3 ideas
The 'New Society' is organized as a voluntary association of members rather than a sovereign state, with cooperatives that sit between capitalism and socialism, and with women voting. Land is owned in common and leased for fixed terms that revert at a jubilee, on the model of the biblical Jubilee. The design is meant to capture rising land values for the community and to block speculation and the growth of a landlord class.
The novel's political climax is an election in which Rabbi Geyer's party campaigns to restrict the New Society's membership to Jews. His party is defeated, and the society affirms that anyone who accepts its duties may belong. Herzl argues that a Jewish homeland keeps its moral legitimacy only if it refuses the ethnic exclusion that Jews themselves suffered in Europe.
The Arab population is represented chiefly by Reschid Bey, a prosperous Muslim member of the New Society who says Jewish settlement enriched the country and asks why anyone would object, though he also defends the Arab farming that preceded it. The book leans on economic uplift to answer the question of legitimacy. A present-day reader may see this as a limit of the utopia, since Arab political wishes get little independent treatment.