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As the world marks the first anniversary of the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, it’s interesting to note that Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl, in his political activity a century ago, was sensitive to what was going on in Arab societies. After he despaired of receiving a charter from the Ottoman Empire to settle Jews in Palestine, it seemed for a brief period that there might be an option to settle Jews in El-Arish in the northern Sinai (or “Egyptian Palestine,” as Herzl called it).
A Zionist delegation was sent to examine the possibility of establishing agricultural settlements in the El-Arish area, with Herzl himself visiting Egypt in 1903. He met with the British governor and with Egyptian Foreign Minister Boutros Ghali (grandfather of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali), who seven years later, when he became prime minister, was assassinated by an Egyptian nationalist.
The most interesting of his impressions of Egypt appears in Herzl’s report on a lecture delivered by a British expert on the problems of irrigation in Mesopotamia. Herzl wasn’t particularly taken by the speech, but was very impressed by the audience, “particularly the large numbers of young, intelligent-looking Egyptians that filled the hall.”
Understanding the dynamics that Britain was hindering vis-a-vis certain processes taking place in Egypt, Herzl made comments reminiscent of Karl Marx’s statements on the dialectic nature of the British regime in India: “These are the future masters; it’s surprising that the English don’t realize this,” wrote Herzl. “They think that they’ll be dealing with fellahin forever.
“Today a force of 18,000 troops is enough for a country of this size, but for how long?” he continued. “The role of the British is grandiose; they are purifying the Orient, bringing light and air to the polluted corners there, eradicating ancient tyrants and undermining the regime’s distortions.
“But with their freedom and progress, they are teaching the fellahin what rebellion is. The English colonial methods will either shatter England’s colonial empire, or lay the foundation for Britain’s world dominion. I would want to come back here in 50 years to see what will happen.”
Not a bad forecast for a European journalist, who with his political and historical instincts understood something that few of his generation had contemplated: that European imperialism would, with its own hands, create the ideological and social infrastructure that would bring about its own destruction.
Nearly 50 years after Herzl wrote these things, on July 23, 1952, the Free Officers Revolution, led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdul Nasser, cast off the last remnants of British colonialism in Egypt.
-haaretz.com, 30 January 2012
Theodor Herzl, a free thinking liberal with distinctive socialist ideas, is considered the father of modern Israel. At the First International Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, held 29 October 1897, he made this declaration, “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.” Fifty years later, the United Nations voted to partition the territory called Palestine between a Arab state and a Jewish state.
Although not religious, Herzl knew that the time had come for the Jews to return to their homeland. What the prophet Amos wrote almost 2,800 years ago, is continuing in fulfillment from the last century until this day, “And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God” (Amos 9:14-15).
(For more on Israel’s return to the land, read The Palestinian Right to Israel, Item 2256, $19.99.)
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Monday, 20 February 2012 00:00
ISRAEL-Theodor Herzl’s Significance 100 Years Ago
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