A History of Zionism (77 page)

Territorialism

Although in a modified form, the critique of Zionism from the liberal-assimilationist and the religious-orthodox points of view persists to this day, whereas the opposition of the Bundists and the Territorialists is now largely a matter for the historical record. The Territorialists split away from the Zionist movement after the plan to settle in Uganda had been rejected. In 1905 the Jewish Territorial Organisation (
JTO
) was founded in London under the leadership of Israel Zangwill and some Anglo-Jewish friends, and with the support of various left-wing ex-Zionist groups in eastern Europe. They maintained that the vital interests of the Jewish people were not in Palestine: ‘We do not attach any real value to our supposed “historical rights” to that country.’ Nor did they acknowledge any organic connection between Zionism and Palestine.
*
JTO
organised an expedition to Angola and investigated the possibility of settlement in Tripolitania, Texas, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Nothing, however, came of all these schemes, and in 1925
JTO
was disbanded. Ten years later the Freeland League, a neoterritorial movement, came into being. It did not insist on political independence but was ready to accept autonomy in cultural and religious affairs. It drew up plans for mass settlement in western Australia, Surinam, and other parts of the globe, but these were no more successful than the
JTO
schemes. The Freeland League welcomed the establishment of the state of Israel but declared that in view of its limited area the country could not solve the problem of Jewish homelessness. With the liquidation of the displaced persons camps after the Second World War and the absorption of these people in various parts of the world, the league faded away.

Far more substantial was the influence of the Bund, the strongest Jewish party in Poland during the interwar years. As a militant Socialist party, it was equally opposed to cooperating with the Jewish bourgeoisie, the orthodox, and the Communists. Unlike Lenin, its leaders believed that the Jews were a nation, even though they were dispersed over many countries. Their slogan was ‘Nationhood without statehood’, and they emphatically rejected the idea that the Jews had no fatherland, that they were strangers everywhere but in Palestine.
†
They claimed that the establishment of a Jewish state would perpetuate the conflict between Jews and Arabs and that in any case Palestine was too small to solve the Jewish problem. They criticised labour Zionism for its willingness to collaborate with capitalists and the orthodox, on the ground of their incompatibility with Socialist principles.

The Bund ceased to exist after the extermination of Polish Jewry and the establishment of a Communist régime in that country. Some of its leaders succeeded in making their way to America, where they continued to maintain in their publications that their opposition to Zionism had been fully justified. Israel would never contain more than a minority of the Jewish people. Moreover, its very existence was dependent on the well-being and prosperity of western Jewry. If American Jews were compelled to leave their native country, Israel could not escape ruin and disaster. What Zionism had fought for and what it had achieved were two different things. It had striven for the liberation of all Jews. It had accomplished, at best, the risky liberation of a minority. It had split the Jewish people into two different nationalities.
*

The Bund had been a specifically east European phenomenon; its ideology could not be transplanted to the western hemisphere. It made a certain impact on the American Jewish labour movement during the years before and after the First World War, but as this movement became more and more Americanised, and as the social structure of American Jewry changed, this influence, too, faded away. The sons and daughters of the Bundist workers became physicians, lawyers and teachers, fully absorbed into American cultural and political life.

