Theodor Herzl - The Jewish State: The Historic Essay that Led to the Creation of the State of Israel

Foreword copyright 2019 by Alan Dershowitz

Based on the original translation from German to English by Sylvie DAvigdor and published by the American Zionist Emergency Council in 1946. No copyright is claimed on that text, which is now in the public domain.

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ISBN: 978-1-5107-5531-4

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Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

By Alan M. Dershowitz

Among the most influential political pamphlets in history is Theodor Herzls The Jewish State . Published in Germany and Austria in 1896 as Der Judenstaat , it quickly joined the likes of Common Sense by Thomas Paine and the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles in the pantheon of polemical writings that changed history.

Herzl, a secular Jewish journalist working in Vienna, was assigned to cover the notorious Dreyfus trial in Paris. Alfred Dreyfus was a French army officer of Jewish background who was framed by anti-Semitic officials on charges of spying for Austria. Watching the kangaroo military tribunal and the rampant anti-Semitism of the army, the Church, the government, and so much of the populace led Herzl to conclude that there was no future for Jews in Europe. In Herzls estimation, he only answer to the so-called Jewish questionthe rampant discrimination against Jews throughout Europewas for the Jewish people to have their own nation state. The Jewish State outlined Herzls idea of how to do just that.

Herzl accomplished so much in so short a career. His public career as a Zionist writer and leader spanned less than a decade, yet he as still able to create the blueprint and organizational structure for the future nation state of the Jewish people. Herzl predicted that within fifty years of convening the first Zionist conference in Basel in 1897, there would be a Jewish state. Remarkably, his prediction came true when Israel declared independence in 1948.

Now that we are witness to the return of anti-Semitism throughout Europe from both hard left and hard right as well as Islamic extremists, Herzls words seem more prescient and enduring than at any time since the end of the Holocaust. This is not 1934 or 1944. It is not that terrible era in which Jews were at the mercy of enemies sworn to their destruction, precisely because Herzls dream became reality. He famously said, If you will it, it is no dream.

Herzl and those who followed him after his premature death at age forty-four not only willed it, but they fought for a rebirth of the nation state of the Jewish people in the land from which they had been brutally exiled two thousand years earlier. Their offensive weapons were declarations, such as the Balfour Declaration; resolutions, like the San Remo Resolution of 1920; treaties, including the Anglo-American Treaty of 1924; and United Nations votes, highlighted by the 1947 division of the British Mandate into two states for two people. Tragically, they also had to use defensive military weaponsmostly makeshiftto prevent the genocide planned by the surrounding Arab nations and groups that refused to accept even a tiny Jewish state on historically Jewish land.

Israel, the culmination of Herzls dream, is now a strong nationmilitarily, economically, scientifically, even diplomatically. It earned these strengths through hard work and human resources, because it lacks material resources such as oil. It has contributed more to humankind in its mere seventy-plus years of statehood than any nation during a comparable time period.

Yet Israel is condemnedby the United Nations, on university campuses, and in many parts of the worldmore than all the rest of the worlds nations combined. It has become the Jew among nations, subjected to the same double standard to which individual Jews have been subjected for millennia. It has achieved success by any measure, but it has not achieved the one goal it has sought since it declared its independence in 1948the goal of peace. It is militarily threatened by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Isis, and other groups. It is economically threatened by boycotts. It is diplomatically threatened by the United Nations.

Israel has repeatedly offered peace to Egypt and Jordan, whom finally accepted compromises necessary to make an enduring peace. The Palestinians were offered a state and peace in 1938, 1948, 2001, and 2008. But as Abba Eban once put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Herzl believed that a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel would be an answer to the age old Jewish question of how to deal with a people that has long been victimized by pervasive discrimination. He believed that Jews would thrive in a state in which they constituted a majority and in which they suffered no discrimination based on their culture, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. He was right. But what he failed fully to comprehend was that the discrimination and double standard that he witnessed against Jews as a people would carry over, at least in part, to the Jewish state that he contemplated. Just as the success of Jewish individuals had caused jealousy and animosity throughout Europe, so, too, has the success of the Jewish state generated jealousy and hatred among so many nations, individuals, and institutions.

The difference is that Israel and its supporters now have the power to fight back against this bigotry, whereas they lacked that power in the 1930s and 1940s. Without Herzls pamphlet and subsequent organizational skills, the Jewish people might not have that power to fight back, and there might not have been an Israel as we know it today.

Would Herzl recognize todays Israel as the Jewish state he envisioned more than a century ago? In some respects, yes, while in others no. In his pamphlet and his subsequent utopian novel, Old-New Land ( Altneuland ), he contemplated a secular state at peace with its neighbors in which Jewish culture and values thrived. He understood that there would be conflicts between right and left, nationalists and universalists, secularists and theocrats, but he believed that these differences could be resolved by democratic processes. He insisted, however, that the rabbis remain in their synagogues rather than in the legislature and that there should be separation of religion and state. (We shall prevent any theocratic tendencies . We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples . [T]hey must not interfere in the administration of the state.) He would be disappointed to see the oversized influence of the growing, but still relatively small, ultra-orthodox community and the rabbis on the political and even private lives of the secular majority. He would also be disappointed at the refusal of Israels Palestinian neighbors to make peace with the Jewish state.