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 "historic wrong" that was the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Jews that accompanied it. He also advanced a theory that the Palestinian Arabs had to be integrated with Zionism because, in his view, they were fundamentally of Jewish origin, but had been Arabized and converted to Christianity or Islam after managing to avoid being dispersed during the Jewish–Roman wars. Provided by Wikipedia