The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book tells the story of the old-time Israelis in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At that time my parents lived in a wooden shack with an outhouse, in a neighborhood at the center of Tel Aviv that no longer exists, named Nordiya. Today, where that wooden shack once stood, the Dizengoff Center Mall is located. I would like to thank my mother Leah for sharing the stories of her austerity hardships with me.

This book is based on a PhD dissertation supervised by Yosef Gorni and Avraham Shapira submitted to Tel Aviv University nine years ago. My teachers both had an important influence on this book; Yosef Gorni challenged me with difficult questions and offered constructive criticism while Avraham Shapira shared his wealth of knowledge. I thank them both deeply. Yaacov Shavit and Aviva Halamish were the first to encourage me to publish the dissertation and commented on the first draft of the text. I am ever so grateful to them for all the help they have given me over the years. Yechiam Weitz, Assaf Likhovski and Tuvia Friling commented on some of the chapters. Avi Bareli, Gilat Gofer, and Michael Feige shared their vast knowledge with me while this book was in the making. Special thanks are due to Mordechai Bar-On whose extensive reader’s report helped me shape this book into what it is today. Yehuda Nini was there for me when I needed to discuss this project and offered his kind and knowledgeable advice.

I am thankful to Tel Aviv University and the Yitzhak Rabin Center for the financial support that enabled me to dedicate the years needed to complete this research, as well as to Yad Tabenkin for the research grant.

Archival material was collected in various archives—I wish to thank all those who assisted me throughout my research, especially Gilad Livneh, Michal Zaft and Ronit Cohen of the Israel State Archive; Leana Feldman and Hana Pinshau of the Ben-Gurion Archives, and Lili Adar at the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute’s library; Michael Polishchuk and Haya Zeidenberg at the Moshe Sharett Israel Labor Party Archives; Batya Leshem and Gita Bar-Tikva at the Central Zionist Archive and Ilan Gal-Pe’er at the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labor Movement Research Archives.

I wish to thank Am Oved Press and the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel for publishing the book in Hebrew in 2008. In particular I want to express my deep gratitude to Eli Shealtiel and Herzeliya Efraty who edited the Hebrew version.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Anita Shapira, Head of the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, for supporting this publication in both matter and spirit and for her ongoing encouragement. My many colleagues at the junior researcher’s forum at the Chaim Weizmann Institute offered their advice and friendship.

I wish to express my gratitude to Ilan Troen, who encouraged me to submit my book for publication in the Schusterman Series in Israel Studies, as well as to his coeditors Jehuda Reinharz and Sylvia Fuks Fried at Brandeis University. And to Editor in Chief Phyllis Deutsch, Ann Brash, and Katy Grabill at the University Press of New England, as well as to Jeanne Ferris who copyedited the English manuscript, Golan Moskwitz who read the proofs, and Joanne Sprott who prepared the index, thank you all. Riva Starr reworked the endnotes; I thank her for being so attentive and patient.

I wish to express my gratitude to Haim Watzman for his meticulous translation from the Hebrew and for his curiosity and concern.

During the 2009–2010 academic year, York University’s Center for Jewish Studies hosted me while I was working on the translation. I wish to thank Sara Horowitz for extending the invitation, as well as Erik Lawee, Marty Lockshin, Carl Ehrlich and Laura Weisman for their assistance and friendship.

Derek Penslar of the University of Toronto read this manuscript and offered invaluable comments, as well as his and his family’s warm hospitality.

I am also thankful to Pnina Lahav, Bernard Wasserstein, Yael Zerubavel, and Ronald Zweig for their long time encouragement. Together with David Tal, Tali Margalit, Yael Darr, Danny Gutwein, Zohar Segev, Meir Chazan, Tali Lev, Uri Cohen, Michal Ben Jacob, Dina Roginsky, and Sylvia and Emanuel Adler they helped me work my way through both the translation and the Canadian winter. Audrey Karlinsky and her family and friends provided a home away from home.

The translation of this book was funded by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, the Littauer Foundation, and the Yoran Sznycer Research Fund at Tel Aviv University. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise awarded the book a publication grant. The Association for Israel Studies awarded this book the Shapiro Prize for Best Book in 2009 for which I am ever so grateful.

Above all, I am forever grateful to my beloved husband Gideon and our two sons Yuval and Yotam for their love. Along with our four-legged fury family members, they made my long days by the computer all good days.

