have been anything but a European Jew, because his whole idea was a response to a specific challenge posed by European conditions. And if Herzl had not been there, the great need of Eastern European Jewry would have produced some other apostle who would have provided the same kind of answers.

This was actually put to the test. Herzl died of a heart attack on July 3, 1904, at the age of 44. Near the end of his short life, disappointed at the failure of his efforts to acquire a charter establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, Herzl turned his attention to other potential sites. For some time his interest centered on the area of El-Arish in northern Sinai-one of the territories conquered by the Israeli Army in the 1967 war. When this project seemed unrealistic because of the lack of water in the area, he favored the acceptance of an offer in 1903 by the British government to settle the Jews on three thousand square miles in, of all places, Uganda. His stand shocked the masses of Eastern European Zionists; it was repudiated with contempt. (One wonders how the recent war would have looked if Ugandian Israel, facing the animosity of a black Africa, would have found itself fighting the armies of an African League!)

Born when and where it was, Zionism could not have developed any differently. It was completely preoccupied with itself, with its great national and social vision, with the dangers facing European Jews. It was too preoccupied with problems in countries Zionism wanted to leave-in violent debates with assimilationists, Communists and other rivals-to bother with the still largely unknown land where the new Jerusalem was to be built.

Choosing their symbols, the Zionists looked to the past of the Jewish people, not to the landscape of Palestine. Zion, though only a little hill in Jerusalem, was a religious symbol, the place whence would come the word of God. The magen David, the shield of David, which became the emblem of the movement, was a symbol taken

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