Palestine and Patriotism

Current Comment Page · The National Sunday Magazine Section · A Reply to Rabbi Schulman, Opposing Zionism

By Louis D. Brandeis

Palestine and Patriotism — Chicago Tribune, 9 January 1916 — Chicago Tribune · Chicago, Illinois · 9 January 1916

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Transcribed from the clipping

“THE War of the Civilizations has directed fresh attention to the Zionist movement which of course, is not a movement to remove all the Jews of the world to Palestine. In the first place there are fourteen million Jews, and Palestine would not accommodate more than one-fifth of them. In the second place, it is not a movement to compel anyone to go to Palestine.

It is essentially a movement to encourage the Jews to exercise the same right now exercised by practically every other people in the world—to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or in some other country; a right which members of small nations as well as of large, Irish, Greek, Bulgarian, Servian or Belgian, may now exercise as fully as Germans or English.

Furthermore, Zionism is not a movement to wrest from the Ottoman the sovereignty of Palestine. The relation of the Turks to the Jews has been friendly.

Zionism merely seeks to establish in Palestine for such Jews as choose to go and remain there, and for their descendants, a legally secured home, where they may live together and lead a Jewish life; where they may expect ultimately to constitute a majority of the population, and may look forward to what we should call home rule… First: That Palestine is fit for the modern Jew.

Second: That the modern Jew is fit for Palestine. This land, long treeless and supposed to be sterile and hopelessly arid, has been shown to have been treeless and sterile only because of man’s misrule. It has been shown to be capable of becoming again a land ‘flowing with milk and honey.’

Oranges and grapes, olives and almonds, wheat and other cereals are now growing there in abundance… In a single generation the export of oranges increased from 60,000 boxes to 1,500,000… But as the Ghetto walls are falling Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed, assimilation cannot be averted, unless there be re-established in Palestine a centre, from which the Jewish spirit may radiate… To accomplish this, it is not necessary that the Jewish population of Palestine be large as compared with the whole number of Jews in the world… Furthermore—is it desirable that America should be practically the only country to which the Jews of Eastern Europe may emigrate after this war?

Is it not desirable that Palestine should give a special welcome to the Jews, as the Zionists propose?”

Context added by this archive

A future justice of the Supreme Court, writing in a Sunday magazine supplement in January 1916, twenty-two months before the Balfour Declaration, over his own signature. Two sentences are worth reading slowly.

The aim is a legally secured home, where they may live together and lead a Jewish life; where they may expect ultimately to constitute a majority of the population. And the land was sterile only because of man’s misrule. The people whose misrule is meant, and against whom the majority would be counted, are not named anywhere in the essay.

The orange figure he cites — 60,000 boxes to 1,500,000 — is the same export trade a California paper had reported in 1901 as a Palestinian business (CP-1901-001). The page is shared with an advertisement for hair color restorer.

Cite this clipping

"Palestine and Patriotism," Chicago Tribune, 9 January 1916. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1916-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1916-001