Rights and Sovereignty in a Developing International Order: David Ben Gurion's Am Yisrael in the 1920s/30s Global Landscape

The topic of this paper is David Ben Gurion's 1931 anthology of essays, "אנחנו ושכנינו," which has not yet been translated into English. The paper analyzes David Ben Gurion's argument in this work that national identity is utterly international in character. In this early 1930s moment, Ben Gurion focused on evolving transnational relationships and the language used to describe them, national identities, and the interconnectedness of nationalisms. אנחנו ושכנינו demonstrates that Ben Gurion's Zionism was not conceived in a Jewish vacuum; rather, it was part of an evolving worldview, an understanding of the developing international world order, which led him to certain political conceptions of state, nation, nation-state, and citizen in the Zionist context.