...Herzl envisioned a Jewish state which combined both a modern Jewish culture with the best of the European heritage. Thus a Palace of Peace would be built in Jerusalem, arbitrating international disputes—but at the same time the Temple would be rebuilt, but on modern principles. He did not envision the Jewish inhabitants of the state being religious, but there is much respect for religion in the public sphere. Many languages are spoken—Hebrew is not the main tongue. Proponents of a Jewish cultural rebirth, such as
Ahad Ha'am were critical of
Altneuland.
In Altneuland Herzl did not foresee any conflict between Jews and Arabs. One of the main characters in
Altneuland is a Haifa engineer, Reshid Bey, who is one of the leaders of the "New Society", is very grateful to his Jewish neighbors for improving the economic condition of Palestine and sees no cause for conflict. All non-Jews have equal rights, and an attempt by a fanatical rabbi to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens of their rights fails in the election which is the center of the main political plot of the novel.
[8] Herzl also envisioned the future Jewish state to be a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, with a developed welfare program and public ownership of the main natural resources and industry, agriculture and even trade organized on a cooperative basis. He called this mixed economic model "Mutualism", a term derived from French
utopian socialist thinking. Women have equal voting rights - as they did have in the Zionist movement from the second Zionist Congress onwards.
Altneuland was written both for Jews and non-Jews: Herzl wanted to win over non-Jewish opinion for Zionism.
[9] When he was still thinking of Argentina as a possible venue for massive Jewish immigration, he mentioned in his diary he wrote that land was to be gently expropriated from the local population and they were to be worked across the border "unbemerkt" (surreptitiously), e.g. by refusing them employment.
[9] Herzl's draft of a charter for a Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) gave the JOLC the right to obtain land in Palestine by giving its owners comparable land elsewhere in the Ottoman empire....
Theodor Herzl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia