THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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has been conceived as Zion for three thousand years, then it definitely belongs among the nations and not to an English protectorate at the eastern corner of the
Mediterranean. In which it is not foxes and wolves who say good night to one another, but the Suez Canal and Mosul oil, Arab tension and the British sphere of
influence, the sinking empire and the American monster who say good day to one another. This sort of thing is rather too little to suit the idea of Moses Hess, or too
much. If a Jewish nation still exists, then its liberation coincides with social liberation, or its state is an invention in which the British speculative buyer has no longer
shown such an interest as in 1917, as in the solvent age of the Empire, and which is now leading America into atomic war. If a Jewish nation no longer exists, then
experience shows that there remains an old affinity in the best Jews with everything which suggests the destruction of the great Babel, and a New World. This dream
has its action centre where the country of their birth and education is, where it helps to build the language, history, and culture of the latter, where it participates both
patriotically and expertly in the struggle for a new earth. Hic Rhodus, hic salta, Zion is everywhere according to the intention of the prophets, and the local mount in
Palestine has long since become a symbol. Nazi Germany was its strongest counter­blow, the Soviet Union defeated this counter­blow, for all the oppressed in the
world, including the Jews, in harmony with the universalist hope of the prophets. In short, this partial movement could come to an end without a Jewish component itself
coming to an end, whether as a nation, whether — in a considerably more genuine fashion — as witness to and evidence of a messianic cast of mind; Zionism flows out
into socialism, or it does not flow out at all.
Novels set in the future and full­scale utopias after Marx: Bellamy, William Morris, Carlyle, Henry George
It was some weeks later. It was now the middle of November, and Mr Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressing­gown and his thick llama wool
pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk, and working ever and again at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the title of it was ‘The Better
Government of the World’. H.G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through
Since everything grows worse in bourgeois terms, the dream does not come to an end even here. But it is only reasonably fresh when it announces