Truth about the ‘crisis of Zionism’
At the root of diaspora disaffection with Israel is a failure to grasp that Zionism is about rights
WHEN the French playwright Edmond Fleg attended Herzl’s Third Zionist Congress in Basel in 1899, he marvelled at the scene: “I looked about me. What Jewish contrasts! A pale-faced Pole with high cheekbones, a German in spectacles, a Russian looking like an angel, a bearded Persian, a clean-shaven American, an Egyptian in a fez, and over there, that black phantom, towering up in his immense caftan, with his fur cap and pale curls falling from his temples.”
Fleg saw the sum of Jewish exile in that room. Jews of east and west, religious and secular, wealthy and poor, radical and conservative. A people dispersed to every corner of the globe, just melting a little into their surrounds, adopting local language, custom, dress, before being rudely plucked out and sent onward by Kings and Empresses, warlords and clerics, to new lands and new privations.
The staging of a Zionist assembly in Europe, which unified Jews of all nationalities, classes and religious streams under the banner of a single idea, had been achieved through a combination of grandeur and old-fashioned community organising. At the First Zionist Congress, also held in Basel in 1897, Herzl appeared at the Stadtcasino in black trousers, tails and a white tie, really more befitting a matinee of La Traviata than a Jewish communal event. In the days leading up to the event, Herzl had sat up with students addressing envelopes long into the night.
At that First Congress, a manifesto was adopted which succinctly articulated the aim of Zionism. It was to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel secured under public law. Within this simple declaration stood an almighty mission. The Jews hadn’t had a national home for two millennia. The Land of Israel had since 135 CE been known by another name, had seen multiple empires befall it, and had a meagre Jewish population of roughly 25,000. Moreover, the mass physical return of a scattered and acculturated people to long vanquished lands was something that had never been achieved in human history.
It was this dreamy idealism that gave Zionism a magnetic quality.
It animated Jewish youths to throw themselves into the community organising and intellectual discussions out of which organised Zionism grew. It led to the founding of grassroots Zionist groups like Bilu, whose members actually travelled from Tsarist Russia to Palestine and established agricultural settlements.
It compelled the likes of Chaim Weizmann to spend his student days in Germany as a member of another Zionist group, the Verein, throwing his humble stipend into sausages and beer while raucously debating Zionism, socialism, nationalism and internationalism in cafes until the wee hours.
And it prompted the writer Israel Zangwill to lambast the Jewish estab
Dreamy idealism initially gave Zionism a magnetic quality
lishment for seemingly holding back the progress of Zionism to the detriment of the suffering Jewish masses.
Zangwill thundered to a gathering of the Jewish poor in London’s East End, “we are supposed to pray three times a day for the return of Jerusalem, but, as soon as we say we want to go back, we are accused of blasphemy!”
When this generation of Jewish activists encountered the pamphlets of thinkers like Leon Pinsker and Herzl, their minds were instantly seared and permanently changed.
How could a vigorous, determined young Jew coming of age in a time of unsparing brutality towards Jews, be unmoved by Pinsker’s illustration of their stateless people wandering the earth as “a ghost-like apparition of a living corpse … living everywhere but nowhere in the correct place”? Or Herzl’s oratory, which promised that “the Jews who wish for a state will have it. We shall live at last as free people on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes”?
Not only was Zionism exciting and radical, world events conspired to make it a matter of life and death. Jews were forbidden from walking in the rain in Iran for fear that their uncleanliness would wash off to sully Muslim shoes. They were looted, raped and slaughtered across Russia in 1881 and 1905, in Fez in 1912 and in Shiraz in 1910. This turned Zionism from a rising ideal into an urgent humanitarian mission.
The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, while comparatively less bloody than some of the others of the time, was chronicled so graphically that it caused not only grief but a deep shame in the Jewish world. The poet Hayim Bialik wrote that “in the dark corners of Kishinev, crouching husbands, bridegrooms and brothers peering through the cracks of their shelters, watching their wives, sisters, daughters writhing beneath their bestial defilers, suffocating in their own blood, their flesh portioned out as booty.” The New York Times reported that “the scenes of horror were beyond description … [as] the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.”
After Kishinev, an editorial of The American Hebrew noted that “American Zionism had come of age,” while a Christian speaker at a Zionist meeting at Cooper Union declared that in the wake of Kishinev, “all efforts must be made to establish a Jewish commonwealth.” Zionism offered Jews an escape from Kishinev, both physically and psychologically.
Any lingering doubt about the necessity and urgency of Zionism dissipated as the Holocaust descended on Europe. As David BenGurion noted, “what Zionist propaganda for years could not do,” being to fully reveal Jewish self-delusion and vulnerability, “disaster has done overnight.” The surviving Jews, absurdly warehoused in displaced persons camps in Europe several years after the defeat of Nazism, yearned to locate the ruins of their families and try to build new lives away from European antisemitism. “Palestine is definitely and pre-eminently the first choice” for resettlement, Earl Harrison, President Truman’s envoy for refugees, reported.
The creation of Israel in May 1948 did nothing to dim Jewish interest in Zionism. The establishment of the state may have been the practical fulfilment of the vision expressed at Basel in 1897 but much work remained.
There was the immediate defence of the nascent state from civil war and invasion, the ingathering of exiles, rescue mis