A Jewish Palestine
"The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land"
The welding of the idea of the Jewish people with the idea of the Jewish land is manifest in every page of the Jewish Liturgy. When the lad is confirmed and assumes the full burden of the law, he prays that 'God may have mercy upon Zion, for it is the hope of our life,' and that 'He may save her who is broken in spirit speedily even in our days.' He thanks God for having planted eternal life in the Jewish people. 'Gladden us, O Lord our God, with Elijah thy servant, and with the Kingdom of the House of David thy anointed. Soon may he come and rejoice our hearts. Suffer not a stranger to sit upon his throne nor let others inherit his glory.'
Rabbinical literature is full of apophthegms that express the positive passion of the teachers of Israel for the soil, the air, the water, the physical being of the national land. 'Whosoever walks four cubits in Palestine is assured of the world to come.' 'It is better to dwell in a Palestine desert than to live in a land of plenty abroad.' 'To live in the land of Israel outweighs all the commands of the Torah.' 'The air of Palestine makes men wise.' 'Even the chatter of Palestine is worthy of study.' 'Palestine is the microcosm of the world.' 'Rabbi Abah used to kiss the rocks of Palestine. Rabbi Chazah used to roll in the dust of Palestine.' The whole doctrine of the rabbis in regard to the national home is summed up in the sentence: 'God said to Moses, "the Land is me and Israel is dear to me. I will bring Israel who is dear to me to Land that is dear to me.' Here is the triple thread which is Judaism -- God, the Jewish people, the Jewish land. What the rabbis taught and felt, the Jewish people believed and felt.
With the nineteenth century we come to efforts which are neither strictly political nor yet miraculous. The Jew begins to return to Palestine, but to return as an individual. It is probable that there never was a period when there was no Jewish settlement of any kind in Palestine. Mediaeval Jewish travelers have left records of Jewish communities, and there is evidence of the existence of Jewish agricultural communities, perhaps from the days of the Temple. In the seventeenth century, the illustrious Don Joseph Nasi and his mother conceived the idea of planting Jews on the soil of Palestine. Early in the nineteenth century, Jews from Eastern Europe began to drift in, brought thither mainly by the profound emotion of the bliss of dying and being buried in the dust of the Holy Land. Every Jew who settled in Palestine was a link between the Diaspora and the land of Israel, for it was the duty and the pleasure of his brethren to maintain in Palestine men given up to meditation and study and dedicated to the spiritual life.
Many public men in Great Britain were deeply interested in these efforts to restore the Jewish people to the Jewish land. Lord Shaftesbury was the foremost of them. 'The inherent vitality,' he wrote, 'of the Hebrew race reasserts itself with amazing persistence. Its genius, to tell the truth, adapts itself more or less to all the currents of civilization all over the world, nevertheless always emerging with distinctive features and a gallant recovery of vigor. There is unbroken identity of Jewish race and Jewish mind down to our times; but the great revival can take place only in the Holy Land.' He believed that the hour had struck for the Jewish restoration, and he labored to persuade English statesmen to take up the holy task. Another distinguished Englishman of those days who was penetrated with the same conviction was Colonel Churchill, the British Resident at Damascus, who urged upon the Jews the return to Palestine as the solution of the Eastern question.
There is no chapter in the colonizing history of any people finer than the story of these Jewish pioneers. They came to Palestine ignorant of agriculture, ignorant of the land, ignorant of the people, miserably equipped. The government laid its dead hand on all development. It was only by stealth, and with the assistance of baksheesh, that a house or a shelter could be erected. There was no security for land property or life, and fever and pestilence raged. The settlers had to compete with native labor accustomed to a very low standard of life. They had to make their own roads, furnish their own police, their own schools, their own sanitary apparatus; and while the government of Palestine offered them nothing but the privilege of paying taxes, the governors of the countries from which colonists came extended them no protection. On top of these troubles there came a severe crisis in the agricultural industry on which the colonists were mainly dependent. In the end, all these difficulties were conquered, and Jewish colonies of today in Palestine, numbering over forty, are so firmly founded that they could resist the ravages of the war and of the blockade. These Jewish settlements are perhaps the only vital communities in the country.
