The Invention and Decline of Israeliness. Baruch Kimmerling

with most of the essential services offered by any state. Defense, administrative machinery, education, welfare, health, and employment services were absolute neces-sities.³¹ The state in the making could also mobilize the exclusive loyalty of the Jewish community's members without risking a (premature) head-on collision with the colonial state.

      The colonial regime provided the Jewish immigrant settler society mainly with the security umbrella needed for the community's growth and development in the face of the Arab majority's opposition. Although the Jews were not always satisfied with the pace and extent to which British security was supplied, in the long run, they were the major beneficiaries of the regime. The accumulation of institutionalized power and the formation of an organized machinery of violence by the settler society, together with the ability to mobilize Jews in Palestine and in the Diaspora for political ends, constituted two necessary conditions for the existence of Palestine's Jewish community as a viable political entity regardless of its size. Furthermore, the so-called organized Yishuv provided an immediate alternative to the colonial state that was destined to disappear together with the British colonial regime. In creating an entity with such considerable political potential, the Jewish community was forced to concentrate most of its institutions and manpower into the autonomous “state in the making.” Thus, the boundaries between “state” (i.e., the central political institutions) and “society” (nonpolitical but exclusive ethnic institutions) were completely blurred, as institutionalization of political organizations and leadership intensified internal social control and surveillance.

      “Knesset Israel,” the quasi-governmental institution of the immigrant settler community in Palestine, overlapped, to a great extent, not only with the leadership of the Zionist parties,³² but also with the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, the local operational branch of the World Zionist Organization. Within this political complex, the Histad-rut, or General Labor Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine, was founded in 1920. This organization itself amounted to a quasi-statist mechanism. In addition to performing the usual functions of a trade union, the Histadrut owned manufacturing plants and construction firms (Solel Boneh and later the Koor consortium), marketing and purchasing cooperatives, a comprehensive health and hospitalization system, a bank, an employment bureau, a newspaper (Davar), a publishing company (Am Oved), and a competitive and mass-oriented sports organization (Ha'poel).³³ An entire subculture based on symbols—a (red) flag, anthems, ceremonies, parades, and festivals and holidays (May Day)—was also developed.³⁴ Owing to its vast economic and profit-oriented involvement and its status as a major employer in the system, the Histadrut was never regarded solely as a union movement that protected workers, but rather as an additional nation-building organ with its own economic and political interests vis-à-vis the other state-and society-building institutions, on the one hand, and the workers, on the other.

      Not all the Jews in Palestine were part of this “state in the making.” For example, in the eyes of the local Orthodox Jewish community (including branches of Agudat Israel, the largest religious party in the Jewish world at the time), the colonial state was the sole recognized political authority.³⁵ The state in the making also excluded members of the Communist party, and to a certain extent, parts of the long-established Sephardi Jewish community, who were culturally and politically linked with the previous Ottoman regime, as well as the small Yemenite Jewish community. An issue that produced much controversy in the Jewish community of Palestine was the communal position of the Revisionist Zionist movement, which opposed the socialist-led coalition in the World Zionist Organization, arguing for a more assertive Zionist policy and for a bigger share of power, positions, and material resources. Another highly crystallized and institutionalized portion of the Jewish community in Palestine, the municipalities, held a central position in the polity. Even so, they were not fully integrated into the state in the making, mainly because they enjoyed the advantage of independent financial resources. The municipal councils, primarily those with nonsocialist petit bourgeois majorities, such as the municipalities of Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan, were autonomous to some extent both from the British and from the central Jewish political centers. They played a mediating role between the colonial state and the Jewish ethnic community.³⁶ It should be emphasized that the very presence of these excluded groups indicates how clearly the boundaries of the state in the making were demarcated.

      Although the organized Jewish community was not without its internal struggles and tensions, it had evolved unique mechanisms that could serve as safety valves to prevent the intensification of confrontations. One mechanism was a coalition of benefactors who raised external capital through “national funds” collected by various worldwide Zionist organizations and distributed by the local leadership. This was needed because the Zionist venture was a uniquely nonprofit and noneconomic settler movement,³⁷ which had chosen its target territory, not with a view to wealthy and abundant land, natural, and human resources, but instead at the behest of a nationalist utopia, driven by religious and primordial sentiments (see chapters 3 and 6).

      THE STATE

      With its declaration of independence in May 1948, in the course of what it refers to as “the War of Independence,” on part of the territory originally included in the British colonial state, the State of Israel set two primary goals. The first was to establish clear-cut boundary lines between the state and society and to achieve a dominant symbolic status for the state, or what might be called a “high stateness.” The second was to obtain an optimal level of dominant state institutions vis-à-vis other historical power foci in society. In the pre-state era, the boundaries between these foci and those of the state in the making were blurred or, in some cases, nonexistent. The Israeli state carried out its boundary-establishing activities in a gradual and systematic manner in order to prevent the creation of instability and the weakening of its own position in relation to the prestate power centers.³⁸ At the same time, it was in the state's best interests to maintain its alliance with groups that could ultimately assist it in penetrating new areas and peripheries and establishing a hegemonic order (see chapter 3).