The Case for Israel

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way t

The popular rendition of his view was that Palestine was a “land without a people, waiting for a people without a land.”3 That, of course, was not entirely accurate. Neither, though, was it entirely wrong. While there were people in Palestine, they were not organized in any way approximating what Europeans would have expected. The Ottomans (Turkish

majority wanted to see the Palestinians enjoy the right to self-determination, but not at the cost of denying Israelis the most fundamental right: to life. They looked around the Middle East and saw the overthrow of corrupt, nonelected Arab rulers and their replacement by Islamist radicals.

the leadership of the Yishuv sensed that it needed to alter its strategy. It began to endorse illegal immigration and exerted more effort in helping Jews to enter Palestine.