Kfar Maas

February 2011

INTRODUCTION

The First Years

In the autumn of 1950, a writer for Israel’s popular daily newspaper Ma’ariv vented the frustrations of Israel’s average, honest, conscientious, yet exasperated and angry citizens:

Ben-Gurion … has not even for a single day found it within him to put himself in the place of a simple Jew of Israel, a simple citizen who goes to his government … and goes through all the nerve-wracking, humiliating furies and agonies of hell that each of us has experienced. He has not spent a single day in benchless corridors and has never gone, like an ordinary citizen, into the office of an official who doesn’t know how to say Hello and who doesn’t bother to keep a chair in his office so that he won’t have to offer anyone who enters a seat, and it doesn’t matter what happens afterward, the endless refusals, and the endless forms, and the arbitrary treatment, and the dilettantish attitude.¹

For its ordinary inhabitants, the new state of Israel, whose establishment in 1948 represented the extraordinary consummation of the Zionist enterprise, quickly turned into a troubling, everyday reality. The new state became a home for devoted Zionists from all over the globe but also took in hundreds of thousands of impoverished or persecuted refugees, at least some of whom would have preferred to go elsewhere. The achievement of statehood created a burden that threatened to overwhelm the state’s own apparatus and the civil society that had been constructed in the preceding decades by the country’s established population. This book examines how the very establishment of the state, and the stress resulting from the mass influx of a new and culturally different population, affected and transformed Israeli society. Beginning as a collective that placed national and communal needs first, it gradually became a society in which individuals sought—and expected the state to allow them—individual freedoms, a steadily rising standard of living, and personal fulfillment.

Mass immigration compelled the government to impose a severe austerity program and rationing, a regime that brought with it food shortages, endless lines, and a notoriously intrusive bureaucracy. Although the country’s veteran citizens—the vatikim (Hebrew for old-timers), or those who had grown up in the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community—initially displayed a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of their newly arrived Jewish brethren, they gradually came to view the impositions as unfair, unnecessary, and too difficult to live with. Israeli society and culture still bear the imprint of these early days. The way Israelis see and interpret the past has changed over time, but its impact has not diminished.

During Israel’s early years, the veteran Israelis felt profoundly disappointed with the state and the society that had emerged after independence. Ostensibly, these people should have seen the War of Independence as a turning point; in the wake of their long, bloody, but successful effort to create a Jewish state, one might have expected them to feel relieved. Instead, the mood after the war was one of dejection. As the intimate environment of the Yishuv was overwhelmed by destitute immigrants, members of this established community closed ranks to preserve their close-knit society. The heavy burden imposed by immigration thus also catalyzed a feeling of alienation.

Within the space of just five years, from 1948 to 1953, Israelis had to cope with a series of setbacks and crises—war, inflation, the program of rationing and price controls, recession, and unemployment. Construction and settlement activities went into high gear but were unable to avert a severe housing shortage. Illness became more frequent, and death rates rose. Despite the state’s rapid development, old-timers experienced this period as drab and shabby. The country they saw around them was far removed from their dreams and ideals.

The immigrants themselves suffered the worst effects of the mass immigration; they struggled simply to subsist. But the shock waves battered old-timers as well,² and it is this group that stands at the center of the current study.

The Collective and the Individual

During Israel’s early years, public debates and conflicts directly or indirectly shaped government policy and the nature of the regime. They left their marks on legislation, jurisprudence, and the way people lived. Whatever the specific issues at stake, the disputes were ultimately about the nature of Israeli identity, the public good, and the responsibilities of citizenship. They had far-reaching consequences for the relationship between the individual and the collective. By tracking the public discourse of the time as recorded in archival material, my purpose here is to bring some of these processes to light.³

Since the Yishuv was the nucleus of the Israeli state,⁴ an understanding of the metamorphoses that occurred in the transition from one to the other will clarify the nature of changes in Israeli society during its initial years. Yishuv society, although pluralistic and stratified, was characterized by voluntary collectivism. Its members enlisted, of their own free will, in the project of constructing a common society and identity. This attitude is evident among social elites, as well as among agents of change like writers, educators, and other intellectuals who placed themselves at the disposal of the collective, living in agricultural settlements, performing manual labor, and serving in the military. Individuals and organizations alike made a supreme effort to develop, learn, and inculcate the use of a common language and fashion a common cultural repertoire. Although collectivism was specifically an ideology of the Left—of the labor movement that was the Yishuv’s leading political force—the Right in its own way accepted collectivistic principles. For the latter, collectivism was manifested in nationalism, culture, the military, and certain political matters. In other words, the Yishuv’s collectivism was not only a matter of the economy and the political and social organization, but rather, and principally, a mental attitude.⁵ It was adopted as a model of proper conduct and constituted an important foundation of the consciousness, feelings, and behavioral repertoire of the society that established the state. The people of the Yishuv, who became the veteran members of Israeli society, felt a strong sense of belonging to and responsibility for the other members of the Jewish nation. This commitment gave them a sense of power and inner strength.⁶ Most of them also had a sense of mission, resulting from their belief that individuals had the power to achieve personal redemption and to contribute to the redemption of their compatriots.

