The Reconquest of Palestine-

by William B. Ziff A New Force In Jewry

Like a slender thread of light in all this wilderness of Jewish indirection, cowardice, lamentation, hopelessness and torpor runs the spirit and manliness of the Jewish pioneers in Zion, the Chalutzim. They have brought their strong, hardy heritage from a pale, unreal tradition into an ecstatic reality. They have realized that if they are to have any future, mere bleats for justice will not give it to them, that they themselves must become worthy of this future by the pure force of their own spirit and their own acts.

The ultimate solution to all this age-old friction can only be found in the establishment of the Jewish State. There is no use in splitting hairs as to the injustice involved in tearing the Jew away from the old lands he has learned to love. Visions of human brotherhood must yield to fact. Unless we wish to continue as human sacrifices on the altar of Messianic delusion.

Practical-minded people have long before our time compounded their faith with a brave resolved spirit. I have only to point to the early pilgrim settlers of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Catholics in Maryland.

WORLD LOVES STRENGTH

The world which sneers at our misfortunes could not help but applaud our strength and decision. It is in the nature of this world to commend spirit, courage and hardihood, and covertly to detest petitioning and weakness, irrespective of what “rights” and “equities” allegedly are involved.

Without acting like escaping criminals or slinking pariahs, we can set our eyes on Palestine in much the same intelligent fashion as Englishmen view Australia, as Germans viewed America as a land of opportunity, and as man the world over seeks to improve his condition.

Only a weakling would believe that in this manly desire to improve his lot is any losing of caste or refutation of his own citizenship. So long as in all respects we are honest men, industrious and law-abiding, we would be no different in this entirely normal contemplation than the large group of American farmers who view the untenanted Canadian prairies as a land of hope.

To acquire Palestine at all, we can scarcely depend on the generosity and largesse of the nations. We must win it through the loyal sacrifices of our people as a mass, and a fighting leadership which will not betray its trust. Up to the present time a muddled, scary leadership, backed by a half-hearted chaotic Jewry, has just about succeeded in ruining the entire enterprise.

MODERN ZIONISM

The Zionist cause is at the moment in a most precarious position. By degrees every essential to its triumphant completion has been cut away before our eyes. Unless we act quickly its final negation is in plain sight.

Let us survey modern Zionism in brief:

In 1896 a great and far-sighted man arose in Israel named Theodor Herzl. He was, astonishingly enough, not the inspired product of the Pale, but a son of assimilated Western Jewry. With clear, calm eyes this God-like, thinker weighed both cause and effect, eliminating from his great mind all the shibboleths and unreal doctrines with which his fellow Western Jews were doping their minds.

An immediate howl arose from those very Jews who should have supported him most, the educated, cultured classes. The Jews of Germany and Austria with fine aloofness gazed upon him as a dangerous maniac who cast aspersion on them by his very existence. Historic Jewish apprehension and fear came quickly to the fore. In 1897 the rabbis, of all people, vigorously condemned him. They attempted to discredit the growing magnetism of this great, creative conception by publicly thundering against it everywhere. They loudly announced that every city was Zion, evidently with an eye to what they anticipated would be the Gentile reaction to this unnatural idea.

REACTION SURPRISING

These flabby-souled gentlemen received the shock of their lives when they began to find that while Jewish leaders were trembling in their boots at the idea, Gentile statesmen all over the world were giving it their sympathetic approval.

One by one our timid public men began to acknowledge that at least the conception was not sacrilege. Heartened by the sympathy of Gentiles, and to a degree by the enthusiasm of part of the Jewish masses, they grudgingly announced that it was “all right as a haven of refuge for persecuted ghetto Jews,” but was, even at that, impractical. There were so many momentous obstacles in the way, they whined.

Herzl anticipated all these cowardly Jews with the following biting paragraph:

“A scheme such as mine is gravely imperilled by the antagonistic attitude of ‘experts.’ Now experts are often nothing more than men sunk in the groove of a daily routine, whence they have an extraordinarily limited view. At the same time their adverse opinion carries great weight and can do considerable harm to a new project, at any rate until this new thing is sufficiently strong to throw ‘experts’ and their stupid notions to the winds.”

By 1914 a powerful non-Jewish public opinion favoring the enterprise as a rational historical development had leaped full-bodied into being.

The Allied statesmen, completely misunderstanding the Jewish psychology of timidity and apprehension, offered to do the handsome thing: They declared in favor of the Jewish State. Their object was the sympathetic adherence of the body of Jewish public opinion in the neutral countries. Though frightened Jewish rabbis and leaders fought the project with stiff aloofness, the Jewish masses accepted the gesture with eager interest.

At this time what was clearly in the minds of the Allied statesmen was the creation of a complete, self-sustaining Jewish State. Had we possessed even a peasant Serbian for a leader instead of the sacrosanct, vitiated hypocrites who acted for us, our problem would have been immediately solved. It was our great historic opportunity and not only did our leaders actually miss it, but they actually fought it down.

LILY-LIVERED WORDS

These men, afraid that it would complicate their “patriotism” elsewhere, avoided the phrase “Jewish State” as if it were the plague, and to the astonishment of the practical-minded Allied statesmen insisted on substituting the meaningless words “National Home.”

At this psychological time had they been men like the leaders of any other people, they could have had not only the present boundaries of Palestine, but nothing short of its ancient historic boundaries. The would include the rich Lebanon valley of Syria, Sinai peninsula and a vast stretch of territory to the east.

Instead they allowed the whole affair to rest vaguely for several years after the original Balfour Declaration, until it had managed to accrue the unavoidable opposition of other forces which meanwhile had had time to consolidate themselves.

Worse than this, at the instigation of our unbelievable representatives, they insisted upon distributing virtuous phrases into both declaration and mandate in regard to the rights of the native population. These phrases any half-qualified mind could see would later be used as a basis for any attempt to defeat the purpose of the mandate.

