A Volcano of Our Own Making

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In A Volcano of Our Own Making, Avi-ram Tzoreff explores the biography, writings, and activism of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (1880–1957), a prominent figure in the history of modern Jewish thought and in the movements for binationalism in Palestine. Known to his readers as Rabbi Binyamin, Radler-Feldman continued to demand the return of Palestinian refugees and the abolition of Israeli military rule following the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. In this book, Tzoreff introduces the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of R. Binyamin’s theoretical reflections on Jewish tradition, Hebrew literature, governance, civilization, and ethnicity. More than an intellectual biography, this book uses R. Binyamin as a lens for a comprehensive, critical understanding of the Zionist settler-colonial project and sheds light on patterns of resistance to it from the perspective of an oppositionist from within the Zionist movement itself. In doing so, Tzoreff examines larger questions about pre–World War I multinational empires, global anti-colonial movements, and the intersections between religion, secularism, and nationalism.

Avi-ram Tzoreff is a historian focusing on the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, and the political and cultural history of Jews in Ottoman Iraq and Habsburg Galicia.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. The Multinational Periphery: Galicia as the Bedrock of Binationalism
2. Hameʿorer’s Minority Report: Challenging Modern Hebrew Literature’s Secular Image
3. “An Imagined Desert That, in Reality, Is the Core of the Yishuv”: The Emergence of Zionist Settler-Colonial Policies
4. “Natural Workers”? The Yishuv from the Standpoint of Its Yemenite Victims
5. “Not Withdrawing into the Boundaries of the Land of the Gazelle”: Binationalism and the Critique of Zionist-Colonial Affiliation
6. “Saving ‘My Sick People’”: Criticism of the “Negation of Exile” and Zionist Policies During World War II
7. Resisting Zionist “Deir Yassinism”: Palestinian Nakba and Binationalism in the Israeli Settler-State
Epilogue: On the Possibility of Counter-History

Notes
Bibliography
Index