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The Time to Favor
Zion Is Come
Herzl and Zionism
The Berlin Congress of Nations
gave to Zionists the first genuine opportunity to go about with a
sparkle in their eyes. It made possible land purchase in their
homeland. This signal awakened Jewish minds to Divine Providence
working on behalf of His people. One of those great men of vision
was Theodore Herzl, whose name stands as a monument of Zionism.
In 1896 Herzl presented a
booklet entitled, "The Jewish State." He appealed to
rich Jews to call a congress of Jews and begin laying the ground
for Zionist activities. The book was a success. An unexpected
success in the wrong quarter. He thought the rich Jews would
spearhead the movement. He was wrong. The poor and oppressed Jews
all over Europe and Russia arose to the appeal. Zionism came to
bloom.
When the Kishinev pogrom and
severe persecution meant thousands of Jews had to flee with no
place to go that was friendly, Herzl was ready to accept the
British offer of land in Uganda. It was practical salvation for
the Jews who faced death—humanitarian ideals led him to accept
even this land to save his people. Herzl's face turned white when
the sixth Zionist Congress said no to Uganda. The lives of some of
his kinsmen could not supersede the Divine Destiny and it was then
he realized with all those there assembled, that Zionism was
linked in-separably with Palestine. There could be no alternative.
Herzl lighted the Zionist torch
and carried it high and magnificently, but it remained for Chaim
Weizmann to plant the torch in Palestine and gain the
international recognition of the rights of the Jewish people to
their former homeland. Chaim Weizmann, by the providence of God,
secured for his people the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917.
Message from the late
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol
One development whose crucial
character remains beyond question was the . . . Balfour
Declaration. This was indeed an event of paramount national,
international and historic significance. The promise it held out
went far beyond the formal undertaking of the British Government
to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in
Palestine: implicit in this Declaration and herein lies its deeper
import—was the promise of a general international recognition of
the historic rights of the Jewish people in Palestine, a
recognition to be realized a few years later in a decision of the
League of Nations.
David Ben-Gurion was aware of
one important fact overlooked generally by Jewry. In an article on
the Balfour Declaration, published November 14 in "Der
Yiddish Kampfer," the organ of the Poale Zion movement in
America, he said:
A miracle happened and the
broken vessel was made whole again.... England has not restored
our land to us. Precisely now at this moment of triumph, it should
be emphatically stated: it is nor in England's power to return our
land to us. Not because the land is not, or not yet, in her
possession. After the entire country, from Beersheba to Dan, is
conquered by the British, it will not be ours even with their
consent, and even if all the nations of the world agree to it. No
people can establish title to a land except through its own toil,
creative effort and settlement.
England has done a great thing:
it has recognized our existence as a political entity and
acknowledged our right to the Land. But the Hebrew people itself
must transform this into a living fact. Through its own efforts of
body, soul and material assets it must set up its national home
and complete its national redemption.
The American Zionists did not
receive Ben-Gurion's words favorably. To many in Jewry the Balfour
Declaration was the end of the matter, the Balfour Declaration was
eternal, and whenever any Hebrew felt disposed to go back to his
homeland the opportunity would be there with iron-clad guarantee.
The British were the first to
observe that the Jewish people were not in a hurry to return.
Aryeh Pincus, Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive observed:
"Between 1917 and the Churchill White Paper of 1922—severing
Transjordan from the Jewish National Home—there was abundant
room for fast and widespread colonization. But aliya came in
trickles, and the small numbers spread out over the years could
not prevent the consolidation of Arab complicity. This failure
made it easy for the British to high-light the fact that
Transjordan was not essential to Jewish national
aspirations."
Lord Arthur James Balfour told
Dr. Weizmann after the approval of the Balfour Declaration and the
decision on the British Mandate at the San Remo Conference:
"Now you have got the signal to start, but you yourself will
have to do the running." Failure on the part of Jewry the
world over to press into the land shows that few of them were in
touch with reality. While those in Russia were sealed within the
Bolshevik bastion, those elsewhere—free to return—found it
difficult to be more than spectators and were unprepared to
"run" to the land of promise.
The Balfour Declaration did
start a small return of Jewry to Palestine and the work of
rehabilitation and reclaiming the land was under way. "For
who hath despised the day of small things." (Zech. 4:10)
Ironically, the Nazi persecution, which was bent on destroying
world Jewry and came near to its goals in Europe, became the very
force that guaranteed the survival of Israel. Ben-Gurion said,*
"Jews from Germany provided the country with know-how,
ability, capital and initiative." David Ben-Gurion also
observed that in 1933, immigrations "rose to 30,377, in 1934,
to 42,259, and in 1935, 62,000." This fact reminds us of
Psalm 76:11: "Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee; the
residue of wrath shalt Thou gird upon Thee."
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