A History of Zionism (108 page)

*
Quoted in Silverberg,
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
, p. 318.

†
Some of the figures, such as 112,000 for Germany and 100,000 for Poland, look somewhat suspect.

‡
HaKongress Hazioni ha 22. Din vekheshbon stenografi
, Jerusalem, n.d., p. 7
et seq.

*
Ibid.
, p. 87.

†
Ibid.
, p. 142
et seq.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 344. Sneh left the Zionist movement not long after and became a member of the Communist Party; his break with Moscow came only many years later and after countless disappointments.

*
Ibid.
, pp. 344–5.

*
The Times
, 8 January 1947.

*
Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 295.

†
The English text of the speech was distributed by the press department of the Soviet Embassy in London; see
Zionist Review
, 23 May 1947.

*
The Jewish Evidence before the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine
, Jerusalem, 1947, pp. 25-6.

*
Quoted in Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 288.

†
Der Tog
, 5 September 1947. Quoted in Silverberg,
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
, p. 343.

*
New York Times
, 30 November 1947.

*
Quoted in H. Sacher,
Israel: The Establishment of a State
, London, 1952, p. 105.

*
Zeev Sharef,
Three Days
, London, 1962, p. 44
et seq;
A.A. Poliak,
Bekum Medinat Israel
, Tel Aviv, 1956, p. 175.

†
Sharef,
Three Days
, p. 167.

*
Ibid.
, pp. 122-3; Ben Gurion,
The Peel Report and the Jewish State
, p. 86.

CONCLUSION:
THIRTEEN THESES ON
ZIONISM

Political Zionism appeared on the European scene more than three-quarters of a century ago. Its intellectual origins go back to the French revolution and the romantic wave of national revival which followed it. As a political movement it was part of the liberal-humanist tradition of the
risorgimento
, of Kossuth and Masaryk. It differed from other contemporary national movements because the Jews were a landless people who to a certain extent had lost their own specific character. At the time the idea of a national revival among the Jews appeared only as a chimera. But if the forces of cohesion were weak, the persecution of both individual Jews and the community at large helped to fan and to consolidate the waning national consciousness.

Zionism is the belief in the existence of a common past and a common future for the Jewish people. Such faith can be accepted or rejected, it can be a matter of rational argument only to a very limited extent. Like other national and social movements Zionism has developed an ideology but its ‘scientific’ claims are bound to be inconclusive. The Zionist analysis of antisemitism and its solution could have been right, but Zionism would still have been a failure if its call had passed unheard and if its solution could not have been applied by it because of lack of support among the Jews or because of adverse international conditions. Equally, the success of Zionism would not necessarily prove that it is based on a correct analysis of the ‘Jewish problem’. As far as national movements are concerned, myths are always more powerful motives than rational arguments.

It is too early to assess Zionism in terms of success and failure. Nor is it altogether certain what success and failure mean in this context. A military victory may be an episode in the history of a nation. To a certain degree Zionism is bound to be a disappointment; only political movements whose histories do not extend beyond the utopian stage retain their pristine virtue and cause no disappointment. All others, sooner or later, clash with reality and the result cannot possibly live up to expectations. The syndrome of
comme la République était belle sous l’Empire
applies to all secular movements. Zionism faced gigantic obstacles, it had to fight for the realisation of its aims in the most adverse conditions and this was bound to affect the ultimate outcome. The origins of Zionism and its subsequent fortunes are full of paradoxes; some of them appear a little less inexplicable in the light of the unique character of Jewish history and the position of the Jews in nineteenth century European society.

