ZIONIST PUBLICATIONS Zionism aims to create a publicly-secured, legally-assured home for the Jewish People in Palestine. — Basle Program Palestine and Jewish Nationalism Reprinted from The Round Table March, 1918 ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA 55 Fifth Avenue, New York City 1918 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/palestinejewishnOOzion Palestine and Jewish Nationalism Among all the surprises of the war there is perhaps none more striking than the emergence of Zionism, the Jewish national movement, from comparative obscurity into the sunshine of popular acclamation and interna- tional sanction. Four years ago Zionism lay outside the orbit of the student of political affairs. It had, indeed, solid achievements to its credit. It had created a world- wide organization, numbering some quarter of a million of Jews of every possible political allegiance and every possible shade of belief. The regeneration of Palestine by means of Jewish agricultural and urban settlements had made considerable progress, despite the manifold obstacles imposed — rather passively than actively — by Turkish rule, and there had been a marked growth of Jewish national sentiment in these settlements, which found expression in 1913 in a revolt against an attempt to oust Hebrew in favor of German as the language of instruction in some schools controlled by a German- Jewish organization opposed to Zionism. When war broke out Zionists were busy with a scheme for a He- brew University in Jerusalem, which would have been — and will be — a rallying point of Hebrew scholarship and idealism and a powerful means of restoring to Hebraism its rightful place in the life of the civilized world. These phenomena pointed to the steady if not rapid or easy 6 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM development of a self-conscious and self-dependent na- tional centre of Jewry and of Judaism in Palestine. But there was nothing to attract the attention of the states- man to what Zionism had done and what its achieve- ments foreshadowed. Though various Governments had on occasion expressed sympathy with the aims of Zion- ism, and the British Government in particular had made the Zionist Movement an offer (which proved abortive) of a territory in East Africa as the home of a Jewish settlement with some measure of autonomy, Zionism was not, and had no apparent prospect of becoming, a factor to be reckoned with in international politics. Now, almost suddenly, all that is changed. Thanks to the breadth and sincerity of British statesmanship, to the inherent justice of its own aims, and to the ability with which those aims have been presented, Zionism has received the official approval of the British Government —an approval which, in the circumstances in which it was given, makes the realization of the objects of Zion- ism one of the avowed war-aims of the Allied Powers. The way in which the Government's declaration of sup- port has been received shows that substantially it speaks the mind of the whole British nation, and indeed of the whole Commonwealth. And while, no doubt, for many people the declaration obtained its special significance by virtue of its coincidence in time with the -victorious ad- vance of British troops in Palestine, it is none the less true that the permanent occupation of Palestine by Great Britain is in no sense made a condition of the support to be accorded by Great Britain and her Allies to Zion- ism. Mr. Lloyd George, in his statement of British war- PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 7 aims on January 5th, did not stipulate for a British Pales tine, but laid it down that the "separate national condi- tions" of Palestine must be recognized; and this state- ment, taken in conjunction with the Government's earlier declaration, means that, in whatever way the political future of Palestine may be determined by the peace set- tlement, Great Britain will insist on explicit recognition of the right of the Jewish people to establish there its "national home." This position accords both with the general spirit of Allied war-aims and with the require- ments of Zionism, which, while it imperatively needs a just, stable, and progressive government in Palestine, and knows how such a government is mosj Likely to be obtained, would obviously be travelling beyond its proper sphere if it attempted to insist on the transference of Palestine to the control of one or more specified Power or Powers. Be that as it may, the Zionist question lias definitely attained political importance of the first rank, and the time is ripe for an attempt to understand what Zionism is, what it has done, and what it aims at creating. What is precisely the place of Palestine in the Jewish scheme of things? What have Jews done in practice to substan- tiate the claim that they can build a "national home" for themselves in Palestine, and ought to be given facilities for doing so? What political conditions must be created as regards Palestine if Jewish hopes are to be realized? And what are likely to be the consequences, both imme- diate and more remote, of the establishment of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine? These are among the questions that call for an answer. 8 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM J. What Palestine Means to the Jew The Jewish love of Palestine is a thing unique in its kind, and its particular quality requires elucidation if the meaning of Jewish nationalism and the significance of the Jewish return to Palestine are to be understood at all. Love of his country is a natural instinct of the normal man, an instinct capable of calling forth the utmost en- deavor and sacrifice of which he is capable. Nor does the attachment necessarily cease when a man leaves his own country for another. Not only does the emigrant himself retain the sentiment, but he may transmit it to his children and his children's children, so that it persists through generations of men who have never set foot in "the old country." But this sentiment does not live and grow in the hearts of the absent except on the prop of some concrete connection. Contact is maintained through friends and relations who remain behind ; the sentiment, the sr^irjnUialJact, finds concrete expression and nourish- ment in the interchange of letters, of newspapers, of per- sonal visits. At the very least, there is the living recollec- tion of some ancestor who once lived himself in "the old country," and whose portrait, perhaps, is treasured as a family relic. When every concrete connection of this kind —trivial in itself, but important because it is the material basis of something spiritual— has vanished, the sentiment can scarcely survive, and sooner or later the descendants of those who left "the old country" become merged heart and soul in the life of the new. With the Jews and Palestine the case is very different. It is not, perhaps, so different as might appear at first PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 9 sight; for, though the number of Jews who have had any concrete personal connection with Palestine during the last fifteen centuries or more must have hern an insignificant minority, yet throughout that period, whenever there have been Jews in Palestine, the collection of funds for their maintenance has been recognized as an integral feature in the life of every traditional Jewish community elsewhere. But the existence of a link of this kind is an effect, not a cause, of the Jewish love of Palestine. There seems to be no reason in the nature of things why a Jew in Russia should contribute money for the support of lews in [eru- salem whom he does not