(From the Vienna correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette, July 1897)

A NEW MOSES has arisen and a Pall Mall representative has unearthed him. It was not in the bleak and howling wilderness, but in one of those charming mountain resorts of the jaded Viennese that our Patriarch—or Dr. Theodor Herzl, as he is called for the nonce— revealed himself and his purpose, and chatted about the biggest idea in creation. If his adherents have read destiny aright, he is the one whom the scattered and persecuted tribes of Israel have vainly sought for centuries to lead them back to the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. In the plainest and most prosaic of nineteenth century language, he has on foot the floating of a limited liability company in London, with an invested capital of millions, for the purpose of acquiring Palestine and thoroughly organising it for settlement. That is the so-called Zionistic movement of today. Dr. Herzl, according to himself, is no business man. And yet he has facts and figures at his finger-ends which have won for him converts throughout the world. His strength seems to lie in the fact that he has a mighty grievance to remedy and brings plain common-sense to bear upon it. He talks nothing of precursory signs, Moses and the Prophets, of Dispersion fulfilled, and Restoration foretold. Imbued with the genuine altruism of the times, he has taken on his broad shoulders, in the service of his countrymen, a task to which the twelve tasks of Hercules, in the service of Eurystheus, were but a bagatelle. He proposes in one coup to settle the Anti-Semitic agitation for ever and aye, and in its stead a Jewish State, which is today a myth, an unknown quantity, is to startle the world by a leap into existence.

First impressions are proverbially deceptive. Dr. Herzl, a tall, handsome, courteous man, is no exception. He is disappointingly phlegmatic for one with a cause that may deplete Europe in a decade or so of ten million inhabitants and solve the most burning social question of the day. It is only when you have seen something of the hidden fires of enthusiasm that smoulder ‘beneath the surface that you get another impression. The worthy doctor has played many parts in his time. He has practised law and written plays, and is now one of the best known journalists and literary men in Austria. He is in the prime of glowing manhood, a devotee of the “bike”, of a Grecian rather than a Jewish type of profile, and with an immense reserve of strength in a frame modelled on perfect athletic lines. He means to found a colony up-to-date, which will know nothing of the solitary unaided pioneer of a virgin country, without civilisation, law and rational government. Sheridan exclaimed that he had finished his play when he had found his plot—he had only to write it. In the same way, Dr. Herzl will have acquired and opened up the land before the colonisation proper takes place.

“For founding the Jewish State”, said Dr. Herzl, “my plan might be styled a Jewish Rhodesia, but with this difference, that within a year or so of Palestine being acquired from the Turk, I shall have a million colonists in the country”.

“And your plan, Doctor?”

“It is to confer over this point that a congress has been arranged for at Basle on August 29. I am told that among the Bulgarian Jews there is a belief that on that date a Messiah will arise; but whatever may happen, there is no doubt that that congress will be the Redeemer of the Jews. The immediate result of the Zionistic movement has been to unite the most antagonistic Jewish elements, and to bring into actual life a new school of Jewish literature”.

A crowded and enthusiastic meeting in support of the forthcoming Zionist Congress under Dr. Th. Herzl, at Basle, was held at the Jewish Working Men’s Club, Whitechapel, on the 1st inst., the chair being taken by the Rev. Dr. Gaster, Sephardic Chief Rabbi. At the outset Mr. J. de Haas, secretary in England for Dr. Herzl, read a letter from Father Ignatius, who said he regretted that the Chovevi Zion would not be represented at the congress. He regarded the view of the rabbis who dissented from the Zionist movement as very curious, and was of opinion that the anti-Semitic movement was paving the way for a European consensus in favour of a Jewish settlement. No European nation could have any political or international objection to such an occupation of Palestine. Religiously Christendom would greatly sympathise in the erection of a Jewish State, and commercially speaking it would benefit the world. Mr. Jacob de Haas, in proposing the resolution, “That this meeting of Jews resident in London approves the holding of the Zionist congress which will assemble at Basle on August 29-31st, and wishes to be represented at the congress by delegates”, said that the Jewish nation was a huge family, and in the forthcoming congress they would meet to discuss their domestic troubles. Out of the 9,000,000 Jews accounted for, not more than ten per cent, lived absolutely free from active persecution or anti-Semitic attacks, and, moreover, it was admitted that nothing could be done for the masses in the countries in Which they lived. Mr. E. Ish-Rishor supported the resolution, which was carried unanimously.

One of the Israeli chemical industry’s major distribution bottlenecks could soon be removed with the news that a Belgian company specialising in planning transport projects has offered to help extend the rail network to the Red Sea port of Eilat.

At present, the railway only connects the phosphate deposits near Arad to the Mediterranean ports of Ashdod and Haifa. Export shipments of phosphate rock and potash from the Dead Sea Works intended for East African and Asian markets have to be transported across the Negev to Eilat by lorry.

Extension of the rail system across the desert has been proposed again in view of the buoyant demand and rising price of Israel’s two major chemical exports. An earlier attempt to get the Japanese to build a rail link from the Dead Sea to Eilat failed because of the cost of ascending the 396m.-deep Jordan valley near the Dead Sea. Even the offer of the Sodom potash plant’s entire by-product salt — equal apparently, to the world’s total needs—failed to move the Japanese.

Israel mined 750,000 ton of phosphate rock from the Negev last year. Potash production probably reached lm. ton with expansions in hand to raise production to 1.2m. ton.

European Chemical News, July 26th, 1974.