“For two thousand years past they put us off with excuses and false promises. Civilization has been progressing for thousands of years: mankind now flies loftier than the eagle and dives deeper than the Leviathan. Has it become better for us? Have we not remained the same scapegoats from the time of Rome to the Crusades, from these to the ‘Haidamaks,’ and from them to the Pogroms of the present day?
“We, the wandering souls, demand our rest. Enough of wanderings and being bandied about! Give us back our body, our country! We want to be equal with the rest, suffer with the rest, fight with the rest, live with the rest.”
Thus lament the dead, teaching the living. Will the world not listen to them?
“What do you wish?” the Zionists are asked. They reply: We want a home in the land of Israel. On the day of Judgment, when every historical right—from the smallest to the greatest—is announced, elevated, proclaimed, and demanded; when even the weakest, the most doubtful claims of half-forgotten and but recently-awakened little peoples, based on old, torn, ambiguous and now scarcely legible documents and traditions, assert themselves and demand rights of ownership; when history takes its place as judge on the throne of justice, and the national territorial idea is accepted as the world’s code, in order to resolve every doubt and to arbitrate every dispute; when the great in power penitently declare that every injustice, especially towards suffering peoples, must be righted; when these things come to pass, then (we Zionists say) the Jewish people is in duty bound to proclaim its old, holy, historical right to the heritage of its heroes, its prophets, its civilization, its religion, its language, and its labours!
It is an ancient right, but it has not lapsed. It is the ancient oath, the ancient covenant. No right has been earned more honourably. None has been paid for with more and nobler blood. None is so highly established and deeply founded.
In order not to lay itself open to a verdict of letting its claim go by default, the Jewish people will have to proclaim its immortal right to the land of Israel. It is the sacred duty-right of loyal children towards their parents. Not to demand the land of Israel means that we tacitly waive our rights to it, and this means a waiving of our rights to everything: tradition, honour, justice, the law of Moses, and the general historical idea.
We don’t trust a man who denies his mother, however much of a patriot he may be in his country. He is an opportunist, but no patriot, because patriotism is idealism.
Nothing will daunt us in our resolve to proclaim solemnly our historical right and to demand it with all our energy. Do not trouble us with intimidations, on the score of a possible growth of anti-Semitism, and so on! These fears are senseless. Anti-Semitism is a consequence not of Zionism, but of the “Galuth.” Those who have the courage of their convictions and a sense of honour, are not to be influenced by craven fears. Our duty it is to proclaim our right, and we shall fulfil this duty. Will this bring us sufferings? Good: we are prepared for that. Martyrs from of old as we are, we have been through fire and water during thousands of years, we have been the target of every attack, the victims of every persecution, and we fear no chicanery when it is a question of fulfilling a holy duty of our conscience.
Whoever understands Zionism, knows it is not our intention to raise conflicts. We stand for a peaceful movement. We began in a time of peace and we desire to renew our work and substantially to enlarge it, in the coming time of peace. We did not wish to harm anyone, to wrong anyone, and we wish to do so still less, if possible, now than before. We wish to make our country a model of social justice and human brotherhood; the spirit of our prophets shall fill our land, and the ancient Hebrew genius shall there have its dwelling-place.
We certainly, not less than all the other Jews and all just men, are strongly interested and are anxious that we, wherever we live, wherever we are, and wish to be citizens, should have our rights secured. Where the Jews are not yet emancipated, they shall be emancipated; where they are but half emancipated, their emancipation shall be completed and perfected; and where they are already emancipated, their emancipation shall be in no way checked or diminished. This question of rights we had better formulate in the following manner: Not that rights should be given us, but that our rights shall no longer be filched away, restricted and encroached upon wherever we have our domicile, wherever we fulfil our duties, and bear all burdens in order to defend the soil of the country to the death; wherever we work, live, and die together with its other inhabitants. Not that we should be emancipated, but that people should emancipate themselves from the instinct of persecution, from malice, from envy, which find expression in various forms: in pogroms, in boycott, in social ostracism, in open or masked disabilities; that we should not be shut up in cages like wild animals, whether it be in the brutal form of a Ghetto, a “pale of settlement,” or in the more subtle form of social exclusion and coldly polite hypocritical repulse: whether it be finally, in that cunning form not of Anti-Semitism, but of Asemitism which declares that, as in the case of poisons, the country can at best absorb only a limited quantity of Jews, while any excess is dangerous.