A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  What a curious transformation: Versailles promised the Jewish people a national home in its historic land, five times the size of the present-day State of Israel. This promise was given as a result of the universal recognition of the Jews’ right to be restored to the land from which they had been forcibly exiled, a recognition reinforced by the knowledge of the extent of Jewish suffering over the centuries as a result of that exile. No one gave more eloquent expression to this direct relationship between the removal of the Jews from their land and their subsequent suffering than Lord Byron in his melancholy “Hebrew Melodies,” and at Versailles the whole world echoed his sentiments.

  Yet today, nearly eighty years after Versailles, after the destruction of six million Jews in the Holocaust, a horror that Byron could not possibly have imagined, and after five wars launched by the Arabs to annihilate the survivors who had gathered in a fraction of the land promised to the Jews, the Jewish people are now being told that this is still too much. Worse, they are told that the desire to have a country not ten but forty miles wide is proof that they are expansionist, aggressive, and unreasonable.

  How is it that Zionism, which enjoyed such universal goodwill at the beginning of the century, is under such relentless attack at its close? How is it that a movement that was enthusiastically supported by the leading statesmen of the day, such as Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Tornáš Masaryk, has come under increasing criticism and pressure from today’s world leaders? How is it that the very word Zionist, once proudly espoused by Christian and Jew alike, has acquired an odious or at least suspect connotation? How did these transformations come about? To answer these questions, we must examine Zionism’s spectacular rise, assisted by the foremost powers of the world, and its equally spectacular betrayal by these very powers.

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  THE RISE OF

  ZIONISM

  In the autumn of 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent of the influential Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, called on his friend, the eminent writer Max Nordau. Herzl wanted to hear Nordau’s reaction to his thesis that the Jews of Europe were being placed in unprecedented danger by the rise of anti-Semitism. This would produce Jewish activists for Communism, he suspected, and further grist for the anti-Semites. Such developments, Herzl believed, would lead to catastrophe, not only for the Jews but for Europe as a whole. The only solution was the immediate establishment of a Jewish state and the exodus of the persecuted Jews to it.

  Herzl was candid with Nordau about the reception that established quarters of European Jewry were giving his ideas. One of his friends had suggested that he explain his project to Nordau because Nordau was a psychiatrist. “Schiff says that I’m insane,” Herzl said, leaving the obvious question unasked. Nordau, who had written extensively about the decline of European civilization, turned to his friend and said, “If you are mad, then I am mad as well. I’m behind you, and you can count on me.” 1

  Herzl’s recruitment of Nordau began a unique partnership between two of Europe’s leading Jewish intellectuals, combining prophetic genius with pragmatic purpose, which was to found political Zionism, the movement that revolutionized modern Jewish history. To these men, Mount Zion in the heart of Jerusalem symbolized the reestablishment of a Jewish state in which the scattered Jewish people would reassemble and begin anew its national life. Herzl’s Zionism, of course, had many antecedents, from the continuous longings of Jews since ancient times to restore their sovereign life in their homeland, to the aspirations for national salvation of Rabbi Yehudah Alkalai in Serbia of the 1840s and of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer in Prussia in the 1860s, to the yearnings for Jewish redemption of the secularist Moses Hess. Hess had begun his quest by inventing Communism, which he instilled in his ungrateful student Karl Marx, only to end up discarding it in favor of the idea of a Jewish national home. 2

  Above all, Herzl’s Zionism was preceded by the Jewish national movement that emerged in Russia in the 1880s under the leadership of M. L. Lillienblum and Leo Pinsker. Pinsker’s short but powerful tract, Auto-Emancipation, published in 1882, one year after a wave of pogroms in Russia, touched on most of the major themes that Herzl later developed. It galvanized the dormant Jewish national consciousness in a large segment of Russian Jewry, and it made a mass movement of the drive toward settlement in Palestine that had begun as a trickle around 1800. Herzl had not read Pinsker before he wrote The Jewish State in 1896, but he arrived at the same conclusions independently, much as in the seventeenth century Leibniz and Newton had both invented calculus without knowledge of each other’s work. Nor did Herzl know, when he put forth his ideas, that a fertile field had already been prepared to receive them in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. But he soon became acquainted with this movement as his ideas reverberated throughout the Jewish world.

  Yet Herzl was unlike any Jewish idealist or dreamer before him. Prompted into action by the spectacle of the anti-Semitic Dreyfus trial in Paris in 1894, which he covered as a reporter, Herzl was soon able to offer a concrete program to solve a real problem: a series of practical steps to establish a modern Jewish nation-state in Palestine as a haven and a home for the millions of Jews whose life in Europe, Herzl knew, was rapidly drawing to a disastrous end. Herzl sought to obtain commitments from the leading powers of the world to support an autonomous Jewish settlement in Palestine, to be protected by its own military force. He sought to harness Jewish financial resources around the world to this goal, and he founded the Jewish Colonial Trust (today Israel’s Bank Leumi) and the Jewish National Fund for the purchase and restoration of the Land of Israel.

