As Judd L. Teller points out in this article, after the establishment of the State of Israel, the world Zionist movement, and its American branch particularly, was in the position of a mother who had given away her last child in marriage. What, now, did she have left to live for? In August, the 23rd World Zionist Congress met in Jerusalem to try to answer this question. The results were, however, neither happy nor conclusive. It developed that on such crucial matters as the future of the American Jewish community and the relations between Israel and world Jewry a profound cleavage existed between the American and Israeli points of view. Why this came about, and what its implications are, is the subject of Mr. Teller’s analysis.
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The 23rd World Zionist Congress this past summer should have been a triumphal convocation. Here were the representatives of world Zionism meeting for the first time in Jerusalem, fifty-four years—almost to the day—after the first World Zionist Congress in Basel proclaimed that “the aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a publicly-recognized and legally-secured home in Palestine.” It should have been a particularly pleasant occasion for American Zionism, whose aid, during the past decade, had been so instrumental in the establishing of the new state.
Yet few were really surprised that the Congress was something less than a celebration. There had been serious misgivings about calling it at this time despite the fact that, under the World Zionist Organization’s constitution, congresses were to be convened once every two years and the last one had taken place far back in 1946. It was feared that neither the American Zionists nor the Israelis were as yet capable of adjusting themselves to the new situation in which both suddenly found themselves. American Zionism had been the big brother of the Jewish independence movement in Palestine. Now the Jews of Palestine were the sovereign people and sovereign government of Israel, and their erstwhile big brother, though proud and happy, could not help but wonder where he stood—especially since there came to his ears brazen murmurings from Israeli sources that he had no place to stand at all.
The changed relation between the new Israeli state and the old Zionism was evident in many ways, big and small. Had the Congress met in Palestine at any time under the Mandatory regime, the enthusiasm of the Jewish population would have scaled a hysterical pitch. But when the first delegates to the first World Zionist Congress ever to meet on the soil of Zion began to arrive in Jerusalem early last August, the average Israeli barely took notice of them. He was too distressed with economic problems and the indecisive results of the elections to the second Knesset to be much concerned with “tourists.” And the delegates, though some never went beyond the area bounded by the King David Hotel and the convention hall, were aware of and hurt by this lack of attention. They had, after all, done their share “to make this all possible.”
Indicative of the new state of affairs was the way Prime Minister David Ben Gurion could affect the prestige of American Zionist leaders by lunching with them publicly in the dining room of the King David Hotel, or just barely nodding to them when he passed them in the lobby. Even press agents for Abba Hillel Silver and Emanuel Neumann, who had been engaged in a bitter struggle with Ben Gurion, quickly spread word of a “significant meeting with the Prime Minister” when the latter extended them an invitation to tea.
Opening against such a background, the 23rd World Zionist Congress might have ended in collapse; its leaders were relieved that it ended only in crisis.
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The functions of American Zionism had always seemed clear and obvious to its adherents: to help increase Jewish numbers and landholdings in Palestine, raise funds to this purpose, recruit political support for it, and resist all who might attempt to frustrate it. True, the Basel program, and all subsequent Zionist manifestos, asserted their desire to assemble “the Jewish people” in a “publicly-recognized and legally-secured home in Palestine.” But the phrasing was obscure and the implications of this doctrine for every Zionist, privately, were remote, and had almost entirely escaped American Zionism. In recent years there had been a large enough job to do for the relief and succor of European Jewry. It was tortuous enough to obtain from the Mandatory government certificates to bring into Palestine from Eastern Europe the young pioneers who had undergone special training and indoctrination for collective agricultural work and, at a later date, Jews from Central Europe who were clamoring for Palestine as an asylum. No one requested, and the course of events in Palestine at that time did not demand, American Zionism to contribute immigrants. All that American Zionists were asked to do was to supply financial and political support—which they gladly did.
