The founders of Zionism didn’t blame anti-Semites for the Jewish condition; they faulted the Jews. Without sentimentality, the early Zionists looked at the flaws in the Jewish character, developed over centuries of homelessness and insecurity, and set out to transform their people. Jews were resented as economic middlemen? Get them to work the land. Jews were physically threatened? Teach them to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, Ben-Gurion admonished, but what the Jews do.
