ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS
Polish and Baltic forces financed by Britain, the United States, France and Japan.
The counter-revolution consisted of many elements which had a long tradition of
anti-Semitism and pogroms. This continued, and even developed further, during the
civil war and at least 60,000 Jews were killed by the anti-Bolshevik forces. Although
the Balfour Declaration gave Zionism the lukewarm support of the backers of the
White Guardist pogromists, it did nothing to curb the pogroms. The declaration
was, at best, a vague pledge to allow the WZO to try to build a national home in
Palestine. The content of that commitment was as yet completely undefined. The
WZO's leaders understood that the British government saw the crushing of the
Bolsheviks as its top priority, and that they had to be on their best behaviour, not
merely in terms of insignificant Palestine, but in their activities in the volatile East
European arena.
Western historians call the Bolshevik revolution the Russian Revolution, but
the Bolsheviks themselves regarded it as triggering a world-wide revolt. So also did
the capitalists of Britain, France and America, who saw the Communist success
galvanising the left wing of their own working classes. Like all social orders that
cannot admit the fact that the masses have justification to revolt, they sought to
explain the upheavals, to themselves as well as the people, in terms of a conspiracy
— of the Jews. On 8 February 1920, Winston Churchill, then the Secretary for War,
told readers of the Illustrated Sunday Herald about 'Trotsky… [and]… his schemes
of a world-wide communistic state under Jewish domination'. However, Churchill
had his chosen Jewish opponents of Bolshevism—the Zionists. He wrote hotly of 'the
fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr Weizmann in
particular,. 'Trotsky,' Churchill declared, was 'directly thwarted and hindered by
this new ideal… The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and
Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.' 24
The British strategy of using both anti-Semites and Zionists against 'Trotsky'
rested ultimately on Zionism's willingness to co-operate with Britain in spite of the
British involvement with the White Russian
[11] pogromists. The WZO did not want pogroms in Eastern Europe, but it did
nothing to mobilise world Jewry on behalf of the Jews beleaguered there.
Weizmann's statements at the time, as well as his memoirs, tell us how they saw the
situation. He appeared at the Versailles Conference on 23 February 1919. Once
again he enunciated the traditional line on Jewry shared by both anti-Semites and
Zionists. It was not the Jews who really had problems, it was the Jews who were the
problem:
Jewry and Judaism were in a frightfully weakened condition, presenting, to
themselves and to the nations, a problem very difficult of solution. There was, I said,
no hope at all of such a solution — since the Jewish problem revolved
fundamentally round the homelessness of the Jewish people — without the creation
of a National Home. 25
24 Winston Churchill, 'Zionism versus Bolshevism', Illustrated Sunday Herald (8 February 1920), p. 5.
25 Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 243.
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