Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) is, of course, best known as founder and first president of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. This brilliant and remarkable woman also single-handedly edited the American Jewish Year Book; helped compile the Jewish Encyclopedia; organized and directed the American Zionist Medical Unit, the precursor to the Hadassah Medical Organization; held the social welfare portfolio as an executive of Va’ad Le’umi of Palestine Jewry, in which capacity she instituted hygiene programs and established vocational schools; and served as director of Youth Aliyah, which trained and cared for thousands of Jewish German children escaping the Holocaust.
Not as well known, however, is that Szold opposed the exercise of unilateral Jewish autonomy and self-government in Eretz Yisrael and that instead she advocated a joint Arab–Jewish state that would be part of a broader Arab Federation. As such, if the term “Zionism,” first coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, means the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there, then Szold was no Zionist.
Szold was among the founders and leaders (she served on its executive committee) of Ichud (“Unity”), a political group that campaigned against the creation of an independent, sovereign Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. Though the Jewish Agency and the political leadership of the Yishuv essentially ignored it, Ichud, in a grand act of perfidy and betrayal, unilaterally submitted its “ideas” to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946) and then to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (1947), thereby undermining the unified Jewish position with respect to the establishment of a wholly Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael.
Among other public acts, Ichud published a 1942 letter in the Baltimore Jewish Times (selected possibly because Szold had deep personal roots in Baltimore) claiming that the Zionists were “chauvinistic” and “territorial. ” Even the Arab press at the time reported that Ichud was an anti-Zionist party – which, of course, it was.
Moreover, in the astonishing letter shown here, Szold writes of her continuing support for the British Mandate in Palestine – she argues that it was a “fundamental error” to “agree with the [British] Royal Committee that the Mandate was unworkable” – and, almost unbelievably, that her response to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration was to wish for “another 70 years of the Babylonian exile under British Rule.” On September 2, 1938 – less than two months before Kristallnacht and with ominous overtones of the Holocaust to come – Szold wrote to Abraham Bookstein upon his return from a trip to Poland:
….It is certainly understood that your discussion of your notes from Poland tormented me in a special way. Poland is a high-volume home for Judaism and it has the ability and duty to give to Eretz Yisrael the greatest number of soldiers. To my great regret, I have never visited this land. However, I feel with all my heart that without a fundamental knowledge of this portion of our people there, it is impossible to have a full understanding of the character of our people in general. If our people there will descend together from its ethical heights, which were sufficient to influence our faith, experience, and educational system, then there is no doubt that it is our duty to reproach the offensive lifestyle in Poland.
You ask me what is my position with respect to the British Partition Plan. From the very first instant, I was instinctively against this idea. And every day I find additional reasons for my position. The Jewish state that would come into existence through the Partition Plan would not be even a “kernel” of the state over which Herzl dreamed and as to which the entire Jewish people aspired.
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