Herzl's vision of racism

[bemildred]

In 1902, Theodor Herzl published his utopian novel "Altneuland" ("The Old New Land"), in which he described the Jewish state to be established in Palestine in 1923. In doing so, Herzl not only provided an idealized description of the Zionist movement's goal; he also provided the State of Israel - the product of Zionism - with a mirror for viewing itself in light of Herzl's vision. Not many national movements have such an efficient tool for self-scrutiny.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the description of the election campaign that was to have taken place in 1923. The campaign focused on the rights of the country's non-Jewish inhabitants. Contrary to what is sometimes said of Zionism - that it ignored the existence of Arabs in the country - the book reveals not only an awareness of the existence of the Arab population; the Jewish state is predicated on the concept that all its inhabitants, regardless of religion, race or gender, enjoy equal rights and the right to vote. These rights are extended not only to Arabs, but to women, though at the time the book was written no Western democracy had given women the vote.

In the book, not only do the country's Arabs have the right to vote, some of them serve in key posts. Among them is one of the novel's heroes, an Arab engineer from Haifa named Rashid Bey. To use a term from our day, Herzl envisioned a state that would be both Jewish and democratic, both a Jewish nation state and a state of all its citizens. A new party appeared in the 1923 campaign, headed by a man who had recently come to the country and wanted to annul his old citizenship and rescind the right to vote of all non-Jews. Herzl named the founder of the Jewish racist party Geyer (which in German means a bird that eats carrion), modeling the character and his ideology after the Viennese anti-Semitic leader Karl Lueger.

Geyer's argument was simple: This is a Jewish state, and only Jews should have the right to citizenship. Others can remain as tolerated residents, but they do not deserve equal political rights.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1062723.html

[Trajan]

1. Some powerful analogies here ....

and certain to generate the typical cynical responses ...

(Even my own response was an example of the realist cynicism we expect)

Thanks for this ....

[bemildred]

2. My pleasure. nt

[wtmusic]

3. Religion-based government and equality for all

are mutually exclusive concepts. Pick a religion, any religion.

[LeftishBrit]

4. Sounds fascinating! I hope it gets translated into English.

[Igel]

5. It was.

Old-new land (Altneuland)
by Theodor Herzl
Book : Fiction; English
Publisher: New York, Bloch Pub. Co., 1960.
Edition: <2d ed. with rev. footnotes> | 3 Editions
OCLC: 326585

The Cambridge Library has it, WorldCat tells me. Presumably it's in other British libraries, but it was published in the US so it may not be widespread.

Wiki lists other publication dates as 1961, for Israel; and '87 and '97 for different US publishers. If there's an online union catalog for British libraries (surely there must be), check there to see if it's local.

Ah ... a "union catalog" is a catalog for all the libraries participating in some collective mutual-aid relationship. The big US "national union catalog" was the compilation of all the library card catalogs at I don't know how many hundreds of university, public, and private libraries in the US. A damned handy research tool, if you're into interlibrary loan. WorldCat's replaced it, though, and in recent years they've been augmenting their non-US coverage.

[LeftishBrit]

7. It turns out that it's in my university library...

so I'll try and get hold of it.

[azurnoir]

6. So in the next 24 hours or so

we'll know is Israel has decided to start the process od becoming a Geyerist state