Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [269]
Tall, balding, looking with his goatee like “a well-nourished Lenin,” Weizmann even then carried himself with great assurance. He criticized his seniors in the Zionist movement for being too timid. He publicly disagreed with Herzl over the scheme to buy Uganda from the British government and set up a Jewish state there. For Weizmann—and, in the end, for the overwhelming majority of Zionists—the only possible location was Palestine, in those days a small backward province of the Ottoman empire. That was where the holy places were and the reminders of the last Jewish kingdom, destroyed by the Romans. When Weizmann was once asked why the Jews had a right to Palestine, he simply replied: “Memory is right.”
Weizmann despised assimilated Jews and those who would not support Zionism. They were blind; worse, they were unpatriotic. “The essential point which most Jews overlook,” he said about the German Jews he had known as a student, “and which forms the very crux of the Jewish tragedy, is that those Jews who are giving their energies and their brains to the Germans are doing it in their capacity as Germans, and are enriching Germany and not Jewry, which they are abandoning.” A Jewish home in Palestine was essential. “Palestine,” he insisted, “and the building up of a Jewish nation from within, with its own forces and its own traditions, would establish the status of the Jews, would create a type of 100% Jew.” 4
By 1914 Weizmann had established himself in Manchester as a reader (assistant professor) in biochemistry at the university. He had also risen in the Zionist organization, which now had 130,000 paid-up members, but he did not have the position he felt he deserved. Jews from the East felt he had become too Anglicized, English Jews that he was too Russian. He had offended too many of the older generation with his criticism of Herzl and too many of his contemporaries with his sarcasm and lack of tolerance for bores. His speeches were lectures, from a platform of superiority. Abba Eban, later Israel’s foreign minister, worked for him as a young man: “He revealed a scientist’s economy of phrase and emotion, a hard sense of realities, and an almost cruel insistence on telling his Jewish audiences how difficult and complex their Zionist task was going to be.” Weizmann became Zionism’s leader in the end because there was no one else who could do the job. He frequently grew discouraged, often threatened to resign, but he never gave up on his long-term goal to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Zionism was his extraordinary ability to win over key figures, both within the Jewish community and among the world’s leaders. “Starting with nothing,” he told an opponent, “I, Chaim Weizmann, a yied from Pinsk and only almost a Professor at a provincial university, have organized the flower of Jewry in favour of a project which probably by Rothschild (Lord) and his satellites is considered as mad.”5
With the war, Weizmann moved up a gear. By his own estimate he had 2,000 meetings with politicians, civil servants, diplomats: anyone who could be useful in gaining Palestine for the Jews. He overcame the offhand distaste for foreigners and Jews among the British upper classes. One forgot, said Cecil, with surprise, his “rather repellent and even sordid exterior” in the face of his “subdued enthusiasm” and “the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude.”6 Weizmann made a conquest of Cecil; more important, he made one of Cecil’s cousin Balfour, foreign secretary after 1916. It was a strange friendship—the intense, committed Jew from the Pale and the charming, worldly Englishman who had drifted through life with such ease—but for Weizmann and Zionism it was crucial.
Balfour has always been hard to pin down: a philosopher who became a politician; an aesthete who loved tennis and golf; ruthless, as the Irish learned to their cost, but invariably kind and polite