The Struggle for Independence 149
produced in 1896 a pamphlet The Jewish State, in which he pro-
posed the creation of a Jewish national territory. It fell on fertile soil
among Jewish student-societies in European universities, and others
whose dream of the return to ZIon had been given urgency by the
persecution of Jewry in Russia. The three motifs: religious Zion-
ism, the need of asylum from persecution and discrimination, and
Herzl's political idea, fused. 'Almost overnight lie found Mmself
the head of a great party in Jewry: political Zionism had been
bom.. . .Jewry was to be divested of its peculiar attributes and
made "as other nations", bound together politically and self-con-
scious/ After seven years of failure of the Zionist Organization to
interest any Great Power in their plans *to establish for the Jewish
people a home in Palestine secured by public law', it received in
1903 an offer from the British government to establish an autono-
mous Jewish settlement in what was then called British East
Africa. Herzl himself, who had never been wedded to Palestine
as the only land for his prospective state, was attracted by this
so-called'Uganda Scheme'; but before anything could be finally
settled he died, and the Zionist Congress of 1905, dominated by
Eastern European Jews imbued with the traditional religious
Zionism, resolved on the fundamental principle of the coloniza-
tion of'Palestine and the adjacent lands' and nowhere else.1
The outbreak of the First World War transferred the centre of
gravity of the growing Zionist movement from the continent of
Europe to Britain and the U.S.A. In these two countries the
principal protagonists of Zionism were respectively Dr. Hayyim
Weizmann, born in Poland but for some years lecturer in chemistry
at Manchester University, where he had 'converted Prime
Minister Balfour to Zionism in the middle of the East Manchester
election'2 (!): and the lawyer Louis D. Brandeis, who actively
supported Woodrow Wilson for President of the U.S.A. and was
rewarded by being made a Judge of the Supreme Court.3 A
'British Palestine Committee' formed on Weizmann's inspira-
tion, issued a periodical under the slogan 'To reset the ancient
glories of the Jewish nation in the freedom of a new British domi-
nion in Palestine'. The only non-Jewish member of this com-
mittee, the journalist Herbert Sidebotham of the Manchester
1 Hyamson, Palestine: A Policy, ch. V.
2 Herbert Sidebotham, Great Britain and Palestine, 54.
3 Rabbi Stephen Wise, In The Jewish National Home, 1917-42 (Paul Good-
man, ed.), 41.