Radical Revisionism gave rise to the unique world-view held by a small group known as the Committee for the Unification of Hebrew Youths or the Canaanites. Its initiator and dominant figure was the poet Uriel Shelah (Halpern), known by his nom-de-plume, Yonathan Ratosh. Most of this handful of intellectuals, no more than twenty in number, had literary tendencies, and flourished in Little Tel Aviv, primarily between 1940 and 1946. The somewhat pretentious objective of the committee was to represent the spirit of the new Hebrews of Palestine. In actual fact, the committee comprised a few talented local artists and journalists who were individualistic by nature and anti-establishment by inclination. The writer Amos Kenan contended that support for the Canaanites was ‘an act of defiance’, while Ratosh claimed that it derived from ‘a sense of total alienation’.

The Canaanite world-view can be defined as pan-Hebraism. When it surfaced in the 1940s it seemed to spring conceptually from Ratosh's language and poetry, but it embodied an extreme anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish position, as well as a deterministic geo-political and imperial vision concerning the borders and racial intermingling involved in its fulfilment. In effect, Canaanism was not bound to any definition of time or historical reality. Its fascination lay in the ‘esoteric pathos’ which united a small band of people in a closed, elitist and missionary sect. Politically, Canaanism was merely an episode, but its ideas tended towards the radical Revisionism of Lehi.

Yonathan Ratosh (1908–81) was a talented poet, a shallow thinker and an ineffectual politician.