Zionism and its Liberal Critics, 1896-1948

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The most plausible case against Zionism, and the one most frequently advanced up to the establishment of the state of Israel, was directed against its basically 'utopian' character. Both those who welcomed the dispersion of the Jews, and those who deplored it, shared the belief that nothing could be done to undo this historical process. It was too late to concentrate millions of Jews in a part of the world that was already settled and which played an important role in world politics. Mankind was progressing towards assimilation, cosmopolitanism, a one-world culture; everywhere economic and social developments were reducing national distinctions. The attempt to arrest the movement of history, to resist this trend, was utopian and reactionary. Assimilation among the Jews of Western Europe had proceeded too far to permit a return to Jewish nationalism. In Eastern Europe on the other hand there was still both a Jewish national consciousness and a real social problem, but this was on such a massive scale that Zionism could not provide a remedy. Before the first world war even leading Zionists thought that in the next twenty to thirty years between Ioo,ooo and a million Jews at most would settle in Palestine; but the 'Jewish problem' affected millions in Eastern Europe, not hundreds of thousands. The critics of Zionism rejected the movement as utopian 'not because something like this has never happened before or because some imagination is needed to envisage such a solution', but for the commonsense reason that even the settlement of several hundreds of thousands and cultural autonomy for the rest would not be a solution. Landauer and Weil, who were among the most sober and best informed early critics of Zionism, disputed the belief that West European Jewry could be preserved from assimilation even if a Jewish state were to come into existence in Palestine. The Jewish question in the West would ultimately be