When the Yishuv became the state of Israel, the nature and manifestations of collectivism changed. Instead of being motivated by a grass-roots ideology, by individuals and groups, it became the chief principle of government, its ethos and logos. I argue that a dialectic process took place in Israel’s early years. Society became more individualistic, as Israelis became less inclined to sacrifice their personal preferences and health—and less willing to volunteer their energies, money, and time—for the good of the collective.⁷ Yet this took place at a time when most of the country’s top leaders and policymakers subscribed to a collectivist socialist-Zionist ideology and were working to create a centralized regime.⁸ They wanted a strong central government so that the state apparatus could be used to fashion society (or at least certain aspects of it) and mold a collective identity that would encourage individuals to exert themselves to achieve common national goals. Unlike voluntary collectivism, which depends on individuals’ motivating themselves, centralized collectivism is powered by politicians, bureaucrats, and other leaders.

A nation that has declared its allegiance to an individualist ethos can pursue an efficient centralist collectivist policy for limited periods, such as in times of economic depression, as the United States did in the 1930s. In contrast, a centralized collectivist establishment like Israel’s during the 1950s can engender individualism.⁹ Centralized collectivism was personified by David Ben- Gurion, the most important Israeli leader of the country’s first decade. His ideology, ethos, and modus operandi were shared by most members of the governing elite and officialdom. However, some aspects of the government’s centralized collectivist policies yielded unforeseen results and contributed to the process of individualization. Centralized collectivism was apparent in the ideology and ethos of the veteran population, if we consider its public discourse, but less so in its consciousness, and even less so in its actions. The disparity between discourse and practice increased over time.¹⁰

As individualization intensified, the Israeli public’s sense of common destiny was maintained and fostered by a number of historical and sociological factors. Among these were constant military tension, the fresh scars of the War of Independence, the heritage of the Yishuv and the struggle against the British, Israeli society’s confrontation with the consequences of the Holocaust and its survivors, and the salient presence of the heroes of the War of Independence, as well as of institutions and political movements that had played key roles in the struggle. Although the veteran Israelis came increasingly to place their individual interests before those of the nation, they continued to view themselves as a collective committed to the interests of the Jewish people as a whole—both those who lived in Israel and those who were destined, in the Israelis’ view, to eventually settle in Israel.

The Origins of the Individualist Ethos

The dominant voice of state institutions, and the state’s endeavor to take over functions that had previously been performed by voluntary groups and political parties, inevitably led to a reduction in voluntary collectivism. Veteran Israeli society found itself caught between the norms that were the product of its ideals and consciousness and the demands of day-to-day life.¹¹ The liberal individualist ethos had already appeared during the Yishuv period, but it became a coherent ideology and praxis only many years after the country’s first decade.¹² Nevertheless, advocates for this outlook, among them elected officials and the courts, participated in the public discourse of the 1950s.¹³ The change derived from the process of institutionalization and from the declining role of voluntarism, which was replaced by the pursuit of personal interests.

Another factor in the change was the appearance of a new social elite, the bureaucracy. Most members of this elite were Ashkenazim—Jews of Eastern and Central European origin. Although they belonged to the labor movement on the political level, a large chunk of the elite was making its way out of the working class. They relegated productive manual labor to the new immigrants, in particular those from the Middle East and North Africa, the Mizrahim (sometimes called Sephardi or Oriental Jews).¹⁴ The distinction between the elite and the new working class was not solely ethnic—the former group included Mizrahim who had been members of Yishuv society and of the labor movement. But because the Yishuv elite was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi (only 11 percent of the pre-independence Jewish population was Mizrahi), and because it drew its ideology and culture largely from European sources, new Ashkenazi immigrants faced fewer obstacles to integration and moved from manual labor into business and government jobs more quickly. The result was that the working class became more and more Mizrahi.

