April 1943
Source: The Jewish Frontier, An Anthology, 1934-1944, The Jewish Frontier Association, Inc. New York, 1945, pp 131-144.
Moshe Shertok, who changed his last name to Sharett, served as the first foreign minister and the second prime minister of the State of Israel. During the Mandatory period, Shertok led the Jewish Agency’s political department and worked alongside many Zionist leaders in lobbying for the state. In this speech from April 1943, he argues for the importance of creating a Jewish state and presents a centrist Zionist perspective relative to the other Zionist thinkers of the time. Shertok takes a pragmatic approach, as he acknowledges that the Arab population of Palestine deserves the same rights as the Jews but does not waver on the importance of a Jewish majority. He states that “the people who live in Palestine today, beside the Jews, are entitled to have their national aspirations recognized, but so are we.” While Shertok realizes that the Arab population opposes a Jewish presence, he is firmly against a binational state, a proposal by some Zionists for a state based on a 50-50 power-sharing agreement between Jews and Arabs. Such a potential agreement would potentially require population parity. Shertok feared that committing to a population quota would eventually block Jews seeking refuge in Palestine, thus defeating a key purpose of the Jewish state.
Given during World War II, while the Holocaust was underway in Europe, it came on the heels of David Ben-Gurion’s (head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine) May 1942, Biltmore Hotel Program, announcing the eventual establishment of the Jewish state. While Shertok does not mention the Nazis by name or detail their atrocities, he does demonstrate an understanding of the disaster the Jews of Europe were facing: “What we believe is possible in Palestine is to transplant there very large numbers of Jews, perhaps all the surviving Jews of Europe.” Looking toward the end of World War II, Shertok reflects upon how World War I resulted in the mandate system and how the current war could be a catalyst for moving from the idea of a national home to a state. He describes the end of the war as “a most decisive turning point in our history, perhaps the most decisive turning point since we were driven away from Palestine.”
This speech serves as both a call to action to build a state soon and as an explanation for why the Jewish commonwealth model is the best suited for the Jewish state in Palestine. Shertok would gave a powerful speech, in May 1945, “Let My People Go to Palestine.”
Maya Rezak, July 2, 2025
Palestine — A Jewish Commonwealth, Moshe Shertok
April 1943
Source: The Jewish Frontier, An Anthology, 1934-1944, The Jewish Frontier Association, Inc. New York, 1945, pp 131-144.
We have reached a most decisive turning point in our history, perhaps the most decisive turning point since we were driven away from Palestine. This turning point came not only as a result of the war and of what it brought in its wake for our brothers in Europe. It came before the war, with the change of policy on the part of Great Britain as the mandatory power in Palestine in regard to the future of the Jewish people in that country. So long as the mandatory regime went on as it was conceived in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration and laid down in the Mandate, we could concentrate all our thoughts and efforts upon the practical job at hand of sending people into Palestine, of acquiring land in Palestine, of proceeding step by step from little strength to greater strength, without necessarily posing to ourselves the problem of our ultimate goal in Palestine as a question of the most immediate concern.
For many years we resisted and defeated attempts to concentrate Zionist attention on the question of our ultimate aim. We regarded such discussions as unwarranted and harmful. We feared that they would result only in the diversion of attention and energy from the practical, vital task before us to dreams and fancies which could in no way add to our actual strength. That was the state of things as long as we could be reasonably certain that the framework of the mandatory regime, narrow and restricted as it was, was something firm and unshakable, and that it would be kept up and give us an opportunity to show what we could do, and that in the fullness of time we would be able to achieve the desire which burned in the hearts of every one of us.
But an end was put to that regime. An abrupt, violent change took place in Great Britain’s official policy months before the war. In May 1939, the question of our political future in Palestine appeared to be in the balance, and we had to face that problem. We had to take up the challenge and give our answer to it.
Before and since that change, developments have taken place, all tending in the same direction, all working with a cumulative effect, and today, if we do not want to fail in our historic responsibility, we must put before ourselves four-square the problem of what is to become of us in Palestine and what we are going to do in this generation — during the war, at the end of the war, immediately after the end of the war — in order to prevent the defeat of our historic aim in Palestine.
