A History of Zionism (86 page)

The Zionists had been unable to enlist the help of wealthy Jews before the war and Professor Weizmann was not much more successful than Dr Herzl in bringing about a radical change. It was all the more galling since other institutions seemed more successful in getting the money they needed. When in the middle 1920s the Soviet government approached American Jewry to contribute to its Crimean settlement scheme, it got a friendlier reception than the Zionists. And when, in the 1930s, the Nazi government imposed a ‘fine’ of £80 million on German Jewry, it collected the money in no time. A fraction of this sum would have sufficed to build Palestine in the 1920s.

The fourteenth Zionist congress (Vienna 1925) was in many ways a repeat performance of the previous ones. The right-wing General Zionists attacked the Socialist settlers for leading a semi-parasitic existence, being supported by the movement. Ben Gurion and his comrades maintained on the other hand that since there was only one Jewish farmer for every forty-two Jewish residents of Palestine, the agricultural sector had clearly to be strengthened. Gruenbaum again charged Weizmann with destroying the Zionist movement, whereupon Weizmann angrily answered: ‘I have never retreated from full-blooded Zionism. I am a Jewish statesman and you are an assimilatory Jew.’ In a long and brilliantly delivered speech Jabotinsky attacked the executive for having failed all along the line. Weizmann in his answer paid tribute to Jabotinsky’s rhetorical skill, but claimed that his arguments were based on the assumption that twice two makes five; Jabotinsky’s whole colonisation philosophy rested on the belief that instead of paying for the purchase of land, the Zionist movement should insist on getting it free from the mandatory government. Such a policy might work, Weizmann said, in an empty country like Rhodesia but it was unrealistic when applied to Palestine.

Two years later, at the fifteenth congress in Basle, Jabotinsky made another long and closely reasoned speech, fairly moderate in tone, in which he referred to the Greek precedent: why was it that the Greek government had succeeded in resettling one and a half million Greeks from Turkey with an investment of a mere £15 million? Why did the Zionist executive claim it needed much more money for a considerably smaller number of immigrants? Weizmann had no difficulty in refuting the argument: the settlers had received land free of charge and the Greek government had also put at their disposal seventy thousand houses – Greece and Palestine simply could not be compared.
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There was no great highroad leading to the building of Palestine, no miracles were likely to happen. Only patient work would develop the country. The Basle congress witnessed another clash between Right and Left, another Gruenbaum attack on Weizmann. Weizmann somewhat unkindly suggested that Gruenbaum could have saved time by asking the delegates to reread the speech he had made two years earlier.

The only major change concerned the composition of the executive:

But these changes did not greatly affect the policy of the executive. Of the members of the 1925 executive Lipsky had to be in the United States throughout most of the year in his capacity as head of the American Zionist Organisation. The members residing in Palestine were associated with specific functions (Ruppin was in charge of colonisation, Sprinzak of labour relations, etc.). The political work was done by Weizmann and Sokolow and their assistants in London. Leonard Stein acted as secretary of the political department. He was replaced in 1929 by Professor Lewis Namier.

It would be tedious to provide a detailed account of the proceedings of the Zionist congresses in 1925, 1927 and 1929. The basic issues were few, the freedom of manœuvre of the movement limited, the speeches usually variations on the same theme. The executive was constantly admonished by its critics to take a tougher line with the British, to collect more money, not to squander its funds, and not to discriminate against anyone. The executive on its part issued slogans which were no less platitudinous, such as ‘Consolidation’ or ‘Concentration of all forces’. The establishment of a Zionist office in Geneva was one of the few innovations. It was headed by Victor Jacobson, who was to maintain liaison with the League of Nations mandates commission to which the Palestinian government had to present yearly reports. While Jacobson and his assistants did some useful lobbying, they could not, as some Zionists fondly imagined, play off Geneva against Jerusalem and London, or vice versa. The Zionist Organisation was not acting from a position of strength. Moreover, some members of the mandates commission, such as its president, the Italian Marquis Theodoli, were bitterly anti-Zionist. The executive was represented in Jerusalem by Colonel Kisch, who was replaced by Arlosoroff in 1931. When Arlosoroff was murdered in 1933, his former assistant Moshe Shertok took over.

