What’s the Point of Zionism Without Zion?

“Zionism Without Zion” appears to be the new battle cry of the literary set. At least that’s how the New York Review of Books puts it in a review in its latest number. The appraisal is written by a prominent professor, Alice Kaplan, who turns her attention to a new book by Rachel Cockerell, “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land.” The book also received a rave in the New Yorker, and generous treatment in the Times. Call it the enduring appeal of the Uganda Plan. That was the scheme, rejected at the seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, to plant a Jewish homeland in East Africa. Ms. Cockerell’s book centers on her family’s involvement with yet another anywhere-but-Zion notion — the Galveston Plan, which between 1907 and 1914 sent some 10,000 immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Tsarist Russia to Texas. Funding came from no less a figure than Jacob Schiff.The plan to push Jews to the Lone Star State was the brainchild of a group called the Jewish Territorial Organisation, which arose after Theodor Herzl’s death and was led by Israel Zangwill, whose other claim to fame was popularizing, in a play from 1908, the phrase “melting pot” — echoed in Ms. Cockerell’s title. The community’s leader was a London-born rabbi, Henry Cohen, who arrived in Texas after stints at Jamaica and Woodville, Mississippi.The curiosity of early Zionists — including Herzl, who also considered Argentina — in respect of a safe haven outside the Promised Land is understandable in light of the emergency of antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Plus, what must have felt like the sheer implausibility of a return to the land of David and the Maccabees. It turned out, though, that the biggest dream — after the nightmare of the Holocaust — came to fruition. Today’s interest in alternatives to a Jewish state in the Land of Israel appears to our eyes to be far more pernicious. Israel, despite endless wars against it, is thriving more than seven decades after its founding. Yet Ms. Kaplan equates the “yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history,” with “Palestinian suffering.” The Jewish suffering, though, is the intended result of war on the Jewish state by Palestinian Arabs and their allies.Ms. Kaplan confesses that Ms. Cockerell’s “passages on the search for a Zion that isn’t Palestine — in Angola and Libya, in Mexico and Paraguay — filled me with a strange kind of wishfulness: What if they had gone there instead?” Thank goodness, we say, that they headed to the land God promised and not, say, to Tripoli or Luanda. To wish away the existence of Israel after generations of exile is an obtuseness that flabbergasts. The Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein wrote in his diary on November 29, 1960 — the 13th anniversary of the partition of Palestine — that, “We have yearned so long for miracles. How can we fail to see the bright hand of the miracle to which we have awakened?” The New Yorker’s review of Ms. Cockerell’s book calls the Zionist project “courageous, visionary, blinkered, desperate,” and “desperately catastrophic.”The truth is something like the opposite of catastrophic — there has been no more successful national liberation movement, nor one that has redounded so much to the world’s benefit. The Zionists, in all their glorious factions, won the debates over the Jewish future that raged long ago in Viennese coffee houses, Warsaw synagogues, and New York newspapers. There are now nearly eight million Jews who live in Israel. Where would Ms. Kaplan have them go?

What’s the Point of Zionism Without Zion?

What’s the Point of Zionism Without Zion?

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