When the last war ended, one of the new things which it created on the constitutional plane of international arrangements was the concept of the mandate. It was a wide concept, and quite a number of countries came under it. Palestine was only one of them, but country after country reached the stage where it was deemed worthy of independence, and mandate after mandate was abolished. Today the Palestine Mandate stands as an exception to that process. The question of the duration of the Mandate would have stood before us today as a consequence of this war even if we had not witnessed a change in the mandatory policy before the outbreak of war. But the Zionist content of the Mandate was liquidated, and the Mandate, instead of being an instrument of facilitating the achievement of the Zionist aim, became an instrument of defeating it. Moreover, as a result of the disturbances of 1936 to 1939, in fact as a result of the first phase of those disturbances in the year 1936, the whole question of Palestine was thrown into a melting pot. A major inquiry was held, a very authoritative body called the Palestine Royal Commission surveyed the whole field, and the most far-reaching conclusion that it reached was that the Jews in Palestine, in order to be able to work out their salvation, must be given political independence — that a Jewish state must be established. It is true that the commission proposed that the solution of our problem should be applied only to a part of Palestine, and a very limited part at that. In quantity their conclusion was a bitter disappointment, but in quality it was a most far-reaching, positive step: They recognized that the world will not redeem its pledge to the Jewish people unless we were restored in Palestine to the position of statehood on terms of complete equality with other nations.
And last but not least, the question of the relations between Palestine and the neighboring countries has been definitely put on the political agenda. The question of the interconnection between various states in the world, between groups of states in various parts of the world, and between all states of the world as forming one world unit has been put on the order of the day. The final solution of Palestine’s political problem thus becomes inescapable, and if we are not prepared with an unequivocal statement of our aims, our case is bound to go by default. The question of what is to become of Palestine will be decided in the not-distant future, but it may be decided in accordance with the will of others without taking into account our vital interests. Throughout the last 25 years we have increasingly felt the need for a more dynamic policy in order to make our work in Palestine possible. We have increasingly felt the need for governmental powers in order to be able to do what we had to do in Palestine: conduct immigration, undertake large-scale development schemes, bring in Jews, settle them, make life for them possible.
We have always said that our work is in its very essence a state-building enterprise. We knew very well that we must start from the very beginning. To us it has not been a question of formal independence alone. Formal independence alone would not have settled our problem in Palestine, so long as we were few and weak, as we were 25 years ago. We had first to acquire land, even to “create” land, in Palestine and bring in people. We had to build up these people, to make workers, producers and defenders of them. We visualized the attainment of independence as the ultimate goal, but in the process of the work we found that some power, some political means at our disposal, in addition to the financial means such as we possessed and in addition to the human energy that we were able to mobilize, were essential if we were to be able to make further headway.
Today, in the face of a policy which is diametrically opposed to our aims, as well as in the face of the unique chance for remaking the world which democratic victory in this war is going to bring about, we must put our case before the world in its entire magnitude. We must speak clearly as to what we believe should be done in Palestine. What we believe is possible in Palestine is to transplant there very large numbers of Jews, perhaps all the surviving Jews of Europe. We must speak in terms of millions. We must speak in terms of years, not decades. The thing must and can be done quickly, more quickly and on a larger scale than we thought possible ever before.
Our experience in Palestine proves that. When we started our work in Palestine, it was a poor, sparsely populated country. It was a country of emigration rather than of immigration. It was only contact between the land-hungry, homeless Jew and his native soil that worked the miracle of Jewish productivity. It is not because the best Jews in the world went to Palestine that they were able to do there what they could not do anywhere else in the world. It was not because Palestine was the best or the richest country that the Jews succeeded there more than they did in any other country, but because Jews are the people made by Palestine and because Palestine is the country which alone in the world is a place which the Jew can call his own.
Our enterprise was laughed at. It was lightly dismissed and rejected by people who pretended to be great economic experts. All this, they said, is artificial, mere fancy, and it cannot lead to a great historic work of reconstruction. They argued that it was against the world trend to take a people of town dwellers and bring them back to the land. The general trend is a flight of people from the rural districts to the towns, and these people are trying to reverse the historic process. The general trend of migration is from poorer to richer countries, and these people are trying to set in motion a process of migration from rich countries into the poorest country imaginable. The trend of general human progress is in obedience to economic laws, and it is against those laws that people should base their lives not upon their economic interest, but upon some idea, some fancy, a remote recollection of their glorious past or a very vague hope for the future.
Not only has our experience in Palestine given the lie to all these prophecies and shallow dicta of would-be experts, but it is becoming more and more evident that the trends of world development are pointing in the same direction. Under the complex condition of human life in the world today, it is impossible to leave economics and social affairs to take care of themselves. Life must be organized and planned. At the root of that organization and planning there must be a national decision. A people, a nation, a class, any collective entity must ask itself: What do we want? And it must plan accordingly.
