Canaanism
[2] Canaanism never had more than around two dozen registered members[clarification needed], but because most of them were influential intellectuals and artists, the movement had an influence which went far beyond its size.
[4] Kuzar also says they hoped to revive this civilization, creating a "Hebrew" nation disconnected from the Jewish past, which would embrace the Middle East's Arab population as well.
(The term "Hebrew" had been associated with the Zionist aspiration to create a strong, self-confident "new Jew" since the late nineteenth century).
Following the first Aliyah, a generation that spoke Hebrew as a native language arose in Palestine and it did not always identify with Judaism.
One of the principal techniques used by the Canaanites to produce Hebrew literature was to adopt words and phrases (especially hapax legomena, which the Canaanites regarded as traces of the original unedited Hebraic Tanakh) from the Tanakh, and use them in a poetic that approximated biblical and Ugaritic verse, especially in their use of repetitive structures and parallelism.
The late literary scholar Baruch Kurzweil argued that the Canaanites were not sui generis, but a direct continuation (albeit a radical one) of the literature of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Shaul Tchernichovsky.
[12] The Coalition published a journal, Aleph, which ran from 1948–1953, featuring the works of several luminaries of the movement including Ratosh, Adia Horon, Uzzi Ornan, Amos Kenan and Benjamin Tammuz.
The journal was named after a Young Hebrews' flag designed by Ratosh, that featured an aleph in the more figurative shape of an ox's head,[13] as in the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.
In 1951, leaflets were distributed by self-identified Canaanites in opposition to Zionism during the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that year.
Later that year, the Coalition was formally organized at a conference of ideologues, but the permit to formally register as an NGO was deliberately delayed by the Interior Ministry; the ministry's representative explained that the approval has been delayed because "the group did not complete the standard inquiry of the granting of approvals for political societies".
After the arrest of Amos Kenan in June 1952 on suspicion of throwing a bomb onto the doorstep of David-Zvi Pinkas, newspaper editorials were lodged against the Canaanite movement and its members.
Among participants in the discussions were also identified individuals who were Canaanites, as Rostam Bastuni, an Israeli Arab who was a member of the second Knesset for Mapam, and Yehoshua Palmon.
Some of the artists who took after the movement were the sculptors Yitzhak Danziger (whose Nimrod became a visual emblem of the Canaanite idea), Yechiel Shemi and Dov Feigin, novelist Benjamin Tammuz, writer Amos Kenan, novelist and translator Aharon Amir, thinker and linguist Uzzi Ornan and many others.
The journalist Uri Avnery praised Horon's journal Shem in 1942 but did not subscribe to Ratosh's orthodoxy; in 1947 he derided the Canaanites as romantic, anachronistic, and divorced from reality.
[14] However, the influence of Canaanism is still evident in some of his political thought, such as his 1947 proposal for a pan-Semitic union of Middle Eastern states.
[15] Avnery, along with several former Canaanites (notably Kenan and Boaz Evron) later changed positions drastically, becoming advocates for a Palestinian state.
Kurzweil believed the Canaanites replaced logos with mythos, producing a religious delusion: Since it itself neglects the historical continuity of its people, introduces obscure concepts into their political vision in its declarations of a 'Hebrew Land on the Euphrates', and relies on increasingly irrational argumentation, the movement is liable to find itself an escape into the realm of myth.
For the moment, we shall content ourselves with this quotation from Huizinga: "Barbarization sets in when, in an old culture… the vapors of the magic and fantastic rise up again from the seething brew of passions to cloud the understanding: when the mythos supplants the logos.
"[25][26] In the same article Kurzweil argues that, if no viable alternative was found, the Canaanite movement might become the leading political ideology in Israel.
