Summary
German Zionist and practical-settlement advocate who, in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, coined “Egyptian Palestine” and “Greater Palestine”, co-founded Sha’are Zion and the Jewish Orient Colonization Society with Franz Oppenheimer, edited Palästina, and was Herzl’s antagonist over Cyprus and small-scale settlement (PDF p.123-125, p.129, p.143-149).
Details
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Trietsch founded Sha’are Zion [The Gates of Zion] in 1898 with Leo Motzkin, among others, to promote settlement in countries adjacent to Palestine; his exegesis made El-Arish, east of the Brook of Egypt, settleable Eretz Israel (PDF p.124).
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He shared Oppenheimer’s reverence for Henry George, translated George’s Moses lecture into German, and became the garden city idea’s main proponent within the Zionist movement after Oppenheimer introduced him to it (PDF p.124-125).
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Herzl, at odds with Trietsch since his First Zionist Congress motion to begin colonization with Cyprus, considered him a renegade although he adopted Trietsch’s “Egyptian Palestine” concepts; at the Sixth Zionist Congress Herzl discredited him by reading the statement of a Galatz woman ruined by Trietsch’s failed Cyprus expedition (PDF p.125, p.129).
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As editor of Palästina he argued a scientific Palästinakunde would replace biblical-messianic fantasy with a technical roadmap, blaming political Zionism’s unwillingness “to allow the premature shattering of the power of fantasy to control the masses with the hard arguments of facts” (PDF p.143).
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His “Greater Palestine” map in Palästina depicted Palestine without clear-cut borders to visualise settlement potential across the Middle East, and he argued for centrally coordinated but decentrally distributed colonization creating local Jewish majorities in nexus with Palestine (PDF p.146-149).
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Trietsch contrasted Arab emigrants from Syria, who returned capital and know-how from New York to their homeland, with the Jewish diaspora’s lack of attachment, and argued new diasporas near Palestine — Egypt and Cyprus — should be created as a network in constant nexus with it rather than dispersed to distant centers (PDF p.150-151).
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He proposed “spheres of interest” on the borders of “Greater Palestine” for possible future annexation, charted by the “Jewish colonial politician” (PDF p.156).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer, Jewish Orient Colonization Society, Greater Palestine, Altneuland (journal), Commission for the Exploration of Palestine