Turning a page back in the history of Palestine, during the end of the nineteenth century, when the terrible pogroms in the newly absorbed Polish and Lithuanian areas of Russia had begun to bring heavy Jewish immigration into Palestine. The heavy immigration had occasioned problems and some good deal of strife and violence before Albert Einstein visited the British Mandate in 1923. However, in 1927, in "The Jews and Palestine, in "About Zionism," Einstein had written referring to his experience during his visit, "At no time did I get the impression that the Arab problem might threaten the development of the Palestine project. I believe rather that, among the working classes especially, Jew and Arab on the whole get on excellently together."
The tiny size of the total Jewish population in Palestine in 1923 is well elucidated by Albert Einstein writing in regard to his joy in participating in fund raising for a Hebrew University there. "I firmly believe that the Jews, given the smallness and dependence of their colony in Palestine, will be immune from the folly of power."[Letter of Maurice Solovine, March 8, 1921]
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Four months later Einstein tempered his joy with his first apprehension about Zionist organizing. "I am very glad to have followed Weizmann's invitation. In several places, however, a high-tensioned Jewish nationalism shows itself that threatens to degenerate into intolerance and bigotry, but hopefully this is only an infantile disorder."[Letter to Paul Ehrenfest, June18, 1921]
After Einstein's stay in Palestine in 1923, he wrote in his 'My Impressions of Palestine' article in New Palestine Magazine, "A remarkable tribute to the real power of Palestine is the fact that the Jewish elements which have been resident in the country for decades stand distinctly higher, both in the matter of culture and in their display of energy, than those elements which have only recently arrived."
(An observation that would reflect itself as a Revisionist conquering attitude eventually replaced the original Labor Zionists international socialist philosophy, which was shared by Einstein.)
"Among the Jewish 'sights'
none struck me more pleasantly than did the school of arts and crafts, Bezalel, and the Jewish workingmen's groups....To me their was something wonderful in the spirit of self-sacrifice displayed by our workers on the land. " in the face of their difficulties from debts to malaria. In comparison with these two evils, the Arab question becomes as nothing. And in regard to the last, I must remark that I have myself seen more than once insurance of friendly relations between Jewish and Arab workers. I believe that most of the difficulty comes from the intellectuals and, at that, not from the Arab intellectual alone."["My Impression of Palestine," in New Palestine]
Two years later, Einstein said he would not remain associated with the Zionist movement unless it tried to make peace with the Arabs, in deed as well as in word. "The Jews should form committees with the Arab peasants and workers, and not try to negotiate only with the leaders." [Clark, Einstein, p.482, citing Bentwich, My 77 years, p.99]
On November 25, 1929, Einstein wrote to Chaim Weizmann - the future first President of Israel - stating:
"If we do not succeed in finding the path of honest cooperation and coming to terms with the Arabs, we will not have learned anything from our two thousand year old ordeal and will deserve the fate which will beset us."
Since our study of the history of the Second World War encompasses the clashes between differing economic systems, namely racist colonial capitalism, fascism and communist party run socialism, it seems appropriate to point out the international socialist origins of Zionism, for it continued to be the philosophy of the great majority of the refugees of the Holocaust entering Palestine, even after the founding of the state of Israel. Even today, the Kibbutzim, which began as utopian collective agricultural communities combining socialism and Zionism, remain a proud symbol of a young Israel.
Moses (Moshe) Hess, born in 1812, was a socialist German-French-Jewish philosopher, a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (all three wrote for the now famous German revolutionary Rheinische Zeitung), was both one of the earliest proponents of socialism and a precursor to what would later be called Zionism. In his seminal, Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862) Hess argued for the Jews to return to Palestine, and proposed a socialist country in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" in the modern world. Hess's contribution became important in retrospect, as the Zionist movement began to crystallize and to generate an audience in the late nineteenth century as a movement within international socialist ideals.
When Theodor Herzl, who is referred to as the spiritual father of the Jewish State in the Israeli declaration of independence, first read Rome and Jerusalem, a generation in time after it was written, Herzl wrote, "Since Spinosa, Jewry had no bigger thinker than this forgotten Moses Hess"[Moses Hess
By Lawrencebush, Jewdayo Grid, 1/20/2011][Exhibit Highlights Zionism's German Roots, January 29, 2016 BY ANNA ISAACS, Jewish Political Voices Zoomars] and that he would not have written Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) if he had known Hess's 'Rome and Jerusalem' beforehand.
Einstein, a strong and outspoken socialist, see his 'Why Socialism,' [thlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/] followed the progress of Jewish settlement in the British Mandate, and when, in the 1930s, international socialist Zionism came under pressure from the political right, he wrote, "Under the guise of nationalist propaganda Revisionism seeks to support the destructive speculation in land; it seeks to exploit the people and derive them of their rights," [in JEWISH-ARAB AMITY URGED BY EINSTEIN, New York Times. April 20, 1935]
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