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No. 20. | Vienna, 17 May 1901. | 5th Year

What is the Purpose of the Delegation of the Russian "Chowewe-Zion"?

By B. Goldberg (Vilna).

II.

Its wishes, principles and demands the Odessa General Assembly has laid down in the form of ten resolutions, which are to serve the Delegation as its instruction and its guiding line.

Of the First Resolution we have already spoken.

The Second and Third Resolutions run:

"The Delegation is to apply to all those institutions and personages from which it expects an advantage, and is to employ every possible means that may be of use to it for the realization of its tasks."

This resolution contains no precise definition. A certain intention lay at the bottom of that: it was not desired to lay all the cards publicly upon the table. As for the means, they are of course conditioned by the course of the negotiations, and especially by the readiness to meet us shown by the few monopolists of the Ica. If it be in any way possible, and if with the Ica a willing ear and an attentive treatment be found, then the affair will remain an inner-Jewish one. But should this readiness not be found, or should there be, as many expect, bolts pushed across the way, then the Delegation will, after mature deliberation, probably turn to the public opinion of Europe; the affair will be set forth plainly in the great European journals, and it is hoped that through the discussion in the press of the world a pressure may be exercised not only upon the Ica, but also upon all our millionaires and milliardaires. It is unhappily but too well known how slightly and how meanly Jewish public opinion and the criticism of the Jewish press are esteemed in Jewish "high circles," and with what sensitiveness, on the other hand, these same great personages react to every utterance in the general European press.

The Fourth Resolution runs:

"The Delegation is to work to the end that in the ordering of the colonization question the system of tutelage over the colonists and labourers be abandoned, and that the colonists and labourers be given the possibility of establishing themselves freely and independently."

This resolution is the quintessence of a good half of the deliberations at Odessa. I would say that it is a kind of "Magna Charta libertatum," proclaimed at Odessa to the colonists in the name of the "Chowewe Zion" of Russia. Indeed, many of the younger men have in their enthusiasm even compared it with the great act of the liberation of the serfs in the year 1861. That system of directing the colonies through a many-headed administration, hardly to be controlled, under which the colonists have in truth forfeited their free human right, the disposal of their own persons, of their own property and of their labour power, has in theory been unanimously and solemnly condemned at Odessa and finally abolished. The Delegation is to procure the emancipation of the colonists, and therewith the abolition of the Administration, from all the institutions concerned, and above all from the Ica.

The further Resolutions V and VI give us enlightenment as to how the Odessa Assembly conceived the transition from the system of Administration to colonial self-government. They run:

V. Resolution:

"In order to regulate the present conditions in Palestine, a temporary Commission shall be set up in Palestine. To this Commission shall be accorded the right to pass, in all questions touching the life and the economy of the colonists and labourers, resolutions binding upon the institutions which set up this Commission (that is to say, upon the Ica, the 'Chowewe Zion' and the colonists and labourers)."

VI. Resolution:

leaves open the possibility of a Commission without binding resolutions.