The Maccabaean

FEBRUARY, 1919

ZIONISM has ceased to be, for Zionism implies the necessity of a movement in order to bring the possibility of the establishment of a Jewish or Zionist Commonwealth before the eyes of the world, Jewish and non-Jewish. I may say without fear of contradiction that the establishment of a Jewish Palestine under the League of Nations and with the trusteeship that must obviously be granted to Great Britain is just as truly before the mind of European statesmen, and above all of American statesmen in Paris, as any other question which lies before them today.

Let it suflice to say that the wholly sympathetic and favoring attitude of President Wilson and Colonel House and their associates of the American Peace deputation—and herein they represent the good-will and conscience of America—is shared by such European statesmanship in England, France and Italy and the lesser -Allied lands as counts.

Two things will come out of the Peace Conference, and these two things after all are among the main objectives of the war. The overwhelming of Prussianism was nothing more than a means toward this high end or these high ends. These two things—and they are almost interchangeable— are the establishment of a League of Nations, and the securing of independence for the smaller nations. If the war had not been fought in order to create such an alliance among the civilized peoples of earth as would make the peace of justice possible hereafter, it would have become necessary for the Allied nations to devise a method of guaranteeing and perpetuating the moral and political achievements of the war. The League of Nations means that the great nations, including our own, England, Italy, and France, which have won the war, understand that in the future the right of a people to live is not to be determined by the size of its army or the might of its navy, but by its own will to live, the will to live predicated upon those conditions of nationality and history which are the test of the reality of the claims of a people to live its own life.

Upon one thing I wish to comment without delay because it involves the acceptance of certain inexorable burdens. One grave disadvantage under which the Jewish people rest in relation to the Peace Conference is the status of the Russian Empire, involving as it does a division of the greatest Jewry in the world for a time in any event into a series of relatively lesser Jewries, and the consequent failure of the great Russian Jewry to exercise in itself and through a free and united Russia that power which would have been sure to have fallen to the lot of Russian Jewry. This means one thing—that the task of leadership rests upon American Israel and the task of supreme service falls to the lot of the American Jew. If the Russian tragedy had been averted, Russian and American Jewries would together have taken the lead in organizing world-Jewry and in securing those ends upon which the Jewish people are bent. In the circumstances of the breakdown and ihe break-up of Russia, the chiefest responsibility for the Jewish future rests upon American Israel, upon the statesmanship of its leaders, upon the capacity for service of all the people.

The position of Jews in respect to the Peace Conference of 1919 is a very different thing from the status of Jewry in 1878. Since 1878 not only have the Jews come to command a high place in the life of all the civilized peoples but the world assembled through its representatives at Paris dare not forget that Jews have greatly and nobly served in the armies of all nations, and that is true even of the Russia of the old order.

The happiest circumstance connected with the Peace Conference arises out of the fact that Jews have no special case to present to the Peace Conference. In other words, we do not and will not appear before the Peace Conference as special pleaders. The world has moved since 1878, for the war that has just ended has been fought for the fundamental convictions and contentions of the Jew. What we have long held to be our right, the Allied world finally found it necessary to defend at infinite cost of blood and treasure as