When Israel was but a dream

‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two books published at the same time to open with almost identical sentences. But then My Promised Land and Herzl are telling different sides of the same tale: the story of Zionism from the beginning, one of the strangest, most romantic, most bewildering episodes in modern history, and to this day one of the most bitterly contentious

Aboard that first steamer to Jaffa was ‘the Rt. Honourable Herbert Bentwich’, as Ari Shavit calls him, although the official record doesn’t suggest that he was entitled to the prefix of a Privy Councillor, for all his considerable distinction. He was a London Jew, one of the first generation of his family, originally from Poland, to be British-born; the son, grandson and great-grandson of rabbis; a successful lawyer; and the great-grandfather of Shavit, himself a celebrated Israeli newspaper and television commentator.

As Shavit says, the Israeli question cannot usefully be answered with polemics, though that doesn’t stop them pelting down like this winter’s rain. Instead, he has made a fascinating personal odyssey, a voyage round the past and present of ‘the Jewish State’, as an idea and a reality. That was the title of the little book published in 1896 by Theodore Herzl, ‘a German Jew from Hungary’, in his own words, who became a Viennese journalist. And it was he who, as the Israel political theorist Shlomo Avineri relates in his new biography, was travelling in the Rossiya to make his first visit the Holy Land, where he would meet Kaiser Wilhelm II: from the beginning the Zionist enterprise would be bound up in the great game of international power politics.