  It was the political nature of Herzl’s version of the age-old Jewish dream of returning to the land that ignited the imagination of millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world. One of the innumerable spirits moved to action by Herzl’s message was my grandfather Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, who was converted to Zionism as a youth in the 1890s and became one of its foremost orators, spreading its message to Jews from Siberia to Minnesota. Later, in 1920, he followed his own exhortations and, sailing from Trieste to Jaffa, took his large family to settle in Palestine. I have a photograph of him as a delegate to one of the early Zionist Congresses originated by Herzl. The photo is from the congress of 1907, one of the first to be convened after Herzl’s premature death. For my grandfather, then a young man of twenty-five, this was the first congress. Not so for Chaim Weizmann, who later led the liberal General Zionists and who would become the first president of Israel; nor for the gifted author and orator Vladimir Jabotinsky, who later led the Revisionist movement in the campaign for Jewish independence under the British Mandate. Over the next three decades these two men were to clash over the destiny and direction of the Zionist movement, but in 1907 they were still united on many of the issues. The congress drew not only political activists; Haim Nahman Bialik, the great Hebrew poet of modern times, attended the same gathering.

  Such was the brilliance and power of Herzl’s idea that within a few years many of the best Jewish writers, scholars, and artists in Europe had dedicated themselves to the cause—winning sympathizers in every civilized nation and in every humane government, founding the institutions of the Jewish national government, and inspiring the mass resettlement of the barren and broken Jewish homeland.

  Initially, Herzl found greater receptiveness among non-Jews than among his own people. He succeeded, for example, in obtaining an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. (It would perhaps be easier today for a private person from an unimportant country to get an audience with the leader of China than it was for a young Jewish journalist to receive an audience with the Kaiser a hundred years ago.) Herzl’s secret was that he was the first Jew in modern times to rediscover the art of politics and the idea of cohering interests. To the Kaiser he described Zionism as a plan that would not only divert the energy of some of Germany’s young radicals but create a Jewish protectorate allied with Germany at the crossroads of the Middle East, thus opening a pa
thway to the East for the Kaiser. (Herzl made the case for German sponsorship of Zionism on the basis of political gain for Germany, but the Kaiser was also interested in ridding his realm of some of its “radicals.”) Appealing again to self-interest, Herzl was able to secure another unimaginable audience with a world potentate of the day, this time with the Ottoman sultan, in Constantinople in May 1901. Invoking the story of Androcles, who removed the incapacitating thorn from the lion’s paw, Herzl told the bankrupt sultan: “His Majesty is the lion, perhaps I am Androcles, and perhaps there is a thorn that needs pulling out. The thorn, as I see it, is your public debt.” And this thorn Herzl proposed to remove with the help of the great Jewish financiers. 3

  The remarkable speed with which world leaders hastened to give a hearing to Herzl’s unfamiliar, fledgling cause demonstrates the success of his approach and the power of his personality. By October 1898, only a year after Zionism had made its debut at the First Zionist Congress, he had met with the Kaiser three times.

  The receptivity that the great courts of the day accorded him in no way blinded Herzl to the primacy of winning Jewish adherents to Zionism. After Nordau, his greatest conquest among Jewish intellectuals was the celebrated English writer Israel Zangwill, who used his talents and influence to spread the creed of Zionism in Britain, which at the time was the foremost world power. Yet his most fervent support came not from the comfortable Jewish salons of Central and Western Europe but from the multitudes of impoverished Jews in the East—in Poland and Russia. There he found an emerging Jewish intelligentsia that embraced Zionism with the enthusiasm of youth, rebelling as they were against the cloistered ghettos in which most of their people still lived.

  Herzl began his public campaign when he was thirty-six years old. He died only eight years later, at the age of forty-four. But in those brief eight years he wrought a revolution without parallel in the history of nations. Indeed, Herzl’s clairvoyance was anything but mad. Within five decades, both the horror and the triumph of his stunning vision had come to pass. The separate anti-Semitic fires were collected into one vast conflagration that destroyed the millennia-old Jewish communities of Europe. At the same time the Jewish people, again precisely as Herzl foresaw, stood on the threshold of the creation of the State of Israel.

  Why was international opinion so ready to receive Herzl’s ideas? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the widespread support for Zionism in the leading countries of the world was grounded in a view of the Jews that had developed in the wake of the European Enlightenment two centuries earlier, a movement that stressed the natural rights and liberties of all mankind. Many, though by no means all, of the Enlightenment’s leading thinkers (Voltaire being a conspicuous exception) believed that the Jews had been unjustly condemned to suffer an unparalleled deprivation of these rights, with all the misery that this deprivation entailed; hence the Jewish people were entitled to be reinstated to a position of dignity and equality among the nations.

