The chutzpah to dare

Editorial

In a cost-cutting measure, the German air carrier Lufthansa announced it would cut flights to Israel, among other routes. The news came just as the Israeli airline Israir announced a new route from Tel Aviv to Basel, Switzerland.

This new Tel Aviv to Basel route is significant, the airline noted, because Basel is a desirable tourist destination that puts travelers in Switzerland, just a short distance from the borders of France and Germany. It is, of course, also the birthplace of Zionism.

In August 1897, Basel was the site of the First Zionist Congress, at which Theodor Herzl presided over a ragtag group of idealists with the crazy idea that the Jewish people should have a state of their own. Herzl was able to foresee the reality of Jewish nationalism in the ancient land of the Jewish people, but even he could not have foreseen Israir flying direct from TVA to Basel.

Herzl may have seen the news – a scant six months before his death in 1904 – that the Wright brothers had succeeded in a heavier-than-air human flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. It is likely that he heard of the famous flight, given that his primary vocation was journalism, but the European media were deeply anti-Wright, convinced that the first human flight would take place not in the New World, but above European soil. French newspapers called the Wrights bluffeurs – bluffers.

Herzl received similar treatment, not least from disbelieving Jews. A joke has Viennese coffee denizens offering to join the struggle for a Jewish state if Herzl could guarantee them an ambassadorship to Vienna.

No one now doubts the impact Herzl had in the creation of the state of Israel. Similarly, no one anymore calls the Wright brothers bluffeurs. But these dreamers and doers could not have imagined the controversies that would roil a century on. Herzl’s vision of Jews living unmolested in the Holy Land remains a dream. And, while heavier-than-air flight may be as routine as ordering a sachertorte, Herzl would doubtlessly be baffled by the airborne controversies over pets on board and nut-free cabins.

^TOP