A History of Zionism (87 page)

The ambivalence of the Zionist movement towards Weizmann’s leadership became even more pronounced as relations with Britain worsened. He was, as Robert Weltsch wrote (and as Weizmann’s critics reluctantly admitted) the only Zionist leader who could meet British ministers on an equal footing. There was no one who could speak so courageously and effectively on behalf of the Jewish cause. ‘His extraordinary powers of mind and his ready wit made him a formidable controversalist; the moral weight and the magic power of his personality made him succeed where lesser men could not even get a hearing.’
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But his Zionist patriotism was increasingly doubted and he was even accused of treason when he refused to act as spokesman for the extremist demands which were gaining ground in the Zionist movement. This widening gulf eventually led to his downfall in 1931. He returned to the leadership only four years later at a time of supreme crisis.

About the tremendous impact of Weizmann’s personality there is general agreement. A non-Jewish observer once wrote that his persuasiveness was irresistible, even frightening. He was always more successful with the Jewish masses (and incidentally with non-Jews) than with his own colleagues among the Zionist leadership. The strength of his personality has been described in a moving tribute by Isaiah Berlin:

He was one of those human beings who … stood near the consciousness of his people and not on its periphery; his ideas and his feelings were, as it were, naturally attuned to the often unspoken, but always central hopes, fears, modes of feeling of the vast majority of the Jewish masses with which he felt himself all his life in deep and complete natural sympathy. His genius largely consisted in making articulate and finding avenues for the realisation of these aspirations and longings. … He was a man of immense natural authority, dignity and strength. He was calm, paternal, imperturbable, certain of himself. He never drifted with the current. He was always in control. He accepted full responsibility. He was indifferent to praise and blame. He possessed tact and charm to a degree exceeded by no statesman of modern days. But what held the Jewish masses to him until the very last phase of his long life, was not the possession of these qualities alone, dazzling as they were, but the fact that although outwardly he had become an eminent western scientist (which made him financially and therefore politically independent), and mingled easily with the remote and unapproachable masters of the western world, his fundamental personality and outlook remained unchanged. His language, his images, his turns of phrase were rooted in Jewish tradition and piety and learning. His tastes, his physical movements, the manner in which he walked and stood, got up and sat down, his gestures, the features of his exceedingly expressive face and above all his tone of voice, the accent, the inflexion, the extraordinary variety of his humour, were identical with theirs – were their own.
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Yet the picture of the greatest Jewish statesman of his age would be incomplete without mentioning, at least in passing, some of his shortcomings and weaknesses. His political views were those of a democratic nationalist, not unlike Masaryk’s. He had absorbed them instinctively and remained always, first and foremost, an empiricist. Once shaped, his political views changed little if at all over the years. He read few books and had few interests outside Zionist politics and chemistry. Like Herzl he was no original political thinker. He was at least partly unaware of the great and mostly negative changes that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s. He had easily found a common language, with Balfour and Lloyd George and men of their generation, but communication with their successors became increasingly difficult. His democratic humanism was out of tune with the new
Zeitgeist
and the new
Realpolitik
, out of tune with an increasingly violent world in which humanism and moral necessities counted for little and physical power was almost the only criterion. In these changed conditions Weizmann’s effectiveness as a political leader was bound to diminish.

