Ben-Avi, Itamar. Palestinism: Moulding a Common Country for Two Brother-Peoples

(ZIONISM)

Hassolel

Jerusalem

1929

Second and Enlarged Edition

Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben Yehudah (the surname, AV"I, is an acronym for “Eliezer Ben Yehudah,”) took his father's pioneering linguistic efforts in an entirely different direction - (or perhaps it was but the logical outcome of Ben Yehudah's radicalism). Ben-Avi defined Zionism as the longing for Zion, hence as he himself was born in Zion, he regarded himself no longer a Zionist per se, but rather a Palestinian. Thus he advocated that the ideal of Zionism be transmuted into that of "Palestinism," namely the development of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state for all native inhabitants of Palestine, partitioned into Jewish and Arab cantons. In the present time, in what is for some, the "post-Zionist era," many will see this as a visionary tract. See EJ, IV cols. 469-70