Smilansky was born into a farming family in Ukraine and urged agricultural labor to renew the Jewish people. He joined the First Aliyah in the 1890s. He helped launch and led the moshav movement and edited its newspaper. His Negev land purchases expanded the future Jewish state. He wrote novels and nonfiction and published essays in Hebrew newspapers in Europe. He advocated Jewish-Arab coexistence and a binational state.
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