Zionist Speculation: Colonial Vision and Its Sublime Turn

Abstract:This essay considers speculation as a colonial method. To this end, it interrogates the ideological role of vision, understood as both a plan for the future and a mode of seeing, in early Zionist writing. Through an analysis of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902), a work of speculative fiction published by “the visionary” of Zionism, vision emerges as a practice of political and visual speculation that overlooks what already exists in Palestine in order to see beyond the land and into its hidden future potentials. By foregrounding intentional planning and prospective economic improvements, such speculation serves as a justification for colonization and as a counterclaim to indigenous presence, racialized as inefficient and unintentional. Colonial speculation further combines this practice of overseeing with an ethos overcoming. By centering the intentional choice to be present in Palestine and improve it, colonizers not only overcome their initial compromising position—their distance from the land—but also alchemically transfigure it into their greatest political asset, as distance becomes the precondition for speculative, intentional vision and its ownership claims. In this sublime turn, the colonizers’ subsequent presence is presented as superior to the “mere presence” of the indigenous population. While Zionism perceives itself as a thoroughly material project, it is thus exposed as a mode of speculative fiction, which requires distance from the land to justify colonization based on prospective rather than real improvements.