It is abundantly clear that this is exactly the course which the new
Zionists too are taking to-day, though as yet, it would appear,
unconsciously. How great, for instance, is the gulf between the
Jewish Company of Herzl’s vision—possessing a capital of fifty
millions sterling, and undertaking not only to plant the settlers in
the Jewish State, but also to sell the property and transact the
business of all the Jews in the Diaspora—and the small Bank, with
its quarter-of-a-million, which has now been opened, after infinite
labour, to carry on some simple and unimportant business operations
in Palestine and Russia! Or again, is there any sort of relationship
between the Society of Jews which Herzl describes in his pamphlet—a
Society which is to stand at the head of the whole people and manage
all its national affairs, as Moses did—and the Actions Committee
which now stands at the head of the Zionist organisation? And how
shall we be brought to the Jewish State—that free State guaranteed
by all the Powers—by such minor concessions as it is possible to
obtain now, according to the Zionist leaders, at Yildiz Kiosk for a
certain price? The plain truth is that all this work, which the new
Zionists regard as “political” work _par excellence_, has as little
to do with the theory of political Zionism as had the petty
colonisation work which Pinsker took up. In the one case as in the
other, the whole value of the work lies in its effect on the people,
which it educates gradually in the direction of unity, organisation,
national resolution. In other words, we are still, as we were in
Pinsker’s day, at the first stage, the preliminary stage of
preparatory work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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