These Jewish colonies, just because they are the children of an ideal and a passion, much more than of the pursuit of material gain, have a unique atmosphere and quality. The farmer and the laborer are scholars as well as sons of the soil. The school and the public hall are as indispensable as the shed. The cultivation of the Hebrew tongue is as natural as the cultivation of the land, and the children of the colonists speak and sing and play and jest in Hebrew, their mother-tongue. A considerable Hebrew literature of great range has sprung up, from the masterly dictionary of Ben Jehudah to the daily newspaper. There are reviews specializing in education and in agriculture; there are medical reports and a considerable variety of monographs on every aspect of the life of the colonist. This pulsating Jewish life, small in scale though it still is, is the microcosm of the Jewish Palestine that is to be. Perhaps the political charter of the New Jewish Palestine never would have come but for those few score thousands of Jewish settlers.
The Zionist Organization called into being financial instruments such as the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Anglo-Palestine Company, which strengthened and sustained the Jewish settlements in Palestine, notably under the trials of the war. The congresses summoned by the Organization are memorable for the influence they exerted in bringing together the scattered hosts of Jewry, and in educating Jewry as to the Jewish present, the Jewish past, and the Jewish destiny. Nobody who has ever attended a Zionist Congress but has felt that here was something unique; that here, in this gathering of Jews from the remotest parts of the earth, all assembled to deliberate solely upon Jewish questions, there was a living demonstration of the ancient saying that all Israel are brethren. To be present at a congress was to have what was most Jewish in Jewry brought under one's eyes.
The Zionist Organization reintroduced the political element into the creation of a Jewish Palestine. It was not concerned with parties or factions inside the various countries; but its aim was to give the Jewish people in Palestine a secure home under the guaranty of the Great Powers. It is possible that Dr. Herzl, the father of the Zionist Organization, was too optimistic in his expectations that either Turkey or the Powers would recognize the value to themselves and to the world of a Jewish Palestine. Nevertheless, his efforts were not wholly sterile. He fixed the identity of the Jews and of Palestine in the political vision of modern statesmen, and he secured from Great Britain two offers which were the first recognition in modern times, by any government, that the Jews constituted a nation, and that they had a right to remake a Jewish national home; that, in the words of the old and pregnant dictum of the rabbis, Israel was not a. widower. These offers were of an autonomous Jewish settlement in East Africa, and of a Jewish settlement in the Sinai Peninsula. For a variety of reasons they came to nothing, but they sustained British interest in the Jewish national restoration, and they were a milestone on that road which was to lead to a Jewish Palestine under a British trusteeship.
On the material side, the debt of Palestine and the whole Jewish people during the years of war to American Jewry is incalculable. When the United States was neutral, and the American Jews had access to the East, they promptly assumed the responsibility which had fallen upon them. If the centre of gravity of the commonwealth of Jewry has passed from Russia to the United States, that is due, not simply to wealth and numerical strength, but to the fact that, when the call came, American Jews answered it. Justice requires that the services of German Zionists in the preservation of the nucleus of the Jewish Palestine should be noted. Alone of the Great Powers during the war, Germany could bring political influence to bear upon the Turkish authorities and on more than one critical occasion the German Zionists induced the German Government to a check on the fury of Djemal Pasha. But not the least remarkable of Zionist manifestations during this trying time was the political insight of the Zionist leaders.
The Zionist leaders pinned their faith, a faith which never wavered in the darkest hours, to the Allied cause. The Zionist leader in England, Dr. Weizmann, a distinguished scientist attached to the Manchester University, got into touch with British statesmen in the earliest days of the war. The first of these to grasp the importance of the Jewish national claim was Mr. Balfour, whose interest has been steadily sustained, and whose merit it was to sign the famous Declaration of the British Government recognizing the Jewish rights to Palestine. Such of the leaders of the Zionist Organization as war conditions permitted assembled in England, and it was his ceaseless labors which brought about the death in London of Dr. Dchlenow, a leader of the Russian Zionists. The chief part in this diplomatic work was carried on by Mr. Sokolow, who represented the Russian Jews, and Dr. Weizmann. Dr. Weizmann was chiefly concerned with the British authorities, and Mr. Sokolow went on missions to Paris, Rome, and the Vatican.
