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No. 45. — Vienna, 4 November 1904. — 26 Marcheshvan 5665 — 8th Year.

On the Question of Organisation.

"Herzl is dead; something must be done to save Zionism," That is what one hears here and there from sincere and zealous friends. And lo and behold, they sit down and save Zionism by tinkering with the Organisation Statute" (!). One must say with the proverb: "God preserve us from our all-too-zealous friends; from our enemies we shall guard ourselves." For, in the first place, Zionism, thank God, needs no saviours; and in the second, the destruction of an organisation which for seven years has, on the whole, proved its worth would be anything but a rescue.

The ideal organisation of a movement whose adherents are scattered over the whole globe is a centre with such radiations that, when a key is pressed at the centre, the whole periphery vibrates evenly. Reality will approach this ideal more or less nearly according as the centre works well or less well. But there is no possibility whatever of even an approximate attainment of this ideal if there is no centre at all, or if there are nine centres, of which the one will commonly not know in what contact the other stands with the radii. That is then no organisation at all; that is a Tohu Wabohu.

The apparently best proposals for an ideal organisation were made in their day by Schnirer and York-Steiner. Schnirer's system rests upon the hundred. The chairmen of ten hundreds correspond with the chairman of the thousand. Five thousands form a main group, whose chairman corresponds with the Actions Committee. Circulation thus proceeds from the A.C. to the chairmen of the main groups, from these to those of the thousands, and so forth down to the individual shekel-payer, and conversely from below upward. York-Steiner proposes an improvement of this system at the lower end, since the hundred seems to him too large as a basis; one man, he holds, cannot easily keep in touch with a hundred. He therefore moves as the basis a group of ten men — the minyan system. Both, however, hold strictly to a centre; for what avails the best articulation without a well-functioning centre?

These proposals met with resistance for reasons not easily understood. But sooner or later one will surely have to fall back upon them. Yet the existing organisation too, even if it does not attain the ideal, is at the least not bad. There is constant contact between the centre and the members of the Greater A.C., between these and the Country Committees, and through the districts and societies down to the individual Zionists, so that important pronouncements of the A.C. become known to all Zionists in the shortest time. The writer of these lines has, since the existence of Congress Zionism, as standing referent for internal affairs, been the director of the Organisation, and can bear witness with a good conscience that it has, on the whole, proved its worth.

The advocates of sweeping changes in the Organisation ground their motions on the assertion that the organisation hitherto was cut to Herzl's measure. But not even an attempt is made to prove this assertion. An attempt, moreover, would scarcely succeed. The assertion is simply not true. It would be true if the Organisation Statute had laid down that the seat of the A.C. is in Vienna, that the Congress designates only the President of the A.C., and that he chooses his collaborators himself. The Congress, however, was not of the opinion that the movement should be made to rest upon a single pair of eyes. The best proof of this, and against the above assertion, is the following circumstance: our Organisation Statute knows nothing at all of the institution of a leadership, of a single directing individual. It entrusts the direction of the movement to a body, the Actions Committee, whose several members it has elected by the Congress itself. Indeed, the president of this body is not even nominated by the Congress; the body elects its chairman itself. It might therefore also have happened that the A.C. should elect someone other than Dr. Herzl as its chairman.