  It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of so many of the most powerful ideas of the Enlightenment, who put his finger on the uniqueness of the Jewish situation:

  The Jews present us with an outstanding spectacle: the laws of Numa, Lycurgus, and Solon are dead; the far more ancient ones of Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta and Rome have perished and their people have vanished from the earth; though destroyed, Zion has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not lost among them; they no longer have their leaders, yet they are still a nation; they no longer have a country, and yet they are still citizens. 4

  The solution to the problem of the Jews initially seemed obvious. The Jews would be granted civic and religious equality in the societies in which they lived. In America, where a new society was being created according to the principles of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson wrote with considerable satisfaction that he was “happy in the restoration of the Jews to their social rights.” 5 Similar advances were being made in Europe. The Jewish problem was well on the way to being solved.

  Or was it? Rousseau, at once arch-revolutionary and arch-skeptic, also sounded one of the earliest chords of skepticism. After the legacy of “tyranny practiced against them,” he was not at all sure the Jews would be allowed or able to partake of the new liberties envisioned in the new society, including the most basic one, freedom of speech:

  I shall never believe I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities [of their own], where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say. 6

  In this, Rousseau was among the first to condition personal freedom on national freedom. Although in our century of dictatorships, many have wrongly believed that national freedom can happily exist without individual freedom, 7 Rousseau was hinting here at a contrary idea: that the Jews could never be truly free as individuals unless they possessed a free state of their own.

  This idea was later developed and modified by the Zionists, who said that the Jews would never be equal unless their persecuted members came to live in a state of their own, and that even those who were left behind as fully enfranchised minorities would suffer from a sense of inferiority unless they too had somewhere a sovereign homeland that would bolster their sense of identity and to which they could choose to go—much as the Irish in America had Ireland, the Italians had Italy, the Chinese had China.

  But the fact was, and it was plainly evident to the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, that the Jews did not have such a homeland to which they could return. As Byron evocatively captured it in his “Hebrew Melodies”:

  The wild dove hath her nest

  The fox his cave

  Mankind their country

  Israel but the grave. 8

  Slowly at first, then with great rapidity, the idea began to take hold that civic equality was necessary but insufficient as a remedy for the Jewish problem. Only a Jewish national restoration in the Jewish homeland would produce a satisfactory solution. It would restore the Jews to a condition of normalcy not only as a nation but as individuals as well, much as Rousseau had intimated. As U.S. President John Adams put it, “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation, for as I believe… once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted, they would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character.” 9 The need of the Jews to be reinstated in Israel was recognized by Napoleon, who apparently understood that extension of citizenship to the Jews of France could not substitute for Jewish national restoration. In 1799, when his army was twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, he proclaimed: “Israelites arise! Now is the moment… to claim your political existence as a nation among nations!” 10

  The stream of sympathy for the Jews grew progressively stronger in the nineteenth century. The increasing frequency of Western travel to the Holy Land, the emergence of a small but growing movement for Jewish immigration, and the appearance of concrete plans for large-scale Jewish settlement of Palestine all contributed to the rapid growth of non-Jewish support for Jewish national restoration. Just as the romance of renascent Greek nationalism elicited enthusiastic support from Byron, and just as the Italian national revival excited many of the greatest minds in Europe, the prospect of the rebirth of Jewish nationhood had a similar effect. British, American, and French writers, journalists, artists, and statesmen all became ardent proponents of facilitating the return of the Jews to their desolate homeland.

  There was, for example, Lord Shaftesbury, who wrote in 1838 that he was

  anxious about the hopes and destinies of the Jewish people. Everything [is] ripe for their return to Palestine…. the inherent vitality of the Hebrew race reasserts itself with amazing persistence… but the great revival can take place only in the Holy Land. 11

  In 1840 the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, offered protection to the Jews in Palestine and undertook to convince the Ottoman sultan that it would be to his advantage if “the Jew
s who are scattered throughout other countries in Europe and Africa should be induced to go and settle in Palestine.” 12 Lord Lindsay, too, wrote in 1847 that the “Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence open to them, may once more obtain possession of their native land.” 13 And in 1845, Sir George Gawler, a governor of southern Australia and the founder of the Palestine Colonization Fund, urged: “Replenish the farms and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affection are rooted in the soil.” 14 British statesmen who declared their support for Jewish national restoration were a “who’s who” of prime ministers and elder statesmen, including not only Palmerston and Shaftesbury but Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Manchester. In the United States, successive presidents made declarations of sympathy for Zionism, including William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. 15