1. Zionism is a response to antisemitism. To note this is not to disparage the original impulses and the character of the movement. All national movements have come into existence and developed their specific character in opposition to and usually in the fight against outside forces. Jewish religion, Zion as a symbol, the nostalgia for the lost homeland and other mystical factors played a role in the development of Zionism. But political Zionism as distinct from mystical longings would not have come into existence but for the precarious situation of central and east European Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century. It became a psychological necessity for central European intellectuals, who realised that the emancipation of Jews had triggered off a powerful reaction and who then found the road to full emancipation barred by strong hostile forces. For the Jewish masses in eastern Europe Zionism was the dream of redemption from their misery. But it could then be no more than a dream. While the Ottoman empire existed, mass immigration to Palestine was ruled out. Up to the Balfour Declaration Zionism’s main function was cultural-psychological: it sustained the faith of its believers but was of no political importance. After the First World War the trend towards Zionism was strengthened by the growth of antisemitic movements which culminated in the rise of Nazism. Had it not been for this increase in tension and anti-Jewish persecution, Zionism might still have existed as a small literary-philosophical sect of idealistic reformers. It became a political force as the result of outside pressure, not because eccentric Jewish
littérateurs
published stirring appeals. Persecution
per se
, needless to say, would not have resulted in a national revival. But one cannot stress too strongly the force of circumstances: in a world without antisemitism Zionism would not have flourished. Critics of Zionism have, however, often drawn the wrong conclusion from this indisputable fact. Political movements never develop in a vacuum. Without the
ancien régime
there would have been no French revolution, without tsarism, no 1917.

2. Antisemitism in its most rabid and murderous form did not prevail in eastern Europe, where the ‘objective’ Jewish question existed in its most acute form. It came to power in central Europe, where the relatively small Jewish communities had progressed far on the road to assimilation and where the Jewish question was no longer a major socio-economic problem. It is one of the many paradoxical features of modern Jewish history which makes nonsense of the attempt to explain antisemitism simply in socio-economic terms. It came as a complete surprise to the Jewish critics of Zionism, but the Zionists, too, were unprepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude.

While the rise of Nazism and the Jewish catastrophe in Europe were not inevitable, there would have been a Jewish problem anyway, since nowhere in Europe were the Jews generally accepted as fully belonging to the community. They were and are tolerated within the liberal order of western Europe. Elsewhere they could at most strive for national minority status. Throughout their history the Jews have become (or remained) a group on the whole identifiable, with certain specific characteristics. For historical reasons, and in view of the possibility for individuals to opt out of the community, many Jews have been only partly aware of the peculiar character of their social existence, and this has caused some confusion among them. They have tended to forget that for all practical purposes their status in society does not depend on an act of will but is decided upon by non-Jews. This decision depends by no means only on the degree of their assimilation, their loyalty as citizens, or the contributions they have made in various fields to the prosperity, the culture and the defence of their native country. The Zionists believed with Mazzini that without a country they were bound to remain the bastards of humanity. Others did not accept the idea of a national state as a historical necessity.

3. Zionism has always regarded assimilation as its main enemy, without clearly distinguishing between emancipation and assimilation. It has decried life in the diaspora as physically unsafe and morally degrading, intolerable for proud, self-respecting Jews. Zionism has preached the more or less inevitable ‘ingathering of the exiles’. This is to ignore the background of emancipation and to regard assimilation as a weakness of character rather than a historical process with a logic and a momentum of its own. For Zionism, the secular form of religious mystique, is a child of assimilation; but for the deep and prolonged exposure to European civilisation there would have been no national revival among the Jews. Zionism, in brief, is the product of Europe, not of the ghetto. Given the general situation and the position of the Jews in European society, assimilation was inevitable in central and western Europe and to a lesser extent elsewhere. While it was probably bound to fail in Poland and Rumania, it has made great strides in other countries. Jewish history does not prove the impossibility of assimilation, nor did Herzl rule it out (‘If they let us be for just two generations …’). He also wrote: ‘Whole branches of Jewry may wither and fall away. The tree lives on.’ But the main branch – east European Jewry – disappeared in the holocaust. Assimilation in the western world was retarded by the antisemitic wave of the 1930s and the holocaust, which strengthened Jewish consciousness. But it seems to have been only a temporary setback, and as the shock passed, assimilation again came into its own. Antisemitism has appeared in one form or another in all countries where Jews have lived (and in some where they did not). But low-level antisemitism has not made assimilation impossible, and it has certainly not acted as an agent of Zionism. History has always shown that substantial numbers of men and women have chosen to leave their native country only when facing intolerable pressure. Zionist doctrine has rejected assimilation as morally reprehensible: Nordau often dwelt on the rootless cosmopolitans without ground under their feet, suffering personal humiliation, forced to suppress and falsify their personalities. The image of the new Marranos and their spiritual misery was overdramatised even with regard to the world before 1914. It bears little relation to the present-day world. Jews as individuals and groups have faced difficulties, but it is certainly not true that ‘all the better Jews of western Europe (or America) groan under this misery and seek for salvation’. Nordau, who wrote this, never set foot on Palestinian soil, but continued to write from Paris for his European public. Yet Nordau was only half a generation removed from Jewish tradition. Subsequent generations grew up in an environment more remote from Judaism. Many are no longer religious and the Jewish tradition is largely meaningless to them. The new assimilationists are not conscious traitors to their people, nor are their personalities necessarily warped or permeated with self-hate. The ties have loosened; they have grown away from Jewish tradition and become indifferent to it. A catastrophe would be needed to stop this process. Assimilation involved a conscious effort in the nineteenth century, when society was imbued with tradition and had generally shared values and rigid standards. To be fully accepted, the assimilationist Jew had to conform to the standards and values of this society and to give up what set him apart from it. Present-day pluralistic western society is different in character: not only have the Jews much less of their own substance, but society itself has lost its moorings. Traditional values have been jettisoned; like the Jew, society is becoming rootless. This cultural crisis, which may be protracted, may be conducive to assimilation while it lasts. But while it helps to break down some of the barriers between Jews and non-Jews, it also undermines the spirit of liberal tolerance on which Jewish existence in the western world is based.