But even while the military fortunes were in the balance, a great political victory had been won for a Jewish Palestine. On November 2, 1917, on the eve of the capture of Gaza and Beersheba, Mr. Balfour issued the memorable pronouncement: 'His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.'
The declaration of the British Government was speedily adopted by the French and Italian governments, and it has since been approved in terms or in substance by all the powers associated in the war against Germany.
It is not invidious to inquire what were the motives which brought the British Government to this momentous decision. As has been pointed out, it was in line with a long British tradition of interest, religious and political, in the Jewish restoration to Palestine, and it met with unanimous approval among the British people. The idealistic motive weighed heavily with British statesmen, as those Jews who came in contact with them during the war can testify. Another consideration was the necessity for recasting British policy in the East, now that Turkey had become an irreconcilable enemy to Great Britain. British statesmanship instinctively realized the necessity of substituting for the Ottoman Empire a new East, constituted by the revived and restored subject nations. The part which a Jewish Palestine could claim as an interpreter and a bridge and a reconciler between East and West appealed to the British imagination. These ideas weighed much with the late Sir Mark Sykes, who throughout was the chief channel of communication between Zionism and British statesmanship. A third argument was the political influence, immediate and future, of the Jewish people. America was a new recruit to the war, and England appreciated the value of Jewish friendship. A people of fourteen millions spread throughout the world was, again, a political fact not to be depreciated.
WHAT do the Jews want in Palestine? what do they hope? what do they intend? In the proposals laid before the Peace Conference by the Zionist Organization, the following demands are submitted. (1) For the recognition of the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine, and the right of the Jews to reconstitute Palestine as their national home. (2) That the boundaries of Palestine shall extend on the west to the Mediterranean, on the north to the Lebanon, on the east to the Hedjaz railway and the Gulf of Akabah. (3) That the sovereign title to Palestine shall be vested in the League of Nations, and the government be intrusted to Great Britain as mandatory of the League. (4) That Palestine shall be placed under such political administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment there of the Jewish national home, and ultimately render possible the creation of an autonomous commonwealth, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. (5) For these purposes the mandatory power is to promote Jewish immigration and close settlement on the land; to accept the cooperation of a Council representing the Jews of Palestine and the world, and to give this Council (which is to be precluded from making a private profit) priority in any concession for public works or the development of the natural resources of Palestine. (6) Hebrew shall be one of the official languages of Palestine, and the Jewish Sabbath and Holy Days shall be recognized as legal days of rest.
What kind of men will come? Palestine will get many of the best in Jewry, for, beyond a doubt, Zionism is the one vital Jewish thing in Jewry. It appeals to the idealism of the Jew, be he student, professor, craftsman, or businessman. Zionism has saved the soul of Jewry in every country of the Diaspora. Many, far more than the non-Jew even dreams, are girding themselves for the great adventure. The desolation that has swept over the European world has set free hosts of the pick of Jewry, and a Jewish Palestine will have at its disposal talents of every variety and of rare quality. Those who do not go themselves, and with their own hands and brains share in the building of the Palestine, will be happy to assist from a distance by material help and encouragement. Even those who have resisted the march of Zionism will rally the positive work of reconstruction, once the conflict of theories and politics over and done with. In the new Palestine there will be a task attractive to every man of fine spirit. Though not every Jew will ever be there physically the whole Jewish people will assuredly collaborate in making the new Jewish Palestine.
Such is the goal toward which the Jewish people are striving, and such is the fabric for which the ground is now being cleared by the labor of the Peace Conference at Paris. The Zionist ideal is the twofold ideal, national and human, of the Rabbis. 'Jerusalem is the city that made all Israel brothers. Jerusalem is destined to be the mother-city of all the lands.'
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