S.S. Subnow, the greatest Jewish historian of his time, took a position somewhere between the Bund and Zionism. No one could have accused him of preaching assimilationism; he denounced it as treason and moral defeat. But in contrast to the early Zionists he saw the Jews as a ‘spiritual-historical nation’. This did not necessarily conflict with their civic duties in their native countries. Unlike the Zionists, he did not regard the Jews as an abnormal nationality. Zionism was in his eyes a renewed form of Messianism, an ecstatic idolatry of the national idea. There was much idealism in it, but from the practical point of view it seemed to him a web of fantasy. The Lovers of Zion had assisted 3,600 Jews to settle in Palestine in seventeen years — 212 per year! Even if the Zionists succeeded in settling half a million within the next century, this would be no more than those living at present in the Kiev district. For this reason he thought it irresponsible of Lilienblum and Ahad Ha’am to talk about the rejection of the diaspora. Unlike the Bundists, he did not rejoice in the prospect of diaspora nationalism: ‘If we had the power to transfer the entire diaspora to a Jewish state we would do so with the greatest joy. We acquiesce in the diaspora only because of historical necessity and we strive to preserve and develop the national existence of the greater part of the nation which will remain!’ On another occasion (in 1901) he wondered whether it might be possible after all to effect the gradual colonisation of Palestine in such a way that there would eventually be a Jewish population of about one million. In that case the conditions would exist for achieving national autonomy as he envisaged it. Dubnow emigrated from his native Russia after 1917, settled in Berlin and was killed, well in his eighties, in the Riga ghetto in 1941. Not long before his death he noted in one of his books that Jewish Palestine had grown more quickly than he had anticipated in the ‘days of his little faith’ when he had accused the Zionists of lack of realism.
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Marxism and the Jewish Question

While Socialism had many followers among the Zionists, Socialist theory, especially the Marxist variety, was hostile to the Jewish national movement. Marx, Engels, and their immediate disciples were preoccupied with the problems of class and class struggle. A systematic study of national movements was undertaken only later on, towards the turn of the century, especially in countries where these issues were of particular importance and urgency, as in prewar Austria. Marx and Engels shared the view of their liberal contemporaries that cultural, economic and social progress was gradually overcoming national exclusivity and that the world (or Europe at any rate) was moving towards internationalism. Unlike the liberals, they did not believe that all national movements were equal; some were downright reactionary. It all depended on whether a particular national movement served or impeded the cause of revolution. About east European Jewry they were ignorant, and as for the Jews in the west they again shared the liberal belief that assimilation would solve that problem. The young Marx did publish an essay on the Jewish question but it is of greater interest to the student of metaphysics than of history. Not for a moment did he believe in the existence of a Jewish people; for Moses Hess’ Zionism he had nothing but contempt. The idea that Judaism and the Jews as a collective had a future must have appeared to him as an aberration typical of the loose thinking of someone too stupid to understand the implications of his own doctrine. Judaism for Marx was a totally negative phenomenon, something to be got rid of as quickly and as radically as possible. As far as he personally was concerned, his Jewish origin must have appeared an unfortunate accident of birth and a matter of considerable embarrassment. But this was by no means an original or specifically ‘Marxist’ attitude. Many of his anti-Socialist contemporaries reacted in exactly the same way. They were assimilationists who thought that a man’s national origin was not of great importance. They were first and foremost citizens of the world and only secondarily German, Austrian or Russian nationals. Socialists of a later day held the same view, and in this respect there was no substantial difference between revolutionaries and reformists. Leon Blum and Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky thought of themselves above all as members of the international Socialist movement.

Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did the Jewish issue assume greater importance in Socialist thought and policy, partly as the result of the spread of antisemitism. There were many Jews in the leadership of the European and American Socialist parties; in fact some delegations at the meetings of the socialist International before 1914 were almost exclusively Jewish. But with the rise of nationalist and antisemitic currents their position became more difficult and they grew more conscious (and self-conscious) of their Jewish origin. This did not, however, affect their basic conviction, that the coming Socialist revolution would solve the Jewish question wherever it existed, and that meanwhile everyone had to participate actively in the struggle for the liberation of the working class in his country of origin. In western Europe early Zionism was regarded by Socialists as a romantic, Utopian, reactionary aberration. Bernard Lazare was almost alone in sympathising with the new movement. In eastern Europe, too, not only Zionism but even less ambitious forms of Jewish nationalism such as Bundism, with its demand for cultural-national autonomy, were emphatically rejected by the leading Socialists. For Plekhanov and the men of his generation the Bundists were merely ‘Zionists suffering from seasickness’. The ideological rationale for Socialist anti-Zionism was provided by Karl Kautsky, for many years the most respected interpreter of Marxist doctrine for west and east European Socialists alike.