But our representatives were more interested in a hypocritical affectation of “justice” and “liberalism,” more worried about emasculating the mandate to protect their individual selfish positions in the diaspora, than they were in the welfare of Jewry. How Herzl must have wept in his grave!

IGNORED HERZL’S WORDS

Even then in all this tragedy of betrayal and errors, all might not have been lost had they heeded the clear policies of the master Herzl.

Instead of attempting to build up a Jewish State, they were obsessed by the fanatic notion of building a model community which “all the world would admire, a new vision of social justice, etc., etc., which would revolutionize the entire world order, etc., etc., etc.”

They therefore deliberately restricted the development of the Jewish commonwealth in favor of this premature, if not completely made, vision. To see it in all clarity, listen to Herzl’s words of warning:

“An infiltration is bound to end in disaster. It continues until the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the government to stop the further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy.”

A prefare to “The Jewish State” by Jacob de Haas (1904) points out:

“Though the Jewish State idea may be Utopian, which its advocates deny, its author sketched no Utopia, and offers no picture of an ideal human future. It was sufficient for him to point out how the wounds of Israel might be healed and to remove the chafing which the conjunction of Jew and anti-Semite brings about.”

A FIGURE OF CONTEMPT

Soon in the course of events followed a Jewish High Commissioner who promptly solidified the elastic interpretation of the Mandate in a groove unfavorable to the Jews. History will look at this man not only with contempt but with wonder as a striking commentary on his times. He came immediately after the first riots and his first official act was to throw the brave Jewish defenders of the colonies into the same class as Arab rapists by magnanimously pardoning both, all in the same breath and the same document.

At first unbelieving that they were dealing with such a weak-kneed, inept leadership, the British were completely astonished. Their respect for the Jews grew less and less in consequence. Despite our claims to having made the desert bloom like the rose, despite our pleadings for fairness and justice, they leaned more and more heavily to the Arab side, until they became actually anti-semitic.

THE AXE FALLS

First they tore off two-thirds of Palestine and set it up as an independent principality to which Jews were not even allowed admittance, though these Transjordanian Arabs could come into Palestine as freely as they pleased. The only way this outrage could be accomplished under the terms of the mandate was to have our Jewish leaders agree to it. This they did, actually affixing their signatures to this outrageous document, cringing under the empty threats of the British, that if they not, the British would cancel the entire Mandate. What a comedy this would be if it were not so hopelessly tragic!

Lloyd George, who completely misunderstood the spineless Jewish leadership, was appalled at this act of vandalism and warned his nation in the following words:

“We shall not reconcile the Arabs, but we shall alienate an even more powerful race, and, what is worse, British honor will be tarnished.”

LLOYD GEORGE WAS WRONG

If Lloyd George feared Jewish resentment against this flagrant breach of faith, how little he understood our temporizing, cringing Jewish leadership, which would take every affront and every robbery with dove-like eyes and fawn upon the hand that cheated it, so as to avert worse robbery.

How can any sound, sane, spirited man even review this ridiculous situation without weeping!

Worse followed worse for the Jewish cause. Jews were restricted from coming to Palestine unless they had money, though the entire scheme had been visualized not as a place to build villas for wealthy men, but as a home soil for the redemption of the Jewish farmer, the laborer and the mechanic.

Jewish industry made even the little mudhole grudgingly left to us into a garden, but while Jewish working men were not only kept out but actually deported, even though they were gainfully employed, the Arabs from Syria, Transjordania, Egypt and Iraq were freely allowed to enter in large numbers.

RESTRICTIONS MADE

Restrictive laws unheard of in any other British commonwealth, protectorate or dominion were put into operation to prevent the Jews from acquiring land. Jewish doctors and lawyers were deliberately prevented from practicing, in a style almost identical with the drastic anti-Jewish continental evasions.

Income derived from taxes paid by Jewish investment and enterprise was directly handed over to Arabs, and the Jews allowed to shift as they could, on the general theory that Jews can take care of themselves. Tax money was handed to Arabs with complete abandon. Unbelievable as it may sound, while Jews contributed by far the largest percentage of tax money, they have never had any money advanced for the founding of a Jewish school, while many Arab schools have been founded out of this money. There is even $100,000 a year granted to Arab religious courts. One hardly need mention that the Jewish religious courts get nothing.

ARABS PROTECTED

Vandal Arabs have been in the habit of destroying the orange groves and young forests which the Jews are planting to recover the land. Under Palestinian interpretation of justice, if such a vandal Arab is caught in the process of destruction and shot, the Jew who shoots him is a murderer and will be so tried. If Arab Bedouins choose to cut down the {SPAN}ora###{/SPAN} grove on a Jew’s land and squat there, the British administration will not remove them. It is necessary, therefore, to buy the Arabs off. In Palestine this has almost gotten to be a business in itself.

The whole outrageous situation epitomizes itself in the bequest of a Bagdad Jew who left $500,000 for education in Palestine. The bequest was, of course, made for Jewish education, but the government calmly divided the amount up and spent half to build an Arab school. And when the Arab school was opened, they avoided even mentioning the Bagdad Jew’s bequest. A long time later they allowed the other half to go to a Jewish school.

No act in this world could more epitomize the complete offensiveness and cold malice of the British Colonial Administration.

It is very difficult for a Jew to get a job in the government in Palestine Even Jewish women tourists are refused admittance lest they marry one of the Jewish male residents. British policy forces an absurd condition in Palestine whereby there is a tremendous disproportion of young men, a disproportion which is increasing all the time.

Jewish sturdiness and enterprise have made the need of immigration unavoidable to even the most biased eyes, and hence the British administration was forced to let a small number of Jewish workmen