For almost fifty years, the Zionist labour movement led the Jewish community in Palestine and later, in the State of Israel. Among the close-knit group of its founding fathers, Berl Katznelson was a unique figure. He was an intellectual, a politician, a man of letters, a statesman and the initiator of many of the social and economic institutions THAT shaped the face of the movement and in its wake, the character of the country as a whole. The biography of Berl is more than the biography of an individual: it is the story of a movement. The book traces Berl from a young Russian socialist and romantic pioneer on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, into the propounder of a work ethic and the founder of the central political current of the Israeli labour movement. The development of this movement is depicted against the background of the major political events of the period: Jewish-Arab relations, the European crisis of the thirties as it affected the Jewish people and the successes and failures of Zionist policy. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand in depth the complexity of Israeli society today.

This timely book tells the fascinating story of how Zionists colonizers planned and established nearly 700 agricultural settlements, towns, and cities from the 1880s to the present. This extraordinary activity of planners, architects, social scientists, military personnel, politicians, and settlers is inextricably linked to multiple contexts: Jewish and Zionist history, the Arab/Jewish conflict, and the diffusion of European ideas to non-European worlds. S. Ilan Troen demonstrates how professionals and settlers continually innovated plans for both rural and urban frontiers in response to the competing demands of social and political ideologies and the need to achieve productivity, economic independence, and security in a hostile environment. In the 1930s, security became the primary challenge, shaping and even distorting patterns of growth. Not until the 1993 Oslo Accords, with prospects of compromise and accommodation, did planners again imagine Israel as a normal state, developing like other modern societies. Troen concludes that if Palestinian Arabs become reconciled to a Jewish state, Israel will reassign priority to the social and economic development of the country and region.