What Would Ahad Ha’am Think about Israel Today?

At the beginning of his superb essay on Ahad Ha’am, Hillel Halkin cites his protagonist’s savage takedown of Altneuland, a futuristic 1902 novel by Theodor Herzl—by, that is to say, Ahad Ha’am’s successful rival for leadership of the Zionist movement. The novel imagines the marvels a traveler would find upon visiting a utopian Jewish-state-to-be. Halkin characterizes Ahad Ha’am’s “caustic” treatment of Altneuland as “the most contentious Jewish book review of the century.”

At the end of his essay, returning to that same review and to the two men’s rivalry, Halkin can’t help wondering what Theodor Herzl would make of the actual Jewish state—the state that “would never have existed without him”—if he could come back to visit it today. It’s a great question, and it raises another question: namely, what would be the reaction of Ahad Ha’am himself—the father of “cultural Zionism,” as opposed to Herzl’s “political Zionism”—to such an experience?

Although Halkin doesn’t delve into the matter, by chance Fania Oz-Salzberger, a professor of history at Haifa University, brought both men back from the grave in an imaginative piece she contributed eight years ago to the Israeli journal Kivunim Ḥadashim (“New Directions”). For good measure, she had them accompanied on their nationwide tour by Vladimir Jabotinsky and a small group of other deceased Zionist luminaries.