know, and with w hom he has no personal contact of even the most indirect kind. The fact is, that the link between the Jew and Palestine is a national link in the most absolute sense — in the sense of being en- tirely independent of any sort of personal connection. The individual Jew may live his life outside Palestine, and his tradition gives him a scheme of values and a code of relig- ious, ethical and social practice which make his life dis- tinctively Jewish. He may have no idea that there will be any concrete restoration of Jewish national life in Palestine before the Messiah comes to fulfil the promise of the Re- turn. But deep down in the roots of his being, bound up with the very sense of his Jewishness, there is the convic- tion that until the Return takes place his nation is in exile, because, however satisfactorily he and millions of other Jews may adjust themselves to their different environ- ments, the life of his nation cannot be properly lived except in Palestine. This it is that explains why for so many centuries the Jewish love of Palestine has found its most characteristic expressions not in political effort for the re- 10 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM covery of the country, and not even in pilgrimages (though these have not been wanting), but in constant prayer for the restoration of the Temple as the symbol of the restoration of the full Jewish life; in the elaboration and study of re- ligious rites which cannot be performed outside Palestine; above all, in the attitude of mind expressed in the Rab- binic saying that the Divine Presence is itself in exile, and will be restored to its home only with the restoration of Israel. The feeling underlying all these phenomena, and others of the same kind, is not one of personal dis- satisfaction, of individual home-sickness or longing for something that the individual has lost, but one of national incompleteness. The Jewish love of Palestine, then, as it has persisted through centuries of estrangement between the people and the land, is peculiar in its selflessness and its spiritual qual- ity. And that fact has given rise to misunderstanding among men whose conceptions of the relation between the spiritual and the material and between nationality and re- ligion are derived from the theory and practice of modern Europe, and not least among those Jews who have adopted the European standpoint as a matter of course in the pro- cess of assimilation to their environment. From that stand- point the Jewish love of Palestine comes naturally and al- most inevitably to be regarded as something purely relig- ious, as a feeling which has for its object not a particular piece of territory on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, but simply a "spiritual Zion." Palestine, it is supposed, has become for the Jews merely an abstraction, merely a symbol for the realization of their religious and ethical ideals : the Return, so long and earnestly hoped and prayed PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 11 for, does not mean a physical restoration to the physical land, but merely symbolizes the establishment of the King- dom of God and the empire of righteousness. Christianity has helped to give currency to this notion by its practice of using the concrete terms of Jewish history in a spiritual sense of its own. But nothing could in fact be more op- posed to the whole spirit and tendency of Jewish teaching. Judaism knows nothing of a "new Jerusalem" which exists only in Heaven. Judaism spiritualizes the material, but for Judaism to spiritualize is not to dematerialize. The material remains material; but it derives a spiritual value by virtue of its being regarded as the necessary basis of an idea. Body is body and spirit is spirit, but in life the two are necessarily interdependent, and if it is the spirit that gives meaning to the body, it is the body that gives to the spirit the possibility of expression and activity. Through- out the whole range of Jewish ideas there runs this concep- tion of a relation between body and spirit which is such that, while the spiritual is supreme, the material has a neces- sary part to play, and would lose its power of playing that part if it were transmuted into something merely abstract or symbolical. What Palestine means to the Jew can be understood only in the light of this Jewish attitude to the problem of body and spirit. In the course of centuries of exile Palestine has become spiritualized — but spiritualized in the Jewish sense. It has not become, and never can become, an abstraction or a symbol. It is the actual, physical land that matters, though its geographical position and its physical features are absolutely unknown to millions of those who pray for it. If once the masses of Jews were to abandon their belief 12 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIQNALISM in the future restoration of Palestine in favor of a belief in a "spiritual Zion," to be realized in the world to come, the principle of Jewish cohesion would be gone, and the Jews would soon cease to exist as a distinct human group. But, on the other hand, if the spiritual ideal which is asso- ciated with Palestine in the mind of the Jew were removed — if his love of Palestine became simply the desire for a country with so much milk and honey, so much natural wealth, so many harbors, so much scenic beauty — then Jew- ish nationalism would equally be a dead thing and "the Jewish people" an empty phrase. It is the combination of the material and the spiritual element, each indispensable to the other, that gives its specific quality to the Palestine- sense of the Jewish people. It is this alone that explains the extraordinary persistence of the feeling of exile in a people which has ceased to be a nation in the ordinary sense, has built up prosperous communities in all parts of the world, and has provided itself with a way of life which is capable of adjustment to the most widely differing environments. That feeling of exile is, as was said above, a feeling of national incompleteness : an instinctive recognition of the fact that in the national life the elements of body and spirit are not developing side by side and co-operating as they must do for its full self-realization, because the material basis— the national land— is lacking, and whatever spiritual development takes place without it can be nothing more than a semblance of life. It is instructive in this connection to contrast the posi- tion of Palestine in the life of the Jewish people with that of Greece in the life of the ancient Greeks. Probably the Greeks were much more alive than the Hebrews to the PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 13 physical beauty of their country, and loved their country for its own sake in a way of which ancient Hebrew liter- ature shows little if any trace. But their national conscious- ness was independent of the particular piece of territory which they called Hellas. Their sense of the difference between themselves and other human groups had its roots mainly in two things — in difference of language and in difference of political institutions. And they were able to carry their language and their City State with them to other countries. They could be as Greek in Italy as in Hellas; they could create a great centre of Hellenism in Egypt. | The Hebrews, on the other hand, when they left Palestine ceased to speak Hebrew, and adopted for every-day pur-^ poses the language of the land in which they settled; and they regarded the communal organizations which they built up as nothing more than temporary expedients. It could never occur to them that their own distinctive form