The decline of the principle of frugality, the accelerated transformation of parts of the former Yishuv society into a new bourgeoisie, the appearance of a new and ostentatious capitalist class, and the percolation of this capitalist ethos into other social classes all reinforced social change. Another factor in this transformation was weariness, the spiritual anticlimax experienced by revolutionary societies when they face the task of institutionalizing their achievements. Yet another was the character of the immigrants themselves. Those who came from Europe evinced no inclination to accept the norms of pioneering Yishuv society. They identified far more with Western models of success, aspiring to individual fulfillment and city life. They viewed money, not the frugality of the manual laborer, as the measure of status and success. Furthermore, the adherence to religious, ethnic, and family tradition that characterized the immigrants from the Maghreb and Mashrek ran up against the ethic of enlisting in the service of the collective.¹⁵

Individualism is a charged term. Its meaning in the hegemonic Israeli discourse of the 1950s differs from its meaning today. When used by the state’s leaders and senior members of the labor movement, the term was derogatory. Individualism was a synonym for selfishness and careerism, the reason or principal cause of what was called the pioneer crisis, the phenomenon of individuals’ turning their backs on the huge and pressing needs of society and the state.¹⁶ The criticism of the pursuit of money and status did not distinguish between these desires and individuals’ need to set boundaries and live their lives according to the dictates of their inner will. The prevailing collectivist discourse looked with suspicion on two aspects of liberalism. The first of these was liberal politics, with its commitment to democracy and the rule of law. The principles of liberal politics limited the state’s power to impinge on inalienable individual rights, even in the name of overwhelming national need. The liberal state aspired to balance the values of equality and freedom, with the latter taking precedence over the pursuit of collective goals. The second aspect was economic liberalism, which rejected state intervention in the economy. The ruling class of Israel in its early days seems to have linked the expansion of European individualism to the growth of capitalism, even if that expansion also had a place in socialist thought.¹⁷ In contrast with the prevailing approach in Israel at the time, many Westerners viewed liberal democratic individualism as a positive phenomenon—as the individual’s standing up for his or her uniqueness and originality, and for his or her voice. The demanding nature of the collective in Israel’s young society and the view that it sought no more than to foster the general good stood, in certain ways, in opposition to the image of the collective in Western societies, where liberal democratic principles required the state to respect and nurture individual rights.¹⁸

In the face of this disparity, it is important to look at the interactions between the individual and the collective, and in particular between the individual and the regime. I will therefore examine events in which the discourse of civil rights appeared, as well as struggles to promote such rights. One of the basic assumptions on which this book is based is that awareness of human rights and efforts to promote them are evidence of the growing empowerment of the individual and his or her enhanced status within society. Mapai, the largest of the labor parties and the party of government of the Yishuv and of the state of Israel for its first three decades, viewed the protection of the individual’s fundamental social and political rights as a central value. It therefore worked hard to secure them.¹⁹ Civil rights, however, needed more protection.²⁰ The discourse of rights was not silenced, as some studies have suggested,²¹ when the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, decided in 1950 to enact a set of basic laws as an alternative to a constitution. Social, political, and civil rights were an important issue on the public agenda.

Most work on Israel’s first years paints with broad strokes; it focuses on political parties and policy debates. Such accounts describe the period from the outside, at a distance of time, and critique it with the benefit of hindsight. The purpose of this book is not only to present a comprehensive picture of some of the changes that took place during this period, but also to portray them, as much as possible, from the point of view of the Israelis who experienced them. My goal is to understand these people’s feelings, expectations, and disappointments. Only by comprehending the mentality of the period; the way people saw the society they lived in and their own place within it; how they felt and what they thought about their country, their lives, their pasts, and their futures; and how they coped with the challenges they encountered can we today understand the changes that occurred during the country’s critical early years.

This book is divided into three parts, revolving around three thematic axes. In each part, I will seek to point out the agents of change and the causes of the process of individualization. The first part is devoted to the relationship between the regime and the public, set against the background of the enforcement and implementation of the austerity policy pursued by the government. Chapter 1 looks at how housewives in the original population coped with the austerity regime. Little scholarly attention thus far has been devoted to this sector, its opinions and beliefs, and its relationship to the authorities and the Israeli community at large. I propose that housewives were agents of change who accomplished or motivated a process of individualization in Israeli society. Chapter 2 examines the austerity regime through the prism of the rule of law. It follows the government’s enforcement policies, the extent of public compliance, and the reasons Israelis violated the austerity regulations. Chapter 3 is devoted to the role of the judicial system and its relationship with the government and the Knesset. In chapters 2 and 3, I argue that the failure to implement and enforce the austerity program undermined trust between the individual Israeli and the government. In my view, mutual alienation between the two encouraged individualism.²²

