The Hebrew Falcon Adya Horon and the Birth of the Canaanite Idea

A pioneering study of a formative chapter in Middle East intellectual history, examining the historical myth that underlies the "Canaanite" brand of Israeli nationalist anti-Zionism.

Adya Gur Horon (1907-1972) was a provocative public intellectual and historical and geopolitical thinker who called for the overthrow of the Israeli non-democratic state-order in favor of an "imperial" Hebrew national vision based on the domination of the whole Levant. Drawing on Horon's private archive, Roman Vater studies the intellectual sources of the mid-twentieth century Hebrew national ideology, known as "Canaanism," contending this vision can only be properly understood in light of Horon's articulation of its historical "foundation myth." The intellectual and political rivalry between Jewish ethnic nationalism and Hebrew civic nationalism, represented by the "Canaanite" challenge to Zionism, continues to inform current debates about Israel's identity and its relation to world Jewry on the one hand and the Arab world on the other-and largely determines Israel's global political alliances to this day. The Hebrew Falcon is indispensable reading for scholars and students of nationalism, Israel, Zionism, and the intellectual and political history of the modern Middle East.