liberal pretence of a jewish state131 Reference is made by the protagonists in the text to an “Arab fantasy,” “the place with the crazy Arab name,” and the “solemn puzzlement of the Orientals … at the sudden appearance of Occidental goods in the country” (Herzl 1987, 48, 234, 208). This uneasiness points to both an uncomfortable silence on the presence of an indigenous population on land earmarked for a Jewish society, and an unsettled ambiguity on the circumstances of their coexistence with their Jewish colonizers in the newly established commonwealth. Where the indigenous Arabs are not completely removed from the consciousness of the colonial protagonists of the story, they are demoted to the peripheries of the Jewish landscape. Indeed, during their first moments in colonized Palestine, the protagonists Löwenberg and Kingscourt remarked: Some of the riders wore picturesque Arab costume, others the conventional European clothing. Occasionally, too, camels filed past, singly and in cavalcades – picturesque and primitive relics of an obsolete era (Herzl 1987, 119). Fragments of an active and traditional Arab life that is yet to be eradicated from the colonial landscape surface in such disoriented moments of the text. These pieces act as a brief reminder of the colonial record of displacement before they are again relegated to the mental void of the protagonists. That said, despite the ambiguities and inconsistencies surfacing at various points of Altneuland and hinting at a present yet inconsequential indigenous population, the official (and familiar) colonial narrative is consistently maintained: “We [the Jews] did not have to ruin anyone in order to ease the lot of our masses” (Herzl 1987, 87). This sentiment also frequently reappears in Yakobson and Rubinstein.11 The colonial logic embedded in contemporary attempts by the Jewish state to involve and represent Arabs in the new society is also revealed in the novel. Indeed, Altneuland does depict a certain fraternization with Arabs, through which the liberal-Zionist conception of ‘coexistence’ 11 There are many instances of this throughout Israel and the Family of Nations, but to give an example, on the question of the exodus of Palestinian refugees the authors state that “[w]hen the state [of Israel] was established and independence declared, hostilities were already ranging and many of those who would become Palestinian refugees had already left the territory of the Jewish state” (2009, 95). There is no mention here by the authors of the campaigns of coercion, demoralization and violence launched by the Zionist military forces to cause this exodus, so as to secure territorial domination for a future Jewish state. In effect, Yakobson and Rubinstein absolve Zionist military groups of responsibility for their part in the Nakba. For a historical account of the multifaceted Zionist offensive which resulted in the Arab exodus, described by Walid Khalidi as “a mixture of psychological and terroristic warfare,” see (2005b, 49).