The book’s second part, comprising four chapters, examines the political arena. The intention is to reveal Israelis’ positions on the issues of the day through the mirror of the actions and words of the political parties that competed for their votes. Politics is thus discussed as a means, not an end in and of itself. An extensive discourse on rights evidenced itself in the two election campaigns examined here, reflecting, I argue, the needs and travails of the veteran Israeli public. This discourse serves as a way of plumbing what the public thought about the proper relations between the individual and the collective. Chapter 4 looks at the campaign leading up to the local elections of November 1950. Chapter 5 analyzes the election results, their significance, and their implications. Chapter 6 focuses on the subsequent national election campaign. Chapter 7 discusses the outcome of the national elections and the comprehensive and significant policy changes that followed them, both in the area of mass immigration—which manifested the collectivist ethos—and in the government’s economic program. Another thread that runs through this group of chapters is the political establishment’s intervention in and attempts to influence the electoral process, thus violating its autonomy. Part 2, in particular chapter 7, offers evidence of such tampering, and considers how this affected the foundations of Israeli democracy and the collective consciousness of the country’s society, particularly that of the veteran Israelis.

Part 3 examines the effect that the massive immigration of the state’s early years had on the first Israelis and their attitudes toward the Jewish collective. (The state’s non-Jewish citizens were perceived at that time as others who lay outside Israeli society.) This section is concerned with the history of emotions, portraying the revulsion the old-timers felt toward the immigrants, especially those from the Middle East. This attitude had its source in an unflattering image of the immigrants as constructed by cultural agents, the immigrants’ living conditions, and the foreignness of their customs. Chapter 8 offers a theoretical explanation of the term disgust and discusses how this image of the immigrants was created by mediating agents—national leaders, bureaucrats, and journalists. The chapter also examines the immigrants’ living conditions during their first years in Israel, and the connection between those conditions and the group’s negative image. Chapter 9 shows how immigrants were seen as parents, and how the veteran Israelis’ impressions of immigrants were affected by the marriage practices of some from Islamic lands. Chapter 10 sums up the relationships between old-timers and immigrants and examines the role that the veterans’ sense of disgust toward the immigrants played in the formation of the Israeli collective. It also looks at how this revulsion transformed the old-timers’ attitudes toward the collective. In contrast with the common image of Israeli society at its inception being a mobilized society ruled by an all-powerful party machine, I will show that Israeli life was in fact shaped not only by the country’s decision makers but also by how the average Israeli related and reacted to the elite’s principles. Social attitudes and moral values are not only instilled in the public by intellectuals, scholars, and political leaders—that is, from the top down—but also by agents of change, often difficult to identify, among ordinary citizens.

 AT HOME AND ON THE STREET

Chapter 1

Austerity

Desperate Housewives and the Government

In April 1949, when the young state of Israel was in the final stages of its War of Independence, its government imposed an austerity regime. The country’s exhausted, battered population, consisting both of those who had arrived in earlier years and the new immigrants who began pouring into the country after the end of British rule, wanted to recover from their wounds. Now they faced rationing and price controls on food and other commodities. Rationing was not new to them—it had been instituted during the war, although in a limited way. ¹ Many Israelis had hoped that life could return to normal in peacetime, but the goal of the new measures was to enable the state to absorb the immigrants—refugees from Europe and the Islamic world, most of whom arrived with few possessions and who, following their arrival, endured substandard nourishment, housing, and health services. The austerity program was only one aspect of the government’s intervention in the economy, but it directly affected the lives of the entire population.

Rationing and price controls were not an Israeli invention. During World War II, similar policies had been imposed by the British administration in Palestine. Israel retained most of the Mandate’s legal code, so the young state already had on its books the laws and regulations required to institute such a program. England had imposed an austerity system on its own citizens during the war, and this policy continued during the postwar rehabilitation period. It came to an end only after the general election of 1951, which returned Winston Churchill and his Conservative party to power. The new British government significantly reduced state intervention in the economy and phased out rationing and price controls, ending them finally in 1955.² Israeli policymakers used England as the model for their austerity program. Notably, the Hebrew word chosen as a translation for austerity, tzena, is a form of the Hebrew term for modesty and humility—an abstract value, not just a public