* * *

Zionism was a revolution like few in history.

Today, the word revolution may mean admitting a Negro into a swimming pool or changing the ownership of the factories or replacing one set of politicians with another. As deeply as they changed the lives of their peoples, how much did the great revolutions of our century-the Bolshevik, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Cuban, the Algerian-actually affect the daily life of the individual?

Zionism was incomparably more revolutionary. It sent people from one country into another; a completely different one. It transferred people from one social class to another, usually a much lower one. It changed their language, their environment, their culture. It completely cut them off from their former lives and had them build others. Such a revolution is rare in human history. Looking for a precedent even remotely similar, one can think only of the First Crusade or the voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers. Big historical movements like these, changing the course of history and the face of the earth, must be viewed as a whole. It is quite futile to analyze them, to try to dissect them, laying bare just a few of their characteristics, and imagine that you have reached the heart.

Yet even a movement like this is a child of its time and its place. In order to understand Zionism, one has to realize when it was born and where. Officially, Zionism was born at the end of the last century, the invention of one man, Theodor Herzl, a bearded Viennese journalist. His picture, resembling an Assyrian king of antiquity, hangs opposite my seat in the Knesset, the only decorative element in the entire hall.

Herzl was trying to find a solution to the plight of the Jews in Europe. As a journalist in France, he was deeply impressed by the anti-Semitic outrages there during the Dreyfus affair. He formed the belief that Jews would never

37