Cooperation and Struggle: Rethinking the Impact of the American Zionist Leadership on the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress

Abstract

Cooperation and Struggle:Rethinking the Impact of the American Zionist Leadership on the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress Zohar Segev (bio) On December 9, 1946, the twenty-second World Zionist Congress, the first since the outbreak of World War II, opened in Basel, Switzerland. This Congress, whose deliberations took place in the shadow of the Holocaust, was crucial for the future of the Zionist movement. Previous scholarship has underscored the growing rift between David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, and Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, during the 1940s, describing at length how the former's political stature grew while Weizmann's position deteriorated, leading to his de facto deposition at the Zionist Congress in 1946. Despite Weizmann's dwindling power in the 1940s, it was only in 1946 that Ben-Gurion was able to marginalize him totally.1 In this article, I rethink the effect that American Zionist leaders had on the twenty-second Zionist Congress in general and on Weizmann's ouster in particular. I will show that Weizmann's waning prestige, along with the growing power of Zionism in the United States, in general, and of its leader, Abba Hillel Silver, in particular, require a different assessment of the political realities at the Congress. Many of Weizmann's supporters concluded that it would be futile to persist in their efforts to secure his reelection as president of the Zionist Organization; Weizmann's unwillingness [End Page 75] to cut ties with Great Britain made him politically unpopular with delegates to the Congress. As a result, several of Weizmann's erstwhile supporters who opposed Ben-Gurion decided to cooperate with Silver. In spite of Silver's efforts to depose Weizmann, the two men shared a similar ideology of liberal, General Zionism, in opposition to Ben-Gurion's labor Zionism on the left and Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism on the right. This broad ideological congruence made it easier for some of Weizmann's former supporters to choose Silver as their champion. The result was a political bloc that, at least potentially, posed a challenge to Ben-Gurion's dominance within the Zionist movement, the Yishuv, and the state in the making. The significance of Weizmann's political decline should be understood in the light of his extraordinary importance in the Zionist movement. As one of the chief architects of the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann's authority to lead the movement was widely recognized. Indeed, Weizmann was the president of the Zionist movement for most of its existence from 1921 till 1946.2 Weizmann believed that the best way for the Zionist movement to further its goals was to cooperate with world leaders. In particular, Weizmann was disturbed by Ben-Gurion's strategy of getting the United States to pressure Britain to agree to the establishment of a Jewish state. He was certain that this would lead nowhere and implored Justice Felix Frankfurter to impress upon Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders that the idea was doomed to failure.3 Weizmann's criticism of the Zionist [End Page 76] strategy in the United States was not confined to the debate over the nature of political activity there and extended to the damage sustained by Britain as a result of the pro-Zionist activity in Washington, an issue that continued even after the war.4 Most Zionists disagreed with Weizmann's stance, and so, while rank-and-file members of the movement still venerated him, a majority of Zionist Congress delegates found Weizmann's perspective unacceptable, and came to view Silver, who advocated for more pressure on Britain and a more aggressive push for a Jewish state, as a reasonable alternative. The machinations of the twenty-second Congress reflected these shifting political calculations. Weizmann and American Zionists Before 1946 American Zionists played a major role in the dramatic events that occurred in the Yishuv and the arena of international Zionist politics during the 1930s and 1940s. Their growing weight within the Zionist movement was in part a consequence of the deteriorating situation of European Jewry, as well as a reflection of their country's enhanced stature and increasing involvement in the international sphere. But it...