The Ashkenazi Revolution

106decided, in his pamphlet “The Jewish State”, that the lands that should beconsidered were the Land of Israel and Argentina. These two lands werenot, by any means, suitable for the goals that Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl had setfor himself. The coast of the Levant had never served as settlementterritories for European peoples. The Romans were accustomed toestablish Roman and Latin settlements in the areas they conquered, but theRoman Senate strongly opposed Roman-Latin settlement in the Levant andallowed it only to a limited extent in a later era. The Crusader attempts atsettlement failed. The Philistine settlements did not develop into a lastingcivilization. From then and always, the Land of Israel, like all the lands ofthe Fertile Crescent, was a target for wandering and settlement for thetribes of the Mideastern wilderness, but not at all for the peoples of theWest. The odds of transforming the Land of Israel into a place to absorbmasses of Western Jews were, from the beginning, very small. The factthat, until 1939, only 350,000 Ashkenazi Jews had migrated to Israel, andthat the massive migration to it – which would determine its futuredemographic character – was a migration of Mideastern Jews, shouldtestify to the basic error of Herzl. Also, Argentina was not suitable as aterritory for the establishment of a Jewish state. Argentina is afundamentally Spanish and Catholic land and it is difficult to imagine itagreeing to set aside, within its borders, territory for a Jewish country. Thenatural place for the establishment of a Jewish country, could have been anarea in the New World, which does not yet comprise an organic orinseparable portion of a modern country: An almost completely empty area,or sparsely settled by a mildly multicolored population. The greatmigrations of the peoples of Europe, in the 19 th century, flowed to suchareas, areas settled by a mildly multicolored and weak population, that waslargely replaced by the migrants and, at its expense, colonization wascarried out. As suitable areas for the establishment of an Ashkenazi state,empty areas in Australia, or the colonial areas in Africa, either British orPortuguese –whose ruling peoples are interested in development but wholack the European human resources to populate them - should be taken intoconsideration. In any case, it is clear that neither the Land of Israel norArgentina should be considered as possible areas in which to establish anation or to solve the problem of 9-10 million Ashkenazim who live in