Huck and Jim vs. Herzl and Morris: Mark Twain on Zionism and the first aliyah

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/morris-zionism-aliyah.html

In this little-read sequel to Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, bourgeois Tom Sawyer sounds awfully like Herzl, Jabotinsky, Peters, and Dershowitz, in his belief that nobody who isn’t organized in a proper nation state has any right to the land. Just living on and working the land isn’t enough. Poor white Huck and poor black Jim, on the other hand, immediately identify with the Palestinian peasantry, who just want to be left alone on their farms. Jim even seems to have an intuition about Palestinian hospitality: “Ef we wuz to go ‘mongst ‘em, jist we three, en say we’s hungry, en ast ‘em for a bite to eat, why, maybe dey’s jist like yuther people. Don’t you reckon dey is? Why, DEY’D give it, I know dey would, en den—“

Mark Twain's tribute to the French Revolution

'The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.

There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.'
From Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), quoted here