We are fully aware of the fact that we do not live and act in a vacuum. The world is a very complicated organism. We know how it affects our life in the countries where we are today, and we have learned from bitter experience how it affects our chances of re-establishment in our own country. But difficulties are there to be overcome, not to be overlooked or to run away from. One great difficulty facing us is that the country to which we are returning is not an empty space. That is the cruel penalty we are paying for having left that country. There is no such thing as empty space in the world today. The laws of pressure operate in human society as they do in the physical world, and the country which we left empty in the course of centuries became populated. It is not fully filled, but still there is a considerable population there belonging to a different people. It is perhaps natural for that population to resist entry into Palestine, not to want to see Palestine change its familiar character. But we cannot help that. Our survival as a people, our rehabilitation as a nation, are here at stake. The people who live in Palestine today beside the Jews are entitled to have their national aspirations recognized, but so are we. We are human beings, like other peoples on the face of the earth, and it is an elementary right of every human being to live in an environment that is congenial to him, to live together with his own people, speaking the same language, sharing the same feelings and shaping their environment in accordance with their ideas and tastes. That right cannot be denied to us, and the only place where we can achieve the fulfillment of that right is Palestine. The Arab people inhabits vast and potentially rich countries, much richer than Palestine. The future and the national development of the Arab people are more secure than of many other peoples in the world, apart from the Jews. No nation, no political unit achieves 100% of what it wants. Even if the Arabs were to give up Palestine completely, they would be achieving more than many other peoples, but they do not need to give up Palestine completely. We say that Palestine is our country, the only country that is ours. That does not mean that the Arabs who have lived in Palestine for centuries past and whom that country is a home in the real sense of the term should be asked to give it up, to give up the feeling that they are at home there. We believe that Palestine is the one country where Jews as a people are destined to achieve their self-determination. The Arabs as a people will achieve their self-determination in much larger territories and in much larger numbers than we shall ever have the chance of achieving in Palestine. However, the Arabs who live in Palestine are fully entitled to the preservation of their character. That need not interfere with the attainment of our goal, of converting Palestine into a predominantly Jewish country. That should not and need not interfere with our aim to see Palestine as a whole established as a Jewish commonwealth.
What does it mean when we say, “We want Palestine established as a Jewish commonwealth”? We want to bring as many Jews as possible into Palestine, and by that we shall certainly create there a Jewish majority as we believe that this is the destiny of that country — because it is ours. And because there is no other to be the home of the Jewish people, we also believe that it is right and just that the policy of the government to be established there should be actively to promote that development, actively to make it possible for as many Jews as possible to settle in Palestine. The future of Palestine will forever be bound up with the future of the Jewish people in the sense that the commonwealth which we want to see established in Palestine will be a Jewish commonwealth. That does not mean that there will be, that there need be any discrimination, any difference as regards individual rights between Jews and Arabs. We cannot in one and the same breath claim equality for ourselves and deny equality to others. There must be a regime of complete equality of rights for all inhabitants of that country, but there must be a clear decision taken — a decision backed by the great powers, a decision which the conscience of the world should indorse — that this is the country where the Jews are to be given the fullest possible scope for working out their salvation, settling there in large numbers, striking roots in the soil, creating agriculture and industry, transport and commerce, and culture, so that the imprint on Palestine should be mainly an imprint of a Jewish country, of a predominantly Jewish country. That is the meaning of the term which we have launched into the world: a Jewish commonwealth.
We are facing a three-cornered struggle today. We have to struggle with the world at large to create understanding and sympathy for our aims. We have to struggle with the world immediately around us in Palestine; we have to resist local pressure and to strengthen ourselves so as not to give in to that pressure. But we also have to conduct a struggle within our own ranks, among the Jewish people, and that last struggle is perhaps the most difficult of all. The struggle between brothers is always the most difficult and painful. We have to struggle with the assimilation which dies hard. We have to struggle with Jewish cowardice, with Jews who are afraid to speak out as Jews, to face the world as Jews, to tackle the Jewish problem. We have to struggle even within Zionist ranks for the proper understanding of what the essence of Zionist policy should be at the present time, and that struggle is, again, world-wide. It has to be conducted in America, in England and even in Palestine.
It is difficult for a people not accustomed to act together suddenly to gather under one banner and accept one central discipline. We are a scattered people, everywhere a minority, and in the conditions of our life there is a very substantial measure of unity in Jewish ranks today. That does not mean, however, that we can rest content with that measure of unity and that we can give up the struggle against very dangerous deviations from our central path.
Such deviations are manifest even in Palestine. A group of very important Jews in Palestine got together and formulated a political program, entirely divergent from the official Zionist program which has been endorsed in Palestine and in other countries. This group says: We also want immigration, we also want settlement on the land, we also want freedom for the Jews in Palestine, but we can achieve it in a different way. We can achieve it if we are less ambitious in our political claims, if we do not proclaim that we want Palestine to become a Jewish commonwealth if we do not ask for immigration to be regulated by ourselves.