of na- tional life might be lived in its completeness as well out- side as in Palestine. They took Palestine with them in their hearts: it remained an essential element in their national consciousness. Their physical land and their spiritual ideas were inseparable, and "to sing the song of the Lord in a strange land" was an impossibility. In the light of what has been.said it will be clear that the modern Jewish aspiration for a return to Palestine is not simply— is not fundamentally— a desire to change po- litical conditions for the benefit of a particular nation. It is first and foremost a natural expression of his Judaism on the part of the modern Jew. It is as true to-day as it ever was that the ideas of the Jewish God, the Jewish way of life, the Jewish people and Palestine are inextricably bound 14 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM together, are in fact but different facets of one central principle which is the principium individuationis of the Jew- ish people. None the less, modern Jewish nationalism is like the nationalism of other peoples, an attempt at self-pres- ervation. Its differentia is. that in the Jewish people the idea of self-preservation is more consciously bound up with the sense of universal human values and ideals. And for that reason it may claim with some justice that its realiza- tion will be fraught with consequences of peculiar impor- tance to humanity at large. If every nation, by virtue of feeling itself a nation— no matter what may be the elements of its national consciousness— is regarded as having an in- defeasible right to the opportunity of self-development, and if the general concession of this opportunity will enrich human life, then surely humanity should reap a peculiarly rich harvest through the free development of a nation whose national consciousness has become bound up with its sense of universal spiritual values. In a very real sense the Jew- ish nationalist may claim that "Palestine for the Jews" means "Palestine for the world," not because he wants Palestine to be anything but distinctively Jewish, but be- cause he feels that the more distinctively and truly Jewish it is, the greater will be its influence on the world "in the direction of establishing 3 truer understanding of the right relation between body and spirit, between the individual nation and the divine idea of human brotherhood. But if modern Jewish nationalism, standing as it does in the closest relation to the fundamentals of Jewish thought, regards itself as charged in some degree with the fulfilment ot the universal purpose which works through Jewish his- tory, it remains none the less true thai there is a gulf fixed PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 15 between the restoration seen in the Prophetic visions and the restoration for which Jewish nationalists are working here and now. That complete fulfilment to which the Prophets looked forward is and must remain a distant ideal, and one to which human effort can stand only in the relation of blind groping, not in that of conscious and well-calculated endeavor. It is in its very nature catastrophic, a sudden and complete reversal of things as we know them. To work for its realization would be like working to bring about a volcanic upheaval. Zionism is concerned with mat- ters of human calculation and effort, with things that are, humanly speaking, attainable by a gradual evolution. Bui there is of course no contradiction here, though there is a difference. Zionism has suffered at times from being thought (and perhaps from being in fact) anti-Messianic, and at other times from indulging in visions too Messianic in their brightness. Its own inner development and the events of recent years have given it equilibrium and the possibility of understanding itself as a typically Jewish union of body and spirit — at once a concrete, practical attempt to re-establish a Jewish national settlement in Pal- estine, and an idea which derives from the Prophets and can have its ultimate fulfilment only in the fulfilment of their vision. II. Recent Jewish Work in Palestine. In actual practice, ideas do not work themselves out by their own motion, and their realization is not brought about solely or even mainly by the efforts of those whom they consciously inspire. Human beings generally need the pressure of some material need to rouse them to action for 16 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM a cause, and every human movement can be interpreted with some degree of truth as a reaction to material stimuli. In the case of the Jewish national movement it would be absurd to ignore the material pressure which led numbers of Jews to emigrate to Palestine in the "eighties" of last century; but it would be equally absurd to represent it as having created the national sentiment to which in fact it only gave an incentive to action. The conscious Jewish nationalism of modern times — as distinct from the nation- alism which is implied and taken for granted in the whole Jewish scheme of things — began as a reaction not against persecution or anti-Semitic prejudice, but against the ten- dency to assimilation which set in as an inevitable result of the political and social emancipation of the Jews in Western Europe. As far back as 1862 a German Jew, Moses Hess, published a book called Rom und Jerusalem, in which he subjected to a scathing analysis the prevalent assimilationist conception of the position of Judaism in the modern world — that conception which is conveniently summed up in the phrase "Englishman (Frenchman, Ger- man, etc.) of the Jewish persuasion" — demonstrated the essentially national character of Judaism, and forecasted the re-establishment of a national Jewish commonwealth in Pal- estine under French auspices. A little later a Russian Hebrew writer, Perez Smolenskin (1842-1885), again con- sciously attacking the assimilationist tendency, urged the importance of Palestine, along with the Jewish Law (To- rah) and the Hebrew language, as a vital factor in Judaism. Nor were there wanting practical efforts towards the re- settlement of Palestine. To say nothing of the schemes of Sir Moses Montefiore in the middle of the last century, PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 17 in 1870 the Alliance Israelite Universelle founded an Agri- cultural School (called Mikveh Israel, "The Gathering (or Hope) of Israel") near Jaffa. This step was taken on the suggestion of Hirsch Kalischer, a Rabbi of Posen, by whose writings Moses Hess had been influenced, and who himself took part in the foundation of a Jewish agricultural settlement near the Lake of Tiberias. A few years later some Jews of Jerusalem established a small agricultural settlement called Petach Tikvah ("The Gate of Hope") on the Audja, which is now the largest and richest of the forty or more Jewish "colonies" in Palestine. But it was unquestionably the terrible outbreak of per- secution and massacre in Russia, in 1880-81, which finally gave direction to the nationalist aspirations that were float- ing in the air of Jewish life. While the great tide of Jewish emigration from Russia set towards America, some .of the more idealistic, including a number of University students, turned to Palestine, hoping not only to win a better life for themselves, but to set their people on the way to na- tional redemption. These early settlers founded agricul- tural "colonies" in Galilee, in Judea and in Samaria, and braved with extraordinary stubbornness the manifold diffi- culties with which their undertaking was beset— difficulties which were enhanced by their lack of means, of experience and of knowledge of the country. They could not have survived at all if not for help from without. This help was provided in the first place by societies of "Lovers of Zion" (Chovcve Zion) which sprang up in Russia, and later in other countries, for the propagation of the national idea and the support of the Palestinian "colonies"; afterwards, and in larger measure, by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of 18 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM Paris. Thanks to this assistance the colonization movement survived the ills of infancy, and, though it achieved no re- sults commensurate with the hopes of its early sponsors, gained at least the possibility of development when circum- stances should become favorable. It lies outside the purpose of this article to trace the his- tory of Palestinian colonization in detail.