The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History by James L. Gelvin

Author:James L. Gelvin [Gelvin, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Modern, 20th Century, 21st Century, Political Science, International Relations
ISBN: 9781108488686
Google: twEbEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08X17R1CH
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 16. The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. In the background, the pointed Trylon and spherical Perisphere, the symbols of the fair.

(Source: From the collection of the author)

Although it symbolically concentrated the focus on Arab-Yishuv relations, organizers well understood that the myth of the intrepid pioneer confronting a barren land and the savage “other” would strike a familiar chord with the Americans they hoped to reach. The American director of the pavilion described it as follows:

A group of youngsters, boys and girls, enter hurriedly to take in the Palestine Pavilion while “doing” the Fair. They pause before an expressive photomural showing pioneers prepared to defend a new-built colony. One boy, whose face the distorted vocabulary of the present day would call typically Nordic, turns to his friends and whispers: “That’s just like American history. Those pioneers defending their stockades against Arab terrorists are no different from our ancestors fighting off the howling Indians.”

As if the representation of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine was not enough of a problem, organizers faced another representational nightmare of equal magnitude: the portrayal of women in the pavilion. Although the Yishuv leadership wanted to display the social revolution that Labor Zionism was bringing to Jewish Palestine, they feared estranging socially conservative non-Jewish visitors to the pavilion as well as American Zionist and non-Zionist Jews who were uncomfortable with the social agenda of the second and third aliyot.

Women had provided crucial support to the Zionist movement in the United States at a time when support for organized Zionism in general was declining: During the 1920s, Hadassah, the American Zionist women’s organization committed to raising money for health and welfare projects in Palestine, more than tripled its membership. During the same period, the Zionist Organization of America lost more than half its members. During the 1930s, Hadassah membership expanded another threefold.

The organization owed a large share of its success to its single-minded commitment to charitable activities and its unwillingness to participate in doctrinal disputes that divided much of organized Zionism. By engaging in “gender-appropriate” activities for a cause that was nonetheless “progressive,” and by standing above the fray, Hadassah commanded a base that was both broad and ideologically diffuse. The influence and reputation of Hadassah and like-minded women’s organizations in the Jewish community and the financial support they provided the pavilion alerted designers to the danger of privileging the “new Jewish Palestinian woman” by portraying her as the sole model for emulation and a symbol of the Yishuv as social laboratory.

The attitude toward women and the “women’s question” expressed through the pavilion project was thus equivocal. On the one hand, the designers integrated into the pavilion images of women as selfless helpmates in the colonization of Palestine, picturing them as nurturers, domestic handworkers, educators, and the transmitters of culture. The designers represented Hadassah with a statue of a nurse holding a child, the Women’s League for Palestine with a girl at work on a handloom, and the Pioneer Women’s Organization with a display of handicrafts tooled in trade schools built by the organization for poor immigrant girls.

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