President Chaim Weizmann, who was a science professor before becoming Israel's first president, March, 1949. Wikicommons/ Hugo Mendemson. some rights reserved.After wading through a number of articles giving a retrospective, or more accurately, anachronistic views of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, I wish to contribute to the discussion.
I will begin with an interview I heard on the radio recently. The person being interviewed was Yehuda Meshi Zahav, of the anti-Zionist Eida Haredi movement, famous for organizing anti-government acts including burning Israeli flags, fasting and wearing mourning clothes on Israel Independence Day and other such activities. He is an eleventh generation Haredi Jew and he is the last of his line of anti-Zionists. Today he heads the ZAKA organization, which deals with the collection of the dead from terrorist attacks, traffic accidents and natural disasters as well as giving first aid to casualties as first responders. In 2012 his son was drafted into the IDF and served in a combat unit. What I found interesting was how real world situations impacted on ideological beliefs. More to the point, I was impressed by how Yehuda’s earlier beliefs and actions are not particularly relevant to evaluating his activities today or those of his son. In the same way I found most of the discussion evaluating the Balfour Declaration not particularly relevant to the situation today.
Political Zionists and Practical Zionists
Historically the Balfour Declaration was a consequence of several factors. From the earliest days of the Zionist movement, it was considered important to gain international recognition. Theodor Herzl saw this as a necessary objective without which there could be no Jewish state. Other Zionists were not as convinced as Herzl and saw establishing facts on the ground as being more important. This was the difference between the Political Zionists and the Practical Zionists as they were referred to then. There was a great deal of irony in this division within the Zionist movement. Herzl led the Political Zionists and was singularly unsuccessful in getting international recognition. During his time as a leader of the Zionist Movement and almost as an afterthought, he set up the institutions which enabled the practical successes of state building, without which there would be no State of Israel today. Despite this, Herzl died thinking that he had been a failure because no international recognition had been achieved.
