Decades before the Zionist movement’s inception in the late 19th century, the German Jewish thinker Moses Hess proposed in his contentious manuscript Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862) that a Jewish state be established through settlements in Palestine as “socialist agricultural communities”.
He promoted the colonisation of Palestine, viewing the Holy Land as a forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire; merely an empty land that should be utilised in the interests of the “Jewish nation”.
Twenty years later, in 1882, the Russian Jewish thinker Leon Pinsker published a pamphlet titled “Auto-Emancipation”, in which he pronounced: “The land which we are about to purchase must be productive and have a good situation, and an area sufficient to allow the settlement of several millions.”
Among major Zionist theorists, there is no mention of the indigenous Palestinian nation. In their view, Palestine was “an empty land”.
Even for Pinsker, there is no indication of whom he intended to buy the land from. The primary intention was to build a Jewish settler-colonial state through violence and terrorism.
