The Zionist Organization called into being financial instruments such as the
Jewish Colonial Trust and the Anglo-Palestine Company, which strengthened and
sustained the Jewish settlements in Palestine, notably under the trials of the
war. The congresses summoned by the Organization are memorable for the
influence they exerted in bringing together the scattered hosts of Jewry, and
in educating Jewry as to the Jewish present, the Jewish past, and the Jewish
destiny. Nobody who has ever attended a Zionist Congress but has felt that here
was something unique; that here, in this gathering of Jews from the remotest
parts of the earth, all assembled to deliberate solely upon Jewish questions,
there was a living demonstration of the ancient saying that all Israel are
brethren. To be present at a congress was to have what was most Jewish in Jewry
brought under one's eyes.
Again, the Zionist Organization has educated the Gentile world as to the true
character of the Jewish question. The artificial status of the Jewish people
had evoked self-constituted interpreters and representatives of the Jews to the
outside world. These worthy and well-meaning men had, in fact, lost touch with
those in whose name they spoke. The Organization ultimately overthrew this
curious dynasty, and offered the world in its place Jewish representation at
once democratic and faithful.
The Zionist Organization reintroduced the political element into the creation
of a Jewish Palestine. It was not concerned with parties or factions inside the
various countries; but its aim was to give the Jewish people in Palestine a
secure home under the guaranty of the Great Powers. It is possible that Dr.
Herzl, the father of the Zionist Organization, was too optimistic in his
expectations that either Turkey or the Powers would recognize the value to
themselves and to the world of a Jewish Palestine. Nevertheless, his efforts
were not wholly sterile. He fixed the identity of the Jews and of Palestine in
the political vision of modern statesmen, and he secured from Great Britain two
offers which were the first recognition in modern times, by any government,
that the Jews constituted a nation, and that they had a right to remake a
Jewish national home; that, in the words of the old and pregnant dictum of the
rabbis, Israel was not a. widower. These offers were of an autonomous Jewish
settlement in East Africa, and of a Jewish settlement in the Sinai Peninsula.
For a variety of reasons they came to nothing, but they sustained British
interest in the Jewish national restoration, and they were a milestone on that
road which was to lead to a Jewish Palestine under a British trusteeship.
Pessimists might well have argued that the war, which shattered Jewry and
divided the Zionist Organization, meant the indefinite deferring of the day of
Israel's redemption. Perhaps to no people did the war come at first as so
enormous and so unqualified a disaster. Eastern Europe, the greatest of all
Jewish centres, became the battlefield of peculiarly ferocious war, in which
millions of Jewish existences were brought to naught, and ancient seats of
Jewish culture went up in ruin. For practical purposes Eastern was sundered
from Western Jewry, and the whole of Jewry, save the Jewish communities of the
Central Powers, was separated from Palestine. That major portion of the Jewish
population of Palestine which dependent on support from its brethren without,
was threatened with starvation. The colonies found themselves deprived of their
markets, subjected to the plunder attendant upon Oriental warfare, and exposed
to persecution by the Turkish authorities. The directing heads of the Zionist
Organization were scattered in half a dozen countries. The prospect was very
dark, but the trial demonstrated the tenacious purpose of the Jewish national
will.