OLD NEW LAND

Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, published a book of fiction in 1902 with the title Old New Land in which he envisioned what a Jewish Nation in Palestine might be like. Herzl was a secular Austro-Hungarian Jew. He died in 1904 before World Wars I and II and before the British Mandate. He never lived to see the Holocaust, and never lived to see the creation of the modern State of Israel. The book is written through his eyes.

At the time he wrote the book, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. It is not clear to me whether Herzl was describing a completely independent nation state or a semi-autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish community in the book is envisioned as a society created by Jewish immigrants in which the Arabs and people of any religion or origin have equal rights and participation. This idea is reinforced in the story by an election in which those inhabitants who favor inclusion and equal rights for all (portrayed as the good guys) triumph over those who favor an exclusively Jewish government (portrayed as the bad guys). The Jews bring modernism to the land which benefits all the inhabitants including the Arabs.

In real life, one often sees the picture of Herzl hanging on the wall in photographs of Israeli government offices and political events of both the Right and Left. Perhaps many of those nativists in the extreme Right who favor the recent Israeli Nation State Law don’t realize that their position contradicts the vision of the founder of Zionism. Perhaps those Arabs who say they oppose Zionism don’t realize the inclusiveness of Herzl’s vision of Zionism. Perhaps the extremes on both sides either never read or never comprehended what Herzl said in Old New Land.