11/14/23
I wrote previously about Herzl on HBL.
If I had lived in Herzl’s time and place (Austria & Germany), I wouldn’t come to the same conclusions that Herzl did, and I would not support the Zionist cause. In fact, I would have joined other Western Jews to oppose it.
Herzl’s project was supported primarily by the Eastern Jews who suffered greatly from anti-Semitism (young Weizmann was a reader of that movement), and by some western Christians for biblical reasons. Herzl sought to gain support by heads of states (particularly Germany and Russia), as means to help them get rid of the Jewish population in their respective countries.
The alternative to Zionism was assimilation of the Jews with local populations in the countries they inhabited, which Herzl considered unlikely. He only knew firsthand the Western European Jewish population, which was criticized for only working in the financial sector. He thought that Jews must leave this sector and work in other occupations in order to truly mix with the locals.
Herzl had no firsthand knowledge of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Thus, Zionism was an intellectual Platonic project, led by a man who had no concrete knowledge of the problem he was trying to solve. But in Eastern Europe, the thought of Jews returning to Palestine (the “next year in Jerusalem” toast) was used figuratively by the rabbis for religious inspiration, but never as an actual plan. (Weizmann writes about this in his memoir.)
On the other hand, 40 years later, by World War 2, we saw that anti-Semitism permeated Germany, Poland and Ukraine. Today, Gaza supporters are proving the legitimacy of the Zionist cause: Jews need their own country because anti-Semitism is not going to disappear anytime soon. In America and Europe it is no longer physically safe to be a secular Jew. Israel as a place to escape to seems to be needed for Jews to feel safe in the larger world.
Note: the nature of Zionism may have changed since Herzl’s death in 1904, as it was taken over by Chaim Weizmann and others. I am not familiar with details of this, so I can’t comment. I can say that Weizmann’s group was Herzl’s rival in all the early Zionism Congresses in Basel. The contention back then was that Herzl was ready to accept land that’s not in Palestine (Britain proposed land in Kenya), while Weizmann insisted that it has to be Palestine.