Re: NYTimes.com Article: Europe's Chance in the Mideast

NY Times:
<<Israel is in many ways a European country . . . Most Israeli 
universities, newspapers and orchestras were created by 
European emigrants . . . Richard Wagner, most definitely a 
European composer one whose music was adored not only 
by Hitler but by Theodor Herzl>>

In imagining the future state of Israel, Herzl writes in his novel 
"Old-New Land":

"What happened to old Palestine?  There's been a miracle 
here.  A magnificent city had been built beside the sapphire-blue 
Mediterranean . . . Brilliant Oriental robes mingled with the sober 
costumes of the Occident, but the latter predominated.  There 
were many Chinese, Persians and Arabs in the streets, but the 
city [Tel-Aviv] itself seemed thoroughly European."

"They do not recognize us as Austro-Germans . . . All right, we 
shall move away; but over there, too, we shall only be Austrians"

In The Jewish State he writes:
"We will have a university and an opera [in the Jewish State] and 
you will attend the opera in your swallow-tailed coat with a white 
gardenia in your button-hole . . . Dull brains might . . . imagine that 
this exodus would be from civilized regions into the desert.  That 
is not the case.  It will be carried out in the midst of civilization.  
We shall not revert to a lower stage, we shall rise to a higher one.  
We shall not dwell in mud huts; we shall build new more beautiful 
and more modern houses."

David Ben-Gurion:

The State of Israel is a part of the Middle East only in geography"