Greater Israel–A Land with no People, For a People with no Land (Part 2 of 5)

Part 2 of 2)

Altneuland

Herzl’s Altneuland nevertheless provides a very impressive vision. Herzl is au courant with all concurrent developments in science, machinery and technology. The new Jewish State of 1923 has illuminated highways for automobiles and there are gleaming architecturally impressive buildings and bridges. The country is criss-crossed with continental railways which connect Africa and Europe and the country is a hub for a global telegraphic network. There are inter-city monorails, there is a National Research Institute that conducts groundbreaking research, there are clinics and modern hospitals, a subscriber owned news network, a national water main that supports large irrigation and agricultural works such as a Mediterranean-Dead Sea tunnel (a project that is still yet mooted) using a 1400 foot vertical drop, (Niagara Falls has a vertical fall of 160 feet in comparison) to feed one of the world’s great hydro-generation facilities. There are desalination plants and chemical factories drawing rare minerals, fertilizer and valuable salts from the Dead Sea. There are modern harbours with giant shipping cranes, and an electrical grid that runs up and down the backbone of the entire country. Land is publicly owned and medicine is universal and free to all citizens. There are universities and poly-technical institutes amongst many organizations to assist other developing nations.

Just as importantly or even more importantly, is the Jewish State’s political and legal institutions. Politically, the country functions as a full democracy with an open and universal franchise; the country is pluralistic and ethnically diverse where comity and peace preside between its different religions and nationalities. Arab citizens, through a single representative character Rashid Bey, are portrayed as civilized people who recognize the high civilization that the Jews carry with them and the value that this high culture imparts. There is an independent judiciary and rule of law. All citizens are accorded a roster of private rights and privileges equal to that of any European state.

This is all very startling and far removed from the bucolic, pastoral and agrarian visions of the Lovers of Zion movement (Hovevei Zion)  and the socialist (Bundist) agriculturalists of the pre-Yishuv founders and settlers. Certainly none of Herzl’s vision accords with the dubious, utterly bogus, “setter colonial” binary, and the dreadful racist epithets and political aspersions that are cast at Israel so ceaselessly today. 

Lewis Mumford’s interest in Herzl’s novel is multifold. Mumford had written in 1922, the year prior to his review of  Altneulanda survey of utopias from Plato’s Republic through Henry More’s 1516 “Utopia” to the 20th century techno-utopias of H.G. Wells’ 1905 A Modern Utopia. Herzl’s utopia would consequently be of considerable interest as an extension of this study. 

Mumford was especially absorbed by the pre-mandatory Jewish “Yishuv”, and the pre-state zionist dreamers, planners and architects. Mumford was particularly interested in the energizing moral springs of action of the early zionists to build intensive agricultural communities, model towns and garden cities. Indeed, Mumford’s great mentor, the Aberdeen born Scotsman Patrick Geddes, a man that Mumford could not hold in higher intellectual esteem, was to play an important part in laying out modernistic Israeli cities and towns. Mumford, and very markedly, only speaks of the “great” Geddes in the most hushed and near reverential terms. 

Geddes certainly and by general consensus, and not just in Mumford’s view, was a polymath, genius, and intellectual savant extraordinaire. An early supporter of Darwin, he would become one of the great expositors of evolutionary theory. A botanist, biologist, sociologist, economist, architect and the father of urban design and planning, Geddes was to lay out the original “master plan” for Tel Aviv’s “White City” in 1925, (the only city interestingly that was fully planned and designed by Geddes). Geddes envisioned Tel Aviv as a Garden City in Ebenezer Howard’s sense. In fact, Geddes went further, describing Tel Aviv as the “City of Fruit”, basically a city situated in an orchard; full of flowering shrubs, a place that would be like none other in the world–a city that would dominate and transform the entire eastern Mediterranean basin. 

Geddes’ other contributions in Israel are numerous, including the design for Hebrew University and a city plan for Jerusalem. 

Mumford, as his voluminous correspondence reveals, was greatly preoccupied by the physical danger facing Europe’s Jews, after seeing much of Europe and its civilized order immolated during the First World War. Mumford had not, by his own admission, however, foreseen the full murderous fury that Europe’s Jewish populations would be subject to in the immediate aftermath of the First World War nor did he see the even darker clouds ominously looming. 

