinced.
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Dr. Sneh had walked onto the stage just before Isacson spoke; a short, stocky figure, with a cigarette held in a cigarette-holder, he looked much like the Hollywood image of the Russian Commissar, and during Isacson’s speech he leaned back in his chair with an expression of detached amusement. The chairman, at 10: 30, was obviously preparing to make an appeal for funds, when the audience demanded “Sneh, Sneh!” Somewhat embarrassed and making a point of his accession to democratic pressure, the chairman then introduced Dr. Sneh, saying he would speak in two languages: “Yiddish and . . .”—there was an interrogative silence. And while scattered voices cried out for “Ivrit” (Hebrew), Dr. Sneh told the chairman decisively he would speak only in Yiddish.
The English speech that had been mimeographed for the press gave no hint of Dr. Sneh’s style. He spoke—almost barked—in short, pithy, sarcastic sentences. By his constant references to the “nine” (in the Security Council) and his detailed review of how Israel had been treated by the Anglo-American bloc in the UN, he made it clear that his allegiance to progressive forces rested fairly directly on the fact that Russia and her satellites had supported the Jewish case in the UN and sent arms to the Jews. “For seven months we stood alone. The Arabs in Palestine attacked us. The seven Arab states attacked us. Behind them was all the power of the British empire. But to the nine this was no threat to peace. Only when we took Haifa; when we took Jaffa; when we defended Jerusalem against the Arab Legion and its British officers; when we had shown we could defeat the armies of seven states supported by a great Empire: then there was a threat to peace. Then the nine said, look, here is a terrible threat to peace.” This was the tenor and style of Dr. Sneh’s address.
Dr. Sneh was the only speaker of the evening who did not speak vaguely of unity with “world progressive forces”—a vagueness which could conceal one knew not what degree of allegiance to the Soviet Union. Dr. Sneh spoke rather of the concrete political demands of the Jewish state; of the concrete obstacles that had been placed in the way of its demands by England and America; and of the concrete aid that had been offered by Russia and her satellites. The problems of the “progressive forces” in the rest of the world received a nod, but it was absolutely clear that Dr. Sneh was moved by the needs of the Jews of Palestine, as he conceived them, and in a different world political situation might be found on the side of a different great power. An outside observer could have deduced from his speech that the “Eastern orientation” of Mapam and Hashomer Hatzair, though it had a sizable component of naivety and sentimentality, was a limited one: when and if Russia stopped supporting the Jews and started supporting the Arabs, the Eastern orientation would disappear.
And, indeed, looking at the Shomrim there that night, with their blue scout shirts and colored ties, one could feel one was not dealing with Stalinized youth: they did not have the peculiar kind of intensity and rahrah Americanism (I mean in culture, not ideology) that has characterized American Stalinist youth groups for the past ten years. One could never imagine them adapting popular dance tunes into political ballads. It was revealing that the bar on the corner was completely empty after the meeting: the Shomrim, and many of them are in the early twenties, were getting up horas in the street. And when the next night, after a Wallace youth meeting at the St. Nicholas Arena, the young Wallaceites stopped traffic in Times Square, one could see that this was a very different group from the young Shomrim, who were probably having serious “sichot” in their “kens” (“nests”) that night.
The Progressive Zionist League is a different matter. Since it does not make the demand of halutziut, it is easier to “infiltrate,” and perhaps this has already happened; in which case it is hitched to the Stalinist wagon for good. Even Dr. Sneh himself is a somewhat different matter. He looks and acts differently from the Hashomer Hatzair leaders who have been in the movement all their lives, and in a kibbutz twenty years. Dr. Sneh was first a General Zionist, and only went to the Mapam—not the Hashomer Hatzair—very recently, and on political grounds rather than out of a desire to participate personally in the upbuilding of Palestine, which is the way most Shomrim have come. About him I am not sure, and since he is primarily a political man rather than a halutz, he may yet become the Fierlinger of Palestine.
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Shomrim have always been isolated from whatever influences American culture might bring to bear on them: they dance horas instead of fox-trots, and go to “sichot” instead of movies. Together with fox-trots and movies, they have also missed the rather special sophistication that American leftists of many types have developed about Stalinism: they are as backward about Russia as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre was two years ago, or many European workers are today. And the same has always been true, in a way, of the Palestinian Shomrim. Intensely nationalist, they were inevitably out of the main stream of leftist political thought in the past thirty years. And the fact that they lived in small rural communities further isolated them. Hopefully, it is likely that, under Anglo-American protection, their education in Stalinism will now be allowed to proceed without any such drastic interruption as has occurred in Czechoslovakia.
Very much involved in the details of making the collective colony a going concern, Hashomer Hatzair has not had too much time to worry about the rest of the world, and has remained satisfied with a general radical socialism of roughly the pre-1914 Kautsky variety. The Shomrim have never come to the point of questioning the desirability of collectivism and nationalization as a general principle of universal applicability. After all, no one has ever been executed in a kibbutz for “anti-social behavior”—at worst, he’s thrown out.
But when all society is one great kibbutz, the matter becomes much more complicated: or, to recall the Marxist dialectic, a change of quantity becomes a change of quality. Surreptitiously thinking of Russia as the one great kibbutz—unfortunately anti-Zionist—the Shomrim saw no reason why they should not jump eagerly on the Soviet bandwagon once Russia shifted to support of the Jews.
But nationalism is stronger than ideology, and many observers already detect straws in the wind pointing to another shift in the Communist line on Palestine. And then, one suspects, like the demands for a binational Palestine and Jewish-Arab workingclass cooperation which disappeared after last November 29, the “Eastern orientation” will disappear in Palestine.
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