Literary Zionism

Wikipedia - Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927)
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen name Ahad Ha'am, was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder of cultural Zionism. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Israel, he confronted Theodor Herzl.

Ahad Ha’am
A Tattered Manuscript, 1888
During those long winter evenings, at times when I’m sitting in the company of enlightened men and women, sitting at a table with tref [nonkosher] food and cards, and my heart is glad and my face bright, suddenly then—I don’t know how this happens—suddenly before me is a very old table with broken legs, full of tattered [sacred] books, torn and dusky books of genuine value, and I’m sitting alone in their midst, reading them by the light of a dim candle, opening up one and closing another, not even bothering to look at their tiny print . . . and the entire world is like the Garden of Eden.

Ahad Ha'am
The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem
Translated by Leon Simon
And now Judaism finds that it can no longer tolerate the galuth (i.e. exilic) form which it had to take on, in obedience to its will-to-live, when it was exiled from its own country, and that if it loses that form its life is in danger. So it seeks to return to its historic centre, in order to live there a life of natural development, to bring its powers into play in every department of human culture, to develop and perfect those national possessions which it has acquired up to now, and thus to contribute to the common stock of humanity, in the future as in the past, a great national culture, the fruit of the unhampered activity of a people living according to its own spirit. For this purpose Judaism needs at present but little. It needs not an independent State, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favourable to its development: a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature. This Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become in course of time the centre of the nation, wherein its spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its aspects up to the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable. Then from this centre the spirit of Judaism will go forth to the great circumference, to all the communities of the Diaspora, and will breathe new life into them and preserve their unity; and when our national culture in Palestine has attained that level, we may be confident that it will produce men in the country who will be able, on a favourable opportunity, to establish a State which will be a Jewish State, and not merely a State of Jews.

Steven Zipperstein
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism, p 11, 1993
Not only did Herzl fail to take culture into account, but in his style of politics he represented a sharp, sinister break with Jewish history: his cultivation of the masses (which Ahad Ha’am immediately denounced as demagoguery) coupled with his promise of rapid redemption conjured terrifying comparison with messianic pretenders of the past. . . . Ahad Ha'am went so far as to charge Herzl with heresy.

Wikipedia - Monty Noam Penkower (b 1942)
Professor emeritus of Jewish History at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem), is the prize-winning author of many books on the Holocaust and on the rise of the State of Israel in the years 1933-1948.

Monty Noam Penkower
"The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903," Modern Judaism, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2004)
(As quoted in "Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn" by Daniel Gordis, p. 48)
The horror began on Easter Sunday, April 19:
Initially, young people began hounding Jews to leave Chuflinskii Square, their cause gradually taken up by adults in an increasing state of holiday drunkenness. Late that afternoon, some twenty-five bands, averaging thirty-fifty each, simultaneously fanned out across the Jewish quarter of Bessarabia’s capital, teenage boys taking the lead in smashing the windows of houses and stores. Students and seminarists from the Royal School and the city’s religious colleges, iron bars and axes in hand, followed the hooligans; aided by looters, they plundered and demolished property. The local police made no attempt to interfere, Chief of Secret Police Levendal even exhorting the gangs on. . . . Passing through the streets in his carriage, Orthodox bishop Iakov blessed the mostly Moldavian attackers.
Once it became clear to the mob that the governor was not going to intervene, matters got even worse. The wanton cruelty was virtually beyond description. What followed was
murder and massacre during the night. . . . 50,000 Jews (a third of the population) now fell prey to barbarism . . . a boy’s tongue was cut out while the two year old was still alive. . . . Meyer Weissman, blinded in one eye from youth, begged for his life with the offer of sixty rubles; taking this money, the leader of the crowd destroying his small grocery store gouged out Weissman’s other eye, saying “You will never again look upon a Christian child.” Nails were driven through heads; bodies hacked in half; bellies split open and filled with feathers. Women and girls were raped, and some had their breasts cut off.

