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Dreams up against Reality In his essay “Despite all,” Yosef Chaim Brenner wrote that Jewish life in the land of Israel “possessed little to attract people,” and further, that the holy land “was settled by people from places where it is possible to do something better.” There is the force of insight in Brenner’s candor about the hardships of life in the land of Israel. Brenner surmised that it was difficult to be the first to settle an area where none had come before, but that such obstacles would not suffocate the determination of Zionists to cling to their tiny farms despite having no expectation for high profits or for earnings ever to catch up to expenses, “since the income produced on the farms is low, and the price of food is high.”1 Brenner saw needs in Palestine running way ahead of the capacity of people or economy to meet them. Although Brenner’s essay called upon Jews to make Palestine their home, it also evinced pessimism about the country’s possibilities. Still, Brenner concluded that sweating through the hardships of the reworking of Palestine’s primitive environment was a better option for Jews than staying in the lands of their birth, where lives and culture could be shattered each time the wrong blend of nationalism and populism was deployed.2 Powerfully prefiguring the dilemmas that would confront Zionists coming to live in the land of Israel, Brenner’s essay also falls back on the notion he once so eagerly sought to dismiss that passionate conviction could serve as a mobilizing force for Zionist success. The glaring irony of Brenner’s argument—warning Zionists against gripping their illusions too tightly, but ultimately urging them to build a homeland despite the difficulties— is perhaps in part a measure of the author’s own internal contradictory f i v e No Kaddi

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