The Jewish Agency

The constituent meeting of the council of the Jewish Agency opened on 11 August 1929, after years of effort against stubborn resistance from various quarters. When Weizmann was given the floor, the entire audience rose in tumultuous acclaim. He had achieved the seemingly impossible: ‘By his patience, foresight, persuasiveness and skill he had created an unprecedented unity in Israel. It was the hour of his triumph.’
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Since the early 1920s Weizmann had systematically tried to enlist the help of non-Zionists, especially in the United States. His main partner in this enterprise was Louis Marshall, head of the American Jewish Committee, whom he had first met at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Weizmann was greatly impressed by Marshall’s forceful personality, his devotion to Jewish matters, and his wisdom. Marshall, an assimilated Jew born in upstate New York, had studied Yiddish in order to be able to follow Jewish affairs. Among Zionists the main objection to cooperation with men like Marshall (or Felix Warburg, the banker) was that they had not been democratically elected and did not represent American Jewry, only its upper crust. They feared that the millionaires would gain a decisive influence on the policy of the movement. If they wanted to cooperate, Weizmann’s critics argued, the doors of the Zionist organisation were open to them.
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But this was precisely what they refused to do, for with all their sympathy for the work done in Palestine, they regarded the Zionists as doctrinaires, more interested in Jewish nationalism than in saving Jewish lives. Moreover, it had always been Weizmann’s intention to establish a Jewish Agency as a representative of the entire Jewish people; a resolution to this effect had been passed by the Action Committee in 1922.

Weizmann and Marshall convened their first conference in February 1924, bringing together American Jews outside the Zionist movement who were willing to help work in Palestine. There were further conferences in 1925 and 1928: a Palestine Economic Corporation was established and a commission of economic experts set up to prepare a report on development. It was agreed in principle that the non-Zionists should get half of the seats on the council of the Jewish Agency. The 1925 Zionist congress accepted this stipulation but insisted that all land acquired must be held as public property, that colonisation must be based on Jewish labour, and that the Hebrew language and culture must be promoted. It took three more years before the Action Committee in December 1928 endorsed the agreement by a vote of thirty-nine against five (two revisionists, two radical General Zionists and Stephen Wise). The sixteenth congress, the year after, gave its approval by a majority of 231 to 30.

The tug of war continued, however, with leading figures in the movement, such as Ussishkin, among the doubters. But there was also resistance from non-Zionist bodies. In Britain, for instance, the leading Jewish organisations refused to cooperate with the Zionists. But once the American Jewish leaders had given their blessing to the enterprise the road was clear. Together with Leon Blum, Albert Einstein and Herbert Samuel, Louis Marshall, Felix Warburg, Cyrus Adler and Lee K. Krankel, Weizmann appeared on the platform of the foundation meeting of the Jewish Agency. The president of the Zionist movement was to be
ex officio
president of the Jewish Agency; its main office was to be in Jerusalem, with a branch in London. Its constitution provided for a general council of about two hundred members, an administrative committee of forty, and an executive of eight.

It was a memorable occasion, Weizmann’s most important achievement since the Balfour Declaration. After the meeting he had a long talk with Marshall and Warburg, who assured him that his financial troubles were over and that he would no longer have to travel up and down the United States to make emergency appeals to save his movement from bankruptcy. At long last it had been put on a broad and solid foundation. A few days after the conference Louis Marshall died. With the Wall Street crash the great depression set in, and from Palestine there came news of the most serious riots in the history of the mandate. The disturbances caused a change for the worse in British policy towards Zionism, and this in turn brought about Weizmann’s resignation from the presidency. Within a few weeks of the establishment of the Jewish Agency the Zionist movement faced one of the most serious crises in its history.

