After Seven Years
FROM the adjournment of the Eleventh Zionist Congress on September 9, 1913, to the opening session of the International Zionist Conference on July 7th last, a period of seven years elapsed. This needs to be noted, because it is not without significance in a study of the Conference. Even under the most ordinary circumstances seven years is a very long recess between deliberative sessions— and a hazardous one. It is inconceivable that any parliamentary body in the world could resume its functions with any degree of coherence and understanding after such a protracted interval. No body, of whatever character, could, after so long a hiatus, continue its sessions with the same _ degree of accord as had been its wont. A new generation would have arisen. Youth would have matured and demanded its place. Many one-time familiar figures would be missing, and there would be many new personalities to whom the old traditions, methods and leaders would be unknown, or merely hearsay. Some of these traditions would have lost the reverence they once enjoyed. And these new personalities, or persons, would come with new theories, new points of view, which might be in contradiction to what had prevailed in that long time ago.
If this is true of the general run of parliamentary or other bodies, it is truer still of an international Zionist gathering. Seven years is actually one-third of the whole lifetime of the Zionist movement. And during that period, during this elapsed one-third of the lifetime of the movement, it has made gigantic strides forward. It has passed out from the stage of theory and propaganda. It has entered upon the period of political sanction and practical realization. Seven years ago it counted 127,000 shekel payers—140,000 was a most liberal estimate by the then Secretary of Organization; in 1920, after all deductions had been made (and they had to be made drastically, because the organization budget was based on the figures) there were registered 1,060,000 enrolled members of the Zionist Organization, not including South Russia, where the Jews are unable to organize. Seven years ago it might have been truthfully said of the Zionist movement that it was a distinctly bourgeois movement with a sprinkling of financial aristocracy, mainly Russo-Jewish, and a leaven of proletarianism. It might also have been said of it, truthfully, that it was a movement of orthodox Jewry with a leaven of religious and economic radicalism. True, the Mizrachi and Poale Zion had already been recognized as “sonder verbende”—as “fractions”—but neither of these organizations possessed any considerable strength. The Palestinian element—that is, the actual settlers in the Homeland—were, so far as representation at the Congress goes, a negligible factor. Altogether, the Zionists as represented comprised an insignificant fraction of the Jewish people. But even if the total of 1,060,000 enrolled members be accepted as the maximum strength of the movement, it represents approximately one-quarter of the adult manhood of world Jewry (if figures from South Russia were available the proportion would be greater) and it includes, as quite obviously it must, every shade of opinion, religious, economic and sociological, held by Jews the world over, and every social class into which human beings are divided.
Nor is this all: seven years is a tremendous period even