A History of Zionism (88 page)

The political constellation when Arlosoroff took over was anything but auspicious: the movement faced financial bankruptcy. Sir John Chancellor, the high commissioner in Palestine, was not exactly a supporter of the Zionist cause. The London government was moving further away from the spirit and letter of the Balfour Declaration. The differences within the movement were steadily growing. Even some among the newly elected executive would not have been unduly distressed had Arlosoroff failed in his efforts. In this difficult situation he showed an enormous capacity for work, infinite patience, and a desire to make friends with Englishmen and Arabs alike despite constant discouragement from all sides. Above all he wanted to give a fresh impetus to Zionist work. As the year 1932 drew to a close there were signs of a slow improvement, but Arlosoroff did not live to see the turn of the tide. On the evening of 16 June 1933, he was shot while walking on the Tel Aviv beach. The identity of his killers has not been established to this day and the exact circumstances have remained a matter of controversy ever since. Members of a group of extreme revisionists were widely suspected of the crime, but there was insufficient proof and they were acquitted after a trial which caused a deep split in the Jewish community.

Among Weizmann’s supporters in Germany Kurt Blumenfeld was one of the most influential. A most effective speaker, he was even more persuasive in a small circle and succeeded in gaining the support or many leading non-Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, for the colonising work in Palestine. Robert Weltsch, born in Prague, was the editor of the most influential Zionist organ of the period in any language, the
Jüdische Rundschau
, and, incidentally, wrote many of Weizmann’s speeches. The
Rundschau
was often criticised for its ultra-Weizmannism (on the Arab problem, the question of the Jewish state) but no one disputed its high cultural level. It enjoyed great authority and had a marked educational impact far beyond the borders of Germany. Nahum Goldmann, born in eastern Europe, and educated in Germany, began to take a leading part in Zionist politics at an early age. He belonged to the radical Zionists who opposed Weizmann, but his main interest, like Motzkin’s and Gruenbaum’s, was diaspora politics rather than Palestine. Not quite of Arlosoroff’s calibre, he was an excellent speaker and an accomplished diplomat. He attained a leading position in the movement only in the 1930s.

Among Weizmann’s supporters in America Louis Lipsky was the most gifted and prominent. A man of considerable intellectual and artistic talents, he was at the same time an excellent organiser and the educator of two generations of American Zionists. He became general secretary of the American Zionist Federation early on and assumed its leadership after the defeat of the Brandeis-Mack faction. American Zionism had other outstanding leaders, such as Rabbi Stephen Wise, a formidable orator, who had, however, many interests outside Zionism: every humanitarian cause found a warm supporter in this radical democrat. There was Abba Hillel Silver, another fiery orator, also a rabbi and an early Zionist, who assumed a leading role in the 1940s. Jacob de Haas, born in England, who had won over Brandeis for the Zionist cause, was prominent at one time but dropped out after Brandeis’ resignation. Few American Zionist leaders except Henrietta Szold made Zionism their only cause, and none of them with the exception of Henrietta Szold, Magnes and, in later years, Israel Goldstein, made Jerusalem their home.

This list of prominent Zionists is not only incomplete; it is to a certain extent misleading. The most accomplished orators, the leaders most in the limelight, were not necessarily those who constituted the backbone of the movement. Some of the leading ideologists of the earlier period, such as Idelson, Jacob Klatzkin or Pasmanik, now forgotten, exerted considerable influence at the time even if their ideas were often disputed. Arthur Ruppin, whose place in the history of Zionism has been mentioned, was for many years the executive’s expert on all questions concerned with Jewish settlement. In the accounts of the dramatic debates and the memorable decisions his name does not often appear. He was the protagonist of practical work, doing his job inconspicuously with rare devotion, never in the limelight if he could help it. Yet in retrospect the importance of his work has no equal in the annals of Zionism. There were other such men, the unsung heroes of the movement, without whom Zionism would have remained a debating society, a parliament without a country, intriguing no doubt but of no practical consequence.

Zionist Parties

The World Zionist Organisation was composed both of separate unions (such as Mizrahi and labour Zionism), and of national federations, whose members subscribed to the Basle programme but were not bound by party discipline. Before the Second World War there were fifty such freelance federations and their members were by definition General Zionists. Thus General Zionism was the first party to exist but the last to get organised. It was the main stream, the movement itself was general Zionist. The term ‘General Zionism’ was adopted only in 1907 after the appearance on the scene of other parties within the movement.
*
General Zionism was amorphous, ‘a compound of many views, but not an ideological identity’.
*
As there were no permanent ties between the national federations they came to the congresses strong in numbers but divided and without a clear programme of action. At the twelfth (Karlsbad) congress they represented 73 per cent of the total, but suffered a decline when both the Right and the Left became much stronger. In 1923-5 their share was 50-60 per cent; in 1931 they were reduced to a mere 36 per cent, split, moreover, three different ways. Attempts to bring the three factions together at the first World General Zionist Conference (Basle, 1931) were only partly successful. Nor was the attempt to provide a specific General Zionist philosophy very convincing. Robert Weltsch claimed that General Zionism was not just equidistant between Left and Right, between capitalism and Socialism, between religious orthodoxy and atheism, between militarism and pacifism, between an aggressive and a sober realistic policy; it was not just a policy of passive compromise, the desire to choose the line of least resistance, but a positive, deliberate, conscious decision in favour of the centre and the unity of the movement.
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Such motives may have induced Robert Weltsch and some of his intellectual friends to back General Zionism, but most of its leaders and supporters were attracted to it precisely because it was not a movement of extremes.

General Zionism was plagued by internal dissension. In 1923 the ‘Democratic Zionists’ broke away and established a faction in opposition to Weizmann. They rejected,
inter alia
, the idea of an enlarged Jewish Agency and they also claimed that Weizmann did not pay sufficient attention to the necessity of strengthening Zionist organisations in the diaspora. Moreover, he was said to be too pro-British in his foreign policy.
‡
The main spokesman of this faction was Y. Yruenbaum, whose Polish group (
Al Hamishmar
) constituted the nucleus of the opposition. It was supported by Nahum Goldmann and some of his Berlin friends, a Rumanian group (
Renasterea
), and several small factions in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1927 the opposition was renamed ‘Radical Zionism’. In its programme it tried to outflank the Weizmannites from both the Left and the Right. In contrast to Weizmann, it emphasised the importance of attaining a Jewish majority in Palestine and a Jewish state as the final aim of Zionism. At the same time it stressed the need of democratic Jewish life in the diaspora, a reference, presumably, to Weizmann’s ‘dictatorship’. While most Jews were sympathetic to the idea of building up Palestine, they had not yet been won over to Zionism, and to achieve this was, according to the Radicals, one of the most urgent assignments of the movement. In brief, they asked for a more militant and dynamic policy without, however, always being able to specify in detail what policies they would have pursued that differed essentially from Weizmann’s. Some of their demands, moreover, were mutually exclusive.
*

Radical Zionism, like General Zionism, was a trend rather than a political party. Its early manifestos were signed not only by Gruenbaum and Goldmann but also by Jabotinsky, Schechtman, Stricker and other revisionists who soon established their own organisation. The Radical Zionists had at no stage the support of a sizable section of the movement. They polled 6 per cent of the total at the elections in 1927 but two years later their share dropped to 4 per cent. Subsequently Gruenbaum, Goldmann and most of their supporters returned to the fold of General Zionism, constituting, together with German, British and American leaders, the ‘A’ stream, in contrast to the rival ‘B’ faction headed by Ussishkin, Mossinson, Bograshow, Schwarzbart, Rottenstreich, Schmorak, Suprasky and F. Fernstein. At the 1935 congress, the former had eighty-one representatives, the latter forty-seven.