What is the political program of these people? They say: Palestine should be a bi-national state. It should belong to both Jews and Arabs; Jews and Arabs must be on a footing of political equality, on a 50-50 basis. Some of them add: There must also be numerical parity — again the 50-50 formula — and they take it upon themselves to assure us that that is what the other party will accept if we make the offer and that this can be a basis for reconciliation and for peaceful development. They also say: We must declare from the outset that we are in favor of Palestine becoming a part of a larger system or federation. They appeal to us: You are addressing yourselves to the world, but you should address yourselves to the Arabs. The conflict, they say, is not between you and the world, but between you and the Arabs. This is the problem which you must settle, and you are neglecting it.
What should our answer be? We ought to expose the fallacies underlying this trend of thought. It is true that the conflict is between us and the Arabs; it is not true that the conflict is not between us and the world. It is true that we must do our utmost to find ways of living at peace with the Arabs; it is not true that we shall find those ways by excluding the world from the problem of our relations with the Arabs. Ours is a world problem. If there is a people whose situation is a world problem in the fullest sense of the term, it is the Jews, and the character of this world problem places a very heavy responsibility upon the international factors. It places a responsibility upon England, upon America, upon Russia, and we cannot free the world from that responsibility. We must make it more and more conscious of it, and the Arab world must know that ours is a world problem and that the great powers are taking a very direct interest in it. They must be made to realize that this country of Palestine is not a private domain of the Arabs, but that as a consequence of history — something that cannot be changed — this country is a focus of all Jewish hopes, that the whole world regards that country as being the focus of all Jewish hopes, and that if they are to approach the problem realistically, they must face the fact that Palestine is rooted in the consciousness of the world as a country which the Jewish people considers its own.
By over-stressing the importance of the Arab factor in our problem, we are not paving the way to Jewish-Arab unity. We are not making Jewish-Arab peace more attainable. If the impression is created among the Arabs that the Jews depend primarily on their good will in order to achieve what they want in Palestine, then we stand very little chance of achieving it. But if the Arabs learn that the whole world takes an interest in our problem and that it is necessary for the world to solve the Jewish question, they will sooner or later adjust their policy to that new reality. It is a fallacy to suggest that we can offer the Arabs political peace on the basis of numerical parity with any hope of acceptance on their part. The Arab nationalists fully realize that the consequences that numerical equality between Jews and Arabs is likely to lead to; they are not prepared to agree to such a settlement unless it is imposed upon them by the world.
But we can say: We are prepared to guarantee that our numbers in Palestine will not rise beyond a certain point. We shall just become equal in numbers with you, and then our growth will stop.
How can we bind a Jew to whom it will be a matter of life and death to enter Palestine, who will know that there is room for him there, and that there is no room for him anywhere else in the world, how can we bind him by our political agreement today that he should honor this obligation of ours and not save himself? He will ask: “By what manner of right did you take such an obligation upon yourselves? How can you bind me? It is my country just as it is yours. How did you draw the line? How did you separate the Jewish people into two camps, the fortunate ones who managed to get in before a certain figure was reached, and the unfortunate ones who happened to be too late and in whose face the doors were closed by a Jewish agreement?”
This is an impossible undertaking, and it would not satisfy Arabs either. Another fallacy is to offer a federation of Palestine and the neighboring countries as something that will bring about immediate Jewish-Arab agreement. We should certainly welcome a process of development which would bring us closer and closer connection with the neighboring countries. But we envisage this process on the basis of ourselves being numerous and strong in Palestine. It is only if we are numerous and strong that we can offer something important to the neighboring countries.
Instead of agreeing in advance to a federation without knowing what kind of federation it is going to be, what we should say is we are most certainly prepared to consider any form of unity between Palestine and the neighboring countries which will not be contradictory to our basic interests. But we are already strong enough in Palestine to make it impossible for any other factor to decide the fate of Palestine without our consent, and therefore if the neighboring countries want a federation and they want Palestine included in that federation, they must provide such a scheme that would satisfy our basic interests. Otherwise, we shall not take part in it, and if we do not take part in it, the whole scheme will not work.
If we talk that language, if we assume that attitude, only then can we achieve something. The Arab people around us must realize that a new reality has been created in Palestine which affects the neighboring countries, that the over half a million Jews in Palestine form a compact and highly productive community which has shown what it can do in the present war, a community backed by the Jews the world over with political friends the world over, a community which has chances of winning over the sympathy of the great powers for a major solution of the Jewish problem in Palestine. If therefore our homeland is needed as a part of that federation, Jews must be negotiated with. The question cannot be settled behind the backs of Jews. Palestine cannot be handed over to the Arabs over the heads of the Jews. The Jews are a party, and the most vitally interested party. If it is put on that plane, then perhaps there is hope for a political arrangement that will be satisfactory to all sides. The war will one day come to an end through the victory of the United Nations. The approach of victory is already stirring the conscience of the world, and an atmosphere will be created which will perhaps present a unique chance, one in many generations if not in many centuries, to put our problem before the world.
