another land (Argentina), and that he added the passage about Palestine later on, just to make his Zionist friends feel good."

Weizmann points out that at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, when Herzl definitely joined the Zionist movement, "and thereby accepted the idea of Palestine as the land of Jewish resurrection, the formula of a Jewish state disappeared from his plan." The Zionist program, adopted by that Congress, speaks only about "a legally secured Jewish home in Palestine."

Those times were the heyday of imperialism, which had not yet become a despicable term, a synonym for exploitation and oppression. It was still a glorious concept, imbued with idealism. People were praising Rudyard Kipling's poetry glorifying the white man's burden. Cecil Rhodes, in South Africa, was the symbol of the European superman, a hero to one and all. No one even dreamed about the awakening of Asia and Africa, about the new nationalism of the East. The black man and the brown man were but "natives," barbarians (against whom Europe had to be defended) who merely happened to inhabit places where European nations sent their ships-and armies -for raw materials to supply the necessities of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

Thus, in time and place, Zionism at its inception was not only a part of the last wave of European nationalism, it was a part of the last wave of European imperial expansion. Soon, very soon, this wave would expend itself. Within less than ten years the Japanese were to inflict a terrible defeat on the Russians, bringing to an end the era of undisputed white supremacy.

Perhaps it was a misfortune of Zionism to be born too near the crossroads-a hundred years too late to profit by the great European expansionary movement, thirty years too early to recognize the impending force of Afro-Asian reaction to its arrival in Arab-inhabited Palestine.

The Zionists who congregated in Basel in 1897 for the

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