* Suffice it to say that by 1895 some twenty "colonies" were established in various parts of the country, and the idea which underlay their work, the idea of the "Lovers of Zion," was surely if slowly gaining ground in the Jewry of the Dispersion. Then an event occurred which gave a temporary set-back to colonization work, and seemed likely to divert Jewish national effort for good and all into other channels. Dr. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jew living in Paris, published a brochure called Der Judenstaat, in which he asserted that the Jewish problem could be solved only on the lines of the recognition of the Jews as a nation and the provision of a territory in which large masses of Jews could live under conditions of autonomy, and outlined a scheme for the ac- quisition of a territory under the necessary international guarantees and the transference to it of as many as possible of those Jews who were not contented in their present sur- roundings. Herzl received his immediate impulse from the ugly manifestation of French anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair : and that fact explains both the strength and the weak- ness of his scheme. Jewish national effort may be stimu- lated by anti-Semitism ; but an attempt to base Jewish na- *For a detailed account see Palestine: The* Rebirth of an An- cient People, by A. M. Hyamson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1917). PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM L9 tionalism entirely on anti-Semitism ("the pressure from without makes us one people," says Herzl) is doomed to failure, because nationalism is a positive and not a negative thing. On the other hand, Herzl, looking at the Jewish problem from the external rather than from the internal point of view, was able to grasp the need for a big organiza- tion and for work on a large scale. Had there not been a genuine Jewish national movement — of however modest di- mensions — in existence, Herzl might have wasted himself in endeavoring to carry out a purely "political" scheme which ignored the real character of the Jewish people and the really vital elements of Jewish nationalism. As it was, there came about ultimately a fusion between Herzl and the "Lovers of Zion." It was the Russian "Lovers of Zion" who came in largest numbers to the first Zionist Congress, which he called together at Basle in 1897; and though they were on the whole too ready to yield to the glamour of his large political ideas, and to believe him capable of making bricks without straw, they at least secured the tying down of the Zionist programme to Palestine— a point which Herzl's brochure had left in doubt. This notwithstanding, the new Zionist movement was for a time unsympathetic to "petty colonization," which did not accord with Herzl's notion of getting a charter and purchasing the country out- right. But as time went on the true instinct of Jewish na- tionalism asserted itself. During Herzl's lifetime the move- ment took several important steps in the direction of Pales- tinian work, and after his death (1904) the diplomatic activity in which he had excelled sank for a time into the background, and the development of the settlement in Pal- estine became the chief care of the movement. The net 20 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM results of Herzl's work — and they were invaluable — were the publicity given to Zionism, and the creation of an organ- ization which, when the time came, would be able to assert the claims of the Jewish people. That organization possessed, at J:he time when the war broke out, not only the support of some quarter of a million Jews, and the active sympathy of many more, but also a concrete basis for its claims in the Jewish Yishub, or settle- ment in Palestine. The number of agricultural "colonies" had grown to upwards of forty, with a population of per- haps 12,000, engaged in the cultivation of vines, oranges, almonds, and cereals. Marsh lands had been drained and made habitable and fruitful. Afforestation had been begun on a small scale. The Jewish population in the principal towns had grown by leaps and bounds, and garden suburbs of European type had been built by Jewish energy and capital. A proper system of credit had been introduced into Palestine by the Zionist Bank, the Anglo-Palestine Company. Farm-schools and an Agricultural Experiment Station had been established. Experiments had been made in co-operative colonization and in co-operative workmen's settlements. The nucleus had been formed of a class of agricultural laborers who were at the same time small hold- ers. The Jewish "colonies," left very much to themselves by the Turkish authorities so long as they paid their taxes, had dealt successfully with the problems of local govern- ment, administration of justice, and defense. A beginning had been made of the organization of the "colonies" for common purposes by means of a Council consisting of rep- resentatives of each. At the same time, the Yishub had become more and more conscious of its national character PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 21 and significance. Hebrew had replaced other languages as the mother-tongue of the younger generation. Hebrew schools of all kinds, including a music school and a school of Arts and Crafts, were in existence, and the fust steps had been taken towards the foundation of a Hebrew Uni- versity. In a word, there was scarcely a phase of national activity- — excluding foreign affairs — in which the Jewish people, through this small advance-guard in Palestine, had not adventured. Everything was on a small scale, much was merely inchoate or experimental. But a national life was there in miniature. The importance of this achievement in colonization is not, of course/ to be measured by its size. What it has done is to place beyond doubt the will and the ability of the Jewish people to regenerate Palestine and itself in and through Palestine. And as a consequence it has given to the claims of Zionism a solid basis such as they could not have ob- tained by any amount of organization and activity, whether propagandist or political, outside Palestine. The Yishub, small in size but large in potentiality, is the great political asset of Zionism. Without it the sentimental and historic claims of the Jewish people might have been disregarded, as they have been before; with it, they have become irresistible. The potential value of the Jewish colonization of Palestine — its value as an indication of what the Jews, and they alone, can make of Palestine— is enhanced by the fact that it has been carried out hitherto in spite of difficulties created not only by the absence of any State organization behind it, but by the shortcomings of Turkish government. It must in- deed be said, in fairness to the Turk, that from the Jewish 22 