Ahad Ha'am Topics

• anita shapira
• tom segev
• oxford university press
• hebrew culture
• british mandate
• jewish settlers
• hebrew language
• fellahin
• building a nation
• metropolitan books
• jewish homeland
• jewish culture
• largess
• herzl
• jewish state
• zionism
• yisrael
• benefactors
• savages
• nation state

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They reported on hunger, on Arab dissatisfaction and unrest, on unemployment, and on people leaving Palestine. In an essay 'Truth from Eretz Yisrael', soon after his 1891 journey to the area he warned against the 'great error', noticeable among Jewish settlers, of treating the fellahin with contempt, of regarding 'all Arabs a(s) savages of the desert, a people similar to a donkey. Anita Shapira, Land and power: The Zionist resort to force, 1881-1948, Oxford University Press, 1992 p.42 > variant translation in Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate ,Metropolitan Books, 2000 p.104 . He believed that rather than aspiring to establish a 'Jewish National Home' or state immediately, Zionism must bring Jews to Palestine gradually, while turning it into a cultural center. At the same time, it was incumbent upon Zionism to inspire a revival of Jewish national life in the Diaspora. Then and only then, he said, would the Jewish people be strong enough to assume the mantle of building a nation state. Ahad Ha'am did not believe that the impoverished settlers of his day, laboring in Palestine far from the minds of most Jews, would ever build a Jewish homeland. He saw that the Hovevei Tzion movement of which he was a member was a failure, since the new villages created in Israel were dependent on the largess of outside benefactors.

His unique contribution was to emphasize the importance of reviving Hebrew and Jewish culture both in Palestine and throughout the Diaspora, something that was recognized only belatedly, when it became part of the Zionist program after 1898. Herzl did not have much use for Hebrew, and many wanted German to be the language of the Jewish state. Ahad Ha'am played an important role in the revival of the Hebrew language and Jewish culture, and in cementing a link between the proposed Jewish state and Hebrew culture.

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