Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) wrote in his diary on Sep. 3, 1897, three days after the close in Basel of the Zionist Organization's First Zionist Congress that he had chaired:
in Basel habe ich den Judenstaat gegründet. Wenn ich das heute laut sagte, würde mir ein universelles Gelächter antworten. Vielleicht in fünf Jahren, jedenfalls in fünfzig wird es jeder einsehen.
(at Basel, I founded the Jewish State. Were I to say this in public today, I would be greeted with universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, in any case in fifty, everyone will see [the truth of] this.)
 The above quote starts with the final two words of the top line. |
Fifty years later to the day, on Sep. 3, 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) presented its Report to the General Assembly calling for the end of the British Mandate and proposed a Plan of Partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed UNSCOP's plan almost without changes as Resolution 181, thereby formally recognizing "the Jewish State" that Herzl had foreseen.
 The "Palestine Post" reported the General Assembly vote lacking a sense of its historic importance. |
This extraordinary prediction comes to mind on the 120th and 70th anniversaries of the two dates. (September 3, 2017)
Sep. 3, 2017 addendum: And the all-time worst prediction? Perhaps that of the British Cabinet's only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu, writing to it on Mar. 16, 1915:
Palestine in itself offers little or no attraction to Great Britain from a strategical or material point of view ... [It is] incomparably a poorer possession than, let us say, Mesopotamia ... I cannot see any Jews I know tending olive trees or herding sheep ... There is no Jewish race now as a homogenous whole. It is quite obvious that the Jews in Great Britain are as remote from the Jews in Morocco or the black Jews in Cochin as the Christian Englishman is from the moor or the Hindoo
