Amos Elon's Colonizers

In "Herzl," Amos Elon's iconic biography, a paradox persists: the label of colonialism to describe a failure to colonize.

Amos Elon frequently references colonialism in his iconic biography of Theodor Herzl. In fact, the second half of the text is devoted nearly exclusively to the spiritual founder of Israel’s bouncing around European capitals, imploring leaders of the great powers to take up his “scheme” in giving Palestine to the Jews. Contemporary anti-Zionists love to reference this part of our history to prove its immorality: when our visionary groveled before the feet of the Kaiser, the Sultan, the Czar, the British and the Pope, to solve the Jewish question in a manner that appealed to our greatest enemies, of which Herzl met many along the way, more likely to support his activism than the established Jews of Europe.  

Because of Elon’s repeated use of the word “colonialist,” including labeling the Jews who had built homes in Palestine before Herzl’s first and only visit in 1898 as such, and because of his short nods to such infamous racist imperialists as Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, one might discourage Zionists from entertaining the book, thinking it only hurts our cause in the modern war of words. 

But this thinking would miss one of the central themes of Herzl’s biography: the simple truth that Herzl’s years of exhaustive advocacy to will the Jewish state into existence through imperial negotiation are marked by failure.  

This theme is first explored when Herzl’s meetings with Baron de Hirsch and Edmond de Rothschild, both of whom had established sporadic Jewish villages in Palestine and Argentina, collapse into nothingness. Herzl’s insistence that philanthropy for the Jews had done nothing to alleviate the Jewish condition rendered him a pariah within the aristocracy of his own people. The Jews of stature were greatly offended by this outsider, who realized sometime after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 that the movement for a Jewish state would have to rely heavily on the great un-beautiful masses of the east, whom he had originally looked down upon. Though Herzl continued his grueling diplomatic work in vain until his death, perhaps due to his desire to embody the prestige of a Prussian gentleman (persisting into his somewhat narcissistic reconnection with Judaism), it was only the energy in the Pale of Settlement and within independent Zionist chapters that made his annual Congress possible. 

This was made evident to Herzl a comical number of times. After a brief and ecstatic introductory period, the Kaiser of Germany changed his mind in being the man to restore the Jews to their homeland. His majesty brought Herzl and a Zionist delegation to Jerusalem, but in seeing the decrepit state of Palestine’s Jews, impoverished and marginalized, the German court reneged. Not before, however, they forced Herzl to revise his pitch, removing all reference to the revival of the Jews on their ancient soil as a matter of human rights and progress. In trivializing Herzl’s proposal that he once exalted, the Kaiser could not help himself from conspiracizing that the Zionists had an enormous sum of cash and fretting melodramatically over the state of Christian holy sites should they fall into Jewish hands.  

Then comes the farce of Herzl attempting to negotiate with the Ottoman Turks, who operate exclusively under the auspices of bribes and corruption. The Sultan, who had recently shot a child at point-blank range for reasons unexplored, is a deeply distracted and unreliable figure who runs Herzl ragged during multiple “urgent” visits to Constantinople, wherein Herzl repeatedly presents the proposal that the Jews could consolidate Türkiye's national debt in exchange for a slice of land within the Sultan’s empire. We suspect early on that this business is destined for humiliation, and that the glitz and glamour of the Constantinople court is merely a distraction from a disintegrating power, primarily relevant in the chatter of spies, profiteers, and detached aristocrats.  

Swallowing repeated defeats, including the disorganized anarchy of the “Jewish Colonial Bank,” Herzl turns his gaze to Russia, an extremely controversial (some would say unforgivable) choice especially after the Kishinev pogrom. Herzl encounters only antisemitism among the Russians, who entertain Zionism as an avenue to rid themselves of the Israelites on the condition that there be no Jewish nationalism operating within the Pale or the rest of the empire, as this was no doubt connected to socialist grumblings and the already widespread ethnic agitation. This offer proves inconceivable to the Zionists, the majority of whom (though not Herzl) conceive of Jewish solidarity, in the form of language, politics, and culture, as a necessary precursor to reclaiming the land.  

Then come the British, who are by far the most sympathetic to Herzl’s cause, but who are drunk on the spoils of pure colonialism and therefore see no reason why the Zionists shouldn’t accept either the barren Sinai Peninsula, and then, famously, a jungle in present-day Kenya, then Uganda, where they will be British subjects eternally grateful for the sovereign’s protection. Herzl, desperate, presents the Uganda plan to the Sixth Zionist Congress, in response to which chaos ensues: protests, walkouts, fainting, and accusations of treason. Leon Trotsky watches from the wings and predicts the collapse of the movement altogether.  

As Herzl’s heart palpitations grow unbearable, animating the specter of death over both our leading man and Europe, he travels to seek validation from the Church, a Hail Mary that nobody expects to succeed. Our committed modernist docks in a different century upon his arrival: the church cannot conceive of blessing a return to The Holy Land as the Jews had still refused to accept the one true savior and scripture. The masters of the Crusades had no interest in securing Palestine for anyone but themselves, harkening back to Herzl’s previous failures in dealing with the Jews of prestige, the Germans, the Turkish, the Russians, and the British. There was simply no way that the great powers could afford any natural rights to the Jewish people on merit alone, and therefore any scheme for “colonization” fell flat on its face, as nowhere was there a proposal for true colonization — a system of subjugation where the primary benefactor is a foreign empire.  

In the end, Herzl was proven fantastically incorrect in his wager that only behind-the-scenes work, appealing to the interests of men in military uniform and crowns, would herald in the Jewish state. Amid his endless train and steamboat journeys to meet this or that dignitary (who would be assassinated or deposed within the quarter-century), Zionism instead came alive by way of poor and young Jews taking it upon themselves to split the Red Sea and settle in Palestine themselves. And it is in Palestine where our pioneers placed heavy significance on a Jewish cultural renaissance, something that eluded our Prince of Egypt and perhaps explains him dying on the hills of Moab (Vienna) overlooking the Promised Land, never to enter.  

Zionism failed in adhering to the colonizers because Zionism is not colonialism. Zionism is a revolution in human affairs in its granting the ultimate outcast minority the right to govern and represent themselves on the world stage from the place where their collective identity originated. Zionism succeeded because daring Jews defied the powers-at-be rather than appealed to them, a folly which only resulted in embarrassment and later violence when the British began to lose their grip on the Mandate.  

European antisemites with armies and political persuasion at their command, though they entertained Herzl’s idea, are remembered as a great obstacle to Jewish independence because they came to the realization that there was little in it for them. If Jewish collective action failed to confidently rise in tandem, Trotsky would have been correct, and the Zionists would have been swept into the dustbin of history.  

Regardless of my condemning the foolishness of trying to jam the square peg of Zionism into the round hole of colonialism, I believe we all should continue to view Herzl as a Jewish hero. While it is true that many of his hubris-ridden efforts unraveled, it remains also true that without Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, the poetic narration of the children of Israel reconstituting themselves would have been incomplete, and the speed at which the engine of emigration hummed would have failed to make a difference. Herzl was, after all, a playwright and a journalist first and a statesman second. His stage production ultimately received rave reviews for its splendid actors, but the mad director deserves credit as well.