7 - Ideology and Politics in the Early Years of the State of Israel, 1951–1956

Summary

HADASSAH AT THE TWENTY-THIRD ZIONIST CONGRESS

It will be sad for us all if, in time, a historian of the new Zionist movement of these times records that the Twenty-Third Congress, the first to be held in Zion, which convened more than three years after the establishment of the State of Israel … was marked by a deep rift between the Israeli Zionist world view and the Anglo-Saxon world view.

ZVI LURIE, address to the Twenty-Third Zionist Congress

THE TWENTY-THIRD ZIONIST CONGRESS, the first to be held in Israel, convened in Jerusalem in August 1951. The ghost of exterminated European Jewry hung over the meeting. The congress debates revolved around three specific issues: the organizational structure of Zionist activity in the Diaspora; the relationship between the State of Israel and the Jewish people; and ḥalutsiyut (pioneering).

The delegates from Israel called for full implementation of this ideology, although there was no consensus—either among the Israelis or among the Americans— on what this meant. Israeli delegates voiced harsh criticisms of American Zionists and indeed of US Jewry as a whole. Although a few praised the Americans for their efforts on behalf of the establishment of the state, a clear majority of the delegates from Israel, covering the entire political spectrum, were party to this attack, which was deeply insulting to the delegates from the United States.

Among those who fiercely attacked the American Zionists was Ya'akov Hazan, a member of the left-wing socialist Zionist party Mapam. He strongly objected to the distinction they made between galut (‘the place of exile’) and ‘Diaspora’, and argued that ‘exile is forever exile, and the cup of poison that one exile suffers will inevitably reach the others, as well’. Hazan also condemned Ben-Gurion for condoning this distinction when visiting the United States prior to the congress. The address by Israel Bar Yehuda (Idelman), also a member of Mapam, was no less biting. Bar Yehuda claimed that American Zionists ‘don't want to understand that the problem on Grandierstrasse of the Weimar Republic is fundamentally the same … as in Brooklyn: rich or poor, all are luftmenshen [people oblivious to reality]’. The minister of labour, Golda Meyerson (later Meir), herself a former American, also attacked the American Zionists for their claim that ‘pioneering from America is impossible’.