His attitude to his own people, to the Zionist movement, even to his closest collaborators, was highly contradictory and often ambivalent. He never failed to stress that he was a man of the people: ‘If I have achieved anything, it is precisely because I am not a diplomat. If you want to hurt me, call me a diplomat.’
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‘Herzl came from the west,’ he said on another occasion, ‘and used western concepts and ideas. I unfortunately hail from Lithuania. I know the Jewish people only too well, and it knows me even better. And therefore I lack the wings which were given to Herzl. … Had Herzl been to a
cheder
, the Jewish people would never have followed him.’
‡
But the common touch was blended with elements of a Nietzschean contempt for the masses. He was fully aware of the weaknesses of the Jewish people, the unwillingness of the rich Jews of Europe and America to contribute financially and of the Jewish masses to emigrate to Palestine. The lack of gratitude often shown him only strengthened such feelings. On occasion he seems to have despaired of ever convincing his movement that an all-out effort of the whole people was needed to make the Zionist dream come true. His attitude to his contemporaries in the Zionist leadership was, with a few exceptions, one of barely veiled contempt. Like Ben Gurion after him, he got along well with the younger generation, which looked up to him, but he found it exceedingly difficult to work with others as equals. ‘He was never happy as a colleague,’ Harry Sacher wrote. ‘He disliked seeking counsel and he had no gift for reporting.’
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He was a moody man and could turn his great charm on and off abruptly. More than once he used people only to discard them when he no longer needed them and was guilty of acts of gross disloyalty to some of his closest confidants. He hardly ever expected gratitude from others and only infrequently showed it himself. But the qualities which make a popular leader and a great statesman (one, to quote Berlin again, whose active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen) are not exactly those of a saint. For someone active in politics throughout his life, his weaknesses were surprisingly few and his sins venial.

Other Zionist leaders

One of the earliest challenges to Weizmann’s rule was made by Menahem Ussishkin, who had been a leader in Russian Zionism when Weizmann was still a student. Born near Mohilev in 1863, the son of a wealthy Hassidic merchant, he got his training as an engineer (a profession he never practised) in Moscow. A central figure among the Lovers of Zion, he spent his honeymoon in Palestine at a time (1891) when it was unfashionable, to put it mildly, to do so.
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A heavy-set man with massive shoulders and blue eyes, he had the reputation of being unbending and hard as nails. There was indeed such a streak in his character, but there is reason to believe that he deliberately cultivated the image of the tough, forbidding man, and that behind this façade there was a romantic, dreaming of the redemption of the soil of Palestine. His political ambitions were bound to remain unfulfilled. He had his enthusiastic followers among the Russians but was temperamentally quite unsuited to lead the Zionist movement, which wanted not a dictator at the helm but a master in the art of gentle persuasion. He had the nature of a tsar (one contemporary wrote), his opinions were issued in the form of edicts. He was dead sure that he was always right and no one could be as right as he. It was not only his lack of linguistic ability which debarred him from the heights of Zionist diplomacy.

After having settled in Palestine, Ussishkin was made director of the Keren Hayesod. He was instrumental in buying lands which later became key areas in Jewish agricultural settlement (Yesreel valley, the Beisan valley, Emeq Hefer). While a man of the Right in his political philosophy, he warmly supported the Socialist pioneers in their endeavours even when these ran counter to his own beliefs, for settling on the land remained for him the ultimate test of commitment to the Zionist idea. He had absorbed the Russian Populists’ belief in the unity of theory and action and had nothing but contempt for the diaspora Zionists who saw their own future in Europe rather than in Palestine. Ussishkin died in Jerusalem, the city he loved most, during the Second World War, his prejudices and passions and intellect undimmed; with all his foibles, a man widely respected, a pillar of strength of the Zionist movement.

Nahum Sokolow shared the leadership of the Zionist movement with Weizmann after 1917. He too had played a notable part in the events leading up to the Balfour Declaration. Sokolow was more widely educated than Weizmann but lacked the popular touch, the charisma and the toughness of the born leader. He was perhaps the most accomplished Zionist diplomat but he did not have the vision, the grand design of the great statesman. He was tolerant, sympathetic and generous in his appreciation of others, and modest in his appreciation of himself,
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though he did not lack political ambition, as appeared at the Zionist congress of 1931 which deposed Weizmann and made him the leader of the movement. He was a handsome man, distinguished in manner, eloquent, witty and remarkably well read. But he lacked the demonic streak and the passion which was part of Weizmann’s character. He was too much the intellectual to become the man of action, too courteous, too indecisive on important political issues. He was not a strong man and did not even try to give the impression of being one. Sokolow was reluctant to make enemies; he was not hard enough to be the leader of a popular dynamic movement. He became an elder statesman comparatively early in life, and was very much in demand as chairman and mediator. But he was not the man to provide leadership at a time of crisis.

Leo Motzkin, born in Lithuania, played an important role in the early period of the Zionist movement. He had been Weizmann’s mentor in the Berlin days and later on presided over many Zionist congresses. Like Sokolow, he was a man of the centre, an excellent chairman, but he did not carry much weight in the inner councils of the movement. He lacked discipline and purpose and there was, again in the words of a contemporary, something unfinished about most of Motzkin’s actions. He was said to be a gifted mathematician, but unlike Weizmann he did not finish his studies. He became an expert on the situation of Jews in Russia, and later on in other parts of the world. The compilation of documents he published on these topics was of considerable value, but there is little of his own writing.
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In later years his main interest was diaspora politics - the World Jewish Congress was his brainchild, though he did not live to see it born (he died in 1934). He lacked the single-mindedness of Ussishkin or Weizmann. Perhaps he enjoyed life more than they did. He certainly came to love Paris, its boulevards, restaurants and cafés:

There he could meet Jews of all lands. If you sat at the Café de la Paix any afternoon, you would see a panorama of Jewish life pass by…. He spent more time drinking tea than at his desk. He loved good company and was a good listener. He read heavy literature and nothing light or easy ever crossed his eyes. He never seemed to have time for home life and could be relied on to pack a grip and at a moment’s notice go to London or Vienna or New York - wherever a Jewish cause beckoned. He disliked quarrels and partnerships.
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He was knowledgeable and decent, but not cut out to be a leader of men.

Of all the leading figures in the movement Jabotinsky was the most colourful, but he was in opposition from the early 1920s onward and had little influence on official Zionist policy. His political career has been described elsewhere in the present study. The members of Weizmann’s entourage were specialists, not all-round men like himself; they did not play a central role in internal Zionist politics even when they were members of the executive. Kisch, Eder, Harry Sacher, even Professor Brodetsky were half Jews, half Englishmen in the eyes of the east Europeans; their speeches were not always understood. As they did not share the east European cultural tradition they never felt themselves completely at home in the folksy atmosphere of the Zionist congresses. Jabotinsky apart, the revisionists had no outstanding personality. Robert Stricker, who supported him in the 1920s, had no following and influence outside Vienna. Like Lichtheim he did not stay long with the revisionists.

The labour movement was represented in the leadership by Kaplanski, who was not well known in Palestine, for he settled in Haifa only in later years when he became head of the technical university there. Ben Gurion, Sprinzak, Remes, Ben Zvi, Katznelson made their appearance at the Zionist congresses in the 1920s but their speeches caused barely a ripple. They were still largely preoccupied with their own specific problems, and even the rhetoric of Berl Katznelson did not go down too well. The great prodigy of the Left was Victor (Chaim) Arlosoroff, born in Romny in the Ukraine, educated in Berlin, who entered Zionist politics at the twelfth congress and, in 1924, at the age of twenty-five, became a member of the Action Committee.

Arlosoroff was a man of remarkable gifts, combining Weizmann’s tact, political instinct and intuition with outstanding organisational and oratorical talent. He was the best speaker in the movement, less flamboyant but more persuasive than Jabotinsky. He understood more about economics and sociology than any other Zionist leader, and was in fact a rare combination of the intellectual and the man of action. Politically he belonged to the Hapoel Hatzair and was one of the main architects of the merger with Ahdut Avoda out of which Mapai was born in 1930. He developed his own brand of Socialist doctrine (
Volkssozialismus
) but was the least doctrinaire of men, always ready to modify his views in the light of new developments and experiences.
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Early on he was asked to take on diplomatic missions on behalf of the executive - to Geneva, London and the United States. It was more than somewhat ironical that after Weizmann’s fall he, a self-confessed extreme Weizmannite, was elected to be his successor as the foreign minister of the movement.