From Dreyfus to Pollard

By Lutfi Al-Abed

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Alfred Dreyfus was the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer. He entered the French Army in 1882 and by 1889 he had risen to the rank of captain. In 1894, while he was assigned to the French War Ministry, he was accused of selling military secrets to the German military attache. On December 22, 1894, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. A massive public campaign was launched for his release. Consequently, he was retried in 1899 and was again found guilty. He was then sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In 1904 a retrial was granted, and two years later all previous convictions were reversed.

Herzl: Assimilation Impossible for Jews

The Dreyfus Affair, which dominated French political life for nearly 12 years, was attributed to what came to be called anti-Semitism. The perception that Dreyfus' second conviction resulted not from evidence of his guilt but from an unwillingness by the French court to admit the first conviction had been erroneous also paved the way to widespread acceptance of Zionism. The affair attracted the attention of Austrian-born Theodor Herzl, a non-religious Jew who at the time was the Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. The Dreyfus case led Herzl to conclude that if such an injustice against a Jewish officer could go uncorrected for so long, even in free, republican France, one of the few countries in Europe to grant Jews full citizenship, then assimilation was impossible for Jews even in Western democracies, and that Jews must therefore organize a state of their own. In 1897 Herzl convened the first world congress of Zionists in Basel, Switzerland. After that he entered into unsuccessful negotiations with Turkey and Britain for a mass Jewish settlement in Palestine or the Sinai Peninsula. Herzl was willing to accept Britain's alternative offer of land in Uganda, East Africa, but this scheme was violently opposed by other delegates to the Zionist Congress of 1903.

Now, nearly a century after the Dreyfus case, an American Jew, Jonathan Jay Pollard, has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Washington, DC court for passing Israel hundreds of top secret documents he obtained as a civilian intelligence analyst for the US Navy. During the interval between the Dreyfus and Pollard cases, many significant developments have taken place, starting with the first Zionist Conference's premise that Jews cannot be assimilated, even in Western democratic societies like France. In fact, this basic tenet of the Zionist ideology has contributed to the alienation of many Jews in the societies where they are living, and to the rejection or scapegoating of Jews by the general public or the ruling party in some of those countries. In Hitler's Germany and some of its World War II allies, Jews became the victims of waves of persecution and mass murder. However, the Zionist movement not only survived those tragic events, it even used them to mobilize support for a Jewish state, not in Uganda but in Palestine. This had become possible, thanks to Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917 which, just 20 years after the first Zionist Congress, was originally proposed to the British government as a means to secure backing for the Allies in World War I from Jews in Russia, the United States, and even in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Just 30 years after the Balfour Declaration, the United Nations passed its resolution of November 29, 1947, which partitioned Palestine between its Arab and Jewish inhabitants. This gave Jews the right to have a state of their own in part of Palestine. Just 20 years after the Partition Resolution, Israel seized the remainder of Palestine during the Six-Day War of June 1967.

Has Zionism Made Jews Any Safer?

The rationale for all of these developments was to provide for the safety of Jews in one country. The unasked question is whether these actions made the Jews living outside Israel more or less secure. The facts are that, nearly 40 years after the establishment of the state of Israel, there are still far more Jews in the so-called diaspora than in Israel, and the Jews leaving Israel to return to the diaspora outnumber those leaving the diaspora to settle in Israel.

Now, after the Pollard affair, will Jews leaving Israel to join their more numerous brethren in the West find things changing as a result of Israel's recent actions? American Jewish leaders say no, in public, but clearly are exasperated with Israel, in private. Whereas the innocent Dreyfus found Christian intellectuals and prominent personalities to launch a campaign for his release, no such thing has occurred in Pollard's case. On the contrary, the fact that Israel took advantage of his willingness to transfer his loyalty from the land of his birth to the Jewish State has alerted both security officials and ordinary citizens in the US and Europe to the possibility that Jews working in sensitive positions can be manipulated, either through appeals to Zionist idealism or coercion, by an Israel that has demonstrated a willingness to do so. The Pollard affair has introduced elements of alienation and suspicion into the Jewish experience in the West in general and the US in particular.

Israel Increasingly Isolated

Who is responsible? Is it the Americans, whose unquestioning support for Israel is well established? Is it the Europeans, who since World War II have gone out of their way to atone for the reservations their fathers once expressed openly about the Jews in their midst? Or is it the Zionist movement itself that is endangering the status of Jews everywhere, and particularly in the US, where so many Jews openly declare that their "promised land" is the land of their birth. The Zionist enterprise to attract Jews to their own "land of milk and honey" has never attracted much more than financial and moral support from American Jews, few of whom have settled permanently in Israel. Nor, it seems, can it retain those Jews who leave the Soviet Union with exit visas for Israel, but then change destinations when they arrive in Vienna. The state that 40 years ago managed to mobilize international support for its establishment, and to win the sympathy of large sectors of people around the world in its initial battles with the Palestinians and other Arabs, now finds itself increasingly isolated after betraying its staunchest friend, the US. Whereas the Dreyfus case was the catalyst for and precursor of Zionism, the Pollard case may signal the beginning of the end of the Zionist dream. The loss of international moral support would inevitably lead to the decrease of the external material support upon which Israel has become so totally dependent since its creation 39 years ago. It is by no means certain that the Pollard case signals the moral failure of Israel, but if the tide of Western public opinion has finally turned against Israel, it certainly will not take another 40 years for the world to find this out.

Lutfi al-Abed, a Palestinian-born resident of Lebanon, is a consultant on Arab political affairs.