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM national point of view his rule has had its good as well as its bad side. Talaat Pasha, in a recent interview, made much of the fact that anti-Semitism was unknown in Turkey, and that the Jewish "colonies" in Palestine had been allowed freedom in local administration and in the use of the Hebrew language for educational and general purposes. He had a right to take credit for this tolerance, which, if it re- sulted rather from passivity than from active good will on the side of the rulers, was none the less of great value to the ruled. It may well be that if during the last thirty years Palestine had been in the hands of an efficient and central- ized government, Jewish colonization might have progressed more rapidly on the material side, though the settlers might have been much less easily able to learn the rudiments of self-government and to retain and strengthen their specific national consciousness. But there is a heavy account on the debit side. Not only has Jewish colonization been hampered by burdensome taxes, restrictions on the sale of land, and the neglect of the Government to provide those material facilities without which a country cannot be developed on modern lines, but the absence of security has kept out of the country much Jewish energy and capital which would otherwise have flowed into it, to the benefit both of the Jewish national movement, of Palestine, and of Turkey as the overlord of Palestine. The Turkish revolution of 1908, which Zionists welcomed as the dawn of a new era of free- dom and opportunity, turned out in fact to be the precursor of a policy of Turkification which was even more fatal to Jewish national effort on a large scale than the laxity of Abdul Hamid's regime; and since the war broke out much has happened to destroy whatever lingering belief Zionists PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM may have retained in the possibility of achieving their ob- ject under Ottoman suzerainty. It is clear, therefore, that Zionism imperatively needs a substantial change— whether or not accompanied by a formal change— in the political position of Palestine if the work of a generation is not to be practically wasted, and if the Jewish people is not to be doomed once more to fall back on hopes and prayers. III. Political Conditions Necessary for a Jewish Palestine There is room for divergence of opinion as to the precise settlement of the political problem of Palestine which would best accord with the legitimate demands of Zionism as well as with the wider interests that are necessarily involved. But so far as the Zionist side of the question is concerned, one or two propositions may be laid down with certainly. In the first place, the relation between the Jewish people and Palestine must be recognized as the relation between a nation and its national homeland. This recognition is pro- vided by the British Government's declaration of Novem- ber 2, 1917, while the peculiar relationship of the Jews to Palestine is specifically mentioned in the programmes of war-aims formulated both by the British Labor Tarty and by the international Labor Movements. Secondly, while Zionism cannot of course renounce all claim to ultimate political independence if the system of small States is to continue— its fundamental postulate being that the Jewish people is to have the opportunity of complete and unfettered self-expression— political independence for the Jews of Palestine would be a mere phrase at the present time and in the immediate future, and at the start some other agency PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM must secure to the Jewish people adequate facilities for building up its national home in Palestine on the foundations already laid, by establishing and maintaining law and order in the country, by making proper provision for its defence against aggression from without, and by lending sympathy and active support to Jewish colonizing work in the broadest sense. Thirdly, and as a consequence, the government of Palestine in the immediate future must be entrusted to a single Power, and not to a condominium or an international commission. There is much loose talk about the "interna- tionalization" of Palestine, which, however well meant, is likely to do more harm than good. For experience shows that when a country is controlled by two or more Powers each of them is likely to care more about pushing its own interests than about the welfare of the country; and, how- ever ardently one may hope for and believe in the growth of a better spirit in international relations, only a rash optimism could expect progress in that direction to be other than slow and gradual. Equally bad would it be, from the Zionist point of view, if the Powers contented themselves with declaring Palestine neutral. A purely negative policy of that kind would not give the Jewish people the help that it needs if the promise of the Allies is to be made effective. "Internationalization," then, in any sense which can be at- tached to the term at present, is to be avoided. This is not, of course, to say that international consent is not desirable. Nothing could better accord with the interests of the Jewish people and of Palestine than the universal recognition of the Jewish national claim, and the creation of such conditions as would secure Palestine against be- coming again a bone of international contention. And that PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 25 end might be secured if whatever Power undertook the control of Palestine did so as the mandatory of the Powers in general. But the possibility of a solution on those linos depends on the question whether something in the shape of a real League of Nations is going to emerge from the pres- ent war. If that aspiration is realized, it will be eminently fitting for one of the Powers to act for the League as sovereign of Palestine during the period that must elapse before the Jewish nation can grow to full maturity. The governing authority, whatever it be, would, as Zionists frankly recognize, have responsibilities and obliga- tions to others beside the Jews. Palestine is at present, as it has been for centuries, peopled mainly by Arabs. Ac- cording to the figures available before the war, the Jewish population numbers roughly 125,000 in a total of about 700,000. Moreover, sacred though it is to the Jews, Pales- tine holds within its borders shrines sacred to Christians and Mohammedans also, and the Jews have no desire to intrude in any way upon the Holy Places of those religions. They only claim to be allowed to be neighbors: and, in the his- toric phrase uttered by Pope Benedict XV. to the Zionist ambassador, their hope and belief is that they will be "good neighbors." They recognize too that Palestine has been and may be again a pawn in the game of international rivalry: and though they earnestly desire to be allowed to work out their own national destiny in peace, they do not wish to interfere with the claims, or to be involved in the jealousies, of any of the Powers. The present situation is too uncertain and too full of difficulty for Zionists to debate the question whether Palestine will ever become a pre- dominantly Jewish country, or still more, a self-governing 26 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM Jewish Commonwealth. Many years must pass before such issues will arise in practical shape. Yet it may not be an unfitting conclusion to this article to project our gaze for- ward into a period when Jewish enterprise and Jewish in- dustry have had time to leave their mark upon the life and institutions of the country. What follows then must be read, not as a claim or a programme, but as embodying the natural aspirations of a nation long exiled from its home. IV. Functions and Influence of a Iewish Palestine What a revived Hebrew nation in Palestine may mean to humanity in the future may conveniently be considered un- der two heads — first, the direct influence on the world's history of the development of Hebrew national life in Pales- tine itself ; secondly, the indirect influence which the Hebrew national centre will exert through the Jewish communities in other parts of the world. For, however rapidly and suc- cessfully the Jewish settlement in Palestine may grow un- der more favorable conditions than have prevailed hitherto, for many generations at least, if not for all time, the numeri- cal majority of the Jewish people will remain outside Pales- tine, and the Jewries of the Dispersion cannot be left out of account in any forecast of the part which the Jewish people may play in centuries to come. Such a forecast must naturally be speculative; but if certainty is unattainable in a matter of this kind, some developments may be regarded at least as probable. Jewish effort in the past generation has already reclaimed parts of Palestine which had been swamp or desert for cen- turies. With increasing Jewish immigration and improved facilities, this work of reclamation should proceed apace, PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM until at last the potentialities of the country are realized to the full. What those potentialities are is still a matter of some doubt: in particular, it is doubtful whether Palestine has the natural resources that are necessary for the build- ing up of industries on a large scale. But there is no doubt whatever that the agricultural productivity of the country can be vastly increased ; and it is equally certain that with proper harbors and railways it can become as of old a great highway of communication between the Mediterranean and the East. Palestine has, then, an economic future; ami in making the most of its economic possibilities the fews will not merely lay a secure foundation for their own na- tional life, but will enrich the world by the addition of one more to the number of productive territories. This economic development will be fruitful of benefit to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and the neighboring lands. The Palestinian Arabs have already gained considerably as a result of Jewish colonization work, with its modern inten- sive methods of agriculture, its scientific appliances, its west- ern ideas of hygiene and business methods. There is every reason to hope that future Jewish development in Palestine will react favorably on the economic condition and the cul- ture not only of the Arabs in Palestine, but of tlie Arab kingdom of the Hedjaz. The Arabs are apt to be regarded as a backward race, constitutionally incapable of joining in the omvard march of modern civilization. It is difficult to believe that charge of a nation with such an illustrious rec- ord of civilizing work in the past. Put for centuries the Arab has not had a chance. The rule of the Turk, though sympathetic to him from the religious point of view, is politically oppressive, and makes for stagnation rather than 28 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM for progress. With the European he has too little kinship of ideas and temperament to be capable of learning from him what the West ought to teach the East. But there is a very real kinship between Jew and Arab — a kinship not merely of blood, not merely of language, not merely of religion (for Islam owes more to Judaism than even Chris- tianity), but of joint work in the diffusion of knowledge. It was the Arab and the Jew who brought scholarship and medicine into Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Jewish philosophers and scientists got their knowledge of Greek thought from the Arabs, and brought that knowledge with them into Europe. The Jews thus owe the Arabs a debt which they should be eager and able to repay when their genius has free scope in a national life of their own and the Arabs are their closest neighbors. Coming to the Arabs not as strangers from an entirely different world, but as kinsmen who have gained a rich experience during ages of separation, they will help the Arabs by the influence and example to adapt themselves to modern conditions, and, side by side, the two races will realize their national pos- sibilities. In its co-operation with the Arabs the Hebrew nation of the future will be fulfilling a part, but only a part, of the function which should properly fall to it of acting as medi- ator between East and West. For Palestine will not merely become a highway of commerce in the material sense: it will be a meeting-place of ideas and civilizations. Politically it may have to be a kind of buffer-State ; spiritually it will be the converse. Instead of serving as a barrier, which is the function of the buffer-State, it will hold open the door be- tween East and West, and will help each to a better under- PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM standing of the other. Nor will it simply act as a transmit- ter of ideas : it will make its own positive contribution to the problem of harmonizing the divergent conceptions of East and West. For centuries the Jews have been inter- mediaries in the sphere of ideas as in that of commerce: that was the natural metier of a people intellectually gifted, but lacking a solid basis of its own, and doomed always to wander from continent to continent in search of a resting place. A restored Jewish nation in Palestine will aspire to something higher than that. It will be creative, not merely imitative; it will be, spiritually if not economically, a manu- facturing and not merely a trading nation. And its creative work wiir^express a spirit subtly compounded of elements from East and West— the eastern passion for righteousness, for ideas, fof God, combined with western initiative and appreciation of the possibilities of man's command over na- ture. A Hebrew University in Palestine, re-interpreting the ideas of the Prophets in terms adapted to the modern world, might draw students from distant East and distant West alike, and send them back to their homes with an out- look not merely widened by intercourse with men of the most widely different types, but deepened by contact with those spiritual truths of which Israel is still the guardian, and at present the mute guardian. In international politics, again, which will become more and more concerned with the relations between East and West, a Jewish Palestine might fulfil an important function as the seal of a Court of Arbitration. Both sentiment and geography point to Palestine as of all countries the best suited for this purpose ; while the ideal of international brotherhood is so woven into the very fabric of Jewish national sentiment that concrete 30 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM association with the cause of international peace would be one of the most natural manifestations of the Jewish spirit. A Court of Arbitration at Jerusalem would not be an exotic ; it would he a real expression of Hebrew national life, and its moral force would be enhanced for that reason. Both spiritually and politically, then, a Jewish Palestine may do much towards establishing that world-harmony, that accommodation and fusion of different conceptions, with- out which mere international settlements can be of no avail. And in such a task Jewish nationalism would be working in close accord with the ideals of the British Commonwealth. For'it is one of the primary functions of the