Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (19 page)

The war has indeed justified patriotism as the prime motive of political thought. It is in this atmosphere that the Government proposes to endorse the formation of a new nation with a new home in Palestine. This nation will presumably be formed of Jewish Russians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Romanians, Jewish Bulgarians and Jewish citizens of all nations...

Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.
If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain or to be treated as an Englishman. [By obvious implication Montagu was saying that Zionism ought to be “untenable” for any Jewish citizen of any nation—i.e. not just the Jewish citizens of England.]
I have always understood that those who indulge in this creed (Zionism) were largely motivated by the restrictions upon them and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, [the Provisional Government of Russia had decided to treat its Jews better to stem the exodus in general and the brain drain in particular],
it seems to me to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorised to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people.’
I do not know what this involves, but I assume it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners...

I assert there is not a Jewish nation.
The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or lesser degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation—of the same race...

I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah...

I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons.
I would willingly disenfranchise every Zionist. I would almost be tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest....

I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews.
[Montagu’s own emphasis.] It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mohammedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled...

I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy (of recognising Zionism and endorsing its ambition). I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country’s goods and opportunities than we are numerically entitled to. We reach, on the whole, maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our attitude and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England wants to get rid of us...

I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government should be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the Government should go no further.

By definition “Jews in Palestine” meant only those who were there up to the time Montagu wrote the memorandum, which was more than two months before the text of the Balfour Declaration was finally agreed and issued. By asking his cabinet colleagues to go “no further” than giving a commitment to liberty and equality for those Jews then in Palestine and only those Jews, Montagu was effectively saying: “Don’t do it. Don’t give Zionism the recognition and the endorsement it seeks because, if you do, you’ll be creating the mechanism for fuelling instead of extinguishing the embers of the fire of anti-Semitism.”

When all is said there are two statements that can be made without fear of contradiction.

The first, as Churchill indicated, is that Britain gave the Zionists the Balfour Declaration because it was perceived to be in Britain’s self-interest to do so at the time—no matter the consequences would be down the years for the Arabs, the Jews, the British themselves and the whole world.

The second is that the Zionists were “the greatest war profiteers”. Who said that? None other than Weizmann himself, as quoted in Paul Goodman’s 1945 book,
Tribute on His Seventieth Birthday
.
¹⁰

There remains an intriguing and provocative question.

Did Britain enter into a conspiracy with the Zionists, I mean was Britain secretly committed to the creation of a Jewish state with all that implied—the doing of a terrible injustice to the Palestinians: or was Britain only committed, as the Balfour Declaration said, to the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home, something less than a state?

There is a hook on which it is possible to hang an argument that the anti-Semitic Balfour (if not necessarily the whole of the British cabinet minus Montagu) did conspire with the Zionists. The hook is what Balfour himself said in a memorandum on 11 August 1919 which was prepared for the Paris Peace Conference:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… The four great powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
¹¹

In the language of today that could be translated to mean: “In the Middle East we are going to bank on the Zionists not the Arabs as the protectors of Britain’s interests. It follows that we will support and assist the Zionists to achieve their objectives. Though we cannot say so, and will always deny it, we are for a Jewish state and the Palestinians can get stuffed”.

If Britain intended the Balfour Declaration to mean what it said, its only significance for Jews was as summed up by Ahad Ha-am, the preeminent Jewish scholar, philosopher, moralist and humanist of his time, 1856 to 1927.

In Ahad Ha-am’s considered opinion the Balfour Declaration made possible only the establishment of an international spiritual centre of Judaism; a centre of study and learning for spiritual purification and to which all Jews would look with affection.

The prospect of such a national home for Jews in Palestine, by definition one without political sovereignty, was welcomed by Ahad Ha-am because he was a spiritual Zionist. For him the distinction between spiritual and political Zionism (Jewish nationalism) was all important. He was the conscience of the former and the principal architect of criticism of the latter. But the moral force he represented, a moral force rooted in Judaism, was to be extinguished by the uncompromising attitudes and ruthless nature of the political Zionists and the dreadful event that played into their hands —the Nazi holocaust.

The historical significance of Ahad Ha-am is not merely the fact that he warned political Zionism’s founding fathers that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would require its creators and defenders to abandon moral principles and, as a consequence, put the integrity of Judaism at risk. The point is that he warned them before they proclaimed the coming into being of their movement and issued their dishonest mission statement.

Ahad Ha-Am’s credentials were such that wiser men than Zionism’s founding fathers might have heeded his warnings. If they had done so, the Arabs of Palestine would not have been dispossessed of their land and their rights, and there would not have been an Arab-Israeli conflict.

So who was Ahad Ha-am and on what basis did he conclude that political Zionism’s colonial enterprise was morally wrong and should not be attempted?

As I noted in the Prologue, Ahad Ha-am was a pen name. Its literal meaning was “One of the people.” The man who signed his articles in that way, and who was well known to Zionism’s founding fathers and also to Weizmann (who was one of his students), was Asher Zevi Ginsberg.

He was born into the Jewish community of a small town near Kiev in the Ukraine of today. If he had obeyed the instructions of his father, Yeshayahu, he would have grown up to be a small-minded man, probably a bigot, and his name would not have been known even to Jews beyond the boundaries of part of his Russian homeland.

For a Russian Jew of his time and class Yeshayahu Ginsberg was an exception to the rule in that he was not poor during the years in which he sought to mould his son’s life. For some years Yeshayahu had farmed the estate near Berdichev of a member of the Russian nobility. When Asher was 12, Yeshayahu leased the estate and the Ginsberg family took up residence there to live, apparently, in the style of the Russian gentry. And that might have been the reason why, subsequently, Asher chose to write under the pen-name of Ahad Ha-am, to indicate that whatever people might suppose about him because of the apparent style of his early life, he was an ordinary man.

Material comfort did not tempt Yeshayahu to become anything less than a Jew of totally unbending religious orthodoxy. And he had only one ambition for his son. Asher would become, had to become, a great rabbinical scholar. (Yeshayahu would have been well aware that the respect accorded to him when his son achieved such a status would be priceless). And to that end the pious father did everything in his power to bring up the son in accordance and compliance with strict—the most strict—religious orthodoxy. As a consequence Asher was required to shun wordly matters and affairs. When he was recognised as an illui, a young man of superior intellectual gifts and a master of Talmudic learning, Yeshayahu must have been mightily pleased and supremely confident that his ambition for his son would be achieved. And all the more so when the son accepted the bride of the father’s choice in an arranged marriage.

David Vital, the author of
The Origins of Zionism
, was of the view that by the time he was 30 and had broken free from what he regarded as a provincial prison, Asher was embittered by a sense of wasted and lost years and, in particular, the denial of the formal secular education which he had craved. That may have been so but, because of Asher’s somewhat subversive human spirit, the years were not nearly as wasted as they might have been. In defiance of his father’s wishes, Asher had found various ways, by subterfuge, to study Russian and the major Western languages, along with the literature including the philosophy of each. Locke and Hume were among Asher Ginsberg’s favourite Western philosophers.

Thus it was that when Asher Zevi Ginsberg entered the real world, with a passion for public affairs in general and the affairs of Jewry in particular, he had a good, basic understanding of how it worked and why things were as they were. Most critical of all, and because his father’s regime of religious tyranny had required him to make judgements unaided and virtually uninfluenced by others around him, he had an uncommon and great ability to think for himself. And that, so to speak, was his own tradition; and he was to maintain it for the rest of his life. The basis for all the judgements he was to make about political Zionism was mainly his own highly developed sense of what was morally right and wrong.

From the moment he started to speak and write about Jewish policy matters, he was committed to exposing what he regarded as the “muddlemindedness” and “self-deception” of political Zionism’s founding fathers. He believed their many shortcomings had to be exposed both as a matter of principle and as a necessary preliminary to charting any kind of course in matters of public policy.

Zhitlovsky, as we have seen, thought Herzl was guilty of self-deception for believing that the Tsar had any influence with the Sultan of Turkey. Asher Ginsberg believed that Herzl was guilty of self-deception for even thinking (before he sought the intercession of first the Tsar and then the Kaiser) that the Sultan could be bribed into giving political Zionism what it wanted in Palestine. Asher Ginsberg did not dispute that backsheesh (bribe money) had a great power in Turkey and that even the greatest men there were unable to resist it. But for complete understanding, he insisted, you had to take into account the religion of the great men and their concern for the authority of their government. When you did that, you could see that they were fierce patriots who were absolutely opposed to the settlement of Jews in Palestine. And that meant, Asher Ginsberg also insisted, that the more Jews settled in Palestine, the greater the opposition of the Turks would be.