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I   They made the desert bloom, tall sparkling towers and clean Bauhaus lines, and apple-ring acacias, and teal blue shuttle buses, and stock exchanges, and theme parks, and for some it was the best time ever and for others it was just fine ‘Three decades ago, the site of Tel Aviv was a waste of sand dunes,’ the American scholar E Ray Casto writes for the Journal of Geography in 1937 ‘It was born yesterday (1909), is now with 110,000 inhabitants in full tide of growth, and is destined to grow still more… [it] is the only city of the Holy Land which lacks visible or invisible ruins It has no past’   In Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland [Old-New Land] the Viennese protagonists observe the transformation of Palestine from its ‘backward’ and desolate Arab roots into a thriving utopian society1 A new state is there in its place; it carries no arms, is democratic and supposedly multi-ethnic It includes the lands of southern Lebanon and southwestern Syria, its industrial and political capital is Haifa, not Tel Aviv, whose founding the novel precedes In practice, the Zionist entity2 of today was built on Palestinian genocide, and persists as a limping apartheid settler colony Long before Herzl, Zionist works had adopted the narrative trappings of the frontier story – the stillness of the land, the menacing enemy, and thus, the pioneer hero For the young city of Tel Aviv, this was Meir Dizengoff, its first leader After purchasing 128 hectares north of Jaffa, the founding members of the Ahuzat Bayit ‘neighborhood association’ distributed the land across 60 lots that would become the outline of the planned city, whose name – which roughly translates to ‘hill of spring’ – brought them full circle, lifting the words from the Hebrew translation of Altneuland   Here we have evidence of a Zionist literature and its productive qualities, saturated with romanticism and cold calculus In an 1896 pamphlet, Der Judenstaat [The State of the Jews], Herzl argued for forming in Palestine ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed