A Durable Peace (4 page)

Versailles and the series of conferences that followed it produced a blueprint, however imperfect, for determining who got
what and why. It was generally predicated on Wilson’s premise that distinct national groups were entitled to countries of
their own and to the freedom to pursue their own destinies according to their own lights. In some cases, as in what became
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, several nations were clustered together in a single state where this was deemed practicable.
But such cases were more the exception than the rule. Thus, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each with
a unique language, history, and culture, received independent national domains. So did Poland, which for over a century had
been divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. So did Hungary, which like Czechoslovakia had hitherto been controlled by
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the same token, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were supposed to be free from the Russian
yoke. Largely Greek portions of western Anatolia were to be transferred to Greece, Albania was to be given independence, and
Kurdistan was to be granted autonomy. For the first time, Australia, Canada, and South Africa received
recognition as sovereign nations. And similar recognition was also accorded to one more nation: the Jews.
²

The case of the Jews was unique because, unlike the other peoples, they were a scattered nation, exiled for many centuries
from their homeland. But this in no way affected the judgment of the civilized world at the beginning of this century that
the Jews were entitled to a land of their own. Moreover, it was widely recognized that they were entitled to restore their
national life in their ancient homeland, Palestine,
^*
which up to 1918 was controlled by the crumbling Ottoman Empire. If anything, the tragic dispersion of the Jews through the
centuries
strengthened
rather than diminished the belief that they deserved a state of their own—and an end to their wanderings. Zionism was accorded
the kind of consideration given to other national movements seeking to realize their national goals.

Now that the ice of the Cold War has melted, the world of Versailles that was buried underneath is being revealed once again.
The tenets of Versailles are being dusted off, its arrangements reinstated, and its unsolved problems (as in the Balkans)
are erupting, as though the intervening century had not intervened. Baltic independence has been restored, as has the freedom
Versailles
promised to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. The passage of time appears to have made little difference. Even the
much-celebrated and anticipated monetary union of Western Europe, meant by some to erase national allegiance, shows no sign
of achieving such a radical shift away from basic national loyalties. The relevance of nationalism as a central driving force
in global affairs is being demonstrated daily, as is the durability of many, though not all, of the arrangements conceived
at the beginning of the century in response to the demands for independence of diverse peoples. Most of these arrangements
have endured and gained the world’s acceptance.

But this has not been the case with the Jewish national restoration. For what was accepted at Versailles as a just solution
to the question of Jewish nationhood is today shunned by governments and chancellories the world over. They accept, most of
them, that the Jewish people is entitled to a state. But they reject the Versailles conception of the size and viability of
that domain, preferring to toss the Jews a scrap at best from the original offering. The promise of Versailles to the Jewish
people was that it would be allowed to build a nation in the land of Palestine—understood then to comprise both sides of the
Jordan River (see
Map 3
). This area, now referred to as Mandatory Palestine (the area in which Britain was charged in 1920
to secure a Jewish national home), included the territory of the present-day states of
Jordan and Israel. In fact, many people now argue that the Jews do not deserve even 20 percent of this territory (that is,
present-day Israel, including the West Bank), and they demand that the Jewish people be satisfied with a mere 15 percent of
the original Mandate (Israel minus the West Bank, which comprises the heart of the country). This would leave the Jews with
a state ten miles wide, its cities crowded along the Mediterranean, with radical leaders peering down at them from the Samarian
and Judean mountains that dominated the country. All that would be left of the Versailles promise to the Jewish people, of
a small but nonetheless viable country capable of accommodating fifteen million Jews and their descendants, would be a truncated
ghetto-state squeezed onto a narrow shoreline.

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.

1

I
n 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.