When Israel was but a dream

‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two books published at the same time to open with almost identical sentences. But then My Promised Land and Herzl are telling different sides of the same tale: the story of Zionism from the beginning, one of the strangest, most romantic, most bewildering episodes in modern history, and to this day one of the most bitterly contentious

Aboard that first steamer to Jaffa was ‘the Rt. Honourable Herbert Bentwich’, as Ari Shavit calls him, although the official record doesn’t suggest that he was entitled to the prefix of a Privy Councillor, for all his considerable distinction. He was a London Jew, one of the first generation of his family, originally from Poland, to be British-born; the son, grandson and great-grandson of rabbis; a successful lawyer; and the great-grandfather of Shavit, himself a celebrated Israeli newspaper and television commentator.