Commonwealth, stretching as it does across the Old World and the New, to bridge the age-long gulf between East and West, to create and delevop a sense of human brotherhood and civic fel- lowship between their peoples. Lastly, and not least important, the Hebrew nation in Palestine should justify itself by contributing something of value to the solution of social problems. Eve'n in modern Europe, under conditions of assimilation in which the es- sential character and ideals of the Jew tend to be submerged, the Jewish passion for social justice has shown itself time and again in individuals. Jews have been prominent where- ever there has been a fight for liberty and equality within the State. In a Jewish Palestine this fundamental and ineradicable quality of the Jew would have free play; and its fruits would be the more valuable in that it would be able to express itself in constructive w r ork. Circumstances have too often driven the Jew in modern Europe into the revolutionary camp. But he is not by nature a revolution- ary. He has a strong sense of social solidarity and a deep- PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM seated regard for human life as a thing of value in itself; and his individualism is tempered by an instinctive reverence for law and a habit of defining moral obligations with legal precision. A people with these characteristics should be capable of building a social fabric possessing the elements both of stability and of progress, and of adjusting aright the claims of the individual and of the community. More- over, the conditions in Palestine are favorable to a new ex- periment in social evolution. On the one hand, the very atmosphere of Palestine at once recalls to the Jew the social ideals of the Prophets. On the other hand, he can start his work there with the aid of all the science and ex- perience of modern Europe, a»d yet without the need for that constant struggle against the dead weight of outworn prejudices and institutions which nullifies so much of the energy of the reformers in a country of long-established economic and social traditions. The Jews in Palestine will have no relics of feudalism- to fight against. The political equality of men and women, towards which the nations of Europe struggle so slowly and painfully, is already an ac- complished fact in the small Jewish settlements in Palestine. Democratic government and co-operative institutions are matters of course. The Hebrew nation has the advantage of beginning at a point which it has taken Europe centuries to reach, and of being able to experiment with the minimum of risk and of friction. Herzl, in his prophetic sketch of the restored Jewish community, described it as Altneuland (Old- New Land), and the name will prove an apt one. Before long the characteristic spirit of the nation will express itself in social reform as in art and literature, and it will give as well as take in that interplay of ideas through which values 32 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM created by one nation become the property of all. It may even be that from the Judea of the future there will go forth to the world another great wave of religious and moral inspiration, to break, not wholly in vain, on the rock of materialism. At least, a world which has done homage to the Jewish Prophets of the past will not think the worse of the Jew if his national ambition takes the form of aspiring to produce successors of the Prophets in time to come. Meanwhile, the Jewish communities of the Dispersion will have felt the beneficial effects of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine both in their inner life and in their relations with their neighbors. There has been much misapprehension, partly genuine and partly af- fected, about the effect of the restoration of Jewish na- tional life on the political and social status of the Jewish communities outside Palestine. Some fear, or profess to fear, that when the Jewish nation has once more a political existence of its own Jews will no longer be allowed to exercise the rights of citizenship in non-Jewish lands, or even that they may be compelled to leave those lands for their own. It was no doubt to allay such apprehensions that the British Government's endorsement of Zionism was accompanied by a proviso safeguarding the "rights and po- litical status" of the Jewish communities in countries other than Palestine. This proviso is valuable as placing on rec- ord the British Government's recognition of the fact that there is no inherent incompatibility between the realization of Zionist aims and the continued enjoyment by Jews of social and political equality in Great Britain or any other country. It does not, and in the nature of things could not, afford any guarantee, because no Government could bind PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM its successors, still less the Governments of other countries, as to the course to be adopted in circumstances which have not yet arisen. But no such guarantee is necessary. Only prejudice or loose thinking could set up the contention that the constitution of a Jewish nation in Palestine— even if it had full State sovereignty — would necessitate a change of political allegiance on the part of any single Jew who be- longed by citizenship to another State; and if the appre- hension of loss of equal rights does not rest on that conten- tion, it rests on nothing. For, when once it is recognized that a Jew born in England, and exercising the rights of citizenship according to the law of England, can owe no political allegiance to a Jewish State in Palestine unless he goes to live in that State and becomes its subject by process of naturalization, it becomes obvious that the creation of a Jewish State no more affects the political position of that particular Jew than would the creation of a Hottentot State. It may, indeed, be contended that the existence of a Jewish State, or even of a Jewish national home, would lend a handle to those anti-Semites who wish to rid their own countries of Jews, but cannot make out a plausible case for expulsion, or for such restrictive legislation as would force Jews to emigrate, so long as the Jew has no place of his own to which he can go. But there is a simple answer to that argument. If the nations which have granted equal rights to Jews are capable of retrogressing so far as to substitute a policy of persecution for one of toleration, it would be absurd on the part of the Jews to expect to find in their own homelessness a shield against the evil which threatens them. Experience in Russia (under the old re- gime) and elsewhere proves that a country which for one 34 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM reason or another is predisposed towards an anti-Semitic policy is not deterred from carrying it out by the consider- ation that the Jews have no country of their own. If, then, it be assumed that other States will in future model their treatment of the Jews on Czarist Russia, what ground is there for supposing that it will make any difference whether there is or is not a Jewish national home? The fact is that the Jews, as a scattered people, must always depend on the liberality and enlightenment of the States in which they live (or at any rate of those States which are too strong to fear punishment or reprisals at the hands of a Jewish State if one exists) ; and if the civilized world is going to relapse into chauvinistic intolerance, the outlook for the Jews is so bad that they would be well advised to secure at least a corner of the earth where they can hope to be beyond the reach of anti-Semitism. But there is no reason so to despair of human progress, at