But in recent years Zionists had no monopoly on financial aid to Palestine’s Jewish community. In the 30’s, when the meaning of Hider for European Jewry began to unfold before the eyes of the entire world, American Jews who were largely indifferent to Zionism, but were much moved by the sufferings of their fellow Jews, joined in collecting funds for Palestine, which they saw as the most likely refuge for the persecuted. This led to the founding of the United Jewish Appeal, which in concert with the local welfare funds and community councils has become the most important fund-raising agency. The major Zionist funds themselves have now become beneficiaries of the UJA, and though the Zionists still argue that theirs is the decisive effort behind the success of UJA, fund-raising for Israel has long ceased to be the sole and exclusive province of the Zionist movement in this country.
For this declining role in fund-raising, American Zionism was more than compensated in the 1930’s by the quantitative and qualitative significance of its political assignment. The assignment consisted of spreading the Zionist gospel in the American Jewish community, and of engaging the influence of the United States government, the Congress, and the press in support of the Balfour Declaration and, subsequently, against the innumerable restrictive White Papers and supplementary edicts issued by the Mandatory power. Within Zionism, the role of the Americans was as powerful allies of the militant—and ultimately victorious—wing of Zionism that demanded a Jewish state without delay.
Meeting at the Hotel Biltmore in New York City during World War II, an emergency conference of American Zionists endorsed an aggressive program proposed by David Ben Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive. What soon was dubbed the Biltmore Program proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine as the primary and overriding demand of the Zionist movement—thus stating explicitly and firmly an aim which the Basel program at best only timidly implied. As a result of their alliance with the militants of world Zionism, the majority of American Zionists, led by Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, joined forces with Ben Gurion at the 22nd Zionist Congress in 1946 to force the retirement of Chaim Weizmann, who continued to counsel moderation and restraint.
The period between 1946 and 1948 was the Golden Age of American Zionism. Zionists galvanized American public opinion, at a tempo and by methods which often dismayed the non-Zionists. Zionist propaganda, financed and planned largely in this country, utilized every possible international platform—the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee, two UN Palestine Commissions, and the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly—to advocate and press for Jewish statehood. American Zionist leaders testified jointly with the Palestine Zionist leaders before these tribunals. Instructions to the Jewish community in Palestine that determined the means and ways of the struggle for statehood were the joint product of Palestine and American Zionist leadership.
The Zionists, to be sure, did not always carry the burden alone. At crucial instances, non-Zionist aid was sought and obtained. Yet theirs was the major share, and it was largely because of them that the struggle was won, the state gained. May 15, 1948, when Israel was established, was a fateful, if exhilarating, day for American Zionism. For it immediately began to feel the agony of the mother who has given her last child in marriage. What did it have left to live for?
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The main activities of American Zionism had been fund-raising and political agitation. It had been divested of its fund-raising functions some years before, when Zionist funds became submerged in the UJA. Now the Israeli cabinet and Israel’s ambassadors divested American Zionism of its political functions. Israeli policies, foreign and domestic, were determined by the Israeli cabinet. Representations to governments, including the government of the United States, were now made by Foreign Office personnel. American Zionist leaders concurred that this was as it should be. Yet, they apparently nursed a secret hope that they would still be consulted by their peers in the Israeli government: two sets of minds are better than one, and had they not demonstrated some measure of ability in recent years in bringing about this state, with its cabinet and its diplomatic personnel?
This secret hope was abruptly and publicly shattered by Israeli officialdom. Hoping to capitalize on the upsurge of pro-Israel sentiment among large sections of American Jewry unaffiliated with Zionism, Ben Gurion began to give them special marks of attention. Precisely when Abba Hillel Silver and Emanuel Neumann found their status as Zionist leaders threatened by the disappearance of their political functions, Ben Gurion invited Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee and a non-Zionist, to come to Israel for a talk. For years it had been the position of American Zionist leadership that the Zionists alone spoke for the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Now Ben Gurion, by his invitation to Mr. Blaustein, gave reason to think that this was not, if it had ever been, his view. Indeed, when in the autumn of 1950 he invited a group of American Jewish leaders to Jerusalem to map out a four-point program of American aid, Ben Gurion chose (in addition to members of the Jewish Agency) representatives of the various fund-raising agencies who were largely non-Zionist. He completely ignored the indigenous American Zionist organizations, and it was only after some pressure that they were called in.
