ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS
empires, but neither Germany nor Russia, were to be compelled to sign minorityrights
treaties as a precondition of diplomatic recognition. At first the idea was
taken up by the Allies, who realised that minority rights were essential if the
tangled national chauvinists of Eastern Europe were not to tear each other to pieces
and pave the way for a Bolshevik take-over. One by one the Poles, the Hungarians
and the Romanians signed, but their signatures were meaningless. The rapidly
growing Christian middle classes in these countries saw the Jews as their entrenched
competitors and were determined to dislodge them. The Pole who signed their
treaty was the country's most notorious anti-Semite, the Hungarians declared their
treaty day a day of national mourning and the Romanians refused to sign until the
clauses guaranteeing sabbath rights and Jewish schools were deleted from their
treaty.
There never was the slightest chance of success for the utopian plan. Balfour
soon realised what problems the treaties would create for the Allies in Eastern
Europe. On 22 October, he told the League of Nations that the accusing states would
be assuming a thankless duty if they attempted to enforce the treaty obligations. He
then argued that since the treaties preceded the League, it should not obligate itself
to enforce them. 30 The assembled lawyers then accepted legal responsibility for the
treaties, but provided no enforcement machinery.
[13]
Jews could not be bothered to use the meaningless treaties. Only three
collective petitions were ever sent in. In the 1920s Hungary was found to have a
numerus clausus in its universities. In 1933 the still weak Hitler felt compelled to
honour the German-Polish Minority Convention, which was the only such treaty
applicable to Germany, and 10,000 Jews in Upper Silesia retained all civil rights
until treaty term in July 1937. 31 Romania was found guilty of revoking Jewish
citizen rights in 1937. Such petty legalistic victories changed nothing in the long
run.
The only way the Jews could have had any success in fighting for their rights
in Eastern Europe was in alliance with the working-class movements which, in all
these countries, saw anti-Semitism for what it was: an ideological razor in the hands
of their own capitalist enemies. But although social revolution meant equality for
the Jews as Jews, it also meant the expropriation of the Jewish middle class as
capitalists. That was unacceptable to the local affiliates of the WZO, who were
largely middle class in composition with virtually no working-class following. The
world Zionist movement, always concerned for British ruling-class opinion, never
pushed its local groupings in the direction of the left, although the radicals were the
only mass force on the ground that was prepared to defend the Jews. Instead, the
WZO leaders concluded that they lacked the strength to struggle simultaneously for
Jewish rights in the Diaspora and build the new Zion' and by the 1920s they
abandoned all pretence of action on behalf of Diaspora Jewry in situ, leaving their
30 Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minority Treaties a Failure?, pp. 79-80.
31 Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked shall be made Straight, p. 72.
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