A Durable Peace Read Online Free PDF

liberal General Zionists and who would become the first president of Israel; nor for the gifted
author and orator Vladimir Jabotinsky, who later led the Revisionist movement in the campaign for Jewish independence under
the British Mandate. Over the next three decades these two men were to clash over the destiny and direction of the Zionist
movement, but in 1907 they were still united on many of the issues. The congress drew not only political activists; Haim Nahman
Bialik, the great Hebrew poet of modern times, attended the same gathering.
    Such was the brilliance and power of Herzl’s idea that within afew years many of the best Jewish writers, scholars, and artists in Europe had dedicated themselves to the cause—winning sympathizers
in every civilized nation and in every humane government, founding the institutions of the Jewish national government, and
inspiring the mass resettlement of the barren and broken Jewish homeland.
    Initially, Herzl found greater receptiveness among non-Jews than among his own people. He succeeded, for example, in obtaining
an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. (It would perhaps be easier today for a private person from an unimportant
country to get an audience with the leader of China than it was for a young Jewish journalist to receive an audience with
the Kaiser a hundred years ago.) Herzl’s secret was that he was the first Jew in modern times to rediscover the art of politics
and the idea of cohering interests. To the Kaiser he described Zionism as a plan that would not only divert the energy of
some of Germany’s young radicals but create a Jewish protectorate allied with Germany at the crossroads of the Middle East,
thus opening a pathway to the East for the Kaiser. (Herzl made the case for German sponsorship of Zionism on the basis of
political gain for Germany, but the Kaiser was also interested in ridding his realm of some of its “radicals.”) Appealing
again to self-interest, Herzl was able to secure another unimaginable audience with a world potentate of the day, this time
with the Ottoman sultan, in Constantinople in May 1901. Invoking the story of Androcles, who removed the incapacitating thorn
from the lion’s paw, Herzl told the bankrupt sultan: “His Majesty is the lion, perhaps I am Androcles, and perhaps there is
a thorn that needs pulling out. The thorn, as I see it, is your public debt.” And this thorn Herzl proposed to remove with
the help of the great Jewish financiers. 3
    The remarkable speed with which world leaders hastened to give a hearing to Herzl’s unfamiliar, fledgling cause demonstrates
the success of his approach and the power of his personality. By October 1898, only a year after Zionism had made its debut
at the First Zionist Congress, he had met with the Kaiser three times.
    The receptivity that the great courts of the day accorded him in no way blinded Herzl to the primacy of winning Jewish adherents
to Zionism. After Nordau, his greatest conquest among Jewish intellectuals was the celebrated English writer Israel Zangwill,
who used his talents and influence to spread the creed of Zionism in Britain, which at the time was the foremost world power.
Yet his most fervent support came not from the comfortable Jewish salons of Central and Western Europe but from the multitudes
of impoverished Jews in the East—in Poland and Russia. There he found an emerging Jewish intelligentsia that embraced Zionism
with the enthusiasm of youth, rebelling as they were against the cloistered ghettos in which most of their people still lived.
    Herzl began his public campaign when he was thirty-six years old. He died only eight years later, at the age of forty-four.
But in those brief eight years he wrought a revolution without parallel in the history of nations. Indeed, Herzl’s clairvoyance
was anything but mad. Within five decades, both the horror and the triumph of his stunning vision had come to pass. The separate