When Israel Comes Home

Let us stop a while, today, before these famous Jewish colnies whose progress so worries the Arab world and provokes teh excesses of its anger.

In order to understand this progress, and the stubborn will of these colonists who force the most unfertile of soils to yield in spite of itself, and the presence, among these colonists, of the intellectuals whose delicate hands guide the plow, and this comunal spirit (I do not say Communism) which takes away all private benefit form these intellectuals-to understand, in a word, the breath of idealism that floats over this work o Israel, it is necessary to glance at the underlying idea that causes it.

And right away, at this glance, a face stands out in bold relief. A face with the features of an apostle, with the look of a visionary, with the forehead of a poet, of an enlightened man-some said, a fool… But is it not necessary, for the advancement of every new cause, to have one of these enlightened men whose faith is ready to move mountains-the mountain of Zion!

No doubt, before the advent of Theodore Herzl-since that is the name of our hero-other men had risen to show the road to Jerusalem to the misery of Judaism. There was one Moses Hess and one Leon Pinsker. This latter had even taken several Russian Jews with him to Palestine, in his group called were tiny episodes without influence. The Jewry of the Occident cared little for breaking stones on the roads of Judaea! Were they not comfortably in stalled in this Occident which was open to them? In proclaiming the rights of man, had not the French Revolution freed the Jew, had it not thrown out those prejudiced men who, for so many centuries, had forced the Jew to live behind the walls of the ghetto? In France, they thought, Israel was already at tome.

But it was not at home. Exactly one century after the marvelous proclamation of the equality of all men, a bomb was to explode, which would destroy the beautiful dream. This bomb was called "the Dreyfus Case."

‘DEATH TO THE JEWS,’ IS CRY

And, one night, the streets of Paris resounded with a great cry: "Death to the Jews! "

The cry awakened from his slumber a journalist of Jewish origin, an author of several vaudeville sketches and some other light farces-Theeodore Herzl.

In his trun, he shouted: Thus we will ever be punished for the sins of Israel and of the whole world. Everywhere we are foreigners. Even France, the friendly, only awaited a pretext to show her latent hate. It is time that we should depend upon no one, that we should be a people, that we should have a fatherland of our own where we could ork, and a flag around which we could rally.

And he wrote The Jewish State.

Having written, he started out to fulfill his mission the world over. He wanted to persuade the statesmen to give a bit of land to Israel, to convince the great Jewsih finaniers to advance funders for the purchase of this land.

He went to London, to Berlin, to Constantinople, to Rome; he saw Hirsch, and Carnegie, and Cecil Rhodes; he visited William II, the Tsar, the Grand Turk, he even went to the Pope.

From William II he got a handshake and from the Grand Turk a tiepin…

ENGLAND LISTENS

It was then that an Englishman, Lord Chamberlain ( Israrel has always had the ear of the English, who are also great readers of the Bible) suggested something to him: Since Palestine could not be given the Jews England would give them Uganda, in Africa. Did Herzl want Uganda?

Certainly Herzl wanted Uganda. It was not all that he had wished for, but since, after all…

And then, the excitement! All Israel shouted its fury. This man Herzl wanted to send them to live with the negroes in Africa; he was a traitor. "Down with the African!"

"The African," at that time, was forty-four years old. He had given his all to his mission, and now he was spent.

Sick, weakening, he convoked his actions committee at Vienna. He begged his Brethren to understand him. He had only accepted the British proposition because of his passionate desire to find a homeland for his people. But now he proclaimed that this homeland would not be and could not be other than the land of Moses…

Moses! He evoked Moses without seeing that he himself was living resemblance, more than three thousand years later, and with an astounding reality, of the ancient patriarch; without seeing that this arm he extended toward Zion was the same arme as that of Moses on Mount Sini…

Without Knowing that, again like the great liberator, he would not enter with his people into the Promised Land.

For sesveral months later, Theodore Herzl died.

AFTER HERZL

Herzl was gone, but his spirit continued to radiate among his coreligionists-or rather, his racial brethren, for Herzl’s mysticism was never anything but national and was not inspired by religious principles. The Uganda affair proves that sufficiently. It was the call of the blood that forced Herzl to attempt a regrouping of Israel, and nver the call of the synagogue. It was a racial conception that inspired his actions, and not a religious philosophy,-just as, too, the Zionism of today doesnot seem to be inspired by such a philosophy.

