CHAPTER 9
On October 12, 1492, Columbus landed on a Bahama island called Guanahani by the Indians-and discovered the New World.
But Columbus did not have the slightest idea what he'd done. Nothing was farther from his mind than discovering new worlds; it was the oldest of worlds he was looking for -India and the spice islands. A new world was not an economic proposition, and one may wonder whether the whole expedition would have come about if the result had been foreseen.
Yet, using only the crudest of instruments, knowing very little about geography, his head crammed with false ideas, Columbus bravely sailed forth into the unknown and inadvertently changed the shape of the world.
Something like this happened to Zionism, and therein lie the causes of all its inner conflicts, as well as the solutions to its problems.
Zionism set out with the idea that the Jews of the world constitute a nation-a nation in the European sense, a group of people who identify themselves with a political state, either an existing one or one to be established. Starting from this assumption, the problem was one of transportation, in the widest sense: once a Jewish homeland in Palestine was created, all Jews, or at least most of them, would go there to live in Herzl's Judenstaat.
History has proved this theory false. A Jewish state was indeed set up in Palestine, but the great majority of Jews has not shown any undue inclination to go there. Two