Here is Sophie
Irene Loeb's interview with Ze'ev Jabotinsky published in
The Evening News on, November, 17, 1921. Jabotinsky was in America as a member of a Keren HaYesod delegation with other senior Zionist leaders.
Mrs. Loeb nee Simon was born in Rivne,
Russia (now Ukraine) in 1876. Coming to the United States at the age of six,
she later moved from McKeesport, Pennsylvania to New York. She
was the president of the Board of Child Welfare of New York and in
1921 established the first child welfare building. In 1924, she became
president of the Child Welfare Committee of America. In 1926, she
succeeded in having the Widows' Pension Law legislated by Congress.
She led campaigns that
resulted in the New York State Widows' Pension Law, penny lunches in public
schools, the motion picture law of New York, making building sanitary and
fireproof and additional movements for public betterment. As the first woman
called to be a mediator in a New York strike, she brought about the settlement
of the strike in the taxicab industry in 1917.
In 1927, she was
invited to work with the social service section of the League of Nations in
Geneva to frame an international code for the care of dependent and afflicted
children. She
traveled to Palestine in 1925 and wrote “The New Jerusalem”. The
profits from her "Palestine
Awake” were dedicated to the United Palestine Appeal. She died in
1929.
Her interview was one
of a series with leading Zionist officials at the time.
In preparing for the interview, she "looked up
his history [and] wanted to stop work, run up to the woods and write the novel
of the day. For the facts connected with the doings of this young man would
stir the imagination of a Guy de Maupassant or provoke the pen of a Poe.
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Q. I
heard it said that Zionism cannot be reconciled with the principle of
self-determination, because Arabs and not Jews are today the majority in Palestine.
What is your answer to this contention?
A. I
t depends upon what you call self-determination. Some people think that this
principle simply means taking a snapshot of the world as it is constituted and
populated today, and then acting as though everything "were good and just.
For instance, you take a statistical snapshot of Armenia and you state that the
Armenians are a minority in their own country, because the Kurds and the Turks,
have been successfully massacring them for hundreds of years; therefore
self-determination for Armenia should mean the reestablishing a Turkish or Kurdish
state, in which the Armenians would be left to the tender mercies of the majority.
I think that this conception of self-determination is wrong.
Self-determination
means a reconstruction, a readjustment of the world. A homeless people can certainly claim no majority
anywhere in the world in the present moment, just because it is a homeless
people, and the world has got to be so reconstructed as to give every homeless
people a territory where it could try and reconstitute Its majority. This is
exactly what we demand for the Jews in Palestine.
Q.
And what about the Arabs?
A.
The question has two sides. First of all, the Arabs in Palestine itself. The
number is just over 500,000. There is neither need nor intention to disturb or
displace even one of them. The country, if properly developed, can feed
4,000,000 or even 6,000,000, and we undertake to cram these millions in without
squeezing anybody out. I believe that when the Jews gain a majority in Palestine,
the position of the Arabs there will be politically the same as the position of
the Scotch in Great Britain. It will be absolute equality of rights and duties,
and, in addition it will probably be what we term in Eastern Europe “cultural
autonomy"—the right to run their own schools in their own language, to use
that language for all official purposes, and of course to be absolute masters of
all their religious institutions and holy places. Besides, we're going to make
of them citizens of a rich country, whereas to-day they are citizens of a poor
one. So much for the Arab in Palestine.
Now,
the other side of the question is the national interest of the Arab race as a
whole. Allow me to remind you of a few figures. All the Arabic-speaking
populations of Asia and Africa total less than 40,000,000, but they occupy a territory
almost as big as the whole of Europe, stretching from Morocco to the Persian
Gulf.
Palestine
is only 1-170th part of this immense territory. Its transformation into a
Jewish national home will leave the Arab race as rich in national territory as it
is to-d ay — indeed, one of the richest races of the world, as far as land is concerned. They will be able to develop
their national being In Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, Egypt, Sudan, Syria,
Mesopotamia, the Hedjaz, the Yemine — I really think It is quite sufficient to
satisfy the most ambitious nationalism. There is hardly any race In Europe,
however victorious, which has not sacrificed a small fraction of its territory
for the needs of the world's adjustment.
Q.
Do you expect America to help you?
A. I
expect American Jewry to shoulder, financially, the main burden of
reconstruction. But if you ask me what we expect from America as a whole — indeed
from Christian America — I must make a little preface. This is my first visit
to this republic, but somehow l cannot think of myself as a complete stranger
to American conceptions.
As a
child, I was practically brought up (so was the whole of my generation in South
Russia) on Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and the American tales of Capt. Mayne
Reid and numberless other authors, perhaps forgotten by you, but not
by me. My favorite author, after Dante, has always been Edgar Allan Poe; my favorite
heroes, after Garibaldi, are Washington and Lincoln —and — you will forgive my impartiality
— Grant and Lee. I won’t bore you with mentioning more names of statesmen and writers
and others (up to your wonderful Griffith), with
whom I and many of my fellow-Jews live in almost daily communion.
All
this may account for the fact that whenever a great beau jeste or a bold call comes
from America, be it Woodrow Wilton's fourteen points or Mr. Harding's disarmament
scheme, I feel never surprised. To me it comes natural. It is just
what I and my like expect from America as we know it. This is my reply to your
question: What we expect from America.
Zionism
is a great idea, akin to those ideas which inspired Washington and Lincoln: its
prospects and vistas far back and far ahead as vast in the spiritual plane as your
prairie is in the physical; a nation accustomed to great horizons cannot fall
to grasp the value of our ideal. We expect America to understand our struggle,
and when the time comes, to throw her mighty word in our favor.
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