Summary
Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel (1902), set twenty years in the future, in which Palestine has an overwhelmingly Jewish population and its former Arab inhabitants are virtually absent yet are insisted to have benefited from Zionism — Zachary Lockman’s exhibit for the invisibility, or at best marginality, of the Arab population in early Zionist representation (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 462-464).
Details
- The Arabs of Altneuland are apparently content with their new marginal status, their virtual invisibility in the land where twenty years earlier — when Herzl was actually writing — they had been demographically and culturally dominant; their economic prosperity is held to more than compensate for, indeed to render utterly irrelevant, their transformation into a small minority in a predominantly Jewish society (lines 462-464).
- Ahad Ha’am’s scathing review of the novel charged that the Jewish state Herzl imagined lacked any authentic Jewish content and that Herzl failed to take Arab opposition seriously (lines 482-484; Chapter 1 note 20 locates the review in Kol kitvei Ahad Ha’am, 313–20).
- Chapter 1 note 17 records Lockman’s critique of readings of the novel: Yosef Gorny reads it as manifesting only the “universalist, humanist essence” of Herzl’s thought, without mentioning Herzl’s diary passages envisioning the dispossession and displacement of Palestine’s Arab peasantry (lines 668-674).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Zionism