So some pioneers lefe for Palestin, as, long ago, the "Friends of Zion" had done. But if the "Friends of Zion" had only sought a refuge on the old soil, these men had come to lay the foundation of a Jewish fatherland. Around their tents would some day take shelter a whole nation. That was their dream… By the asceticism of their life, by their spirit of sacrifice (these intellectuals, who had abandoned when they left Europe careers that might have been brilliant, did not expect any reward from their work, for all profits went to the buying of tools and new land) they were, as Edward Halsey has called them, "The monks of Israel." For many centuries, they said, the Gentiles refused us the rights of citizenship and ownership of land. Thus they forced us to the degrading practice of commerce and even usury. Thus was Israel soiled. Now we must sactify ourselves in labor, and more than anything else in labor of the soil. Let our brethren-in tellectuals, workers, peasants-rejoin us, and let the land, rendered fruitful by our sweat, become once more our common fatherland.

NEW ARRIVALS

The Zionist colonies prospered. Every day new men arrived. Each year orange plantations, banana trees, wheat fields and barley, and corn, brought splotches of color to the gray face of Palestine.

But the dream was still gragile. a breath of ottoman discontent would be enough to ruin it. This Palestine, on which these colonists were planting themselves, did not legally beling to them. Of course, they bought the land, but there was nothing to guarantee their rights. The Turk could still expel them, any time he wished.

But it was the Turk who was expelled. Not by the Jews, but by the English. And when the world, in 1918, came forth from the chaos of war, when people were once more permitted to see the map of the world clearly, there could be see, on the doors of Palestine over which the English were mounting guard, this sign: "His majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to factilitate the achievement of that object." (Balfour Declaration, Nov. 2, 1917).

HOME, NOT STATE

This declaration by Lord Balfour spoke of a Jewish home and not of a Jewish state. This was not yet a total realization of the Zionist aspirations. Israel, on the soil of its ancestors, was not yet altogether at home. He was only tolerated. And the foreigner guardians intended to limit his expanison.

But Israel is far-sighted. We shall begin at the beginning, he told himself secretly, and tomorrow will take care of itself…

But if Israel can see far, the Arab can see well. And he heard… As we perceive today!

This beginning on Israel’s part made prodigious progress. In a few years, the number of Jews in Palestine leaped from 70,000 to 250,000. And the boats, despite the murmurs of the English, desnite the vociferations of the Arabs, continued to pour into the country the colonists who rushed to their work.

I saw that work. And I must say right away-what spirit of injustice could keep me quiet?-that it left me stupefied. Here, where once could be seem only desert sand swamp, there are fertile fields spreating out into the horizon. Those hillsides, once rocky, these sand dunes, are covered now with vineyards and forests. These lonng-naked plains are now perfumed with the innumerable orange trees whose golden fruit have won a universal reputation under the name of "orange of Jaffa." Palestine needed water: the colonists sought it in the depths of the earth. Palestine needed light; and electric power; they took it form the Jordam, where their turbines rumble. Even the Dead Sea was constrained to bring its tribute to this association of man and nature: its mineral salts today sustain on its banks a factory in which an army of laborers are busy.

SPIRITUAL HAPPINESS

Do they deserve this bit of land? Have they to the right to the spiritual happiness of a fatherland? To Isaac Laquedom, returning to his country after nineteen centuries of wandering, must it be permitted that he may put down his staff, that he may be once more beneath the roof of home?

And, forgetting all metaphor, to employ a language more direct, I would say: "To those hundreds of thousands of outcasts driven into the cesspools of the cities’ slums, to the hungry mobs crouching in the filth of their quarters in Eastern Europe (have you seen them, O you who imagine every Jew mounted upon a sack of gold? where they are kept penned, like mangy dogs, under the watchful eyes of murderous police who know so well that the Jews are responsible for all the crimes of the world, and only await, to begin one more the smister progrom, the more that is to come… to this whole miserable humanity (for it is for the Jew of the ghetto that Israel is reclaiming Palestine, and not for the Jew of the Champs Elysees) must we accord a bit of light and air where they would rediscover their happiness in work and peace.

But this is not my conclusion. I ahve not said all.