First Zionist Congress were deeply conscious of taking part in a unique historical event. Except for a handful, these more or less self-appointed delegates of the Jewish people had never been to Palestine, had no idea what it was like and took little interest in its realities. Reality did not bother them. They were out to build a new world, only half imagined. The only reality they knew was one they wanted to get away from-the reality of Eastern Europe, with its pogroms, its discrimination, its forebodings of greater catastrophes to come. For this reason the early Zionists did not come to grips with the actual problems awaiting them in Palestine. They knew dimly that some people were living there; they vaguely felt that something should be done about them sometime; but it all seemed too vastly unimportant at that pregnant moment.
Herzl himself visited Palestine for the first time long after he published Der Judenstaat and convened the Congress itself. His main purpose in going to Palestine in the fall of 1898 was not to acquaint himself with the place where his ideas were to be realized, as one might have imagined, but to meet the German Kaiser Wilhelm II in an appropriately dramatic setting. Yet he must have realized by that time that some place must be found for the Arab natives in his grand design. In his second book, Altneuland, the "Old-New-Land," there appears an Arab gentleman, perfectly delighted to be living in a Jewish community, complimenting the Jews on their idealistic determination to grant the natives full equality after they had themselves suffered so much abroad.
I have often wondered how different Zionism might have been had Herzl not been a Viennese journalist but a shopkeeper in a Damascus bazaar. Would Zionism have realized that Palestine was a part of a big area inhabited by Arabs? Might some solution have been found at the very beginning to the problem of co-existence with the people who considered Palestine their own homeland? But these are, of course, idle thoughts. Herzl could not