Die Welt

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No. 2. | Vienna, 8 January 1904 — 20 Tebeth 5664. | 8th Year.

A Correspondence.*)

It was on the 18th of September of last year, that is, only a very short time after the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basle, that our Leader wrote to the Council of Administration of the Ica: "On our road to Palestine, which we are pursuing steadfastly and with all our energy, we have reached an intermediate result. The British Government has offered us (compare the letter of Sir Clement Hill of the 14th of August of this year — that is, 1903 —) an autonomous colony in East Africa." At another point in the same letter it is emphasised, with reference to the opening address of the Sixth Congress: "It is not Zion, and it can never become Zion." And concerning Jewish colonisation, as it is striven for by the Ica on the one hand and by the Zionists on the other, it is said there: "They (the Ica people) say, to be sure, 'somewhere,' while my friends and I say 'Palestine.'"

This was no manifesto designed for the public, but a confidential letter, written solely for the gentlemen of the Ica, at the moment when they were being approached with a matter that ought to have been as important to them as to the Zionists, and even more important than to the Zionists. At the very moment when the Zionist leadership drew the attention of the Ica to the offer of the English Government, the fundamental principles of Zionism were once more stressed with all clearness and firmness, and this body was expressly told once more, so as to make all misunderstanding impossible from the outset: "Though we have received, on our road to Zion, an offer which perhaps promises a place of refuge to thousands who can wait no longer, we can take part in this work together with you — whose statutory task it is, after all, to carry out the colonisation of such Jews — only if it entails no diversion whatever from our road to Palestine. We have no thought of abandoning a goal which, by our innermost conviction, we must reach and shall reach. What the generosity of the English people and its Government offers us is certainly gratifying as a success of our movement; for it is to us, and not to you or to any other person of great capital, that the offer has been made; no distortion will be able to conjure this fact away. But even this success, and still greater advances, which cannot fail to come if our people earnestly and honestly wills it, will never bring us to lose sight of our goal; for such lands may well be desirable and necessary as places of refuge, but Zion they are not and can never become."

To be sure, the Zionist public too had already been able to hear these declarations, in the same and in other words, at the Congress. Yet in wide circles it nevertheless felt uneasy. This time the politicians of the Ica understood more quickly and better than many Zionists that in this matter, too, the principles of Zionism had been safeguarded. And, rightly recognising this fact, they demanded as the only condition of importance merely that the settlement of East Africa should be conducted as a pure work of colonisation and not as a political undertaking. Had the Zionist leadership really cared only for a momentary success, of whatever kind, as is so readily asserted in the hostile camp, it could quietly have accepted this condition. But our Leader declined it. He would not surrender the political character of our movement despite the tempting success, not even in a non-binding exchange of letters. What concerns our leadership is precisely the redemption of the people for which we Zionists strive, and not an act of humanity which might perhaps help a smaller or larger circle to its feet, but can bring no perceptible help whatever to the great body of the people. That is why, in the letter to the Ica too, our road to Zion was once again pointed out, indeed deliberately emphasised, so that it might again be seen that the leadership stands, now as before, upon the ground of the Basle Programme.

The work of our leadership was made still more difficult by the passionate agitation that set in against the East Africa plan. Our leadership could, after all, quietly have declared to the agitated: "Not for ourselves, but for the poorest of our brethren, who must scatter over all the world because they can no longer live in the land of their distress, did we rejoice when we received England's offer. If you yourselves, in the midst of this mass

*) See "Die Welt" No. 1, 1904.