Herzl’s Jewish-Arab Utopia, ‘Old New Land’ – Doomed Never to be Realized?

His detractors would, perhaps, have accused Theodore Herzl of writing his city-pastoral Arcadian vision for the Jewish state, embodied in “Altneuland”, published in 1902, to have been a cynical attempt to convince the Ottoman Emperor to let the Jews have a state in the Levant. Cynical because elsewhere Herzl, a Liberal Political Zionist, had written that such a vision – of Jews and Arabs co-existing in political and cultural harmony — could never be realized.

Herzl’s sponsors would, perhaps, have countered this assertion – and counter now – by pointing to the fact that his diaries, whilst they were brutally honest, suggesting, in 1895, that the Arabs should be “spirited away” from a Judenstaadt (Jewish state) these diaries did not, in 1902, mention his intent to bedazzle or deceive the Ottoman Emperor with his book.

With the exception of Binyamin Netanyahu, perhaps Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime ministers, of all political persuasions, started off with Herzl’s Arcadian outlook and ended up rejecting his vision as being unworkable.

Unlike Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement and Herut, the precursor of Likud, Binyamin Netanyahu has never accommodated such a possibility and, perhaps, were she still alive, Golda Meir would have agreed with him (see her op ed for the New York Times, published on 14th January 1976 where she pays lip service to what “might have been” with the Palestinian Arabs).

And Liberal Zionists and non-Zionists should here take note that their prime minister, a left-Liberal Zionist herself, widely believed to be Israel’s most astute, most articulate leader, saw it her duty to point to the futility of cooperating with the Palestinians.

As to Yithak Rabin, the question of whether he, too, would have changed his mind and dealt severely with the Arabs were he allowed to live, still hangs in the air.

Binyamin Netanyahu and his view, that the Palestinians can only be dealt with by the use of force – his Iron Wall theory, may by some, be explained to the waverers by the adage, cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Antisemitism it would seem, is now ingrained in the collective unconscious – a term defined by Karl Jung who claimed that certain impulses are diected by beliefs embedded in it – at least its Christian variety.

However, the antisemitism of Christians cannot be said to be endemic. If it were endemic, it would ebb and flow.

The antisemitism expressed by the Arabs cannot, perhaps, yet be said to have embedded itself in their collective psyche. Arab antisemitism is a phenomenon which began in the late 19th through to the early 20th centuries: Christian antisemitism dates back to the early years of the Roman Empire, or earlier.

The lead up to, and actual spike in, both the Christian and Arab antisemitism, caused by the dissemination of false propaganda by Hamas, intended by Hamas to contribute to the extermination of the Jews in Israel, has, to what must be their chagrin, backfired – in two ways:-

Firstly, it has led to the jettisoning, by the country’s leaders, of the last vestiges of policies sympathetic to the Palestinians.

The new type of leader is now personified by Netanyahu. And the new type of leader is backed – and emboldened – by the new “sheriff in town” in the person of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, in his turn, is backed and emboldened by his Christian Evangelist base.

Secondly, the rise in antisemitism worldwide means, for many in Israel and the Diaspora that, whatever they do – or don’t do – they are not going to satisfy those who now spread the blood libel lies anew and, conversely, bay for Jewish blood; it means that in their minds the only solution is to plough ahead regardless.