The Invention and Decline of Israeliness. Baruch Kimmerling

logic cannot be objects of change. These changes, however, do not necessarily overlap with changes in government or even regime. Some changes in regime can even be connected to previous changes in the state's logic, which are by and large influenced by the state's position as an actor in the international arena.

      Nonetheless, a state is not a homogeneous and harmonious entity; it includes several branches and institutions, based on different values and power foci. The very doctrine of “checks and balances” among different state agencies presumes the conflicts of interest that are built into the state. These power relations are evident, not only between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, but also within them, such as among the executive agencies of the military, the central bank, and the office of the prime minister or the president. When one part of the executive branch gains power or greater autonomy, the others may lose power or prestige, but the state as a whole does not become weaker or stronger.

      THE COLONIAL STATE OF PALESTINE

      It is generally assumed that what is officially titled the “State of Israel” directly originated in the Zionist movement.¹⁹ In addition to the political mobilization of persecuted Jews and encouragement of their immigration to “Zion,” however, the establishment of a Jewish state on the soil of the “ancestral homeland” was enabled by the support of the great powers. Although the Zionist idea and movement constituted a necessary condition for the creation of a Jewish polity in Palestine, the British mandatory or colonial regime established after World War II was an equally important factor.²⁰ While it was intended to maintain and guarantee British interests in the Middle East, the British administration was also intended to lay the foundations for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.²¹

      Mandatory Palestine was a typical colonial state. Its residents (a Palestinian Arab majority and a growing Jewish minority) did not have the right to determine policies and could only exert influence through negotiation and bargaining. Bargaining included the use, or threat, of both controlled and uncontrolled violence against the colonial power, Great Britain, and its local agencies and representatives.²² Like any other state, colonial Palestine maintained a regime of law and order through the mechanisms of a local police force and other security agencies. The colonial state was also responsible for:

       Establishment of a judicial system and passage of laws applying to the area within the colony's territorial boundaries

       Creation of a modern bureaucracy

       Issue of coins and stamps, development and implementation of monetary and fiscal policies, and systematic tax collection

       Funding typical state activities (road construction, telephone, telegraph, postal services, and radio broadcasting) through state revenues

       Provision of education and health services; facilitation of normal civilian life and minimal welfare; and

       Granting concessions, including rights for the establishment of an electric company, which brought about the rapid electrification of the country.

      In addition to its support of both limited agrarian reform (mainly by encouraging the Palestinian Arab peasantry to redistribute their communal lands among households and register them as private lands) and a cooperative marketing system for agricultural products, the mandatory regime also provided partial protection to infant industries, loaned money for economic development, and extended credit for agricultural production. Passports and identity cards attesting to Palestinian citizenship were issued. Thus, in the brief span of thirty years, the regime created, not only a legal “Palestinian identity” and a limited notion of citizenship, but also a potential political identity for at least some of its Arab residents, who constituted a large majority of the population until the end of the colonial regime.

      Mandatory Palestine was a minimalist state, which directly intervened in only a limited number of areas, preferring to extend wide-ranging autonomy to the two major national communities (Arab and Jewish) under its territorial jurisdiction. Prima facie, both communal entities can be defined, following Charles Taylor's definition, as civil societies in the maximalistic meaning of the term.²³ They were based on free association and were not under the tutelage of state power, yet by structuring themselves as complete systems, they were able to significantly determine or affect the course of state policy. If, however, we consider Hegel's conception of civil society as the societal space in between the family and the state, both communities in colonial Palestine were much closer to imagined familylike associations based on primordial ties than to the rationally based secondary groups that its theoreticians implicitly or explicitly presume to constitute civil society.²⁴

      Prior to and during the initial stage of the creation of mandatory Palestine, the British and Zionist movements operated in accordance with two latent but jointly held assumptions, on the basis of which Great Britain agreed to assist in the establishment of a so-called Jewish national home. The first assumption was that the creation of necessary political preconditions would bring about massive Jewish immigration, measured in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. This immigration presumed a radical change in the demographic and sociopolitical character of the territory under the British mandate, rapidly making it an entity with a Jewish ethno-national majority population. The second assumption was that Palestine's Arab population would not express firm, organized resistance to the process of massive Jewish immigration, or, alternatively, that it would lack the political and organizational ability and skill required to mold such resistance into effective political action. Strong Palestinian Arab opposition to mass Jewish immigration and to intercommunal Arab-Jewish land transfers subsequently confronted the British colonial regime with unacceptably high economic and political costs.²⁵

      Thus, within a short period of time, the assumptions upon which the British pro-Zionist policy was based were proved wrong. First, it emerged that the Zionist movement's ability to recruit Jewish immigrants was limited, and that a fundamental and rapid demographic transformation of Palestine's Jewish population would not take place. Second, once they learned of the content of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Arabs began to organize themselves into a political protest, and even active resistance, movement in order to sabotage the British policy's declared aim of creating a “Jewish national home” and turning the country's Arab majority into a minority within a Jewish state.²⁶ This resistance movement shifted into high gear with the outbreak of the Arab revolt of 1936-39.²⁷ Palestinian Arab demands centered on the issue of the transfer of power, and ultimately sovereignty, to the national majority in Palestine. In order to attain this goal, Palestine's Arabs formulated interim demands, including the establishment of a legislative council, which would be elected democratically by the country's residents, that is, with an overwhelming Arab majority. They demanded, at the least, drastic restriction of Jewish immigration and legislation that would prevent the transfer of land-ownership from one community (the Arabs) to another (the Jewish).²⁸

      When the British realized that their two basic assumptions were not, in fact, valid, they adapted their policy to suit the reality they confronted. The principal objective of British policy in Palestine became ensuring political stability in the area with the aim of continued control at a lower cost. In the wake of the Arab revolt of 1936-39, and in view of the heavy economic and political burden of quelling it, the option of abandoning Palestine became an actual alternative. The outbreak of World War II, however, forced Britain to defer decisions about the future of the mandate and of Palestine. Eventually, British departure would lead to one of two probable scenarios: either transfer of sovereignty into the hands of the Arab national majority or territorial partition of Palestine. The Peel Commission first proposed the latter.²⁹ The Palestinian Arab community rejected partition as a viable option, while the Zionists tended (until the 1942 Biltmore Convention) to accept partition in principle but not the specific plan suggested by the Peel report.³⁰

      THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN PALESTINE AS A “STATE IN THE MAKING”

      Beginning in the mid 1920s, the Jewish immigrant settler community in Palestine became well aware of the possibility that within a relatively short period of time, in accordance with the worldwide decolonization process, sovereignty over the colonial state would pass into the hands of