Summary
A Brit Shalom cofounder, better known by his pen name Rabbi Binyamin, whose pansemitic vision of a Zionism open to Arab integration Peretz presents as Altneuland (journal)‘s fullest statement of peaceful colonization (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.234-238).
Details
- Radler-Feldman was born in 1880 in Galicia, arrived in Berlin in 1901 to study agriculture, became involved with Zionism through Hebrew writers in Berlin, immigrated to Palestine in 1907 and worked with Arthur Ruppin in the Palestine Office; he propagated his pansemitic vision until his death in 1957 (PDF p.234-235).
- Uniquely, his orientalism did not perceive the encounter with Arabs and Islam as an encounter with biblical Judaism; rather it evoked nostalgia for the Polish shtetl (PDF p.235).
- He argued locals’ needs would be better served by technology helping them intensify production on smaller plots, increasing their readiness to sell land that would thus become superfluous to newcomers, and he called for opening Jewish educational institutions to Arab students as the best method of “peaceful conquest” (PDF p.233, p.235).
- He asserted that the “tribal and character kinship between Arabs and Jews has the natural consequence that the former feels closer to the latter than even to the most tolerant Christian”, held that including Arabs in the Jewish education system would break their exposure to antisemitism through Christian schools, and suggested, failing Arabic newspapers propagating Zionism’s benefit, that Zionists create their own Arab language newspapers (PDF p.236).
- For Radler-Feldman even short-term economic drawbacks would not hinder Arab assimilation: Arabs who spent a few years in the colonies “assimilated into the Jewish population to such an extent that they speak Hebrew and Yiddish” and preferred to go hungry there rather than return to their villages (PDF p.238).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Pansemitism, Brit Shalom, Altneuland (journal)