Wikipedia - Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934)
A Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew but also in Yiddish. Bialik was one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew poetry. He was part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to the breath of new life in Jewish life.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik
In the City of Slaughter (excerpt), 1904
Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,
Where seven heathen flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother,
The mother in the presence of her daughter,
Before slaughter, during slaughter, and after slaughter!
Touch with thy hand the cushion stained; touch
The pillow incarnadined:
This is the place the wild ones of the wood, the beasts of the field
With bloody axes in their paws compelled thy daughters yield:
Beasted and swiped!
Note also do not fail to note,
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Watching from the darkness and its mesh
The lecherous rabble portioning for booty
Their kindred and their flesh!
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not stir nor move;
They did not pluck their eyes out; they
Beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle,
O Lord,—and spare my skin this day!
Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke,
Beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out—
How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?
They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,
They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.
The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi's house they flitted:
Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?
The matter ends; and nothing more.
And all is as it was before.
Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame,
So sanctified My name!
It was the flight of mice they fled,
The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead!

Wikipedia - Max Simon Nordau (1849-1923)
A Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic. He was a co-founder of the Zionist Organization together with Theodor Herzl, and president or vice president of several Zionist congresses.

Max Nordau
Jewry of Muscle
For too long, all too long have we been engaged in the mortification of our own flesh... Or rather, to put it more precisely—others did the killing of our flesh for us. Their extraordinary success is measured by hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses in the ghettos, in the churchyards, along the highways of medieval Europe... In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly; the fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers, which rose in a crescendo only when our martyrs on the stakes cried out in their dying prayers in the face of their executioners... Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.

Wikipedia - Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922)
More commonly known as A. D. Gordon, was a Labour Zionist thinker and the spiritual force behind practical Zionism and Labor Zionism. He founded Hapoel Hatzair, a movement that set the tone for the Zionist movement for many years to come.

A. D. Gordon
Logic for the Future (1910)
Labor is not only the force which binds man to the soil and by which possession of the soil is acquired; it is also the basic energy for the creation of a national culture. This is what we do not have—but we are not aware of missing it. We are a people without a country, without a living national language, without a living culture... A vital culture, far from being detached from life, embraces it in all its aspects... Farming, building, and road-making—any work, any craft, any productive activity—is part of culture and is indeed the foundation and the stuff of culture.

Daniel Gordis
Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, p. 81-82
Brenner was at points rather pessimistic that the enterprise could even survive. In his short story “Atzabim” (“Nerves,” 1911), his fear for the future of Zionism is clear. A nameless protagonist tells the nameless narrator the saga of his voyage to Palestine, struggling with the question of whether it was worthwhile. The protagonist leaves Ukraine for New York, where he works in a sweatshop sewing buttons, but eventually sails to Palestine in hope of finding a better future. What he encounters, however, is a reality no less tedious than the one he had hoped to leave behind. The only difference is that now, instead of sewing buttons, he is picking oranges. If Zion had once been a dream, it now seemed to him nothing more than an irrational impulse—a fit of “Jewish nerves.”

Wikipedia - Yosef Haim Brenner (1881-1921)
A Russian-born Hebrew-language author and one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew literature. Brenner was very much an "experimental" writer, both in his use of language and in literary form.

Wikipedia - Rachel Bluwstein Sela (1890-1931)
A Hebrew-language poet who immigrated to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1909. She is known by her first name, Rachel, or as Rachel the Poetess.

Rachel Hamishoreret (Rachel Bluwstein Sela)
Perhaps
Perhaps it was never so.
Perhaps
I never woke early and went to the fields
To labor in the sweat of my brow
Nor in the long blazing days
Of harvest
On top of the wagon laden with sheaves,
Made my voice ring with song
Nor bathed myself clean in the calm
Blue water
Of my Kinneret. O, my Kinneret,
Were you there or did I only dream?

