A History of Zionism (85 page)

The American Zionists opposed the establishment of a big executive office in London, feeling that the work for Palestine had to be done from Jerusalem. They favoured decentralisation and the introduction of modern business methods. American Jews, it was claimed, had greater administrative expertise than their European brethren. The Americans were critical of Ussishkin’s colonisation methods. He had introduced a new Halukka system instead of appealing to private enterprise and initiative. They were willing to exert themselves on behalf of the Zionist cause but they demanded that their contributions should be devoted only to Palestinian projects. They found it scandalous that the rich Jews of Europe, of whom there were many, were unwilling to take upon themselves a similar burden, and they thought that the Ma’aser project, according to which rich Jews were to give one-tenth of their property to the Zionist funds, was totally unrealistic. They wanted a clear division between commercial investments in Palestine and voluntary donations. They were not in favour of diaspora nationalism and refused to pay for Zionist activities outside Palestine. Brandeis, moreover, was put off by Weizmann’s behaviour; having reached agreement with him, Weizmann had acted behind his back to torpedo the agreement.
*
He was irritated by the proceedings of the London conference, the lack of preparation, order and purpose, the absence of any real authority, the constant speech-making. Brandeis, in brief, did not like what he saw of world Zionism. Weizmann and the European Zionists branded Brandeis’ policy ‘Zionism without Zion’. The American Zionists lacked a ‘Jewish heart’. They had never understood the basic character of political Zionism, the demand for a revolution in Jewish life. Instead, they proposed an
ersatz
Zionism. The Europeans argued that Palestine could not be colonised in the same way as America had been built, by private enterprise, but that a central national effort was needed. Criteria of efficiency and business management were not the only ones applicable to a movement idealistic in character. This referred,
inter alia
, to the American opposition to collective agricultural settlements, which they predicted would only cause further deficits in the Zionist budget.

While the London conference marked the break between Brandeis and Weizmann and their respective backers, the struggle for control of the American Zionist organisation lasted for another year and ended with the defeat of Brandeis and Mack at the Cleveland convention in June 1921. Brandeis resigned as honorary president, and together with his leading supporters, Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Wise, Nathan Strauss, Abba Hillel Silver and Julian Mack, withdrew from active work in the organisation. While Brandeis’ decision was final, most of his followers rejoined the organisation in later years.
*

The Brandeis crisis had its repercussions in Europe when two members of the executive, Julius Simon and Nehemia de Lieme, resigned in January 1921 for reasons very similar to those which had led to the withdrawal of the Americans. One of the main issues at stake was the character of the
Keren Hayesod
(Foundation Fund) which was initiated in 1920 at the suggestion of two Russian Zionist leaders. It was to raise £25 million for colonising work. The debates about the character of this fund (whether or not the political leadership was to have a say in its management) preoccupied Zionist conferences for several years and the amount of time spent on these heated debates was often in inverse ratio to the volume of money that was actually collected. Simon and de Lieme, like the Brandeis group, believed that it would be possible to build up Palestine while keeping investment in economically unproductive expenditure (i.e. education, social assistance, etc.) to a minimum.
†
They wanted the money to be used mainly to promote immigration and settlement. Only 10 per cent was used at the time for immigration, whereas 30 per cent went to supporting the Jewish educational system in Palestine. Simon and de Lieme believed in a strict division of labour between the Zionist executive and the Palestinian Jewish organisations, the latter to be responsible for specific local and municipal matters, including education. Many of the suggestions they made were quite realistic and were in fact adopted in later years. At the time they were thought to be premature and were rejected by the majority. The two therefore resigned from the executive.

