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groups, in order to guarantee the rights of whichever group was
in the minority.53
By mid-1948, with the first Arab-Israeli war in full swing,
Magnes was deeply pessimistic. He feared an Arab victory: there
are millions upon millions of Muslims in the world . . . They
have time. The timelessness of the desert. 54 An Arab ambush on
13 April 1948 of a Jewish convoy bearing doctors and nurses
traveling through East Jerusalem to the Hebrew University
Hadassah Medical School campus on Mount Scopus in which
seventy-eight were slaughtered was in effect the final nail in the
coffin of Magnes s binationalism. It was not that he publicly re-
canted. But he understood that it was a lost cause and that
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
his own standing in the Yishuv had been irreparably shattered.
Within days, he left for the United States, and within months,
never returning to Palestine/Israel, he was dead.
Hashomer Hatza ir The Hashomer Hatza ir Movement, founded
in 1915 by Polish Jews in exile in Vienna, added a further ele-
ment to the binational vision: socialism.
After World War I, Hashomer Hatza ir groups immigrated to
Palestine and set up a string of kibbutzim. In 1927, at the found-
ing council of the movement s kibbutz association, Hakkibutz
Ha artzi, the leaders voted for a set of ideological assumptions
delineating the movement s political goal. Ratified as the move-
ment s policy in the council s meeting in 1933, it stated (in the
top-heavy Marxist terminology of the day): In light of the max-
imal immigration of masses of Jews to [Palestine], which will
create a concentration of most Jews in the Land of Israel and its
environs [that is, hinting at Transjordan], and, on the other hand,
[in light] of the fact of the presence of masses of Arab inhabitants
in the country, the future societal development after the period
of national liberation [from British imperial rule] by the socialist
revolution and the cancellation of classes will lead to the creation
of a binational socialist society. 55 Meir Ya ari, one of the move-
ment s leaders, put it in jargon-free Hebrew three years earlier:
Our aim is to realize a binational socialist society in Palestine. 56
But the movement was still speaking of societal change, not
statehood (to which, given its dormant anarchist tenets, it was
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
vaguely antagonistic). World War II sped up the movement s
transformation into a political party and pushed it toward greater
political clarity. In 1942, at the sixth meeting of the Kibbutz
Artzi council in Mishmar Ha emeq, the movement at last spoke
bluntly: The political program of the Zionist Organisation
should include the readiness to establish a political binational
regime in the country, based on the unhindered advancement of
the Zionist enterprise and governmental parity without taking
account of the numerical ratio between the two peoples. More-
over, the Zionist Organisation should regard positively the per-
spective [that is, idea] of establishing a federative tie between the
Land of Israel and the neighboring countries. The resolution
called for continued Jewish immigration in line with the coun-
try s maximal absorptive capacity and, during the transitional
period before the Land of Israel fully integrated into the federa-
tion, Jewish immigration would continue in dimensions that
will assure that the Jews cease . . . to be a minority in the coun-
try. The binational state was to be based on a common front
and cooperative organisation between the workers of the two
peoples in other words, a shared socialist outlook and goals.
To this end Hashomer Hatza ir would act to help set up a social-
ist movement among Palestine s Arabs.57
Apart from its Marxist discourse and socialist goals, Hasho-
mer Hatza ir differed from Brit Shalom in that it always sought
to achieve a Jewish majority in the binational state (albeit with
political parity between the communities, regardless of the de-
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
mographic tilt). And, against the backdrop of World War II, it
focused on saving European Jewry and solving Europe s Jewish
Problem. 58
Other Advocacies of Binationalism Between the two world wars,
for a time, binationalism also held attractions for mainstream
Zionist leaders like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. But their ap-
proach was always tactical. Given the reality of overwhelming
Arab numbers, a binational model that gave Jews political parity,
while allowing for continued Jewish immigration that they
hoped would one day result in a Jewish majority, was ephemer-
ally attractive, even though it ran contrary to the deepest Zionist
endgame aspirations. Haim Arlosoroff, soon to be named head
of the Jewish Agency s Political Department and, as such, the
movement s foreign minister in 1922 asserted that there was
no alternative to setting up a common state in Palestine for Jews
and Arabs as equal nations in their rights. 59 Eight years later,
Weizmann wrote to a friend that [for] now we should be con-
tent with a binational state. 60 Weizmann told the Zionist Con-
gress, in Basel, in July 1931 that the Arabs must be made to feel
that the Jews do not seek political domination nor do they want
to be dominated and we would welcome an agreement . . .
on the basis of political parity. 61 Even Ben-Gurion, under the
impact of the 1929 riots, briefly spoke of absolute political
equality and political parity. In 1939 he recalled that in 1930
he had been in favor of political parity. I use this wording and
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
not binationalism because the latter expression is not clear to
me . . . In 1930 I tried to develop a complete constitution based
on political parity in stages of development . . . Inside my move-
ment I fought for parity . . . I went to the Arabs . . . [But] they did
not want to hear about it . 62 So far, he had said three years later,
not a single Arab leader has been found to agree to the principle
of parity and this without even mentioning their complete
and utter rejection of continued Jewish immigration.63
A variant of the binational idea that surfaced during the late
1920s and 1930s was the concept of cantonization or regional
autonomy. Each community would have a region or regions in
which it ruled itself, with core powers relating to defense and
foreign relations vested in a central authority, possibly located in
Jerusalem. At least initially, the idea was that the British would
continue to play this central governmental role but some vari-
ants had it that the central government, either immediately or
down the road, would be controlled by the majority population.
At one point Mussolini was reported to favor the idea.64
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