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Thursday, December 24, 2009
Chaim Weizmann
I woke up and on my way to pick up my two newspapers, I encountered one of the volumes of Chaim Weizmann's letters and papers in my library (or my excess library, located in the garage of my house). I was reading it this morning and thought of this: 1) we still don't have a critical anti-Zionist biography of either Weizmann or Herzl or Ben-Gurion. That is a big gap in the literature. Some new PhD with fluency in European languages and Hebrew should focus on that. There are Arabic biographies of those people but they are not worthwhile. 2) Because the Zionist colonizers prevailed in Palestine, we still don't know much about the alternative Zionist plans. I mean, it was clear in those papers that the Zionist discussions were occupied for years with Uganda as a the destination. In fact, Weizmann suspected that Herzl was cooking a scheme to finalize the Uganda plan. 3) there are references in those papers to the "Mesopotamia" plan that was cooked by Herzl (presumably for Jewish colonization in Iraq) and on which we don't know much; 4) When you read the private papers or letters of the founders of Zionism you clearly more than detect a contempt and condescension on the part of those leaders toward Jewish masses (rabble in the language of this lousy Weizmann).