ISRAEL: After a Small Pause

When Chaim Weizmann was a boy in Pinsk, Russia, he had already found his cause: he walked from door to door, collecting kopeks for a Jewish homeland in Zion. When he was eleven, he wrote to his teacher that the Zionist goal must be accomplished with British aid.

True to his early sympathies, he went to live in Britain. At the end of World War I, when Prime Minister David Lloyd George offered him any honors he wished for the brilliant services he had rendered Britain as a scientist, Weizmann declined. Said he: “There is only one thing I want —a national home for my people.” A few months later, the Balfour Declaration of a Jewish homeland was published.

The Spirit of Bond Street. Weizmann greatly admired the British, was often accused by his fellow Zionists of imitating them (he wore Bond Street shirts and acquired a marked habit of understatement in his speech). In 1946, when he favored the British partition plan, David Ben-Gurion opposed him; Weizmann was forced out as head of the Zionist organization.

In Geneva last week, ailing and half blind at 74, he handed to a friend the small blue booklet in which His Britannic Majesty commended his subject, Chaim Weizmann, to the world: the passport would be returned to Britain’s Home Secretary. In a DC-4, Weizmann flew to Israel to assume the citizenship (and the presidency) of the Jewish state which he, more than any one man, had helped make a reality. Said he as he landed: “It is good to be home at last.”

When he walked into the crowded hall where Israel’s Council of State met, everybody rose and applauded. Premier Ben-Gurion, in tieless sport shirt, pointedly remained seated. The Promised Land which Weizmann had been spared to see was in a sense not his; the tough men—some in army khaki, some in black rabbinical hats—had little patience with the old man who still talked about “the traditional friendship between the Jewish people and Britain.”

The Spirit of Peace. Yet even those who were prepared to sneer were strangely moved by Weizmann’s homecoming. Half cynically and half devoutly, an Israeli newspaperman said: “After all, even Moses himself didn’t make it.”

Would he be more than an honorary President? Said he last week: “I take myself for a type that would rather be something more than a figurehead.” Weizmann proclaimed a conception of Zion far above the costive strivings of Israeli nationalism. Said he: “We are a small country, but a big people. We must not be satisfied with just having a country of our own. We must prove that we still possess the force that once gave the world moral law and social laws. Our relations with other peoples must be pervaded by the spirit of peace and by the spirit of the Jewish nation which, after a small pause of 2,000 years, has come home.”