Page 9 - Holyland Magazine - 2023 Edition

Caesarea Port. Photo: Dana Friedlander, IMOT.
On left: Ancient Roman aqueduct on the shores of
the eastern Mediterranean at Caesarea.
Photo: Itamar Grinberg, IMOT

Fishermen on the Yarkon River
near the Trail as it meanders to
the West from Tel Aviv.
Photo: Aryeh Green

*Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland (Old-New Land) was his seminal fictional work which followed his more well-known Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) setting
out a framework for his vision of a proposed Jewish state. As Shlomo Avineri noted in a review on the 100th anniversary of its publication, “The famous motto Herzl
chose for his novel—‘If you will it, it is no dream’—has a clear implication. No historical determinism decides the fate of nations. The crucial ingredient is human
agency, not ‘objective’ conditions. Ask any schoolchild in Israel who said im tirzu ein zo agadda, and they will immediately recognize it as Herzl’s saying. This insistence
on the creative and transformative power of human will is as relevant today as it was… when it was inscribed by Herzl on the front page of his great non-utopian novel.

9