The tensions between American Zionism and Israel were fed by the fact that Silver and Neumann, who headed the formally nonpartisan Zionist Organization of America, were in sympathy with the conservative-capitalist General Zionist party in Israel, which, since the elections to the first Knesset, constituted one of the pillars of the parliamentary opposition to the moderate-socialist Mapai government of Ben Gurion. Silver and Neumann saw in these invitations to non-Zionists a deliberate Mapai design to scuttle the American Zionist movement because it would not toe the Mapai line. As for Ben Gurion, he was persuaded that American Zionist leaders wished to use the Zionist movement as a vehicle for intervention in Israel’s affairs in behalf of the right-wing General Zionist opposition, and was only too happy to see Silver and Neumann resign—as they soon did—from the Jewish Agency Executive.
American Zionist anger at Ben Gurion’s trafficking with non-Zionists was exacerbated by the Zionists’ own feeling of inadequacy and uselessness. Time and again this sense of uselessness was reinforced by the aloof behavior of Israeli representatives in this country. (When Zionists were about to launch a campaign in 1950 to enlist American support for Israel on the Jerusalem issue then before the UN, Abba Eban coldly told them that Israel could take care of its own international affairs.) The Zionist leaders were of the belief that their movement, though its membership was dwindling, could still be of great service to Israel. But it could not be gainsaid that Zionist morale was deteriorating, Zionist prestige was slipping. A Zionism without some certified declaration of Israeli approval seemed more and more of an oddity. Both affiliated and peripheral Zionists had begun to ask privately, and in some instances publicly: “Is a Zionist organization necessary?”
It was in this mood of uncertainty that the 23rd World Zionist Congress met. Its purpose was to formulate a raison d’être for the Zionist movement and clarify the Israelis’ attitude to it.
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No sooner had the Congress convened than one thing became certain: Israeli leadership, despite its new-found warmth for non-Zionists, was deeply concerned with the future of the Zionist movement. This interest had already been evidenced—though without dispelling skepticism on the matter—when Mapai endorsed Nahum Goldmann’s proposal, several months before the Congress, that the Israeli parliament vote a special status for the Zionist movement, one which would give it supremacy over all foreign Jewish groups working in behalf of, and in, Israel. It was further testified to by Ben Gurion’s preoccupation—often to the dismay of the Israeli-born “young Turks” on his staff—with the details of Congress affairs.
Even more demonstrative of the Israeli attitude was the series of solemn affirmations from the Congress rostrum by Israelis of all parties that the Zionist movement must expand to embrace larger sections of Jewry. The Americans were gratified, even elated, over these declarations of confidence. But it soon became obvious that the simple word “Zionism” hid a world of ambiguities and that behind the assurances of esteem there was a profound cleavage of opinion between the Israelis on the one side and the American delegation on the other.
The American contingent at the Congress saw its future role in familiar terms, comprising fund-raising and political activity. They argued that the non-Zionists are fair-weather friends only, not to be relied on in a real diplomatic crisis when political support was needed; that the Zionists are the leaven of all fund-raising; and that the Israeli bond drive had learned its bitter lesson in that the bulk of its sales had been to Zionists and through Zionist groups. The Israelis found nothing to object to in all of this—if American Zionism wished to compete in helpfulness with other Jewish groups, why should it be discouraged? They even conceded that non-Zionists might fail Israel in crucial moments.
But the Israelis dissented vigorously, and sometimes venomously, from the view that these were American Zionism’s primary functions. Even as the main task of American Zionism up to May 1948 had been the realization of the Biltmore Program calling for a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, they asserted, so primacy must now be given to “self-realization,” i.e., to recruiting from amidst American Zionist ranks youthful pioneers for Israel.
It was on this point that the Americans and the Israelis clashed head on.
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The Israelis argued: We shall neither be able to maintain the increasing population of our state, nor secure our crazy-quilt frontiers, if we do not cultivate all the arable land in our possession and reclaim the marshes and wastelands of our territory. At present, our greatest shortage is manpower, so that we are not only unable to implement fully our plans for new settlements, but we are short-handed even in our old settlements. The Eastern European countries, which provided us with pioneers up to World War II, are now shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. Immigration from Oriental countries, which will soon also be tapering off, does not provide the kind of human material suited, except after further educational training, for a sustained effort at self-dedicated pioneering. To prevent a further relapse from the high cultural and moral standards that were Israel’s before 1948, the immigration of backward Orientals must be counterpoised by an idealistic immigration of youngsters from the democratic West. America’s five million Jews can surely provide most of the five thousand pioneers annually, which are the minimum required if Israel is to maintain at least its present pace of development. In addition, we need specialists from America, technicians and investors who, along with their assets, are ready to invest their own persons here, for these are the best type of investors.
