Why do you regard his writing and activism as so
important in the construction of the future Israeli state?
>> I agree with you that the term Huze Hamedina,
visionary of the state is wrong.
It's on one hand wrong, because Herzl wasn't the only, and the first one.
There were visionaries before him, like Moses Hess, a colleague of Karl Marx,
Leon Pinsker, who wrote 20 years earlier about Jewish auto-emancipation.
So he wasn't the first one.
On the other hand, when you say visionary,
you mean that Herzl's contribution is only in vision.
He wrote two visionary books, the Jewish State and
the utopian novel called AltNeuLand, Old New Land.
But his major contribution to my mind is that he created the organization, Zionist
organizations that spoke or pretended to speak in the name of the Jewish people.
I think this is something very revolutionary.
When you look at it, until the establishment of these Zionist
organizations, the first one is the Congress in Basel in 1897, it wasn't for
2,000 years, an organization or institution that spoke or imagined that
it was speaking for the Jews, for the Jewish people, for the Jewish religion.
There is no Jewish church, it's not like the Catholic Church.
You had Jewish communities, Kehilot.
You had Jewish countrywide organizations like Kehilat Arba Aratzot
the Committee of the Four Lands of the Polish Commonwealth.
But you never had, until the establishment of the Zionist organization,
an organization, institutions that spoke in the name of the Jewish people.
And when Herzl wrote, in his diary after
the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, 1897, I established a Jewish state.
This was obviously not right, but he said something else in this notification.
We are the national assembly.
We are speaking not just for ourselves, but we are speaking, or
we would like to speak for the Jews as a people and this was not just a statement.
The most important thing that happened in the first Zionist Congress
was not the setting up of the program, which is called the Basel Program.
Which said that the aims of the Zionist organization is
to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Eretz Israel in Palestine.
This is program, this is a piece of paper.
What is important is that as the first Zionist Congress,
you have the establishment of the institutions which
eventually made it possible to move in 1947, 48 from a Jewish community in
Palestine, which was a non-state community, to a state structure.
Three or four examples.
In Basel city and this was Hertzl's idea that there will be a Zionist Congress
meeting every year and they had to make a decision who are going to be the members.
The members of the first Zionist Congress were members by invitation.
Hertzl sent invitations to people who were in correspondence with him,
who wrote him that they agreed with his views about the Jewish state.
There were about 200 people who didn't represent anybody except Hertzl's friends.
But if you want to institutionalize it and create a structure,
you had to decide how to do it.
The idea was it was going to be a membership and only the members of
the Zionist organization will be able to elect the members of the congress.
And by inspiration, somebody suggested to call the membership Shekel,
which was an ancient Jewish coin.
This created something which had to do with history, with Jerusalem,
with the temple in Jerusalem, with the links between the Jewish diaspora that
sent half a shekel every year, every person supposedly, into Jerusalem.
It put the idea of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine in a historical context.
The second thing which happened was, okay, so there are going to be elections.
Once you have elections, you have contests and the first contest and
the first, second, or third congresses were personal.
But then, slowly you could see that there were some candidates that were liberal and
some were conservative, some were religious, some were socialist.
So, you had the creation in the Second or third Congress already of
political factions, of political parties.
They also decided to elect the first congress,
an executive committee, I think of seven, eight members, I don't remember.
They decided that each member will be responsible for
a certain field of activity, for fundraising,
for education, for land buying in Palestine.
In other words, it created a parliamentary,
multi-party system and this is what a Zionist organization was.
Even Hertzl himself had to be elected every congress