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No. 43. | Vienna, 26 October 1900. | Fourth Year

For the Workers in Palestine!

Four hundred workers in Palestine are without work, without bread. Workers? No, no! Those who, with wife and child, are threatened with going under in the struggle for bare life, who have been robbed of the poor man's last consolation, the chance to labour — these are heroes, they are the heroes of Zionism. It is not working machines that have there come to a standstill; hearts are to break that glowed with the purest, most self-sacrificing love for Zion. Heroes are to fall whose fame must be no less to us Zionists than to the Greeks was the fame of those "Three Hundred" who defended Thermopylae unto death . . .

What a boundless sense of happiness must have seized them when, years ago, they attained the goal of their longing, when they felt the hallowed soil of Palestine beneath their feet! The land was stony and waste; the ground, which for a thousand years had squandered its powers in vain, had grown sluggish and weary — no water, no road, no hut — what of it? It was the Holy Land. Not as day-labourers who fulfil the measure of their obligations, neither more nor less, did they perform their work. To them the land was a mother gravely sick: gladly they gave their heart's blood to make Mother "Zion" whole again. Every clod they won for tillage, every hut they built, every seed-corn they scattered in the furrows, was a piece of new vital force for Zion. They were hard years. Not with the elements alone had they to wrestle; often those who had sat out their young years behind book and scripture had to fight fierce battles with hordes of robbers. Evil sicknesses visited them, death thinned their ranks: amid unspeakable toil and suffering they carried together the building-stones for the great edifice which we, who come after, are to complete. Long, hard years! And the bread that was given them for their labour was not over-plentiful. What did it matter? They felt themselves tenfold rewarded, since they were permitted to breathe the air of the homeland. They saw how through their diligence wildernesses became oases, how the olives grew green and the vine-slopes glistened that they had planted. And beneath their feet the holy soil, in which they had bedded their great hope of Zion's rising again, but in which lay also their sorrowful memories, their dear dead. Long, hard years! Yet had anyone told them that they might exchange their scanty bread for a richer loaf in another land — never! Rather not to be at all, if not in Palestine. It is said that among these workers a league has been formed whose members vowed to one another not to leave Palestine, though they should die of hunger. "Wanderer, bear word home to the citizens of Lacedaemon . . ."

To-day these four hundred workers and their families are without bread. The colonists had work for them only at harvest time, and the "Ica," Rothschild's successor in Palestine, does not employ them. "The decisive factors, which could help and would in the first place be bound to do so, withdraw, and are rather themselves the cause of the dismissals."

Is that to be suffered which is there preparing below in so terrifying a fashion? Shall they perish in misery who deserve to be named and honoured beside the best of our people? No, the heroes of Zionism must not become martyrs. The political Zionists, who have entered upon the inheritance of the practical colonisers in order to improve and increase it, will gratefully remember the brave men in working dress who have been set out upon the street with wife and child.

The Jewish Colonial Bank purposes to open its activity by providing these Four Hundred with work. It could have set itself no fairer, no more Zionist task for a beginning.

But it now rests with the Zionists to put the Bank in a position to undertake the urgent work of rescue as soon as possible. In our saddest hours, when the misery of the day weighs us down, precious pictures of the future rise before our eyes: a free people in a free land. There all powers stir joyfully; labour, which once was a bitter burden, has become a delight . . . And we long for the moment when the gates of the land shall open to us.

And shall we then not help with all our strength those willing to work who already dwell in the longed-for land?

B. F.