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Zionism for the people

November 19, 2015 12:59

By

Keith Kahn-Harris,

Keith Kahn-Harris

1 min read

Asher Ginsberg, the influential Zionist thinker better known by his pen name Ahad Ha'am ("One of the people"), died in 1927, long before the state of Israel had come into being. No one can know what he would have said about the nature of the political Zionism that triumphed in 1948 and about the state that it built.

That is convenient, as it allows Ahad Ha'am to be admired and even claimed as a supporter by a swathe of people across the Jewish political spectrum. As a "cultural" Zionist whose vision was to build not a state but a kind of cultural hub, and as someone who had harsh things to say about the Zionist movement's ignorance of Palestine's Arabs, his work attracts today's post-Zionists and critics of Israel.

But he was nonetheless a Zionist who upheld the land of Israel as the Jews' ancestral home and, as such, there are streets named after him in Israel today.

Reading the beautiful Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha'am, (Notting Hill Editions, £14.99) we can at least understand why those who hold a wide range of views on Zionism would wish to embrace him as one of their own.