What would Herzl have thought of Israel and global Jewry today?

Reflecting on the epochal-making gathering, Herzl’s own diary entry from 1897 reads: “In Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this aloud today, the answer would be universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, in any case in fifty years, everyone will recognise this. In truth a state exists by the people’s will to be a state.”

So, I thought it would be fitting to mull over what Herzl would have thought about the Israel of today and the state of global Jewry.

Speaking to his descendants, I thought, would be the best way to get a better sense of what he would have made of the Israel of 2026 compared to the one he envisaged in his writings, including in his 1896 manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land).

However, no relatives exist today. In fact, none of Herzl’s direct descendants lived to see the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, with virtually all of them dying under tragic circumstances.

Herzl’s only son, Hans, died by suicide in 1930 shortly after his sister, Pauline, died of an overdose in France. Herzl’s youngest daughter, Trude, was deported with her husband, Richard Neumann, to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 where they were both killed.

Their son, Stephen Theodor Norman – Herzl’s only grandchild – served in the British army and later took his own life in Washington DC in 1946 after learning that his parents had died in the Holocaust. Shortly before his death, Norman did end up visiting Mandatory Palestine in 1946, and was therefore perhaps the closest of all the Herzls to see the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel that his grandfather, Theodor, had envisaged. Later writing about his encounter with young Zionists on the ground, Norman said: “These children bore the mark of freedom. I thought of the dark, sallow, unhappy Jewish children of Europe. I had seen pictures of their faces; their youthful frames had borne the features of old men and women, and now I saw these little ones who look like children again.”

So, with no Herzl descendent left to ask, I turned to Herzl’s own words and, for a second opinion, to Yaron Peleg, the Kennedy Leigh Professor in Modern Hebrew Studies at Cambridge University, who was my director of studies when I was a student there and has remained a close mentor since.

The most immediate thing Herzl would notice is that his dream actually materialised.

Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian journalist, an erudite, assimilated, bourgeois Jewish man living and working in 19th century central Europe. None of his visions of a Jewish state matched that of a theocracy, a shtetl or an under-developed nation.

His dream was to establish a picturesque kind of Vienna on the Mediterranean. Tel Aviv would astonish him. There, he would find a cosmopolitan cultural life rivalling any major European city he would have frequented, with lush beaches, fine museums, sprawling coffee shops and delectable food offerings.

He would likely marvel at the ingenuity of the country’s inhabitants, its creativity and entrepreneurial spirit – with Israel’s "unicorn economy” enduring even during times of war and distress – and be overjoyed to see a functioning Jewish state, one with its own independent branches of government, public institutions, and developed residential and agricultural communities from north to south.

“Up to the end of the 20th century," Peleg told me, “and relative to its age and size, Israel became an economic and cultural powerhouse, a success that created a brand name that enjoyed a cachet around the world and was extended to Jews outside of Israel too.”

But there would likely be some disappointment and shock, too.

Herzl would likely be distraught to see the perpetuation of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the failure of his hoped-for co-existence between Jews and Arabs to become reality. He might also be surprised by the religious transformation of Israeli society that counters the secular utopia he wrote about extensively. Crucially, he would be surprised by the continued existence of global antisemitism.

Sadly, national self-determination did not serve as a panacea to antisemitism, nor did it enable Jews to “live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes,” as Herzl wished in the concluding passage of Der Judenstaat.

Herzl’s quixotic premise in Altneuland is that as a result of this glistening and futuristic New Society, as he describes it, there would no longer be antisemitism anywhere else in the world.

Peleg adds that Herzl had envisioned a Jewish state that would eliminate Judaism in a way by normalising it, and he believed that normalisation would lead to the disappearance of Jewish hatred around the world. However, “The 7th of October exposed the fragility of both: the slow turn to religion within Israel since 1967 and the animosity toward Jews in the West.”

Herzl could scarcely have imagined a world in which a Jewish state existed, yet at the same time Jews in London, New York and Sydney were facing virulent Jew hatred simply because they were Jewish.

Herzl was certainly not a prophet. He was indeed wrong about much of what a Jewish state would look like once it came into being.

But he was absolutely right about the necessity of the Jewish state in the first place.

And amid the chants calling for the end of Zionism in Basel last week – and the incessant anti-Zionism that almost invariably smells of antisemitism elsewhere in the world – that distinction feels more relevant than ever.

Jonathan Harounoff is an award-winning British author and journalist covering the Middle East and Israel’s former international spokesperson at the United Nations. He is also the host of the new show “UNscripted with Jonathan Harounoff,” set to launch later this month