Zion story

Timesonline.co.uk ^ | February 20, 2008 | Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and the roots of the most contentious communal struggle on earth today

In her last, powerful little book, The Question of Zion (reviewed in the TLS, April 21, 2006), Jacqueline Rose perceptively observed that, “while Israel barely leaves the front page of the daily papers, Zionism itself is hardly ever talked about”. That’s quite true, though not quite unique. Think of the column inches and radio and television time that have been devoted to the small island of Ireland and its smaller province of Ulster, and of the vehement polemic they have inspired, and then ask how often the origins or meaning of Irish Republicanism or of Ulster Unionism are ever talked about, or how many of those commentators could write so much as a paragraph each on Arthur Griffith, Colonel Saunderson or General O’Duffy.

But the conflict in the Holy Land is still more dissonant in this regard. It is the single most bitterly contentious communal struggle on earth today (something which itself casts an ironical light on the aspiration of the first Zionists to “answer the Jewish question” by “normalizing” the Jews and removing them from the pages of history); it must receive more media coverage than India, which has a population a hundred times greater; it inflames acute passions. And yet it sometimes seems that the more strongly people feel, the less they actually know about the story of Zionism. Maybe it should be a requirement for anyone who wishes to hold forth on the subject to write first a few lines each on Ahad Ha’am, Max Nordau, George Antonius – or Vladimir Jabotinsky.

If not many Europeans or Americans know who “Jabo” was, Israelis certainly do.

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Every ideology has its extremists, but Zionism created a normal country.