"Land Back Here and Land Back There: A Jewish Literary Call" by

In 1889, a Jewish Austrian journalist named Theodor Hertzka—not to be confused with his countryman and frenemy Theodor Herzl, the so-called father of political Zionism—wrote a novel that imagined a utopic European outpost in Kenya. The novel, called Freeland: A Social Anticipation, follows a group of colonists as they establish a city they name Edenthal; within twenty-five years the colony’s inhabitants reach twenty-six million in a racial hierarchy of white Europeans and Black natives who are represented in violently racist and sexist ways (like Herzl, Hertzka’s desire to escape from European modernity to a colonized and colonizing utopia was in response to rampant Austrian antisemitism). Hertzka, an economist and journalist by training, spends pages and pages describing Edenthal, where all land is state-owned and businesses are worker-owned, interest rates are locked at zero, capital and techno-futurism abound. The climax of the book occurs when Ethiopia attacks the utopia, Edenthal emerges victorious, and their model of free market socialism is declared to be worth implementing across the globe.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—the novel didn’t just remain a work of fiction, spawning groups across Europe called Freeland Associations, where members discussed the novel and the possibilities of building utopia in the supposedly empty space of British-occupied Kenya. The British Freeland Association, with Hertzka’s backing, actually attempted to settle part of Kenya. The results were, as you might expect, disastrous. As Liza Daly puts it: “The British Freeland Association expedition lasted from early spring through July of 1894, and in the end consisted only of a few poorly-staffed trips halfway up the Tana River. Each stalled out due to inadequate supplies, transportation, and illness. Most of the expeditionary team spent the duration drunk in Lamu, harrassing locals and brawl-ing with other members. There were shootings, thefts, and deaths by misadventure and suicide. No utopia was even attempted.” (For more on Hertzka’s novel, the subsequent expedition, and profiles of the would-be colonists, I highly recommend Daly’s essay.)

Freeland is an obvious example of how a work of fiction can have a real-world effect: the novel brings new ideas and possibilities to readers, who then try to recreate it, even if extremely misguidedly and to ill effect. I bring Hertzka’s work and its foolhardy followers up here because Canadian Jews are also currently enthralled to not one but two fictional settler-colonial narratives: that of Canada, and that of Israel. As a Jewish antizionist writer living in the Anishinaabe lands of so-called Canada, watching the Israeli genocide of Palestinians on my phone, the connections between fictional narratives and settler ideologies is painfully, violently apparent. Where Hertzka’s novel sent Europeans to Kenya and novels like Leon Uris’ Exodus instilled Zionism in the hearts of millions, it is beyond time for Canadian Jewish fiction to push back: to unsettle our hearts and minds, to decolonize our worldviews, concerning both Turtle Island and Palestine. As the bombs explode unceasingly, as bodies are shredded to pieces, as we let ourselves become a people justifying a genocide, the time to do so is in fact long past.

Over thirty years ago, Jewish Talmudists and scholars Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin provocatively suggested that it was not monotheism, but diaspora that was the Jews’ greatest invention, which, to them (and to me) meant collective life not predicated on borders, ownership of land, temporal power of any kind. To believe in the ethical potential of a diasporic existence is to reject the logic of the state, the chauvinism of ethnic nationalism, the hierarchical horrors of supremacy. Tragically, we are living through a deadly corollary of this: what happens when a people succumb to these evils, slide into fascism, kill and kill and kill. Lessons that should have been learned after the Shoah, once again on deadly display for the entire world: has the horrors of settler colonialism ever been so clearly elucidated as it is being right now in Palestine? Another horrific irony.

What is needed is clear: justice in Palestine, the dismantling of apartheid, endless reparations (just as we must wait for eternity for the arrival of the messiah, so do I imagine the coming reparations for the Palestinians, flowing into the offing of eternity). Then, the dismantling of settler colonialism in Turtle Island, everywhere.

And it can start in our fiction.

Jewish literature in Canada must take seriously what the current acute stage of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people makes painfully clear: that our dominant narratives need to be challenged and overthrown. There is currently no room in the Jewish literary establishment for work that sees Palestinians as human, their grievances as legitimate, their oppression horrific, their resistance justified. There have been exceptions, of course, yet for every Mordecai Richler admitting that if he had been born Palestinian, he, too, would throw rocks at Israeli tanks there are twelve Irving Laytons telling their sons to “Be gunners in the Israeli Air Force” (“For My Two Sons, Max and David”).

