"Capitalist Visions of a Jewish Palestine"

What future did Zionist businessmen envision for Palestine? While sharing the overarching goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel, their vision diverged in significant ways from that of Zionism’s dominant political and ideological currents. This paper focuses on two central figures: Zalman (David) Levontin and Siegfried (Eliezer) Hoofien, the successive general managers of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the financial institution established by the Zionist Organization and the largest Jewish bank in the country. Unlike the hegemonic labor Zionist movement, Levontin and Hoofien articulated what I term capitalist Zionism: a fusion of Jewish nationalist aspirations with a liberal-capitalist economic vision for Palestine.
Drawing on memoirs, official reports, personal correspondence, and testimonies before British investigative commissions, this paper reconstructs the dispersed views of Levontin and Hoofien into a coherent ideological framework. It argues that their economic outlook was shaped by a confluence of factors: their professional training and social milieu, their roles as Zionist bankers, and their need to address multiple audiences, including the Jewish population in Palestine and the British colonial authorities.
I argue that the capitalist Zionism advanced by Levontin and Hoofien contained an unresolved ideological tension. On the one hand, they believed that Jewish immigration would generate shared prosperity and serve as the foundation for a kind of capitalist peace with the Arab population. On the other, as active participants in a nationalist settler movement, they could not fully escape the colonial logic of displacement and demographic transformation. This contradiction between liberal economic universalism and nationalist particularism lies at the heart of their vision for a Jewish Palestine.