Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was very
removed from the Jewish people, very severed from it. This
was true even after his vision of Zionism became the focus of
his whole life. A son of an assimilated family, he was unable
to grasp the complexity of Jewish survival, which is totally
based on pure spirituality. Everything else, even a physical
portion of land for the Jewish people to call its own to
express its sovereignty and autonomic independence, is
altogether subservient to its Divinely spiritual origin.
Herzl, who was dubbed by his Zionist followers as the
`Visionary of the Jewish State,' was incapable of seeing even
one meter ahead, within his own radius, between his homeland
of Hungary and the capital of Austria, where the publication
appeared that carried his newspaper reports on the Dreyfus
case which took place in Paris. This is a very constricted
and meager fulcrum — compared to the global expanse of
the Jewish people.
This Am Olom can at times be drastically reduced in
numbers but continues to maintain a position of, "This great
and mighty nation" (Devorim 4:6). This, to be sure, is
when it occupies a high spiritual level, when it fulfills the
dictum of, "And you shall guard and you shall do, for it is
your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the
nations, who will hear all of these statutes and will say:
But this great nation is wise and understanding"
(Ibid.)
To that visionary, these words were foreign, strange and
unfamiliar. All he saw was: Hungarians and Austrians or
French dwelling on their ancestral land and prospering,
whereas the Jews were scattered throughout so many foreign
lands and suffering. This being the case, it was inevitable
that he put one and one together and come up with the idea
that Jews needed their own territorial homeland. This, he
imagined, would solve their problem and prevent any further
antisemitic miscarriage of justice as in the Dreyfus case,
which had made a deep impression on him and prompted him to
formulate his Zionist vision of such a Jewish homeland.
Herzl was undoubtedly an energetic, enterprising person, but
a seer and prophet he certainly was not. A prophet requires
the capacity to look into the future, and one who purports to
be such must first know that without viewing the past and the
present, one cannot predict the future. In the Jewish sense,
Herzl was not able to do this.
Had he known, or even been slightly familiar, with Jewish
history, he would have understood that our exile was not
incidental, nor was it a historic `accident' — but
rather a direct result of cause and circumstances. When our
people did not maintain the spiritual level which was its
mandate as a nation, then the result was invariably, "And
because of our sins, we were exiled from our land . . . "
Whoever lacks this very elementary cognizance, must not only
forfeit the title of seer, but is a total ignoramus vis a vis
the history of our people and its past, and as such, is
lacking a fundamental grip on reality.
*
Some argue — and these people can even be found among
the ranks of religious Zionists — that he was
successful, after all. Now more than a century since his
death, one can definitely point to a Jewish state in Eretz
Yisroel, which is a solid fact.
But this argument chooses to ignore, as he did, the spiritual
dimension of the Exile, which is encapsulated by the phrase,
Shechintoh Begoluso, the Shechinah in Exile.
This is still true even — and perhaps pronouncedly so
— within this very state, from the aspect of the
physical circumstances of the Jewish people in our times. For
do we not see that the theory that an independent Jewish
state would eliminate antisemitism has not been realized? On
the contrary, antisemitism is only on the rise, continually
reaching new heights.
*
One-hundred-and-one years after the death of the `visionary,'
and fifty-eight years after the establishment of the State
— the survival problem of the Jewish people has
certainly not been solved. And most ironic to the point of
absurdity is that it exists within the borders of the Jewish
state!
Many were the times that it was expressed, even by the top
echelon of secular Zionists, that the most dangerous place
for Jews today in the world is here in Israel. It is a
shocking state of affairs that in the last five years, more
than a thousand Jews were killed by hostile forces, read:
terrorist victims.
If there is, indeed, a worrisome rise in the number of
antisemitic events in various countries of the world,
especially on the European continent, they are all a product
of the Middle Eastern conflict. In other words, the State of
Israel constitutes the prime reason which antisemites use to
place the blame for their actions. It is the age-old argument
that Jews are separatists, that "there is one nation whose
rituals are different from all other nations."
According to the projection of the Zionist visionary, the
Jewish state was supposed to redeem Jewry from the plague of
antisemitism. Yet on the contrary, it is the very central
cause for the increase of gentile hatred towards us.
The `visionary' and all the fools who flocked to him —
and there were many — rejected the ancient axiom: "It
is an acknowledged halochoh that Eisov despises
Yaakov."
Reality slaps them in the face in a way that would have been
difficult to describe in previous periods. Even those who
were skeptical and who mocked the visionary's naivete that
antisemitism would disappear with the establishment of a
sovereign country, would not have envisioned that that very
country would still be, fifty years hence, the object of
virulent antisemitism through the world, to say nothing of
the deep-seated hatred and the blood thirst of the
Palestinians which sweeps hundreds of millions of Moslems
throughout the world along with it.
*
Here too, is a major point in Dr. Herzl's colossal failure of
vision. He did not even see, in his time, the already- then-
present situation regarding the Arab presence in the area and
all that this implied. Consequently, he was completely blind
to the future ramifications, even those of the near future
which undermined the whole effort. He invested all of his
energy in getting the approval of the world kingdoms and
republics for establishing a Jewish homeland in Eretz
Yisroel, but totally ignored the very complex Arab
problem.
He thought to uproot the opposition of Torah-true Jewry to
his appearance, as a Jew devoid of any vestige of Jewish
roots, by his cohorts, among them many rabbis from the
Mizrachi movement including its founders and followers. Many
of the latter even referred to him as Moshiach. As for the
other problems, either he did not anticipate them, in spite
of his being a `visionary,' or he regarded them with utter
disdain, believing that everything would fall into place as
soon as he gained world approval.
His successors also naively believed that the Balfour
Declaration had removed the last obstacle from the course of
Zionism. And they too, were foolishly blind, both from the
aspect of the trust they placed in Britain's shilly-shally
diplomacy and in the lack of any true assessment of the
potential hatred/jealousy that would be aroused among the
Arabs.
How illuminating in historic terms is the fact that the ones
who did project the future developments and fearfully
anticipated the eruption of virulent Arab antipathy were
those central figures in the chareidi circles, the very
elements which the Herzlian movement chose to shunt aside
while they seized the center stage of Jewish leadership with
their sheer bulldozer tactics.
*
Eighty-six years ago, there was an Arab massacre at the
settlement of Tel Chai near Metula. It was the first of such
dimensions and was a forerunner of future pogroms. Morenu
Yaakov Rosenheim zt'l wrote then, as a reaction, that
this was not an isolated initiative of some Bedouin brigand
but a direct statement expressing Arab feelings.
Arab nationalists who had been shaken awake by the Balfour
Declaration were prompted to attack the Jewish settlers whom
they regarded as national enemies vying for their right to
Eretz Yisroel. In their eyes, it was `a mitzvah' to
destroy them for the sake of Arab survival. As a political
corollary and commentary to this attack near Metula is the
antisemitic movement in Syria and Israel which does not hide
its motives and goals.
This was not a single reaction of R' Yaakov Rosenheim; it
reflected the interpretation of the event by chareidi Jewish
leadership which was very fearful about the Zionist venture
and from its possible ramifications, especially resulting
from the boastful, arrogant speeches that were geared to
augment the Zionist venture and its central achievement of
the Balfour Declaration.