Ignoring Palestine or propagandizing on behalf of Israel are the two modes currently available to Jewish literary writers in Canada. This cleanly mirrors the situation in Jewish communal and institutional life across Turtle Island. Yet, just as antizionist Jews are becoming harder and harder for their uncles and cousins and parents to ignore—mothers lamenting in Zionist Facebook groups that “York University took my daughter away from me and the Jewish people” can only be a viable excuse for so long—so, too, does anti-zionist Jewish literature need to start claiming more narrative and institutional space.

What might this look like? It looks like no more poems extolling the wonders of the nation-state of Israel and beseeching diaspora children to join its army. No more short stories about what it means to live in a place where the taxi drivers, the weather-men, the executioners are all Jewish. No more novels lamenting the antisemitism on university campuses when that antisemitism is actually just pro-Palestinian sentiment, no more shoot-and-cry lamentations about how valiant Israelis have no choice but to oppress and man checkpoints, no more there are major differences between Canadian and Israeli Jews, sure, but in the end we’re part of one people and have to accept their hardships as our own.

Zionism is an ideology, an astoundingly successful one, yes, but an ideology all the same, as disposable as all the rest. We can choose differently. We can choose better. We can remember what it meant to live in diaspora, to not have temporal power, to not have the nuclear codes, the torture blacksites, the sniper’s scope on the child’s forehead, the backing of the American empire. As Jewish writers, we can nudge this remembering along, we can pull off the manhole covers to our hearts.

Or we will be doomed.

Time is a funny thing: malleable yet inescapable. In a novel, a day can be stretched across hundreds of pages, a lifetime condensed into a sentence. The Canadian nation state has existed for 150 years, the Israeli nation state for 70, the Jewish story of wrestling with god, making our temporary homes wherever we can with whatever we’ve got, brewing languages and jokes and roast chickens for thousands. What is Zionism but an attempt to co-opt Jewish time, to rewrite and rewire so that everything leads to a state and its shadow state? A bomb falls out of a hatch in an airplane, obliterates a family, a young boy who just an instant ago was dreaming of making music on otherworldly instruments. The weapons company CEO’s gold watch ticks as his wealth accumulates. For the Palestinians living under Israel oppression, time is both the enemy and their only hope, the source of their steadfastness: we can outwait our enemies.

The Israeli genocide has made abundantly clear how abysmally the capitalist colonial world has failed us. Our politicians and leaders have failed us. Our CEOs and shareholders have failed us. Our institutions have failed us. Our rabbis and intellectuals have failed us. Our stories have failed us. Zionism has had a stranglehold on the Jewish mind for long enough; the settler imperial mindset has dominated Canada since the state’s founding. It is time to get rid of both. Taking the lead from Indigenous fiction and its unsettling of hegemonic narratives in the face of ongoing apocalypse, from Palestinian fiction and its steadfast refusal to acquiesce, it is time for a revolution in Jewish fiction, and not just from its writers, but from the entire Jewish literary world. Land back here and land back there.

Jewish literature must be an encampment on the university quad, full of radical possibility. Jewish literature must block the trains tracks, must occupy the seats of power, must scuttle the fleets of hatred and war. They have air power and killer drones and eternal victimhood, we have our imaginations, our humanity, our knowledge that we make our reality through our choices, our commitments, our solidarities. We can reclaim Jewish time. And since writing fiction is the alchemy of turning lived time into linguistic and narrative time, our short stories and novels must do the inverse of what Hertzka and his Freeland Associations did: clear the trail for decolonization, for truth-telling, for a return to the diasporic ethics of eschewing power over others and claiming cultural fluidity.

If there’s hope for us, it will come in the form of this difficult self-reflection, of letting go, of hold-ing our cousins and aunts and uncles to account. It may, in fact, be too late. But, if it’s not, there is not a single moment to spare. It is time, time to start writ-ing, to start imagining, to start preaching, reclaiming, denouncing, shutting down.

The work begins now.

Image by the American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department from the Library of Congress.

Aaron Kreuter’s most recent book is the novel Lake Burntshore, which takes place at a Jewish sleepover camp. He is the author of five other books and teaches at Trent University.