The Jewish Cause

To what extent did the Zionist movement seek a Jewish state? Was it after mass Aliyah of Europe's Jews between the two world wars? To what degree did the movement act to save Jews during the Holocaust?

This book undermines various postulations known among the Israeli public and Zionist historiography. The Zionist movement was founded by Herzl as a movement addressing Jews affairs, or in other words - a solution for the Jewish problem in Europe by mass migration of the Jews to a Jewish nation-state. With Herzl's death, and following the Uganda crisis, the perception of the Zionist leadership underwent changes with regards to the objectives of the movement. It was no longer perceived as being responsible for the "Jewish affair", but rather as a project of the slow building of Erez Israel as a spiritual center, meant to contain a limited Jewish elite, while the rest of the Jewish People remained in the Diaspora. Hence, the fact that before World War II a Jewish state did not exist, and that the population of the Yeshuv included no more than 450 thousand Jews, are not entirely a result of British and Arab objection, but also, and perhaps mostly, the outcome of the policy of the Zionist movement. The latter was not decisive with regards to the foundation of a state, and opposed mass Jewish migration, fearing it would blemish the "idealistic" society they wished to create. Seeing as the Zionist movement did not regard itself as responsible for the "Jewish affair", it also did not see itself as responsible for the fate of European Jewry, and did not act as expected during the Holocaust to save Jews.