Friends, brothers, our new society makes of you new men. This is a day of alliance and of reconciliation. Old words—Virtue, Love, Liberty—which had lost their brightness by long disuse have regained their lustre as on the day when they were first engraved on the heart of man. Awake from the long night. It is a new dawn which arises. The Jewish people which has endured, and will still endure, with great firmness of heart the heaviest sacrifices, rising to the heights of the great arguments of this War of Nationalities, affirms that it is ready and determined to work with all its power and full loyalty for Governments and peoples until the realization of its destiny. May this destiny be one in which Liberty will triumph—one from which man and humanity, the individual and the Nation, will derive benefit, one bringing to the Jewish people as to every oppressed people the possibility of living and of realizing its ideal. It is in this spirit that the Zionist Organisation recommends to you the resolution.
On the 14th of December the Zionist representatives, Lord Rothschild, Mr. James de Rothschild, Dr. E. W. Tschlenow, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, and the Author, were received by the War Cabinet. They offered to the British Government the gratitude of the Jewish people for the Declaration of the 2nd November and at the same time expressed their congratulations on the occasion of the capture of Jerusalem. Mr. Bonar Law, who replied to the deputation on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, thanked them for the kind sentiments they had expressed.
The following Manifesto was issued shortly after the British Declaration:—
To the Jewish People.
The 17th of Marcheshvan, 5678 (2nd November, 1917), is an important milestone on the road to our national future; it marks the end of an epoch, and it opens out the beginning of a new era. The Jewish people has but one other such day in its annals: the 28th August, 1897, the birthday of the New Zionist Organization at the first Basle Congress. But the analogy is incomplete, because the period which then began was Expectation, whereas the period which now begins is Fulfilment.
From then till now, for over twenty years, the Jewish people has been trying to find itself, to achieve a national resurrection. The advance-guard was the organized Zionist party, which in 1897 by its programme demanded a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law. A great deal was written, spoken, and done to get this demand recognized. The work was carried out by the Zionist Organization on a much greater scale and in a more systematic manner than had been possible for the Chovevé Zion, the first heralds of the national ideal, who had tried to give practical shape to the yearning which had burnt like a light in the Jewish spirit during two thousand years of exile and had flamed out at various periods in various forms. The Chovevé Zion had the greatest share in the practical colonization. The Zionist movement wrestled with its opponents and with itself. It collected means outside Palestine, and laboured with all its strength in Palestine. It founded institutions of all kinds for colonization in Palestine. That was a preface, full of hope and faith, full of experiments and illusions, inspired by a sacred and elevating ideal, and productive of many valuable and enduring results.
The time has come to cast the balance of the account. That chapter of propaganda and experiments is complete, and the glory of immortality rests upon it. But we must go further. To look back is the function of the historian; life looks forwards.
The turning-point is the Declaration of the British Government that they “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
The progress which our idea has made is so colossal and so obvious that it is scarcely necessary to describe it in words. None the less, a few words must be addressed to the Jewish people, not so much by way of explanation, as to demand the new and greater efforts which are imperative.