Chaim Weizmann

At this turn in its fortunes it is useful to identify the leading trend within Zionism during the 1920s and the men who acted as their spokesmen. Weizmann, of course, dominated the scene, as no other leader had done since Herzl. Before the First World War he was virtually unknown outside the ranks of Russian Zionism. Born in 1874 in Motol, near the border between White Russia, Lithuania and Poland, the son of a small timber merchant, he studied chemistry in Berlin and Switzerland and settled in England in 1904. He had attended a number of Zionist congresses, but though he played a certain role in the opposition to the Uganda scheme and later on in the drive to overthrow Wolffsohn, he was certainly not among the leading figures of the movement. An observer at the Vienna congress (1913) described him as a ‘listless young man’. It was a mistaken impression, for boundless energy in the service of Zionism was certainly one of Weizmann’s outstanding characteristics. In contrast to most of his colleagues he was a great admirer of Britain, convinced of the identity of British and Zionist interests in the Near East, and from his early days in England he tried to make converts to his idea. He was not uncritical of English life. Soon after he had settled in Manchester he wrote to a friend about the social contradictions in the life around him, the stupidity in all walks of life, the terrible and cruel materialism, the outward glamour covering the ugliness within. But nothing shook his confidence in Britain as the one big power willing and able to help the Zionist dream come true. Weizmann played the most important part in paving the way for the Balfour Declaration and in the subsequent negotiations over the mandate. True, he tended to belittle the part played by others in these events (Aron Aaronson’s was by no means inconsiderable), but there is no doubt that he was the main architect of what has been called ‘the greatest act of diplomatic statesmanship of the First World War’: ‘If there was Jewish unity in the critical years between 1917 and 1920 it was mainly the result of Weizmann’s energy, patience, psychological insight and complete knowledge of all the various aspects of European Jewry.’
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Recognition inside the Jewish camp came only slowly. The Russian Zionists thought him a lightweight and the Americans were critical from the very beginning of what they regarded as a one-sided orientation towards Britain. Weizmann’s most faithful supporters came from the younger generation of British Zionists and later on also from the Germans. His own colleagues, the east Europeans, always regarded him with more than a little suspicion. Accustomed to collective leadership, they frequently charged him with dictatorial ambitions. It has been said that he was indifferent to praise and blame,
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but this judgment was not shared by some of his closest confidants. Harry Sacher, writing to Leon Simon in January 1919, complained about Weizmann’s vanity, that he, Weizmann, was absolutely certain in his own judgment and Ahad Ha’am was the only one whom he was willing to consult from time to time.
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Weizmann had negotiated with the British and the Americans during the war without formal authorisation by the Zionist organisation. He was co-opted on to the executive only in 1918 following Chlenov’s death. But even after that, much to his chagrin, he had to share responsibility with Sokolow, and he was elected president of the World Zionist Organisation only at the London conference in 1920.
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From the beginning there were strong misgivings about his leadership among some of those who elected him. When he concluded his survey of activities in 1920 with the cry: ‘This is what we have done, Jewish people. What have you done?’ it struck some of his listeners as both unjust and pretentious. Weizmann was certain that there was no short cut to a Jewish Palestine, that he had ‘daily to convince the British that the implementation of the Balfour Declaration was both in the British interest and a moral necessity’.
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In his report to the Karlsbad congress in 1923 he said: ‘I am not ashamed to say I have no success to produce. After the mandate there will be no political successes for years. Those political successes which you want you will have to gain by your own work in the Emeq, in the marshes and the hills, not in the offices of Downing Street.’ Convinced that the most the Zionists could gain was freedom of action for their practical work, he became increasingly impatient with those who accused him of minimalism (if not defeatism), who thought that vociferous appeals and loud protests would induce the British government to mend its ways. Weizmann always ridiculed this approach. At the 1931 congress he noted that the walls of Jericho had fallen at the blowing of trumpets, ‘but I have never heard of walls having been erected by such means’.