Dr. Chaim Weizmann
By PROFESSOR NORMAN BENTWICH
APRINCE has fallen in Israel. Dr. Chaim Weizmann was not only the first President of the Republic of Israel, but more than any other man he was the creator of the State. To that purpose he devoted his life from his childhood in the Russian Pale, unswervingly, as he has told in his fascinating and revealing autobiography Trial and Error. He had indeed two causes : the re-establishment of the Jewish people as a nation living in their own home, and the develop- ment of the resources of the world by science. But the two were linked together by his own genius. He realised that the Jewish people must win their way to nationhood, and justify it, by their contribution to the things of the mind and the spirit; and he personally must make his way to leadership by that contribution. So it happened that an alien unknown scientist, who came to England from Russia via Geneva, to take a junior post in the chemistry department of the University of Manchester, won his place as a leader of Zionism in England by force of his faith and his scientific distinction. By those same gifts he won for the movement in Manchester the under- standing interest of C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, of Professor Alexander, the philosopher, and Arthur Balfour, in those days M.P. for a Manchester division. In the First World War by his force of will and by his scientific research, which gave the key to the manufacture of some vital element in munitions, he came into touch with leading persons of the British Cabinet, first with Samuel, with Balfour again and Lloyd George, Churchill and Lord Reading, and con- vinced them that the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine should be one of the war aims of the Allies. He was the directing mind of the Balfour Declaration.
He was not .an orator, but he had an uncanny power of impressing an audience, large or small, by the sheer force of his mind. I remember from my youth a meeting in East London at which Weizmann spoke not long after his arrival in England. He was not yet a perfect master of English, but his visible effort to find the right and telling word-, the originality of his thought, free from all commonplaces, and his fund of Jewish stories were much more impressive than the easy eloquence of the popular speakers. Weizmann had the essential quality of a great man : the devotion of a big mind and a single will to a great cause— outside himself. He was possessed by an invincible faith that the Jewish people, restored to their historic home, could realise their genius, and there, and only there, make their true con- tribution to humanity. In a sense he was the last of the great liberal statesmen, of the line of Mazzini, Gladstone and Masaryk. He believed in the power of reason and persuasion, and not in military force or violent means; and he exercised that persuasive power himself in superb degree. Jew and Gentile, statesman and soldier, philosopher and scientist were moved by him to do his will. It was often said that physically he resembled Lenin; and he shared with Lenin a singleness and intensity of purpose. But otherwise the two revolutionary minds were profoundly unlike. Weizmann had no ruthlessness. He shrank from violence of any kind; he denounced terrorism in Palestine, though the denunciation might be to his own hurt. And he spurned the ways of a demagogue. The aim of Zionism must be achieved by organic development.
It was of a piece with his faith in reason and the spirit that he rose in the Zionist movement as the leader of a cultural group in opposition to the " politicals." And his first special objective in the Zionist programme was to found the University of Jerusalem. He moved the Zionist Congress in 1913 to adopt that aim; and when he came out, as the head of the Zionist Commission to Palestine in 1918, to initiate the implementing of the Balfour Declaration, it was his cherished purpose to take the first steps in founding the University. The stones were laid on Mount Scopus in July, 1918, in the presence of General Allenby. As he remarked, learning was the Jewish Dreadnought," and the first thing which the Jews did in their national life was to show their will to create an instrument for a better future. It was one of his proudest moments when Balfour declared the University open seven years later. He was the Chairman of its Board of Governors from then till 1949. Nor was he content with the University. He must have in the Jewish Home his own institute of research. Starting on a small scale, he was able by the magic of his name to build up a splendidly equipped institute of science at Rehovot, where were combined his own home, the centre of scientific study ot the land and the centre of fundamental research. He held to his faith that Israel would only exist by the most thorough application of science to the resources of the country and human man-power.
From his early years in Manchester he believed that England was-the Power which could and would help the Jews to build up their National Home, as his forerunner Theodor Herzl, the creator of the Zionist Congress, had believed. He hitched his waggon to the star of the Bible-loving, tolerant English. Ho held to that principle, despite many discouragements and dis- illusions, for thirty years, from the giving of the Balfour Decla- ration in 1917 to the resolution of the United Nations in favour of the Jewish State in 1947. He imperilled his position by that loyalty after the troubles in Palestine in 1929 and 1930, and he was not re-elected President of the Zionist Organisation in 1931.
For a few years he was in the political wilderness, though he never faltered for a moment in his devotion to the cause. He was called back to leadership after Hitler's persecution -roused Jewry to friish consciousness, and he held his place through all the trials and tribulations of the period before the Second World War and during the war. His moderation and his will to preserve understanding with England brought about for a second time his loss of authority, when, at the end of the war, the doors of Palestine were still shut to the Jewish survivors from extermination. His eloquence and his deep understanding had moved the Royal Commission in 1937- and the Anglo- American Commission in 1946. Yet he could not get helpful action from the Government. During most of the war years he was away from Palestine, working for the Allied cause in England and America with his science. More violent and extreme forces meanwhile had taken control both in Palestine and American Jewry. The British Government was the scape- goat for all the frustrations. And at the Zionist Congress in 1946 Weizmann, who was regarded as the friend of England, was not re-elected.
He was again in the wilderness, but at the very portal of the promised land. Zionism needed his incomparable power of persuasion, and he exercised it before the United Nations Commission on Palestine and with President Truman and the Department of State in America. When the Founding Fathers of Israel made their bold declaration of independence at Tel-Aviv on the last day of the British Mandate, with one voice they called him back from America to be the first Presi- dent of the provisional council of government. Eight months later, after the election of a constituent assembly, that first parliament of Israel elected him as President of the Republic. He was a sick and tired man, and could not take a continuous activity.in the political affairs of the State, though he continued to direct his beloved scientific research. The limitation of his powers in the provisional constitution was a disappointment. Yet his life was a signal example of fulfilment, beyo,nd what he could have imagined in his most ardent aspirations. He had lived to see Israel a nation, independent, upstanding and already creative : and he was acclaimed by his people and the world as the creator and architect of the rebirth.
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