44 chapter two logic of the fictional text. Not only do they share Herzlian thought as a central tenet in their formation and development but also, more importantly, they both conjure the dream of integration, emancipation and coexistence. Intended for a non-Zionist audience and aimed at securing non-Jewish support for the Zionist movement, Herzl uses the fictional structure of Altneuland to express “his own visions of Zionism in its purest, most uncompromising form” (Herzl 1987, vi). Beginning in 1902, the novel follows the main character, Friedrich Löwenberg, a twenty-three year old Jewish Viennese lawyer, who, alienated by the decadence of JewishEuropean bourgeoisie, decides to join an Americanized Prussian philanthropist named Kingscourt with a distaste for humankind to withdraw to a remote island. “Disgusted with life,” Löwenberg agrees to a “life-long obligation” to Kingscourt, and decides to dissolve all of his existing social, cultural and financial ties to the Jewish bourgeois circles in which he had long sought inclusion (Herzl 1987, 32). The novel details their brief visit to Palestine during their journey to the island in 1902 and their observations of the land two decades later during what they had anticipated would be a brief return to civilization. Their second visit to the land reveals that during their twenty year absence: the “empty and deserted” town of Acre had undergone a “miracle;” Haifa had become a “magnificent city” with “cosmopolitan traffic in the streets” that “seemed thoroughly European;” Tiberias had become the “Garden of Eden … a new gem … [with] verdure and bloom everywhere;” Mount Hermon overlooked “the smaller ranges and the rejuvenated land;” Jericho and the Jordan Valley worked with “the newest and best agricultural machinery available” and produced “abundant crops … which brought rich profits;” the Dead Sea had been stirred to life; and Jerusalem, once a “picture of desolation” now had its sacred hills endowed with “new, vigorous, joyous life [and] many splendid new structures,” which transformed the ancient city into a “twentieth century metropolis” (Herzl 1987, 58–59, 61, 161, 241, 247). All in all, Palestine had ascended from a “forsaken” land, “a state of extreme decay [with] poor Turks, dirty Arabs, [and] timid Jews … indolent, beggarly and hopeless,” into a technologically advanced, agriculturally cultivated, intellectually progressive, economically prosperous “Promised Land” (Herzl 1987, 42). A “truly modern commonwealth,” the Palestine built by the Zionist colonialists had been “fructified into a garden and a home for people who had once been poor, weak, hopeless and homeless” (Herzl 1987, 223, 244). The utopian vision of a Jewish commonwealth depicted in Altneuland develops according to a clear colonial logic: through the immigration of a