Much of the Brandeis faction’s criticism of the London Zionist leadership was only too justified. The east European leaders were still committed to the tradition of unending sentimental speech-making and the belief that a speech was by itself a political act. In organisational and financial matters they were amateurs, able perhaps to manage the affairs of a small-town community in Poland but quite incapable of building up a new country by modern methods. The main weakness of the Brandeis doctrine was that it would have transformed the executive into an economic committee located in Palestine with a branch in London to deal with political affairs. The Americans overrated the willingness of the British mandatory authorities to help the Zionist movement and they underestimated the extent to which Zionism in eastern Europe, a popular movement aiming at the transformation of every aspect of Jewish life, needed organisation and leadership. By de-ideologising Zionism they would have deprived it of its soul, by neglecting the Zionist organisation they would have cut down the flow of immigrants. For the east European leaders Zionism was their whole life. For Brandeis and Mack it was just one of several preoccupations, albeit an important one. For this reason, if for no other, the Brandeis faction was bound to lose the struggle for the character and future policy of the movement.

Weizmann’s victory was, however, by no means complete. Immediately after the Balfour Declaration he had been hailed as the leader of his people, a new Messiah. But at the London conference and at subsequent Zionist congresses there was growing criticism. All his mistakes, all his errors of commission and omission, were held against him, whereas his achievements were belittled, as Weizmann’s colleagues became more and more impatient with his gradualism. Weizmann argued that he was indeed a
cunctator
, as Jabotinsky had said, as this was the only policy that could be pursued.
*
He tried to induce his colleagues to be less nervous and excitable about the ups and down of British policy. He tried to explain to them, not always successfully, that without money little could be achieved (the Palestine budget of the executive in 1923 amounted to less than £400,000). Sokolow echoed him; there was not much to be done in the political field at present, the centre of gravity had moved to economics. But these admonitions were not very effective. As early as 1920 Weizmann had to threaten to resign. This, in Ussishkin’s view, would not have been a major calamity; in 1923 he declared that the whole Weizmann system had failed. The attack ended with Ussishkin’s defeat, but a substantial (and growing) segment of the Zionist movement remained in opposition to Weizmann, and only its inability to agree on an alternative leadership prevented a major crisis.

The twelfth Zionist congress, the first after the war, opened in Karlsbad on 1 September 1921, with the delegates from Poland for the first time constituting the strongest group. Mizrahi, the religious party, was the largest single faction, since the centre group, the General Zionists, had no real internal cohesion. Much of the debate was devoted to financial problems. The Brandeis group boycotted the congress but Simon and de Lieme appeared and defended their position against the majority. The congress elected a new executive, half of whose members were to reside in Israel (Ruppin, Eder, Ussishkin, Pick, Sprinzak, Rosenblatt). It ended with a stirring speech by Bialik, the greatest Hebrew poet of his generation, who said the hour of action had come, that ‘we have had too many dreams and fantasies – we want to see action’.
*
Once practical work got under way, Bialik predicted, the unending quarrels and theoretical disputations which had plagued Zionism would die away.

Bialik was over-optimistic, as the next congress (Karlsbad, 1923) proved. There were many complaints about the executive and many dire predictions. The Mizrahi and several General Zionists would have gladly ousted Weizmann. It was in many ways a typical congress: almost everyone argued that he and his group had been discriminated against. Blumenfeld claimed that Zionism had lost its militant character, a process which had begun before the war but had gathered momentum after 1918. Young Arlosoroff, emerging as one of the major figures in the movement, went even further, referring to the danger that Zionism would be ruined and disappear altogether.
†
One speaker, commenting on the announcement that 70,000 dunam had been acquired since the last congress, said that this was about the size of the estate of a single Polish landlord, and not even one of the biggest.

Yitzak Gruenbaum, the Polish Zionist leader and one of Weizmann’s main antagonists throughout the 1920s, claimed that the Jewish people could wait if conditions in Palestine were too difficult for practical work. Like Nahum Goldmann and some other ‘radical’ Zionists, he upbraided Weizmann for neglecting the movement and concentrating on Palestine. Above all, the ‘radicals’ opposed the idea of making non-Zionists members of the Jewish Agency, the constitution of which had been discussed the year before for the first time.

