Major W. E. Gordon, M.P: “What I want to get from you distinctly is that these people who come here, and of whom we are talking now, at all events, are your own people and in need, as you say, of an asylum somewhere, which is the chief thing, the principal consideration?”
Theodore Hetzl: “Yes.”
W.E.G.: “All other considerations are secondary to that in your eyes?”
T.H.: “Yes.”
W.E.G.: “Having those feelings for your own people, do you deny us the right to consider our own people, too?”
T.H.: “You do not want me to answer that question.”
The Chairman: “Whatever the witness says, I do not think the right will be denied to us.”
T.H.: “It is a rhetorical question.”
W.E.G.: “There has been a great deal said about anti-Jewish feeling, a thing I have personally resented in the strongest way, but what I want to get from you as a great Jewish authority is, if the Jewish people are paramount to you and your ways of thinking, may not our own people be paramount to us without our being charged with anti-Jewish feeling?”
T.H.: “It is the same question.”
Theodore Herzl, ed., The Tragedy of Jewish Immigration: Evidence Given Before the British Royal Commission in 1902 (1920)*
Major Gordon’s question was not, in fact, rhetorical. And we may suppose that the Father of Zionism more than once dodged Gordon’s question because his answer would have been, No! Or perhaps that it was not the business of a Jew to assure Britons that Britons should put Britons first.
The Father of Zionism had his own tribal fish to fry.