Herzl, perhaps more attuned to the Jewish predicament, after reporting on the sudden upsurge of antisemitism and the fratricide induced by the Dreyfus Trial and its near fatal blow to the Third French Republic, was deeply shaken by the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Indeed, the whole world shuttered in the aftermath of the Kishinev rampage where 49 Bessarabian Jews were left dead in the Romanian town of the same name and another 92 gravely wounded. This violent pogrom shattered the hopeful assumptions of the 20th century as a coming century of peace, technical advancement, endless wealth creation and worldwide integration. The Kishinev deaths, seemingly so inconsequential and minor from the perspective of the post-Holocaust reckoning, were extensively covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers. And the Jewish community, actively responded to the Kishinev pogrom by creating important philanthropic institutions, including the still extant World Jewish Congress and the Joint Distribution Committee.

A great deal was to transpire between Herzl’s death in 1904 and Mumford’s 1923 penning of his book review of Altneuland. The catastrophic implosion of Europe and with it much of Europe’s civilized 19th century values. Herzl’s world of opera houses, classical music, grand boulevards, coffee houses and the swarms of educated and fashionable literary society to capture his ever perceptive eye had metamorphosized into a continent-wide charnel house. 

And more ominously, something far worse was emerging from the dark corners and festering netherworld of hades. Anonymous antisemitic and anti-zionist conspiratorial narratives were starting their long circuitous worldwide dissemination. The most infamous of these screeds was the forged, fraudulent 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its powerful imagery of a midnight cemetery meeting of the “Elders of Zion”, patterned deliberately on Herzl’s first world Zionist congress meeting in Basle, a conniving immortal cabal plotting global domination and enslavement. This phantasmagoric conflation, with its unsettling imagery and symbolism, found a deep long hidden trapdoor into the darkest recesses of the human unconscious where primal hatred and murder abide. These anti-Jewish conspiracy theories coincided with the Communist Revolution of 1917 and its  revolutionary spectre unleashing unplumbed levels of malevolence and deep rushing currents of irrational suspicion and hatred. 

Lewis Mumford’s world in 1923 had already become hardened and coarsened to a degree that was not previously imaginable. The comity and secure verities of the 19th century were supplanted by a new kind of nationalism imbued with racial animosity and hatred. Between 1917 and 1921 during the Russian Civil War, 1500 pogroms would take place across the Ukraine, White Russia, Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Romania and the Baltic’s leaving as many as 250,000 Jews dead, 500,000 Jewish children orphaned and 1,000,000 people displaced. But these horrors were just a dress rehearsal for much worse that was coming. 

The Great Depression of the 1930s pulled the economic rug out from under the Western democracies. Those with more finely attuned historical antennae could see the danger ahead. Many perceptive voices spoke of the impending catastrophe. The Zionists were perhaps the most vocal and perspicacious in seeing the approaching storm with the assimilationists and the large European Jewish bourgeoisie and the somnambulant religious masses of Eastern Europe and Western Russia being the most oblivious, naive and clueless as to the fate awaiting them. 

Even intellectual figures on the left pointed to the dark storm clouds. Leon Trotsky, the Stalin exiled revolutionary wrote from his Mexico City safehouse in 1938, “that it is quite possible to imagine the destruction that awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future World War. But even without war the next development of world ‘reaction’ will spell the physical extermination of Europe’s Jews.” This ghastly and horrifying prediction was made after Kristalnacht but prior to Hitler’s menacing and haunting January 31st, 1939 prophecy statement:

“If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the complete annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

One might ask why Herzl chose to reset his utopia in the year 1923. It was twenty years in the future, a generation approximately. And at Herzl’s forty-three years of age, it is a point of time in the future when Herzl could still see himself alive, and possibly still influential if not in command of the movement he was building. Twenty years, representing a human generation, is also a discrete span of time. If one takes the events of the earlier period of say 1880-1900 into consideration, and assumes the same level of unhindered technical progress in the coming two decades (i.e. 1903 to 1923), then one could very well picture the electrified machine-driven modernistic state Herzl envisioned. 

*Dedicated to the memory of 24-year-old Danielle Waldman and 26-year-old Noam Shay, attendants at the Supernova concert who were brutally murdered on October 7th, 2023. Long-time romantic partners they were buried side by side in Kiryat Tivon.  May they not be forgotten and may their memory be a blessing. 

(Part 3 of 5 to follow)