From dream to state in one lifetime
Twenty years later at the time of the Balfour Declaration, Herzl was already dead. His successors did it for him. And I would probably then have been able to stand outside 10 Downing Street, jubilant that the Jews now had the Balfour Declaration.
Thirty years after that I would still be a ripe age; and then comes the real fact that I was actually there when the state of Israel was proclaimed at the United Nations.
Twenty years after that came the Six-Day War, when I spent the fourth and fifth day of the war as the guest of General Herzog, later President Herzog.
We had two nights of unforgettable experiences. It was the fourth and the fifth nights and among the guests were journalists like Randolph Churchill and his son Winston junior, and Lady Pamela Berry — the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph — and some very distinguished military critics, some of them former generals in the army.
We were discussing the war. Randolph Churchill turned to Moshe Dayan, who passed by the dinner party, and said: “General Dayan, tell me, I studied what you did in the south, the Egyptian campaign, when your tanks — and you didn’t have too many tanks — recklessly drove into the infantry of the enemy without infantry backing on your side.”
And Dayan, quietly, in his deadpan way of talking, said: “But Mr Churchill, we had infantry, we had wonderful regiments, I could give you the names — Belsen, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Auschwitz. That was our infantry. Can there be better regiments than that?”
On the fifth night we were having dinner and an orderly came and whispered something into the ear of General Herzog. He got up, choking with emotion, and said: “Gentlemen, we have scaled the Golan Heights. I might say the war is over.”
I tell this story for the following reason. I could have still been there for a few years. In other words — within one lifetime, through Herzl, prophecy turned into victory, independence and recognition. Because the week after the Six-Day War, a man like Liddell Hart, the great military critic, wrote that the new Israeli army was the finest fighting force in the world. That was Theodor Herzl’s legacy. Now I want to talk about Herzl not only as the redeemer, the redeemer who redeemed so many of these promises, but also as the apostle to the gentiles.
Because he was not just a tribal fig- Moshe Dayan ( one of the men who turned Israel’s army into an elite fighting force whose victories ensured Herzl’s vision was realised ure; he worked on the world stage and he wished to make friends with nonJews. He went to the Tsarist ministry of the interior responsible for pogroms, he went to see the Pope, who wasn’t particularly friendly in those days. He saw the French, he saw the British, he saw some American politicians. And he made friends.
Now the first Zionist of Christian persuasion was an English clergyman called Reverend Hechler. He was the first non-Jew who saw the point and he became the court preacher of the Grand Duke of Baden, who in turn was the uncle of the Kaiser.
He said to the Grand Duke: “You must meet Dr Herzl.” And the Grand Duke met him and was very impressed and offered his help. He said to him: “I will introduce you to the Kaiser.”
And the Kaiser, in a famous tableau meeting outside the ramparts of Jerusalem — where the Kaiser was visiting Palestine as the guest of the Sultan, his ally — received on horseback Dr Herzl and four or five other Zionist delegates and promised to look a t the memorandum and see what he could do to help the Sultan to give the Jews a charter in Palestine.
At t he same time, in England s a t a bri l l i a nt young biochemist with the name of Chaim Weizmann who did the same thing — made friends with people like Balfour and Lloyd George and lobbied to get support.
Later, long after (Herzl had died already by then) in the years before and during the First World War, he too did some very successful lobbying.
World Jewry was split. German Jewry was pleased with the attitude of the Kaiser and people like the Grand Duke who were friendly. And they had one great quality: they were on the other side from the Russian Tsar. To the Jews at the time the Tsar was almost a Hitler. The pogroms were carried out by the Cossacks, ordered by the Tsar. Thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees in the East Side of New York were refugees from the Tsar.
In other words, German Jews could say: “We fight with the German army against the Tsar.”
On the other hand, British Jews were on the side of Russia, but had their own ideas and were very patriotic British Jews. They had good reason to be patriotic because the Jews had a very good time in England.
Then came that period which is so well described in The Sleepwalkers [by historian Christopher Clark], preparing for World War One, when both sides were fighting this rivalry about how to get the Americans into the war or keep them out of it — the Germans on the one side, and the British.
The Germans used an appeal to their Jewish friends in America — don’t forget that the original great Jewish families in America were proGerman, the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Rosenwalds of Sears, Roebuck — they sent their children to Berlin and Göttingen and Heidelberg rather than to Oxford and Cambridge. And they were of course interested in helping their side.
So it was a completely confused situation. On the German side was a brilliant young Zionist called Dr Nahum Goldmann who later in life founded the World Jewish Congress. And he was employed by Hindenberg and Ludendorff to write pamphlets in Yiddish for the German army to drop by their hundreds of thousands in Poland and in Ukraine, to say, “Jewish brothers and sisters, help us to fight the Tsar, the man who killed your kith and kin.”
This was the confused situation, and in this race for getting America into the war, the British won. And Weizmann won too because he made friends with Lloyd George, made friends with Balfour and in 1917 got the Balfour Declaration.
And this is the e x t r a o r di nar y thing: nowhere in the copious, voluminous corr e s p o n d e n c e p u b l i s h e d b y Theodor Herzl, nowhere in his two great novels, is there any c r i t i c a l word, let alone hostile words , a b o u t Arabs and Palestinians.
On the contrary, the romantic Theodor Herzl hoped that they would be neighbours working together. He thought that the mighty Arab nation under the Ottoman yoke would become free, would turn into a multitude of sovereign countries — monarchies and republics — and there would still be room for a Jewish state next to an Arab state.
And he hoped that this “semitic brotherhood”, as he put it — “cousinhood” as he put it also — would come to pass.
I want to end up with my hope that this will happen and that this last and most important part of Theodor Herzl’s prophecy may one day soon become reality. Herzl’s iconic 1898 meeting in Jerusalem with Kaiser Wilhelm This is an edited transcript of a speech given by Lord Weidenfeld on the award of the Theodor Herzl Prize by the World Jewish Congress