The Natural Right of the Jewish People: Joseph Schechtman and the Creation of Israel

This article analyzes the diplomatic statecraft of the Revisionist Zionist activist and scholar Joseph Schechtman in the days leading up to the founding of Israel in 1948. It focuses on Schechtman's leadership of the Revisionist Party at the meeting of the Zionist Actions Committee, the executive body of world Zionism, in Tel Aviv in April 1948. The key diplomatic question the executive body faced that spring was what to say and do about the United Nations Resolution 181 of November 1947, which had called for the creation of a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international Jerusalem in British Mandate Palestine. The Schechtman-led Revisionists argued that Zionists ought to affirm what he saw as the essential principle of the Resolution — that the Jews had a right to a state — while rejecting the details contained in the Resolution, especially the specified borders of the Jewish state. According to Schechtman, the Arab side had chosen war, and so the Jewish side was no longer bound to the inoperable details of the Resolution. The Zionist Actions Committee did not adopt Schechtman's approach, instead defaulting to a kind of diplomatic ambiguity on the UN question. Yet David Ben-Gurion would advance a very similar position to that of Schechtman's Revisionists leading up to the declaration of Israel's independence on May 14, 1948. The article stresses the important kinship between the Jabotinsky disciple Schechtman and the labor leader Ben-Gurion on the means of attaining independence, as well as on the fundamentally political character of state building.