41. FUNDAMENTALISM VS. LIBERALISM IN AMERICA
"After the Franco-Prussian war," writes Karen Armstrong, "the nations of Europe began a frantic arms race which led them inexorably to the First World War. They appeared to see war as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive. A modern nation must have the biggest army and the most murderous weapons that science could provide, and Europeans dreamed of a war that would purify the nation's soul in a harrowing apotheosis. The British writer I.F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or short story describing a horrific future war did not appear in some European country. The 'Next Great War' was imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal: out of the destruction, the nation would arise to a new and enhanced life. At the very end of the nineteenth century, however, British novelist H.G. Wells punctured this utopian dream in The War of the Worlds (1898) and showed where it was leading. There were terrifying images of London depopulated by biological warfare, and the roads of England crowded with refugees. He could see the dangers of a military technology that had been drawn into the field of the exact sciences. He was right. The arms race led to the Somme and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the people of Europe, who had been dreaming of the war to end all wars for over forty years, entered with enthusiasm upon this conflict, which could be seen as a collective suicide of Europe. Despite the achievements of modernity, there was a nihilistic death wish, as the nations of Europe cultivated a perverse fantasy of self-destruction.
"In America, some of the more conservative Protestants were in the grip of a similar vision, but their nightmare scenario took a religious form. The United States had also suffered a terrible conflict and an ensuing anticlimax. Americans had seen the Civil War (1861-65) between the northern and southern states in apocalyptic terms. Northerners believed that the conflict would purge the nation; soldiers sang of the 'glory of the coming of the Lord'. Preachers spoke of an approaching Armageddon, of a battle between light and darkness, liberty and slavery. They looked forward to a New Man and a New Dispensation emerging, phoenix-like, from this fiery trial. But there was no brave new world in America either. Instead, by the end of the war, whole cities had been destroyed, families had been torn asunder, and there was a white southern backlash. Instead of utopia, the northern states experienced the rapid and painful transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society. New cities were built, old cities exploded in size. Hordes of new immigrants poured into the country from southern and eastern Europe. Capitalists made vast fortunes from the iron, oil, and steel industries, while workers lived below subsistence level. Women and children were exploited in the factories: by 1890, one out of every five children had a job. Conditions were poor, the hours long, and the machinery unsafe. There was also a new gulf between town and countryside, as large parts of the United States, especially the South, remained agrarian. If a void lay beneath the prosperity of Europe, America was becoming a country without a core.
"The secular genre of the 'future war' which so entranced the people of Europe, did not attract the more religious Americans. Instead, some developed a more consuming interest than ever before in eschatology, dreaming of a Final War between God and Satan, which would bring this evil society to a richly deserved end. The new apocalyptic vision that took root in America during the later nineteenth century is called premillenialism, because it envisaged Christ returning to earth before he established his thousand-year reign. (The older and more optimistic postmillennialism of the Enlightenment, which was still cultivated by liberal Protestants, imagined human beings inaugurating God's Kingdom by their own efforts: Christ would only return to earth after the millennium was established.) The new premillenialism was preached in America by the Englishman John Nelson Darby (1800-82), who found few followers in Britain but toured the United States to great acclaim six times between 1859 and 1877. His vision could see nothing good in the modern world, which was hurtling towards destruction. Instead of becoming more virtuous, as the Enlightenment thinkers had hoped, humanity was becoming so depraved that God would soon be forced to intervene and smash their society, inflicting untold misery upon the human race. But out of this fiery ordeal, the faithful Christians would emerge triumphant and enjoy Christ's final victory and glorious Kingdom.
"Darby did not search for mystical meaning in the Bible, which he saw as a document that told the literal truth. The prophets and the author of the Book of Revelation were not speaking symbolically but making precise predictions which would shortly come to pass exactly as they had foretold. The old myths were now seen as factual logoi, the only form of truth that many modern Western people could recognize. Darby divided the whole of salvation history into seven epochs or 'dispensations', a scheme derived from a careful reading of scripture. Each dispensation, he explained, had been brought to an end when human beings became so wicked that God was forced to punish them. The previous dispensations had ended with such catastrophes as the Fall, the Flood, and the crucifixion of Christ. Human beings were currently living in the sixth, or penultimate, dispensation, which God would shortly bring to an end in an unprecedentedly terrible disaster. Antichrist, the false redeemer whose coming before the End had been predicted by St. Paul, would deceive the world with his false allure, take everybody in, and then inflict a period of Tribulation upon humanity. For seven years, Antichrist would wage war, massacred untold numbers of people, and persecute all opposition, but eventually Christ would descend to earth, defeat Antichrist, engage in a final battle with Satan and the forces of evil on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, and inaugurate the Seventh Dispensation. He would rule for a thousand years, before the Last Judgement brought history to a close. This was a religious version of the future-war fantasy of Europe. It saw true progress as inseparable from conflict and near-total destruction.
"There was one important difference, however. Where the Europeans imagined everybody enduring the ordeal of the next great war, Darby provided the elect with a way out. On the basis of a remark of St. Paul's, who believed that Christians alive at the time of Christ's Second Coming would be 'taken up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air', Darby maintained that just before the beginning of the Tribulation, there would be a 'Rapture', a snatching-up of born-again Christians, who would be taken up to heaven and so would escape the terrible sufferings of the Last Days. Rapture has been imagined in concrete, literal detail by premillenialists. They are convinced that suddenly airplanes, cars, and trains will crash, as born-again pilots and drivers are caught up into the air while their vehicles careen out of control. The stock market will plummet, and governments will fall. Those left behind will realize that they are doomed and that the true believers have been right all along. Not only will these unhappy people have to endure the Tribulation, they will know that they are destined for eternal damnation."451
Armstrong argues that premillenialism was modern "in its literalism and democracy. There were no hidden or symbolic meanings, accessible only to a mystical elite. All Christians, however rudimentary their education, could discover the truth, which was plainly revealed for all to see in the Bible. Scripture meant exactly what it said: a millennium meant ten centuries; 485 years meant precisely that; if the prophets spoke of 'Israel', they were not referring to the Church but to the Jews; when the author of Revelation predicted a battle between Jesus and Satan on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, that was exactly what would happen. A premillenial reading of the Bible would become even easier for the average Christian after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which became an instant best-seller. C.I. Scofield explained this dispensational vision of salvation history in detailed notes accompanying the biblical text, notes that for many fundamentalists have become almost as authoritative as the text itself."452440
The leader of this conservative, fundamentalist Protestantism was Charles Hodge. In 1874 he wrote What is Darwinism?, an attack on evolutionism. "To any ordinarily constituted mind," he wrote, "it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design." However, while Hodge and the fundamentalists were pleading for common sense and doctrinal orthodoxy, "other Protestants, such as the veteran abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), were taking a more liberal line. Dogma, in Beecher's view, was of secondary importance, and it was unchristian to penalize others for holding different theological opinions. Liberals were open to such modern scientific enterprises as Darwinism or the Higher Criticism of the Bible. For Beecher, God was not a distant, separate reality but was present in natural processes here below, so evolution could be seen as evidence of God's ceaseless concern for his creation. More important than doctrinal correctness was the practice of Christian love. Liberal Protestants continued to emphasize the importance of social work in the slums and cities, convinced that they could, by their dedicated philanthropy, establish God's Kingdom of justice in this world. It was an optimistic theology that appealed to the prosperous middle classes who were in a position to enjoy the fruits of modernity. By the 1880s, this New Theology was taught in many of the main Protestant schools in the northern states.
“American Protestants were discovering that they were profoundly at odds. Their difference threatened to tear the denominations apart. The chief bone of contention at the end of the nineteenth century was not evolution but the Higher Criticism. Liberals believed that even though the new theories about the Bible might undermine some of the old beliefs, in the long term they would lead to a deeper understanding of scripture. But for the traditionalist, 'Higher Criticism' seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with the modern industrialized society that was sweeping the old certainties away. By this time, popularizers had brought the new ideas to the general public, and Christians discovered to their considerable confusion that [supposedly] the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, nor the Psalms by King David; the Virgin Birth of Christ was a mere figure of speech, and the Ten Plagues of Egypt were probably natural disasters which had been interpreted later as miracles. In 1888, the British novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a young clergyman whose faith was so undermined by the Higher Criticism that he resigned his orders and devoted his life to social work in the East End of London. The novel became a best-seller, which indicated that many could identify with the hero's doubts. As Robert's wife said, 'If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.'"453
Other new sciences, such as psychology, contributed to the shaking of the foundations. Thus the psychologist William James, writes A.N. Wilson, was probing "the mystery of religious belief. Was it the case, as nineteenth-century literalists had believed, that Christianity depended upon the verifiability of a series of actual events or the provability - whatever that would mean - of the existence of God? Was there something in the human mind or personality which could explain why we are, or are not, religious? In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered as lectures at St. Andrews University in 1902, William James found all but no 'evidence' which could justify belief, but he refused to be reductionist and suggest that piety was simply a matter of temperament, still less that religious feeling was a substitute for other sorts of feeling. He maintained the legitimacy of faith, and he did so on the robust grounds that faith, for many, worked. He quoted with approval another American psychologist, Professor Leuga, as saying: 'God is not known, he is not understood; he is used - sometimes as meat-purveyor; sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious impulse asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.'”454
A typically American answer, pragmatic and Vitalist - but completely inadequate…
42. THE FOUNDING OF ZIONISM
The founder of the Zionist movement was an admirer of Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl. As Daniel Barenboim writes, Herzl was a successful journalist who, "confronted by the increasing anti-Semitism in Austria and France, was initially in favor of complete assimilation of the Jews. Interestingly, Herzl's choice of words was not fundamentally different from that of Wagner's in describing the situation of Jews in German society. In 1893 he wrote that 'to cure the evil' the Jews would have to 'rid themselves of the peculiarities for which they are rightly reproached.' One would have to 'baptize the Jewboys' in order to spare them excessively difficult lives. 'Untertauchen im Volk!': go underground amongst the people was his appeal to the Jewish population. Richard Wagner also spoke of the 'Untergang,' the sinking: 'consider that only one thing can be the deliverance from the curse that weighs on you: the deliverance of Ahasuerus -- sinking! (der Untergang)'. Wagner's conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to Herzl's; both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German Jews. It was Herzl's preoccupation with European anti-Semitism that spurred him on to want to found a Jewish state. His vision of a Jewish state was influenced by the tradition of European liberalism. In the novel Altneuland (1903), he describes what the settled Jewish community in Palestine might look like; Arabic residents and other non-Jews would have equal political rights."455
However, Herzl's views began to change on 5 January 1895, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew serving in the French army general staff, was publicly degraded. Paul Johnson writes that he "had been accused, tried and convicted - on what subsequently emerged to be fabricated evidence - of handing secrets to the Germans. Watching the ceremony, one of the few journalists allowed to attend, was Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Vienna liberal daily, Neue Freie Presse. Two weeks before he had attended the courtroom and heard Dreyfus pronounced guilty. Now he stood by as Dreyfus was brought before General Darras, who shouted: 'Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!' Immediately, in a loud voice, Dreyfus shouted: 'Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonoured! Long live France - long live the Army!' A senior non-commissioned officer cut off Dreyfus' badges and buttons. He took out his sword and broke it across his knee. The prisoner was marched round the courtyard, still shouting that he was innocent. An immense and excited crowd, waiting outside, heard his cries and began to whistle and chant slogans. When Herzl left the building, it was beginning to scream 'Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!' Less than six months later, Herzl had completed the draft of the book which would set in motion modern Zionism, Der Judenstaat."456
The Dreyfus affair, combined with Herzl's own experience of German and Austrian anti-Semitism, had an enormous impact on him.457 It demonstrated to him that for various reasons - envy at Jewish success, the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, the increase of racialist theories - the Jews would never be assimilated into the existing system of European statehood, and would have to seek a homeland, a territorial State, of their own if they were to survive. "It was against this threatening background that Herzl began to abandon his assimilationist position. He had previously considered all kinds of wild ideas to get the Jews accepted. One was a huge programme of social re-education for Jews, to endow them with what he termed 'a delicate, extremely sensitive feeling for honour and the like'. Another was a pact with the Pope, whereby he would lead a campaign against anti-Semitism in return for 'a great mass movement for the free and honourable conversion of all Jews to Christianity'. But all these schemes soon seemed hopeless in face of the relentless rise of anti-Semitic hatred...
"... In May 1895 [the antisemite] Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. To devise an alternative refuge for the Jews, who might soon be expelled from all over Europe, seemed an urgent necessity. The Jews must have a country of their own!
"Herzl completed the text of his book, Der Judenstaat, outlining his aims, in the winter of 1895-6. The first extracts were published in the London Jewish Chronicle, 17 January 1896. The book was not long, eighty-six pages, and its appeal was simple. 'We are a people, one people. We have everywhere tried honestly to integrate with the national communities surrounding us and to retain only our faith. We are not permitted to do so... In vain do we exert ourselves to increase the glory of our fatherlands by achievements in at and in science and their wealth by our contributions to commerce... We are denounced as strangers... If only they would leave us in peace... But I do not think they will...' So Herzl proposed that sovereignty be conceded to the Jews over a tract of land large enough to accommodate their people. It did not matter where. It could be in Argentina, where the millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-96) had set up 6,000 Jews in a series of agricultural colonies. Or it could be Palestine, where similar Rothschild-financed colonies were in being. What mattered was the sanction of Jewish opinion; and they would take what was offered...
"Herzl began by assuming that a Jewish state would be created in the way things had always been done throughout the Exile; by wealthy Jews at the top deciding what was the best solution for the rest of Jewry, and imposing it. But he found this impossible. Everywhere in civilized Europe the Jewish establishments were against his idea. Orthodox rabbis denounced or ignored him...
"Nevertheless, what Herzl quickly discovered was that the dynamic of Judaism would not come from the westernised elites but from the poor, huddled masses of the Ostjuden, a people of whom he knew nothing when he began his campaign. He discovered this first when he addressed an audience of poor Jews, of refugee stock, in the East End of London. They called him 'the man of the little people', and 'As I sat on the platform... I experienced strange sensations. I saw and heard my legend being born.' In eastern Europe, he quickly became a myth-like figure among the poor. David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) recalled that, as a ten-year-old boy in Russian Poland, he heard a rumour: 'The Messiah had arrived, a tall, handsome man, a learned man of Vienna, a doctor no less.'458 Unlike the sophisticated middle-class Jews of the West, the eastern Jews could not toy with alternatives, and see themselves as Russians, or even as Poles. They knew they were Jews and nothing but Jews... and what Herzl now seemed to be offering was their only chance of becoming a real citizen anywhere. To Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), then a second-year student in Berlin, Herzl's proposals 'came like a bolt from the blue'. In Sofia, the Chief Rabbi actually proclaimed him the Messiah. As the news got around, Herzl found himself visited by shabby, excitable Jews from distant parts, to the dismay of his fashionable wife, who grew to detest the very word Zionism. Yet these were the men who became the foot soldiers, indeed the NCOs and officers, in the Zionist legion; Herzl called them his 'army of schnorrers'."459
In spite of the importance of the Ostjuden, the Zionist movement remained, as Bernard Simms notes, “not only secular but very much German in character and orientation. Herzl himself was a fervent admirer of Bismarck, German was the working language of the Zionist movement, and Berlin soon became the informal capital of the World Zionist Executive. Zionists did not expect to be able to achieve their state on their own: they would need a great-power sponsor, and Herzl expected and hoped that that would be what he regarded as the most progressive polity in late-nineteenth-century Europe, Imperial Germany. ‘The character of the Jewish people,’ Herzl wrote, ‘can only become healthier under the protectorate of the great, powerful, moral Germany, with its practical administration and strict organization. Zionism will enable the Jews once more to love Germany, to which, despite everything, our hearts belong. ‘We owe it to the German in us that we are Jews again,’ the German Zionist Moses Calvary wrote. ‘Here,’ Calvary concluded, ‘is the living proof of the extent of Germany’s nurturing of our own creative being: political Zionism is Europe’s gift to Judaism.’”460
In spite of his Germanophilia, Herzl was quick to change his great-power orientation to England, as also his orientation within the Zionist movement from the West European Jews to the Ostjuden. This latter conversion was not accidental. In his Autoemancipation (1882), the Russian Jewish doctor Lev Pinsker had appealed to Russian and German Jewry to abandon, in view of the pogroms of the previous year, the failed idea of emancipation and the last gleams of hope in the brotherhood of peoples. "For the living," he wrote, "the Jew is a dead man; for the natives, an alien and a vagrant; for property holders, a beggar; for the poor, an exploiter and a millionaire; for the patriot, a man without a country; for all classes a hated rival."
Another important East European Zionist was Usher Ginzberg, or Ahad-Gaam ("one of the people"). Solzhenitsyn writes: "He sharply criticised practical Palestinophilia as it then was. His position was: 'Before directing our efforts at "redemption on the land", it is necessary to care about "redemption of hearts", about the intellectual and moral perfection of the people'. 'To place in the centre of Jewry a living spiritual striving for the unification of the nation, its stirring up and free development in the national spirit, but on pan-human foundations'. This point of view later received the name of 'spiritual Zionism' (but not 'religious', this is important).
"In the same 1889 Ahad-Gaam, for the unification of those who were devoted to the redemption of Jewish national feelings, created a league - or order, as he called it, 'Bnei Moshe' ('the Sons of Moses'). Its constitution 'was in many ways like the constitutions of Masonic lodges: the entrant gave a promise on oath to fulfil exactly all the demands of the constitution; new members were initiated by a master, an 'elder brother'... The entering 'brother' bound himself selflessly to serve the idea of national redemption, even if he were sure that there was no hope for the speedy realisation of the ideal'. In the manifesto of the order it was proclaimed that 'the national consciousness has primacy over religious [consciousness], and individual interests are subject to national [interests]', and it was demanded that he deepen his feeling of selfless love for Jewry above every other aim of the movement. The order prepared 'the ground for the reception of the political Zionism' of Herzl, which Ahad-Gaam did not want at all.
"In 1891, 1893 and 1900 Ahad-Gaam also travelled to Palestine - and reproached the lack of organisation and rootlessness of the Palestinian colonisation of that time, 'he subjected to severe criticism the dictatorial behaviour of those serving Baron' E. Rothschild.
"Thus in Europe Zionism was born a decade later than in Russia...
"At the first Congress the representatives of Russian Zionism 'constituted a third of the participants... 66 out of 197 delegates' - in spite of the fact that for some this might look like an oppositional move in relation to the Russian government... In this way 'Zionism drew its strength... from the circles of oppressed Eastern Jewry, which found only a limited support amongst the Jews of Western Europe'. But for this reason the Russian Zionists represented for Herzl the most serious opposition. Ahad-Gaam conducted a stubborn struggle with the political Zionism of Herzl (on whose side, however, there rose the majority of the old Palestinophiles). He sharply criticised the pragmatism of Herzl and Nordau and, as he thought, '[their] alienation from the spiritual values of Jewish culture and tradition'. He 'found political Zionism's hope of founding a Jewish autonomous State in the near future chimerical; he considered the whole of this movement to be exceptionally harmful for the work of the spiritual regeneration of the nation... Not to care about saving perishing Judaism, that is, not to care about spiritual-national and cultural-historical attainments, to strive not for the regeneration of the ancient people, but for the creation of a new one from the scattered particles of the old matter'. He used and even emphasised the word 'Judaism', but evidently not in a religious sense, but as an inherited spiritual system...
"The quarrels shook the Zionists. Ahad-Gaam sharply criticised Herzl, and in support of the latter Nordau accused Ahad-Gaam of 'secret Zionism'. Every year there took place Zionist World Congresses, and in 1902 there took place a Congress of Russian Zionists in Minsk, whither the quarrels crossed over..,
"At the beginning of the century the poet N. Minsky expressed the following thought: 'that Zionism is the loss of the pan-human measure, that it reduces the universal cosmopolitan dimensions of Jewry [!] to the level of ordinary nationalism. 'The Zionists, while talking about nationalism, in fact turn away from the genuine national face of Jewry and are zealous only that they should be like everyone, and become no worse than others.'
"It is interesting to compare this with the remark of the Orthodox [Christian] thinker S. Bulgakov, which was also made before the revolution: 'The greatest difficulty for Zionism consists now in the fact that it is not able to return the faith of the fathers that is being lost, and is forced to base itself on the national or cultural-ethnographic principle, on which no truly great nationality can establish itself.'"461
So Herzl had considerable opposition from within Jewry: most assimilated Jews, the Jews who already had their own plans for Jewry in Palestine (like Baron Edmund Rothschild) and the religious Jews who rejected the idea of a secular Jewish nationalism, were against Zionism. However, he found unexpected supported from some Gentile leaders, who were in favour of Zionism as a means of reducing the Jewish population of Europe.
Thus the Russian interior minister, V.K. Plehve, said to him in August, 1903: "You are preaching to a convert.., we would very much like to see the creation of an independent Jewish State capable of absorbing several million Jews."462
Again, the Kaiser said: "I am all in favour of the kikes going to Palestine. The sooner they take off the better…"463
Herzl even had support from Gentile Christians. "In fact," writes Walter Russell Mead, "American Protestant Zionism is significantly older than the modern Jewish version; in the nineteenth century, evangelicals repeatedly petitioned U.S. officials to establish a refuge in the Holy Land for persecuted Jews from Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
"U.S. evangelical theology takes a unique view of the role of the Jewish people in the modern world. On the one hand, evangelicals share the widespread Christian view that Christians represent the new and true children of Israel, inheritors of God's promises to the ancient Hebrews. Yet unlike many other Christians, evangelicals also believe that the Jewish people have a continuing role in God's plan. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, close study of biblical prophecies convinced evangelical scholars and believers that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the triumphant return of Christ."464
However, the contemporary symbiotic relationship between America and Israel did not yet exist. More important at this stage were the British, who, as Karen Armstrong writes, had "developed a form of gentile Zionism. Their reading of the Bible convinced them that Palestine belonged to the Jews, and already in the 1870s sober British observers looked forward to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine under the protection of Great Britain."465
Thus, as Geoffrey Hanks writes, "Herzl was actively assisted by an Anglican clergyman, William Hechler, whose motivation was quite different to that of Herzl. For Hechler, his reading of prophecy had led him to conclude that the Jews would be returned to their homeland which would be followed by the Second Coming. After reading Herzl's book, The Jewish State, he joined forces with the author to promote the Zionist cause by persuading the Sultan of Turkey to allow Jewish immigration to Palestine. He was able to arrange a meeting in 1898 between Herzl and the Kaiser in Jerusalem. When he failed to secure German support for the cause he next looked to England for help, which came in the form of the Balfour Declaration [of 1917]."466
The support of England was to prove critical for the success of Zionism. As Paul Johnson writes, "Herzl rightly called it 'the Archimedean point' on which to rest the lever of Zionism. There was considerable goodwill among the political elite. A lot had read Tancred; even more Daniel Deronda. Moreover, there had been a vast influx of Russian Jewish refugees into Britain, raising fears of anti-Semitism and threats of immigrant quotas. A Royal Commission on Alien Immigration was appointed (1902), with Lord Rothschild one of its members. Herzl was asked to give evidence, and Rothschild now at last agreed to see him, privately, a few days before, to ensure Herzl said nothing which would strengthen the cry for Jewish refugees to be refused entry. Rothschild's change from active hostility to friendly neutrality was an important victory for Herzl and he was happy, in exchange, to tell the Commission (7 July 1902) that further Jewish immigration to Britain should be accepted but that the ultimate solution to the refugee problem was 'the recognition of the Jews as a people and the finding by them of a legally recognized home'.
"This appearance brought Herzl into contact with senior members of the government, especially Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, and the Marquess of Landsdown, Foreign Secretary. Both were favourable to a Jewish home in principle. But where? Cyprus was discussed, then El Arish on the Egyptian border. Herzl thought it could be 'a rallying-point for the Jewish people in the vicinity of Palestine' and he wrote a paper for the British cabinet bringing up, for the first time, a powerful if dangerous argument: 'At one stroke England will get ten million secret but loyal subjects active in all walks of life all over the world.' But the Egyptians objected and a survey proved unsatisfactory. Then Chamberlain, back from East Africa, had a new idea, Uganda. 'When I saw it,' he said, 'I thought, "That is a land for Dr. Herzl. But of course he is sentimental and wants to go to Palestine or thereabouts.' In fact Herzl would have settled for Uganda. So Lansdowne produced a letter: 'If a site can be found which the [Jewish Colonial] Trust and His Majesty's Commission consider suitable and which commends itself to HM Government, Lord Lansdowne will be prepared to entertain favourable proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony of settlement, on conditions which will enable the members to observe their national customs.' This was a breakthrough. It amounted to diplomatic recognition for a proto-Zionist state. In a shrewd move, Herzl aroused the interest of the rising young Liberal politician, David Lloyd George, by getting his firm of solicitors to draft a proposed charter for the colony. He read Lansdowne's letter to the Sixth Zionist Congress, where it aroused 'amazement [at] the magnanimity of the British offer'. But many delegates saw it as a betrayal of Zionism; the Russians walked out. Herzl concluded: 'Palestine is the only land where our people can come to rest.' At the Seventh Congress (1905), Uganda was formally rejected.”467
Even with the Zionist movement formally committed to Palestine as its only possible homeland, there was still strong opposition to the idea from within Jewry. "The Orthodox," writes Johnson, "argued that Satan, having despaired of seducing Israel by persecution, had been given permission to try it by even more subtle methods, involving the Holy Land in his wicked and idolatrous scheme, as well as all the evils of the enlightenment. Zionism was thus infinitely worse than a false messiah - it was an entire false, Satanic religion. Others added that the secular state would conjure up the godless spirit of the demos and was contrary to God's command to Moses to follow the path of oligarchy: 'Go and collect the elders of Israel'; 'Heaven forbid', wrote two Kovno sages, 'that the masses and the women should chatter about meetings or opinions concerning the general needs of the public.' In Katowice on 22 May 1912 the Orthodox sages founded the Agudist movement to coordinate opposition to Zionist claims. It is true that some Orthodox Jews believed Zionism could be exploited for religious purposes. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) argued that the new 'national spirit of Israel' could be used to appeal to Jews on patriotic grounds to observe and preach the Torah. With Zionist support he was eventually made Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. But most of the religious Jews already in Erez Israel heard of Zionism with horror. 'There is great dismay in the Holy Land,' wrote Rabbi Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld (1848-1932), 'that these evil men who deny the Unique One of the world and his Holy Torah have proclaimed with so much publicity that it is in their power to hasten redemption for the people of Israel and gather the dispersed from all the ends of the earth.' When Herzl entered the Holy Land, he added, 'evil entered with him, and we do not yet know what we have to do against the destroyers of the totality of Israel, may the Lord have mercy'. This wide, though by no means universal opposition of pious Jews to the Zionist programme inevitably tended to push it more firmly into the hands of the secular radicals…”468
But the reverse process was also seen: the conversion of secular radicals to an almost mystical love of the land of Israel, a factor that makes Zionism more than just a form of secular nationalism.
For, as Karen Armstrong writes, "Jerusalem was still a symbol that had power to inspire these secular Zionists as they struggled to create a new world, even if they had little time for the city as an earthly reality. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become the second President of the State of Israel, was converted to Zionism while speaking at a revolutionary rally in Russia. Suddenly he felt dissociated from his surroundings and in the wrong place. 'Why am I here and not there?' he asked himself. Then he had a vision. There arose 'in my mind's eye the living image of Jerusalem, the holy city, with its ruins, desolate of its sons'. From that moment he thought no more of revolution in Russia but only of 'our Jerusalem'. 'That very hour
I reached the absolute decision that our place is the Land of Israel, and that I must go there, dedicate my life to its upbuilding, and as soon as possible.'…
"The trouble was that Jerusalem was not 'desolate of its sons'. It already had sons, a people who had lived there for centuries and who had their own plans for the city. Nor was the city a ruin, as Ben-Zvi imagined… [Moreover,] its Arab resident had come to resent the Turkish occupation and were alarmed by the Zionist settlers. In 1891 a number of Jerusalem notables sent a petition to Istanbul, asking the government to prevent a further immigration of Jews and the sale of land to Zionists. The last known political act of Yusuf al-Khalidi had been to write a letter to Rabbi Zadok Kahn, the friend of Herzl, begging him to leave Palestine alone: for centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had managed to live together in Jerusalem, and this Zionist project would end such coexistence. After the Young Turk revolt in 1908, Arab nationalists of Palestine began to dream of a state of their own, free of Turkish control. When the first Arab Congress met in Paris in 1913, a telegram of support was signed by 387 Arabs from the Near East, 130 of them Palestinians. In 1915, Ben-Gurion became aware of these Arab aspirations for Palestine and found them profoundly disturbing. 'It hit me like a bomb,' he said later. 'I was utterly confounded.' Yet, the Israeli writer Amos Elon tells us, despite this bombshell, Ben-Gurion continued to ignore the existence of the Palestinian Arabs. Only two years later, he made the astonishing suggestion that in a 'historical and moral sense,' Palestine was a country 'without inhabitants.' Because the Jews felt at home there, all other inhabitants of the country were merely the ethnic descendants of various conquerors. Ben-Gurion wished the Arabs well as individuals but was convinced that they had no rights at all…"469
And so most of the elements necessary for the creation of the most insoluble political problem of modern times were already in place: Jewish Zionism, the "Christian Zionism" of the Anglo-Saxon nations, and Arab nationalism. Only one element was lacking (or rather: dormant): fundamentalist Islam.
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