A Durable Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

his friend and said, “If you are mad, then I am mad as well. I’m behind you, and you can count on me.” 1
    Herzl’s recruitment of Nordau began a unique partnership betweentwo of Europe’s leading Jewish intellectuals, combining prophetic genius with pragmatic purpose, which was to found political
Zionism, the movement that revolutionized modern Jewish history. To these men, Mount Zion in the heart of Jerusalem symbolized
the reestablishment of a Jewish state in which the scattered Jewish people would reassemble and begin anew its national life.
Herzl’s Zionism, of course, had many antecedents, from the continuous longings of Jews since ancient times to restore their
sovereign life in their homeland, to the aspirations for national salvation of Rabbi Yehudah Alkalai in Serbia of the 1840s
and of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer in Prussia in the 1860s, to the yearnings for Jewish redemption of the secularist Moses
Hess. Hess had begun his quest by inventing Communism, which he instilled in his ungrateful student Karl Marx, only to end
up discarding it in favor of the idea of a Jewish national home. 2
    Above all, Herzl’s Zionism was preceded by the Jewish national movement that emerged in Russia in the 1880s under the leadership
of M. L. Lillienblum and Leo Pinsker. Pinsker’s short but powerful tract,
Auto-Emancipation,
published in 1882, one year after a wave of pogroms in Russia, touched on most of the major themes that Herzl later developed.
It galvanized the dormant Jewish national consciousness in a large segment of Russian Jewry, and it made a mass movement of
the drive toward settlement in Palestine that had begun as a trickle around 1800. Herzl had not read Pinsker before he wrote
The Jewish State
in 1896, but he arrived at the same conclusions independently, much as in the seventeenth century Leibniz and Newton had
both invented calculus without knowledge of each other’s work. Nor did Herzl know, when he put forth his ideas, that a fertile
field had already been prepared to receive them in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. But he soon became acquainted
with this movement as his ideas reverberated throughout the Jewish world.
    Yet Herzl was unlike any Jewish idealist or dreamer before him. Prompted into action by the spectacle of the anti-Semitic
Dreyfus trial in Paris in 1894, which he covered as a reporter, Herzlwas soon able to offer a concrete program to solve a real problem: a series of practical steps to establish a modern Jewish
nation-state in Palestine as a haven and a home for the millions of Jews whose life in Europe, Herzl knew, was rapidly drawing
to a disastrous end. Herzl sought to obtain commitments from the leading powers of the world to support an autonomous Jewish
settlement in Palestine, to be protected by its own military force. He sought to harness Jewish financial resources around
the world to this goal, and he founded the Jewish Colonial Trust (today Israel’s Bank Leumi) and the Jewish National Fund
for the purchase and restoration of the Land of Israel.
    It was the political nature of Herzl’s version of the age-old Jewish dream of returning to the land that ignited the imagination
of millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world. One of the innumerable spirits moved to action by Herzl’s message was my
grandfather Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, who was converted to Zionism as a youth in the 1890s and became one of its foremost
orators, spreading its message to Jews from Siberia to Minnesota. Later, in 1920, he followed his own exhortations and, sailing
from Trieste to Jaffa, took his large family to settle in Palestine. I have a photograph of him as a delegate to one of the
early Zionist Congresses originated by Herzl. The photo is from the congress of 1907, one of the first to be convened after
Herzl’s premature death. For my grandfather, then a young man of twenty-five, this was the first congress. Not so for Chaim
Weizmann, who later led the