Some Israelis cited the example of Germany and warned American Jews that they had better come while the coming was good. Other Israelis even agreed with the Americans that the United States indeed was a wonderful land and very likely “it won’t happen there”—but there can, after all, be no absolute guarantee. All Israelis cited classical Zionist doctrine which, in the main, juxtaposed a “full Jewish life” in a sovereign Jewish territory to debilitating existence in a permanent galut (“exile”).
This was the Jerusalem program proposed by the Israelis. Looked at abstractly, it was not an unreasonable program to suggest to one’s fellow Zionists. But, in fact, when it was broadcast from the Congress rostrum to the American delegates in Convention Hall, it did not sound like a proposal at all. It sounded like a threat, an admonition, an ultimatum.
Behind most Israeli talk of the need for pioneers (halutzim) from the United States, there seethed the doctrine that the golah, i.e. Jewish existence outside Israel, was spiritually doomed, that its main function now is to serve as a reservoir of manpower for Israel. This intransigent Israeli conviction that the golah is fated and sterile was best illustrated by an episode at a conference of Ichud on the eve of the World Zionist Congress.
Ichud is the world federation of moderate Labor Zionists, and Mapai is its Israeli affiliate. In its proposed platform, Ichud listed all of Zionism’s aims in one initial sentence. Some Americans, notably Louis Segal, Secretary General of the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, suggested inclusion in the initial sentence of a phrase committing the Zionist movement to the “enrichment of Jewish life and culture throughout the world.” His Israeli compatriots in the Labor Zionist movement balked almost unanimously. They did not object, they said, to its inclusion in some latter part of the statement, but it was certainly out of place in the initial sentence. Besides, it was unnecessary, for was it not an obvious aim of Zionism? But they did not remark that the other aims listed at the outset of the statement were even more obvious.
The Israelis’ logic was clear. It was a fatuous distraction for Zionism to commit itself to the enrichment of Jewish life outside Israel when the salvation of the Jewish group can only be through assembly in Israel. In line with this view, the Congress resolutions dealing with Jewish culture laid their primary emphasis on “Hebraization of the golah,” the dispatching of “instructors to the golah” etc. This implies none of the spectral perils of dual allegiance exorcised by the American Council for Judaism, but it indisputably indicates a dim view of the cultural potential of Jews outside Israel, and it is unambiguous notice that Israel will wrestle for cultural hegemony in the world Jewish community.
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The American Zionist contingent, caught in an ideological downpour that drowned out all familiar signposts, was confused. They perceived and reacted only to the more obvious implications: after years of service to the cause, they were being challenged to submit their Zionist credentials to a new examination, and were told that their response to the call for manpower would be the measure of their Zionist sincerity. They felt that it was unfair thus to challenge veterans of the cause, and, moreover, that their assignment was absurd in the light of American realities—such efforts at recruiting halutzim on a large scale must inevitably meet with a feeble affirmative response and vigorous hostile resistance.
Rose Halprin of Hadassah best expressed the position of the average American delegate. American youth, she explained, cannot be expected to come to Israel in any large numbers, not yet anyhow, and allowance must be made for the disparity between living standards in the United States and in those countries that have hitherto supplied such youth. But what really touched her to the quick was the indiscriminate use of the, from her point of view, obnoxious term gdut. Mrs. Halprin fell back on a recent ad hoc distinction by Ben Gurion—a distinction alien to doctrinal Zionism, it may be noted—between galut (“exile”) and “dispersion”: gdut was something that either expels or persecutes the Jew, while America does neither; the Jew is neither forced out of there, nor does he wish voluntarily to depart: ergo, America is not gdut! Some of the American addresses even went so far as to imply that the American Jewish community had almost the status of Israel herself, in that America was also a miraculous exception in two thousand years of melancholy Jewish history.