4. Like the Poles and the Czechs, Zionists had their historical opportunity only after the First World War. Moreover, they were bound to clash with another people since the Jews had no homeland. A mass influx of Jews into Palestine in the early part of the nineteenth century (provided the Ottoman government had agreed to it) might have proceeded without much resistance on the part of the native population, because the idea of nationalism had not yet grown roots outside Europe. But there was no national movement at the time among the Jews either: east European Jewry had not yet left the ghetto; central and west European Jews had not yet experienced the new antisemitism.

5. Being a latecomer among the national movements, Zionism from the very beginning was a movement in a hurry, forever racing against time. Both the Balfour Declaration and the UN resolution of November 1947 came at the last possible moment. A few years later the decision would, in all probability, have gone against Zionism. Herzl had written that the success of the idea depended on the number of its adherents and that ‘the Jews who will it shall achieve their state’. But most Jews were indifferent, and success did not depend on them alone, even if there had been more who wanted it. The four years after the Balfour Declaration were perhaps the last opportunity to transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews to Palestine and to create
faits accomplis
without causing a major political upheaval. This opportunity was not to recur.

Throughout its history Zionism failed to mobilise substantial financial support. Despite all his efforts Herzl did not get the help of the Jewish millionaires who he thought would underwrite a major loan to Turkey and thus enable him to get a charter. Up to the late 1930s the budget of the World Zionist Organisation was considerably smaller than that of any major Jewish local community in Europe or America. The freedom of action of the Zionist movement was severely circumscribed by its extreme poverty: land could not be bought, sufficient support could not be given to new immigrants, and funds for political work in Palestine and in the diaspora were altogether inadequate.

6. Zionism had neither money, nor military power, nor even much political nuisance value. It could rely only on moral persuasion, not one of the most powerful levers in world politics before 1918, and almost totally ineffective thereafter. While others had done important spadework, the Balfour Declaration was essentially the work of one man – Chaim Weizmann. Without his leadership and persistent lobbying the Zionist movement would not have received the charter on which its subsequent activities were based. It was the ‘greatest act of political statesmanship of the First World War’ (Charles Webster). There were certain political considerations which facilitated Weizmann’s task. But Britain needed the Jews at the time much less than the Jews needed Britain. The overall benefits which Britain could derive from the declaration were small, the risks considerable. Lloyd George and Balfour were persuaded by Weizmann to issue the declaration, in the last resort, not because it was advantageous or expedient from the British point of view, but because they accepted that it was the right thing to do. That Weizmann and his supporters could be of considerable help to the allied war effort was a contributing factor, but not the decisive consideration. It was on the whole a selfless act, perhaps the last time that an individual succeeded almost single-handedly in inducing the government of a major power to take a decision irrespective of national interest. That Palestine was not an issue of paramount importance made the decision easier. Nor did the statesmen expect the complications which later occurred and which made subsequent British governments gradually relinquish the Balfour Declaration.