Word: weizmann
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...talk was not enough. For Weizmann, the chemist, Zionism was "something organic, which had to grow like a plant." The plant, he felt, could grow only in Palestine and only by physical Jewish achievements in Palestine. He based his philosophy of action on Goethe's famous saying...
Later, as a student in the universities of Germany and Switzerland, young Weizmann met the leaders of Russian Zionism: Achad Ha-am ("One of the People"), the Gandhi of the Jewish renaissance, and Menachem Mendel Ussishkin, its practical leader. He also met Western Jews: assimilationists who wanted no part of Zionism ; dedicated Jews, like Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist Congress; elegant English Jews, like Sir Francis Montefiore, who wore white gloves to Congress meetings because he had to shake so many hands...
...Geneva and Bern ("hot-air factories," his friend Ussishkin called them), Weizmann continued to argue. He fought assimilationists and Marxist revolutionaries alike. When Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov (who frequented the same cafés) heard of his "counter revolutionary" talk, Plekhanov, in a rage, objected. Weizmann shot back: "But Monsieur Plekhanov, you are not the Czar...
...Unrequited Love." In 1904, Fact-maker Weizmann went to live in England. The British government had already (in 1903) offered the Jews a national home in Uganda, British East Africa, and in the El Arish district, now in Egypt, which last month the Israeli army belatedly and briefly occupied. The Zionists had refused. It was up to Weizmann to explain why only Palestine would do. He started talking in 1906, when he first met Balfour; he was still talking (harder & faster) in 1916, when he was made director of the Admiralty Laboratories and invented a new means of producing acetone...
Balfour, Lloyd George, Lord Robert Cecil, Leopold Amery and others helped him to hammer out the terms of the Balfour Declaration which promised to help the Jews establish a national home in Palestine. His enemies were chiefly the English assimilationist Jews, led by Lord Edwin Montagu. Says Weizmann: "There cannot be the slightest doubt that without outside interference-entirely from Jews -the draft would have been accepted . . . substantially as we submitted...