Excerpts from The Controversy of Zion
From Chapter Four
'I have the solution . . .'
Herzl's first and essential premiss was that antisemitism was now an insoluble problem. 'No one can deny the gravity of the Jewish situation. Wherever they live in appreciable number, Jews are persecuted in greater or lesser measure.' Although 'oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us', the Jews were not going to be left in peace. Emancipated Jews longed for assimilation, but this was an illusion; or, rather, true assimilation could be achieved only by intermarriage. The only answer was to recognise that the Jewish question was not a social or religious one but a national question, which must have a national answer: 'We are a people - one people.' And as a people they needed a homeland of their own. It might be Palestine or the Argentine: he would take whatever was offered and whatever Jewish public opinion favoured, though 'Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland'. Years later, Chaim Weizmann, by then the leader of Zionism, was to say that Herzl evidently had somewhere like the Argentine in mind while he was writing The Jewish State and had only added the emphasis on the Holy Land as an afterthought.
Wherever it was to be, once established in a land of their own, 'a wondrous breed of Jews will spring up from the earth. The Maccabees will rise again. . . . The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. . . .
'We shall live at least as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die.'
Copyright © 1996 by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. All rights reserved.