This issue was to bedevil quite unnecessarily the Zionist movement for seven more years. Weizmann was the main protagonist of cooperation with non-Zionists, not only (and not mainly) because the establishment of the Agency was mentioned in the mandate, but because he realised earlier and more acutely than most of his colleagues that the means for building up Palestine could not be raised by the Zionists alone. He anticipated that non-Zionists would hardly be willing to join in the enterprise unless they were given some representation on the leading bodies of the movement. The ‘radicals’ claimed that this was watering down Zionist ideology, depriving the movement of its specific national character, altogether a catastrophe. These discussions generated a good deal of heat but they were, as subsequently appeared, quite irrelevant. For the enlarged Jewish Agency, as set up in 1929, did not play the role that had been envisaged, and the primacy of the Zionist movement and its character were not in the least affected.

The role of the Agency was not the only bone of contention between Weizmann and his critics. The east European Zionists viewed with deep suspicion the activities of the English Jews with whom Weizmann had surrounded himself – Kisch, Eder, Leonard Stein – and who, during his absence from London, were in charge of the political work of the executive. These men laboured under the misfortune of not having been born in eastern Europe. They spoke no Yiddish and little if any Hebrew. They had not participated in the prewar congresses and they had not served their apprenticeship in the movement. They were, in other words unfamiliar types. How far could they be trusted? Weizmann was attacked for his ‘dictatorial tendencies’. He had not bothered, for instance, to bring a resolution adopted (unnecessarily, as he thought) by the Action Committee against the establishment of an Arab Agency to the attention of the British government. He was constantly criticised for not presenting Zionist demands to the British government with sufficient emphasis. When he asked what Ussishkin and his friends would have done in his place (Weizmann later wrote) the reply was: ‘Protest! Demand! Insist! And that seemed the ultimate wisdom to be gleaned from our critics. They seemed quite unaware that the constant repetition of protests, demands and insistence defeats its own ends, being both futile and undignified.’
*

At the thirteenth congress Ruppin presented a sombre picture of the state of constructive work in Palestine: some of his colleagues had talked about one hundred thousand immigrants a year, whereas he had thought thirty thousand would be a more realistic figure. In fact a mere eight to ten thousand had come. The congress had envisaged a budget of £1,500,000, but in reality only one-third of this sum had come in and the Palestine budget had dropped to £300,000, quite insufficient to cover the expense of school and health services, let alone immigration and settlement.

At this congress three of Weizmann’s supporters (Kisch, Lipsky and van Vriesland) joined the executive. But he still bore the main burden, and in his desperate attempts to obtain money in America and elsewhere he had little help from either friend or foe. The world situation in 1923 was not conducive to obtaining loans or donations. Shortly after the congress Weizmann said in Baltimore: another such year and we are lost. There was a real danger that the Zionist congress was about to become a parliament in which endless ritual speeches were made by professional small-town dignitaries whose words bore no relation to the real situation of the Jewish people. There were no financial resources, nor was there any expansion of economic activities, and without these all the speeches about great future prospects sounded very hollow.

Parliament fell into disrepute in the 1920s in many European countries and the Zionist movement was no exception. Its congresses aroused passion and produced some oratorical highlights, but on the whole they were exercises in futility, for they were concerned largely with events and developments over which the Zionists had no control. The opposition to Weizmann was divided into Palestine-Firsters, who wanted a more radical approach by the executive
vis-à-vis
the British (Jabotinsky, Ussishkin), and the followers of Gruenbaum, who were mainly interested in work in the diaspora (
Gegenwartsarbeit
).

More and more impatience was displayed both by the leadership and the opposition as the financial plight thwarted activities everywhere. When Keren Hayesod had been founded, it was announced the £25 million would be collected in five years. In fact it took six years to collect a mere £3 million. Little could be achieved with such paltry sums. The Zionist organisation had been over-spending for years and by 1927 its deficit was £30-£40,000. This could not be called a staggering sum in absolute terms, for a movement trying to build a new country. But by Zionist standards the debt was enormous and it proved impossible for a long time to find anyone to cover this deficit; countless sessions had to be devoted to meeting this emergency. To provide another example: Hadassa, the American Women’s Zionist Organisation, was very active in raising money on condition that it could retain annually for its own projects £110,000, about 20 per cent of the total Zionist budget at the time. This issue, too, was debated countless times by the American Zionist Federation and the World Zionist Congress.