This Was My Comment.

Submitted by Isa Almisry (United States), Mar 16, 2012 at 00:29

"One can go back even further, and read the words of Ahad Ha-'Am in 1891"

That's it. Hardly rambling.

The rest are Ahad Ha-'Am's comments, from his "Emet m'Eretz Yisrael" (" A Truth from the Land of Israel), a pamphlet published in 1891 to warn Jews of the folly of "a people without a land for a land without a people" because it was based on a lie, a fact he knew from taking part in the First 'Aliyah at the end of its first decade. If his contemporaneous comments ramble too much for you, maybe you would prefer the words of his colleague Judah Leon Magnes "If the only way of establishing the Jewish National Home is upon the bayonets of some empire, our whole enterprise is not worthwhile, and it is better that the Eternal People that has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its soul in patient and plan and wait."

In case you do not know Ahad Ha-'Am, he established modern Hebrew prose, and Judah Magnes founded Hebrew U. Both founded "cultural Zionism" in opposition to Herzel, holding that the Jews should raise the Yishuv as a cultural and spiritual model for the Diaspora, rather than swindling the people in the land, i.e. the Palestinians, and impose a racist state doomed to perpetual warfare within and without to sustain it. As Ahad Ha-'Am said in 1891 (hopefully not too rambling) "we surely must learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of these people by doing them wrong...and what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite!...they deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty...and these people will be revengeful like no other." The warning went unheeded then, and Zionism since then has been reaping what it has sown.

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