None of the Americans faced the basic issue, however. Is it or is it not the private obligation of every Zionist to settle in Israel? And—contrary to the classical Zionist distinction between the sunlit “homeland” and the shadowed existence in galut—do American Zionists believe that the Jewish group and its culture can flourish in America? The Americans did not challenge or even attempt to revise the Zionist idea that the assembly of the Jewish people in its own state is the sole and exclusive guarantee for Jewish group survival; they did not question the Israeli claim to the Jews of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. They only requested that American Zionists be exempt from deducing the logical consequences of this doctrine for themselves.
The Israelis were finally persuaded that it would not be sound Redpolitik to issue at this time a Jerusalem proclamation highlighting the implications of the Basel program for American Zionists. Thus, the Americans won. They won tactically only, because—with the exception of some poignant remarks by Hayim Greenberg on the values created by gdut life “in time” rather than “in space”—the American Zionists had not risen, intellectually, to the occasion. Their response was instinctive. They were doubtless fearful of the effect on American Jewish and non-Jewish opinion of a statement by the Zionist Congress even insinuating a relation between the doctrinal commitments and private obligations of American Zionists. Probably they were even more worried about having to define their attitude toward themselves as Zionists and American Jews.
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The fact is that American Zionists had never done much hard thinking about Zionism. Like all Americans, they were inclined to shun intellectual “talk” and concentrate on “getting things done.” Most of the persons leading American Zionism today came to maturity during the era of so-called “synthetic Zionism,” authored by Chaim Weizmann, which flourished between the two World Wars. Weizmann’s was a shrewd, opportunistic Zionism, in which doctrinal aims were subordinated to practical advantages. Weizmann, though an ardent Zionist himself, saw the actual need of Zionism as being an orchestrated effort. Each section of world Zionism performed specific functions, none was requested at this time to give a full solo performance. East European Jewry was expected to provide halutz manpower but not international political influence; American Jewry was expected to provide the bulk of financial and political support, but was never requested to supply manpower. And though American Zionists came to side with the “militants” against Weizmann, they did so for practical, not doctrinal reasons: militancy, they felt, “worked.” Their day of reckoning with Zionist theory was postponed. That day came this year, in Jerusalem.
Now that the American Zionists reject the Israeli suggestion that a Jew must settle in Israel to be qualitatively a full Jew, they find themselves suspended in a limbo somewhere between the Israeli stand and the varieties of non-Zionist positions. Their practical achievements on behalf of the new state have been successful even beyond their hopes. Now they must face up to the question of ultimate ends. What, really, do they want, as Jews?
To retain at least some of its influence in Israel, and to earn the special diplomatic status that the Israeli government has promised it, American Zionism will have to assume the obligation of providing pioneers, on a respectable scale, for Israel. But now that it has thrown overboard the doctrine of “self-realization,” its appeal for halutzim will have to be on a “philanthropic” basis—“contribute manpower to Israel.” There is dishearteningly little prospect of any quick material success. Nor will the nervous knowledge that, should American Zionism fail, Israel will certainly wash its hands of it, be conducive to the kind of assurance that propaganda seems to need in order to make its mark.
The task will be made doubly difficult by the fact that, at the same time, to vindicate their rejection of “applied Zionism” and of the doctrine of the predestined demise of all Jewish group life outside Israel, American Zionists will be morally obligated to shift the emphasis of their activities so as to bear out their faith in the permanence of American Jewry. To this end, they will have to search for activities other than the “Hebraization of the golah” proposed at—and accepted by—the Congress.
Substantial numbers of both Israelis and American non-Zionists tend to regard their respective communities as culturally separate and autarchic entities—Israelis saying, in essence: “Come or you excommunicate yourself”; non-Zionists urging, in essence: “Let us hoe our respective gardens.” American Zionism, trapped between these two pressures, is seeking some third way out. It argues for the necessity of wedding American to Jewish values, and also for the introduction of Israeli Hebrew culture as a dominant theme of the American Jewish home and school. That these two aims are simultaneously realizable is what American Zionists will have to set themselves to demonstrate.
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