Wikipedia - Menachem Ussishkin (1863-1941)
A Russian-born Zionist leader and head of the Jewish National Fund. Menachem Ussishkin was born in Dubrowna in the Belarusian part of the Russian Empire. In 1889, he graduated as a technical engineer from Moscow State Technical University.

Menachem Ussishkin
Inaugural Meeting of the Hebrew Teachers Federation in Palesine (1903)
Whether the children in the village school learn more or less of the rudiments of elementary grammar... more or less of history, more or less of science, does not matter. What they have to learn, though, it this: to be strong and healthy villagers, to be villagers who love their surroundings and physical work, and most of all to be villagers who love the Hebrew tongue and the Jewish nation with all their hearts and souls.

Wikipedia - Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940)
A Russian Jewish Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. With Joseph Trumpeldor, he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky
The Iron Wall & Beyond the Iron Wall (As quoted in Gordis, p. 105)
Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.²⁵
That meant, he said, that the Arabs would never voluntarily come to agreement with the Zionists. If the Zionists wanted a foothold in Palestine, Arab violence would have to be met with an Iron Wall:
[t]his does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is “Never!”²⁶

Betar's Anthem
In the face of every obstacle
In times of ascent, and of setbacks
A fire may still be lit
With the flame of revolt
For silence is dirt
Sacrifice blood and spirit
For the hidden glory
To die or to conquer the mountain
Yodfat, Masada, Betar

Wikipedia - Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981)
An acclaimed Israeli poet, journalist and politician who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew. Widely regarded among the greatest poets in the country's history, he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1957 and the Bialik Prize in 1947, 1954 and 1977, all for his contributions to fine literature.

One Truth and Not Two
by Uri Zvi Greenberg
(interpreted from Hebrew by Laurence Cramer)
Your Rabbis taught: A land is bought with money
You buy the land and work it with a hoe.
And I say: A land is not bought with money
And with a hoe you also dig and bury the dead.
And I say: A land is conquered with blood.
And only when conquered with blood is hallowed to the people
With the holiness of the blood.
And only one who follows after the cannon in the field,
Thus wins the right to follow after his good plow
On this, the field that was conquered.
And only such a field gives nourishing and healthy bread
And the house which arises on its hill is truly a fortress and a temple,
Because in this field there is honorable blood.
Your Rabbis taught: The messiah will come in future generations:
And Judea will arise without fire and without blood.
It will arise with every tree, with every additional house.
And I say: If your generation will be slow
And will not grasp in its hands and forcibly mold its future
And in fire will not come with the Shield of David
And in blood will not come with its horses saddled -
The Messiah will not come even in a far off generation.
Judea will not arise.
And you will be living slaves to every foreign ruler.
Your houses will be straw for the sparks of every wicked one.
And your trees will be cut down with their ripe fruit.
And a man will react the same as a babe
To the sword of the enemy -
And only your ramblings will remain - yours...
And your statue, an eternal curse.
Your Rabbis taught: There is one truth for the nations:
Blood for blood - but it is not a truth for Jews.
And I say: There is one truth and not two.
As there is one sun and as there are not two Jerusalems.
It was written in the Law of Conquest of Moses and Joshua
Until the last of my kings and my traitors have consumed.
And there will be a day when from the river of Egypt until the Euphrates
And from the sea until the mountain passes of Moav my boys will go up
And they will call my enemies and my haters to the last battle.
And the blood will decide: Who is the only ruler here.

Joseph Trumpeldor, 1920
He was fatally wounded during the defense of the Galilee settlement of Tel Hai against an Arab attack. On his deathbed he famously said:
טוב למות בעד ארצנו, אין דבר
Never mind, it is good to die for one's country.

Chaim Weizmann
Ha'aretz newspaper, December 15, 1947
The state will not be given to the Jewish people on a silver platter.

Wikipedia - Nathan Alterman (1910-1970)
An Israeli poet, playwright, journalist, and translator. Though never holding any elected office, Alterman was highly influential in Socialist Zionist politics, both before and after the establishment of the State of Israel.