ISRAEL: With Psalms & Spades

In 1906 the British statesman Lord Balfour met a young Russian-Jewish chemist. For more than an hour, he listened while the young man in passionate broken English tried to explain what Zionism was all about. Finally Balfour said: “Are there many Jews who think like you?” The young man, whose name was Chaim Weizmann, replied: “I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I come from.” Balfour looked thoughtful. “If that is so,” he replied, “you will one day be a force.”

Last week, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, now 74, ailing, and President of the Provisional Government of Israel, gave the world his life story (Trial and Error; Harper; $5). It was also the life story of Zionism. In & out of the action weaves a dramatic subplot: the ironic love story of Weizmann’s devotion to Great Britain, which began with high-minded platonic exchanges and ended with bloody fighting in the desert, where (between them) the British and the Zionists had produced an infant state.

Hot-Air Factories. Like the movement he headed for over 20 years, Chaim Weizmann was born in one of the darkest corners of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian Czars allowed the Jews to live. His father was a small timber merchant in the muddy village of Motol in the Pripet Marshes. One of twelve brothers & sisters, he went to school in the one-room village cheder, where the rabbi’s goat stumbled about among the drying wash and tumbling babies. There and later in Pinsk, young Weizmann studied the Torah, got his first furtive glimpses of scientific books (forbidden in the orthodox cheder), and argued Zionism, socialism and anarchism with his friends. The Weizmann home was almost always in an uproar. “They’ve got to be fed,” Chaim’s mother would cry from the kitchen, “or they won’t have the strength to shout.”

Later, as a student in the universities of Germany and Switzerland, young Weizmann met the leaders of Russian Zionism: Achad Ha-am (“One of the People”), the Gandhi of the Jewish renaissance, and Menachem Mendel Ussishkin, its practical leader. He also met Western Jews: assimilationists who wanted no part of Zionism ; dedicated Jews, like Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist Congress; elegant English Jews, like Sir Francis Montefiore, who wore white gloves to Congress meetings because he had to shake so many hands.

In the cafés of Geneva and Bern (“hot-air factories,” his friend Ussishkin called them), Weizmann continued to argue. He fought assimilationists and Marxist revolutionaries alike. When Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov (who frequented the same cafés) heard of his “counter revolutionary” talk, Plekhanov, in a rage, objected. Weizmann shot back: “But Monsieur Plekhanov, you are not the Czar.”

But talk was not enough. For Weizmann, the chemist, Zionism was “something organic, which had to grow like a plant.” The plant, he felt, could grow only in Palestine and only by physical Jewish achievements in Palestine. He based his philosophy of action on Goethe’s famous saying:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.*

His own version was sharper: “to create facts, to confront the world with these facts, and to build on their foundation.”

“Unrequited Love.” In 1904, Fact-maker Weizmann went to live in England. The British government had already (in 1903) offered the Jews a national home in Uganda, British East Africa, and in the El Arish district, now in Egypt, which last month the Israeli army belatedly and briefly occupied. The Zionists had refused. It was up to Weizmann to explain why only Palestine would do. He started talking in 1906, when he first met Balfour; he was still talking (harder & faster) in 1916, when he was made director of the Admiralty Laboratories and invented a new means of producing acetone for explosives which kept the British guns in action.

Balfour, Lloyd George, Lord Robert Cecil, Leopold Amery and others helped him to hammer out the terms of the Balfour Declaration which promised to help the Jews establish a national home in Palestine. His enemies were chiefly the English assimilationist Jews, led by Lord Edwin Montagu. Says Weizmann: “There cannot be the slightest doubt that without outside interference—entirely from Jews —the draft would have been accepted . . . substantially as we submitted it.”

On the day the War Cabinet handed down its decision on the final, watered-down draft, Weizmann was waiting outside in the corridor. Suddenly his friend, Sir Mark Sykes, burst out of the cabinet room waving the Balfour Declaration. “Dr. Weizmann,” he cried, “it’s a boy.” “Well,” reminisces Weizmann, “I did not like the boy at first. He was not the one I expected.”

At that point, Weizmann got a warning. Said his friend Lloyd George: “You have no time to waste. Today the world is like the Baltic before a frost … it is still in motion. But if it gets set, you will have to batter your heads against the ice blocks and wait for a second thaw.” The warning was almost too late. In 1917 the hard-pressed British had had good reason to win Jewish good will, especially in the U.S. and the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the war they had equally good reasons, they thought, to keep their promises to the newly liberated Arabs. The ice pack was already closing in.

For the next 30 years Weizmann fought the British policy, in love and in anger. Ousted as president of the Zionist Congress in 1931 for his “pro-British” methods, he returned, by invitation, to pick up the cudgels again in 1935. “Jews are not going to Palestine,” he cried to the Colonial Office, “to become in their ancient home ‘Arabs of the Mosaic faith.’ ” To his old friend, Ormsby-Gore (the Colonial Secretary), he wrote that the Zionist policy of cooperation with Britain in Palestine had remained unilateral—”it was unrequited love.” In 1939 the love affair came to a bitter end. The British government issued a White Paper which wiped out the Balfour Declaration and foreshadowed possible control of all of Palestine by the Arabs.

“Provided He Settle.” During the war years (which he spent partly in the U.S. working on the synthetic rubber program), Weizmann listened hopefully to the friendly reassurances of Churchill and Roosevelt, and with special interest to Churchill’s proposition that King Ibn Saud after the war be “made lord of the Middle East . . . provided he settle with you.”

On May 17, 1948, two days after the British evacuated Palestine to the rattle of Jewish and Arab guns, Chaim Weizmann received a message in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria. The Provisional Government of Israel had elected him its first President.

What were President Weizmann’s hopes for the new state? That “God will look down benignly on His children who after a long wandering have come home to serve Him with a psalm on their lips and a spade in their hands.” He was also wistfully hop ing that Israel might still find its way back to friendship with his old love, Britain.

*What you have inherited from your fathers, You must earn in order to possess.