{"id":91823,"date":"2022-01-05T17:05:28","date_gmt":"2022-01-05T15:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=91823"},"modified":"2021-12-28T08:26:59","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T06:26:59","slug":"early-zionist-pioneers-adhered-to-the-same-founding-ethos-as-todays-settlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=91823","title":{"rendered":"Early Zionist Pioneers Adhered to the Same Founding Ethos as Today’s Settlers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Early Zionist Pioneers Adhered to the Same Founding Ethos as Today’s Settlers<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Shlomo Sand<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Kibbutz members of Ein Herod in 1941.Credit: Government Press Office<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I am a loyal reader of Haaretz editorials, and I am imbued with admiration over the audacity of those who write them. Not many of the world\u2019s newspapers feature such consistent and courageous liberal positions, in concise and sharp columns, for years on end. So I felt uneasy reading the article \u201cBar-Lev Is Right\u201d (Dec. 16).<\/span><\/p>\n

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The editorial writer notes that Interior Minister Ayalet Shaked is lying when she claims that \u201cthe settlers are the salt of the earth<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> the successors to the [early Zionist] pioneers,\u201d decisively concluding instead that \u201cthe settlers are not the successors of the pioneers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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I would very much like to join in this statement, but as a historian, as a matter of principle, I am supposed to seek historical truth, even if I know I\u2019ll never attain it. So I will try to begin our little story, which is no fable, from the beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1891, before the publication of Theodor Herzl\u2019s \u201cThe Jewish State\u201d and long before the Balfour Declaration, a loyal lover of Zion who for some reason preferred to be called Ahad Ha\u2019am \u2013 one of the people \u2013 visited the country. A famous Zionist theoretician by then, he sought to check out the work of his admirers and disciples, whom he called colonists, as the Hebrew terms for pioneer and settler had not yet been invented. He made the arduous journey to the country to assess the pace of \u201cimigratzia\u201d (the use of the word aliyah had not yet become common), as well as progress in the establishment of Jewish \u201ccolonias\u201d (as neither the Hebrew \u201cmoshava\u201d nor the modern Hebrew word for settlement was yet in use).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Make no mistake. Ahad Ha\u2019am was inventing and writing a marvelous Hebrew and some of our writing today owes him a great debt of gratitude. But a modern language is created slowly and in stages, and one of the fathers of modern Hebrew should be forgiven for using foreign terms \u2013 and even worse, insufficiently national ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

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On his return from his tour, this father of spiritual Zionism publishes his brilliant essay \u201cTruth From Eretz Israel\u201d in his own newspaper, Hashiloach. The truth that Ahad Ha\u2019am reveals is rather shocking and unfortunately bears out some of Interior Minister Shaked\u2019s comments.<\/span><\/p>\n

The colonists, Ahad Ha\u2019am states, \u201cconduct themselves with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unjustifiably trespassing against them, shamefully beating them without sufficient reason and even boasting of doing so, and there was no one who would stem the tide of this despicable and dangerous tendency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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