I.F. Stone on Israel

Somewhere in the background noise last week I had heard a discussion on how books on current events almost always fail the test of time. One counter-example offered was I.F. Stone's 1946 book, Underground to Palestine.

This is indeed a remarkable piece of reporting. It describes Stone's travels with Jewish survivors of the concentration camps as they make their way illegally from displaced persons camps in eastern Europe across the Czech and Austrian frontiers, through the Soviet zone and finally to an undisclosed port and onto a boat that is to run the British blockade of Palestine. The entire trip, but especially that on two boats, is harrowing. And the Haganah, the forerunner of today's IDF are rightly lionized.

These were desperate people escaping from a Europe still rife with antisemitism and lawlessness. And it is the incredible story of the dream of making a home in a promised land.

Yet we know how this turned out. And by far the most haunting part of the book is an epilogue that Stone wrote in 1978, shortly after Begin's Likud had taken power. For Stone, it seems, this represented the death of the dream of Eretz Israel that he had described in the book. For him, and for many others, Zionism had always been about establishing a home in a land they would share with another people; it was to be a home for the Jewish people and not a Jewish homeland. In today's parlance, it was to be a one-state solution.

In the 1970s, Stone was excoriated by his own people for proposing what he called a "bi-national" state in the land west of the Jordan. Yet he argued in this epilogue that not only had this been the dream of many of the original pioneers but it was now the only hope for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian arabs.

However, for Stone this was simply a vehicle for achieving the much more important goal of living in harmony with the original Palestinian inhabitants. He speaks of what he calls the "Other Zionism", a Zionism commited not to aggresive nationalism and chauvinism, but to a common life in a shared land. This, he both argues and demonstrates, was the original vision of many of the early Zionists, and it is, he was convinced, a prerequisite for the survival of the Jewish home in Palestine. It is worth quoting the final paragraph of the epilogue in full:

No matter which choice, the two peoples must live together, either in the same Palestinian state or side by side in two Palestinian states. But either solution requires a revival of the Other Zionism, a recognition that two peoples -- not one -- occupy the same land and have the same rights. This is the path to reconciliation and reconciliation alone can guarantee Israel's survival. Israel can exhaust itself in new wars. It can commit suicide. It can pull down the pillars on itself and its neighbors. But it can live only by reviving that spirit of fraternity and justice and conciliation that the Prophets preached and the Other Zionism sought to apply. To go back and study the Other Zionism is, for dissidents like myself, to draw comfort in loneliness, to discover fresh sources of moral strength, and to find the secret of Israel's survival.