The Impresario of Zionism

Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world.


The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.

Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.

In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.

-- April 2010

High Season

Everywhere one goes, Jerusalem is crowded with visitors. Hotels are near capacity. The streets are jam-packed with tour buses. So far this year, 2.2 million tourists have visited the country. August was one of the best months ever, but tens of thousands more have now arrived for the Sukkot holiday, among them 7,000 evangelicals from 100 countries to celebrate the Christian Feast of Tabernacles. Hanukkah and Christmas promise still more


Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.

Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.

Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.

Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.

Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.

Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.

-- September 2010

Jabotinsky

Dedicated to the memory of Shmuel Katz


The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.

Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.

During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.

Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.

Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.

Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.

Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.

Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf


-- July 2010

The Obama - Israel "Crisis"

What comes to mind when you think about great moments of crisis in U.S. foreign policy? The Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, Iran's seizure of American hostages? Or, perhaps, Israel's decision to build residential housing in northeast Jerusalem?

Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.

Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.

The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.

Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.

Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.

In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.

-- March 2010