Fingering disintegrating empires.

If one is going to engage in such in attempts to arrive at some clear understanding of the tragedy that Zionism represents (a tragedy for the Jews as well as for the Palestinians), one needs to look first at a fragile, disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. The restive nationalism unleashed by the long echoes of 1848 settled onto a link between ethnicity and territory. The Serbs, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Slovaks all began to agitate for control not only of such matters as the language of legal documents (Vienna's abandonment of Latin for German exacerbated the problem -- the Hungarians managed to carve out an exception, but none of the rest succeeded) but for territory --- this is OUR ancestral home and we have the right to live HERE as a sovereign people. Problem for the Jews was that they really didn't have a "homeland" per se. Sure, the Roman emperor Titus had kicked their distant ancestors out of a patch of ground in the Levant, but that really had no more weight than a fanciful notion that the Saxons ought to reverse the Norman conquest or an alliance of ancient Celtic peoples in Cornwall, Wales, Eire, Scotland, and Brittany ought to throw out all those barbarians who moved in after the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the midst of all this, you get the rise of a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in Vienna Karl Lueger (not to mention the Dreyfuss Affair in France and the pogroms in Czarist Russia.) A brilliant young rabble-rouser, Theodor Herzl, is acutely aware of all this. He reads a tract by a composer he worshiped, Richard Wagner, entitled Judaism In Music in which /Wagner argued that Jews were incapable of producing art that really moves us -- not because they were genetically inferior or something (Wagner cites Mendelssohn as someone with enormous talents who just can't compete with Beethoven) but because they grow up in a culture that is not their own -- that they have been cut off from their own cultural roots (or those roots have atrophied.) That's it, Herzl thinks. He attends a performance of Tannhauser. He is moved and in a star-struck reverie after the performance, he thinks -- if we Jews are ever going to produce something like this, we need to be a people -- which means having our own land, our own territory -- since territory (at least according to the zeitgeist of the time) is an -- the?_ essential ingredient of a deeply-rooted culture. Well, where and what shall it be? How about our ancestral "homeland"? Sure, there are people living there -- but they are not "a" people, they're just inhabitants of another derelict empire on its last legs (the Ottoman Empire). Let's go for it! And thus we arrive at the current tragedy (although the Brits and we Yanks played later crucial roles -- first the Balfour Declaration and then the way a vacillating Harry Truman was pushed into supporting the nascent "state" of Israel by a group of wealthy and well-connected American Jews (read John Judis's Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict). SR