According to Kautsky, the traits derived from the primitive races of man tended to disappear as economic evolution progressed; the Jews were a mixed race, but so were the non-Jews.
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In the past the Jews had been an exclusive, hereditary caste of urban merchants, financiers, intellectuals, and a small number of artisans, who from generation to generation bequeathed certain traits peculiar to these strata. But with the advance of industrial capitalism, the barriers were gradually broken down, the Jews obtained equal rights, and many of them were absorbed by the peoples among whom they lived. Antisemitism, or ‘the Jewish peril’, was given a new lease of life by the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against liberalism. There were two forms of defence against this pressure: proletarian solidarity and Jewish solidarity. Among the Jews of eastern Europe, for specific economic and social reasons the call for national solidarity, i.e. Zionism, had found a considerable echo, but it had no future. Where could space be found for a Jewish state, since all regions in the civilised world had been pre-empted? How were the Jews to be induced to work in agriculture? How was a powerful industry to be developed in Palestine? All theoretical considerations apart, Kautsky thus saw in 1914 insurmountable obstacles on the road to the realisation of the Zionist aim.

His views had not basically changed when he returned to the subject after the war. He was impressed by the idealism of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine and their achievements, which, he thought, must convince anyone who had doubted Jewish energy and resolution.
†
But Zionist enthusiasm was not likely to persist. He predicted that Jewish
Luft-menschen
and intellectuals would again congregate in the cities and the Palestinian proletariat would become more class conscious. As a result, Jewish capitalists would lose interest, and without capital the process of rebuilding would come to a halt. At best, Jews in Palestine would come to outnumber the Arabs, and the new Jewish state, although not embracing the great mass of world Jewry, would nevertheless be predominantly Jewish in character. But this was not at all likely, for the political conditions were rapidly becoming worse: ‘Whatever Zionism does not attain within the next few years, it will never attain at all.’
‡
Zionism, to summarise Kautsky’s view, was not a progressive but a reactionary movement. It aimed not at following the line of necessary evolution but at putting a spoke in the wheel of progress. It denied the right of self-determination of nations and proclaimed instead the doctrine of historical rights.

At this point Kautsky deviated from the views of Marx and Engels, who attached little importance to national self-determination; they frequently referred with contempt to ‘lousy little peoples’ whose interests were to be ignored in the higher interest of history. Thus America’s war against Mexico was progressive because it had been waged in the interest of history, and Germany’s annexation of Schleswig was justified in the name of civilisation against barbarism, of progress against the
status quo.
The fact that Herzl and Nordau intended to carry western civilisation to the east would not necessarily have shocked Marx and Engels as it shocked liberals of a later day. They would have rejected Zionism for reasons of
Realpolitik
, because it appeared too late on the international scene and was not strong enough to accomplish its self-proclaimed task.

Kautsky was sure that the Palestinian adventure would end in tragedy. The Jews would not become more numerous than the Arabs, nor would they succeed in convincing the Arabs that Jewish rule could be to their advantage. ‘Jewish colonisation in Palestine must collapse as soon as the Anglo-French hegemony over Asia Minor (including Egypt) collapses, and this is merely a question of time, perhaps of the very near future.’
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There was no longer any doubt about the final victory of the Arabian [
sic
] people. The only question was whether they would reach it by peaceful concessions or by a period of savage guerrilla warfare and bloody insurrections. The poor, weak Jewish settlers in Palestine would be the chief sufferers in this battle, ‘the least able to defend themselves, as well as least capable of escaping’.
†
All one could hope for, therefore, was that the number of victims would not be great: ‘But the dangers to the Jews who are lured to Palestine by a messianic aspiration do not exhaust all the baleful effects of Zionism. It is perhaps far worse that Zionism is wasting the fortunes and resources of the Jews in a wrong direction, at a moment when their true destinies are being decided on an entirely different arena, for which decision it would be necessary for them to concentrate all their forces.’
‡
Kautsky was referring to eastern Europe, where the fate of eight to ten million Jews was to be decided, and since emigration could not help them their destiny was intimately linked with the prospects of revolution. Zionism weakened them in this effort by encouraging ambitions which amounted to desertion of the colours.