In an interview on Israel

Your first book, The Old-New-Land by Theodor Herzl, is said to have changed the face of the Middle East – how so?

This is probably not Herzl’s most important piece of writing. It’s not a political thing or a polemic. But, it’s this idea that he imagined how wonderful it would be when the Jews re-established themselves in their ancient homeland. It was written shortly before his death in 1904.

The reason I chose this and all the books I selected is that when I was writing my book, Emancipation, what I quickly came to see is that every stage of the integration of this ghettoised community into European society has produced push-back from a minority of Jew-haters on the other side. The vast middle didn’t care one way or the other.

Before Herzl there was Moses Hess who had also theorised about Zionism. He was one of the original left thinkers in Europe who introduced the term communism to Karl Marx. Marx called him the Communist Rabbi. There was a lot of talk at the time about what goes into making a nation. The whole of the 19th century for the Jews, and for the other smaller groups in Europe, was the story of nationalism. What Hess, and later Herzl, decided was that the Jews were indeed a nation in exile and they could not hope to have the respect of other peoples until they had been re-established in their nation. That’s what lies at the core of Zionism.

So Herzl started to raise money. He went to the Sultan in Istanbul and said: ‘Look, let me buy some plots of land in the Palestine province,’ and that is how Zionism got started. And what he was doing in The Old-New-Land was to try and imagine just a few decades down the line what this new state would be like. He writes about things like how women would have the right to vote and that there would be an ultramodern infrastructure. He even imagines a mass travel system going from one end of Palestine to the other and a tunnel from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean so that all of the fabulous mineral wealth of the Dead Sea can be extracted and put on a conveyor belt to the Mediterranean.

The book was hugely influential because in it he imagined this Utopian state. And the reason I chose this book is because, as unlikely a scenario for the future as this is, it still tells you what the founding spirit of Zionism was. At one point he even says that Arabs and Jews will get on as brothers. If you think about this through the lens of today you think, yah right! But the idea was the Arabs would embrace the Zionists because the Jews would bring all of their commercial skills to the region. Everyone’s boat rises on the flood of prosperity.