Israel Belkind

Israel Belkind (1861-1929) was a Russian-Jewish activist, author, educator, and historian who founded the Palestine Pioneers during the First Aliyah. He became involved with the Zionist movement in the 1880s, when continuous Russian pogroms led him to assert that Jewish assimilation was not viable in any part of the world, and it was around this time that he created the design of the "Flag of Zion" that was officially adopted by the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and eventually by the State of Israel in 1948. As he sought to increase the growth and prosperity of the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine, Belkind himself immigrated and, following an initial period in agriculture, began establishing or teaching at educational institutions at various locations, such as Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion, Jerusalem, and Haifa. He published several works in which he expressed his desire to correct the "historical error" that was the alleged dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple. He also advanced the opinion that the Palestinian Arabs could be integrated with Zionism because they were fundamentally ethnic Jews who had been Arabized and converted to Christianity or Islam.