Before all of this, at the beginning, at the First World Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1897, when an assortment of Jews declared that they were a nation in need of a State or, more correctly, in need of real estate for a State, they did so in swallow-tailed coats and white ties. The finery had been enforced by their president Theodore Herzl, who wanted the delegates to feel that they were in the actual parliament of an already existing Jewish State. A few days later, two Viennese rabbis were dispatched to Palestine for some preliminary reconnaissance. Their cable from Palestine was almost epigrammatic; the rabbis wrote: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

Subsequently, Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, in an act of singular generosity offered the Jews 5,000 sq miles in the largely uninhabited plateaus of Uganda — on the forested Mau escarpment, in the midst of a scattering of lions and the Masai tribesmen.

All this when the skies were darkening for Jews in Russia. In February 1903, the corpse of a local Christian boy was discovered along the Dniester river, just outside the town of Kishinev. As the news spread, stories were bruited through the provinces that it was a case of Jewish ritual murder. The Jews, it was alleged, needed the blood of a Christian child to make matzah, their unleavened bread, for Passover. By April, it was open season on Jews in Russia, starting with the Kishinev massacre, where, as Russian troops stood by, drunken Christian rioters armed with axes and clubs spent most of the Easter afternoon slaughtering the local Jewish population.

“The scurrying of roaches was their flight,” wrote Hayim Bialik, the Hebrew poet, about Jews fleeing Russia. In spite of this, there was a big kerfuffle at the sixth Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1903. The hardliners were at Herzl’s throat for as much as proposing the Uganda scheme. Without feeling the want of proportion, Uganda was declared unacceptable, unworthy even as an emergency measure or refuge where the tortured of the Jewish race could pause and catch their breath. At the end of it all, Herzl had to appease the Zionists with a ferrous chant — the Hebrew equivalent of mandir yahin banayege : Im eshkachech yerushalayim tishkach yemini (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither). Zion it was not, Uganda would be a waste of Jewishness. It wasn’t in the prophecy.

The Zionist undertaking was to take the Diaspora Jew, the luftmensch (man of air), the cowardly weightless man, the watchmaker from Latvia, the cabinetmaker from Galicia and make him a strapping worker and peasant in the Promised Land. To reracinate him in better soil. Israel began its life as a written, literary project, a utopian novel written by Herzl called Altneuland (The Old New Land), published in 1902. Altneuland is a fictive chronicle of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Herzl’s utopia, conceived as a blueprint for Israel, in his narrative was something of a large, Jewish Vienna on the Mediterranean, capable of absorbing the world’s entire Jewry. A place concurrently decadent, secular and liberal, whose existence would repudiate Jewish memory. Where men were expected to wear white gloves to the opera. “A delicious luncheon was served in the panelled dining room. Kingscourt was especially taken with the wines. They were all Palestinian, he was told, some of them from David’s own vineyards. The first Jewish villages, established in the early 1880s, had... begun with viniculture. The best varieties of grape had been introduced into Palestine, and flourished.”

Where religion had been excluded from public affairs. Where the ‘Moslem’ Rachid Bey, educated in Berlin, was a full and active member of the Zionist New Society and had this to say about the old inhabitants, the fellaheen:

“Those who had nothing could only gain. And gain they did: employment, better food, welfare. There was nothing more wretched than an Arab village of fellaheen at the end of the 19th century. The tenants lived in buildings not fit for cattle. The children were naked and uncared for... Today, things are changed indeed. People are far better than before; they are healthy, they have better food, their children go to school. Nothing has been done to interfere with their customs or their faith — they have only gained by welfare. The Jews have brought us wealth and health; why should we harbor evil thoughts about them? They live among us like brothers; why should we not return their kindly feelings?”

Where there was no need for an army.

“We are merely a society of citizens seeking to enjoy life through work and culture. We content ourselves with making our young people physically fit. We develop their bodies as well as their minds. We find athletic and rifle clubs sufficient for this purpose, even as they were thought sufficient in Switzerland. We also have competitive games — cricket, football, rowing — like the English. Jewish children used to be pale, weak, timid. Now look at them! We took (them) out of damp cellars and hovels, and brought them into the sunlight.”

Ostensibly, Herzl’s yearning for a Jewish national homeland wasn’t marred by any theological deformity. For him, the romance of the Jewish return wasn’t messianic. Or was it? Why then wasn’t Altneuland in Uganda? Or Madagascar or Alaska? Why was Herzl’s fantasy of welding Zionism, modernistic progress, medicine and science with a humanistic society of equals only imaginable in the biblical homeland of the Jews? Why was the cure for the psychopathology of the Jew found only between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea?

Perhaps the story of Erezt Yisrael can be written as a sequel to the Old Testament, in the majestic language of King James’ Bible. And we’ll have to charge it to Herzl’s account. The luftmensch is now manly; not just a farmer but also a soldier. The whole congregation of the children of Israel has redeemed Herzl’s pledge amply. At any rate, one can find biblical time loops and cyclical recurrences in the narrative all the way.

There is the flight of another inconvenient population, condemned by prophecy, this time from Palestine. And there’s a subplot that brings in the great fetish amongst Jews of unleavened bread. Its origin is in the Book of Exodus (12:39, a report of how the Israelites left Egypt in such great haste that they could not wait for their bread dough to rise). That bread, when baked, was matzah. The bread that brought about the blood libel in Kishinev against the Jews and their subsequent massacre. A teenager’s corpse was found in Kishinev then as it was in Gush Etzion in the West Bank this time. The bread-fixated Jews replied by dropping warning leaflets into Gaza’s towns, ordering them to run in haste. They made phone calls and discharged the more persuasive ‘knock-on-the-door’ missiles. “Matzah is the bread of affliction. For you came out of the land of Egypt in haste. Thus, you will remember the day you left the land of Egypt as long as you live.” The Gazans will soon have their own mnemonic.

(Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer)

asatwik@gmail. com

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