All General Zionists agreed that the national interest should always take precedence over party interests. But since the two wings differed both in their definition of national interest and in their attitude towards Weizmann’s foreign policy, as well as in their approach to social and economic issues, such verbal agreement was not sufficient to restore unity for any length of time. The ‘A’ faction favoured fairly close collaboration with labour Zionism and advocated the inclusion of General Zionist workers in the Histadrut framework, whereas the ‘B’ faction (the ‘World Union’) gravitated towards the Right, preferring the establishment of a separate union outside the Socialist-dominated Histadrut. The ‘B’ faction came out in favour of a Jewish state as early as 1931, whereas the Weizmannites opposed it as premature at the time. The former wanted to transform General Zionism into a political party whose decisions were binding on all its members, whereas the latter preferred a loose confederation. After the split of 1935 most General Zionists joined group ‘A’, which had 143 delegates at the last prewar Zionist congress, whereas ‘B’ was represented by only twenty-eight members. After the war, in December 1946, a new world confederation of General Zionists came into being, but the rivalry continued and in the first parliamentary elections in the state of Israel the General Zionists split into no fewer than seven lists. Eventually most of the members of the ‘A’ faction joined the Progressive Party, whereas the members of ‘B’ established a General Zionist Party which eventually united with the revisionists (Herut). Outside Israel, American leaders such as Abba Hillel Silver, and later Israel Goldstein, were prominent in General Zionism, as far as it continued to exist.

Religious Zionism

The emergence of labour Zionism and of revisionism, and their subsequent fortunes, are discussed elsewhere in the present study. Religious Zionism, as represented by the Mizrahi, was less important, but no survey of the Zionist movement would be complete which ignored the part played by this, one of the oldest factions within the Jewish national movement.

Orthodox Zionists trace their roots to Ramban, the medieval sage, who according to tradition found only two Jews in Jerusalem when he arrived there some 650 years ago, and thereupon decided to work for the strengthening of Jewish settlement in Palestine. They see their precursors in Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov in the eighteenth century, and in Rabbis Kalischer and Gutmacher (a leading Kabbalist) in the nineteenth, in whose thought the rebuilding of Palestine figured very prominently. Among the Lovers of Zion there were several distinguished rabbis, such as Eliasberg and Mohilever, but the organisation of orthodox Jewry, Mizrahi, came into being only some years after Herzl had given fresh impetus to Zionism. The moving spirit behind the Vilna convention (1902) and the founder of Mizrahi was Isaac Jacob Raines, rabbi of Lida, a ‘Litvak’ who in the words of his biographer knew no language but Hebrew, had no general education, but ‘was a man of much wisdom and knowledge, a Talmudic sage, a genius, a preacher of the rarest type, who blazed a trail in Aggadic literature’.
*
Raines had sympathised with the Lovers of Zion, but decided after much reflection to join Herzlian Zionism. Having pondered and rejected the arguments against Zionism by the ultra-orthodox rabbis, he reached the conclusion that whoever concluded that the Zionist ideal had any connection with free thought was liable to suspicion himself as a desecrator of things holy.
*

At the Vilna conference, and at a subsequent meeting in Minsk, there was no agreement between those who argued that the Mizrahi should act as a watchdog within the Zionist movement, i.e. prevent it from falling into the hands of the ‘freethinkers’, and those who maintained that a purely negative approach would be ineffective in the long run and that Mizrahi should therefore engage in constructive work as well, such as education and settlement. These were differences of tactics rather than principle. Mizrahi members have always agreed that the basic aim of the organisation was to ‘capture the Zionist institutions’ and create a religious majority among the Jews of Palestine.
†
The constructivists gained the upper hand and it was decided that Mizrahi should collect the funds needed to establish a modern yeshiva in Lida, a school in Tel Aviv and a teachers’ seminary in Jerusalem. The seat of the Mizrahi executive was transferred from Lida to Frankfurt and later to Hamburg-Altona, in view of the difficulties facing the movement in tsarist Russia.

At first little was done. Mizrahi was then a loose federation of local groups united in their religious and national beliefs and in their wish to act as a pressure group against the ‘democratic faction’ (Sokolow, Weizmann, Motzkin) which wanted the movement to engage in cultural and educational activities as well as in political and colonising work. Since educational work by the non-orthodox was
a priori
unacceptable to Mizrahi, a crisis occurred when it was finally decided at the tenth Zionist congress to accept the programme of the ‘democratic faction’. The more rigid orthodox elements, especially those in Germany and Hungary, decided to leave the Zionist movement, but the great majority stayed within it.
‡