any rate within a year of the Russian Revolution. To obtain an idea of what is really likely to be the effect of the realization of Zionist aims on the position of the Jewries of the Dispersion, it is necessary to realize first of all what sort of relation will exist between those Jewries and the national home in Palestine. That there must be some sort of relation goes without saying: otherwise the term "Jewish" must become a misnomer as applied either to the community in Palestine or to the communities outside Palestine, or to all alike. To assume that there will still be a Jewish people, with a national home in Palestine and settlements outside Palestine, is to assume that spiritual continuity with the Judaism of the past and the present will be maintained both in Palestine and outside it. And PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM it is precisely for this maintenance of spirtual continuity, that the national home will be of greatest value to the people as a whole. Its chief function, regarded purely from the" point of view of the Jewish people, will be— to use a phrase made famous by Achad ha-Am, the "master of those Who know" in Jewish nationalism— that of a "spiritual centre." Embodying in its own life what is best and most character- istic in the Hebraic outlook, the national home will be to the scattered Jewish communities a pattern on which they can model themselves in their attempt to realize Judaism in their own lives. Politically and economically the Hebrew nation in Palestine will move along lines determined by its own needs and circumstances, and the path which it takes will have no direct bearing on the position and the problem of extra-Palestinian Jewry. But in the realm of the spirit, in ideas, in religion, in ethics, it will exert a profound influ- ence on the Jews of the world. They will turn to i! per- force for a truer undertsanding of what Judaism essentially is, and of how far traditional Judaism requires' adaptation, and how it can be adapted, to modern conditions; they will look to it in large measure for their preachers and their teachers; its scholars will help them to a deeper Insight into their national past, its poets will give them a new vision of their national future ; they will send their sons and daugh- ters to its schools and universities, to come back with a quickened Jewish consciousness and a healthy pride of race. By virtue of a conscious individuality of outlook which will give their language, their history, and their customs a value in their own eyes and in those of their neighbors, they will gain a new sense of dignity and of self-respect, and will meet their fellow-citizens on equal terms, knowing that in PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM the commerce of ideas they can give as well as receive. So the Jewish communities of the world, each adapting itself to the political and economic conditions of its environ- ment, will yet remain united by a spiritual bond, and will transmit to the world whatever of value the national centre has to give. Nor will this renewal of national spirit in the Jew benefit his race alone: it will also benefit all those with whom they live. Keen-sighted statesmen and thinkers in most coun- tries where there is a large Jewish population have favored the Zionist movement because they have recognized that • Zionism, whilst making its disciples better Jews, makes them also better citizens of the States to which they belong. It is no accident that the leader of American Zionism should have stood in the van of the social reform movement in the United States and should have won his way by his untiring devotion to public service to a seat on the Bench of the Supreme Court. It may indeed be hoped that, when the promise of Zionism is fulfilled and its harvest is gathered in, many time-honored prejudices against the Jew will be at last destroyed. For his fellow-citizens will be no longer tempted to regard him as a homeless man, a man who has lost his national birthright, and therefore in some vague sense inferior to themselves, incapable of service as whole- hearted as their own to the State of his adoption, at the worst a parasite in the body politic. Not least among the fruits of the renascence of Jewish nationality will be a fuller sense of civic equality and human brotherhood be- tween Jew and Gentile throughout the world. A few words may be said, in conclusion, as to one par- ticular effect which the realization of the Zionist ideal ought PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM 37 naturally to have on the development of political thought and pract.ee. Of all the questions which the present war has brought to the forefront of men's minds there is none more important and more insistently demanding solution than that of the relation of the conceptions of State and Nationality. Throughout the nineteenth century the pre vailing idea in Europe was that Stale and Nationality should be co-terminous; each nation, however small and however unfitted for self-government, should have the complete ma- chinery and independence of a sovereign State. It was a period, therefore, of the creation of petty States and -what is worse for the cause of peace— of irredentist movements. And if the conception of the nation-slate is to retain its predominance in political thinking, there will assuredly be no end of irredentism and no end of war. The only hope lies in the general acceptance of the opposite conception, according to which the ideal arrangement is that of a mini her of nations grouped together for the conduct of the af- fairs which concern them all in common, hut maintaining each its own individuality in language and culture, and endowed with a sufficient measure of internal autonomy. The British Commonwealth comes nearer than any political organism of the present or the past to realizing this ideal. The new Russia may perhaps in course of time approximate to it. But the day is yet far distant when the world as a whole will be organized on the basis of large groups of nations in free association for State purposes, and any new force which will strengthen the tendency in that direction, theoretically or practically, should be welcomed by those who hope for real progress in international relations. Now in so far as the Jewish people develops along the lines 38 PALESTINE AND JEWISH NATIONALISM here foreshadowed — and they are lines which it must follow if it remains true to itself — it will be a force making in that direction. For the existence of Jewish communities all over the world, keenly conscious of their national distinctiveness, spiritually attached to their own national home, yet sharing politically and economically the struggles and the fortunes of the peoples among whom they live, will be an object- lesson in the true distinction and the right relation between State and Nationality. It will strengthen the hands of all those who are thinking and working for the great cause of removing the international rivalries and animosities which have now plunged the world in chaos. The Jewish nation, alike at its centre and at its circumference, will help to show mankind that a nation's life is best lived, not in iso- lation and conflict, but in community and co-operation; that 1 nationality is essentially a thing of the spirit, not bound up * with and fettered by political machinery, but working freely in the hearts and minds of men, and expressing itself in the effort of different human groups to approach the same summit by different roads, each striving upwards along the path marked out for it by its own character and spirit. BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS