The Jews as a nation would remain as they were, moving among all the
peoples. The new Zion was to be no more than a fixed rallying point, an
established but small territorial nationhood, which should do no more
than proclaim their unity. It follows, therefore, necessarily, that the
great mass of Jews, outside the territorial settlement, would have,
after such a settlement had been formed, to obtain a definition of
their political character. What is that definition to be?
I think myself the Jews would answer: "It is to be precisely what it is
to-day, or, rather, what it has been in the Occidental nations during
the past generation." That is, the Jew is to be regarded as the full
national in the nation in which he happens to be for the time. Nothing
shall debar him from any position whatever in that nation. He shall be
regarded in exactly the same light as all the other citizens, and,
conversely, he shall obtain no privilege. In countries where there is
conscription, for instance, he shall be a conscript like anybody else;
where a nation in which he happens to find himself goes to war, he shall
be compelled to risk his life for it like any other citizen. If he
happens a year or two before the war to have settled in the enemy's
country, then he shall be equally compelled to fight for the enemy
against his former country. He shall in every respect be regarded, by a
legal fiction, as identical with the community in which he happens to be
settled for the moment, _but at the same time he is to have some special
relation with the Jewish State_.
He and he alone is to be (certainly in practice and, of right, in legal
decisions) eligible for admission to that city, for office in it. His
opinion is to count in the conduct of that State, wherever he may
personally be placed in the world. He is to regard himself--indeed that
is inevitable from the definition of the new State--as personally allied
to it, if not a member of it. He cannot dissociate himself from its
fortunes nor be indifferent to its success or failure. He must in effect
be _loyal_ to it. He owes it allegiance of a moral kind. He will
necessarily be in much the same position as are men of Irish descent in
the Colonies, in England, and in the United States, to the surviving and
now increasing remnant of their race which has clung to its native land.
But in the particular case of the Jew this allegiance will not diminish
with time. It will remain ever vivacious. The race, as its individual
components pass from one country to another, will make one body,
generation after generation, with the fixed polity settled in the New
Zion. That certainly is the ideal, as I hear it expressed on every side
in conversation and in writing by the Jews who support it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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