thumb|right|Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. thumb|Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet , he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century. Zionism ( ; , ; derived from Zion) is an ethnic or ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people through the colonization'Should the powers show themselves willing to grant us sovereignty over a neutral land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two regions come to mind: Palestine and Argentina. Significant experiments in colonization have been made in both countries, though on the mistaken principle of gradual infiltration of Jews. Infiltration is bound to end badly.'(b) 'Only settlement on a grand scale would bring about a solution to the Jewish problem: the Jews must colonize rather than infiltrate and assimilate. This principle was similar to the assertions of Herzl or Zangwill.' Theodor Herzl cited in Gur Alroey, [ http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.1.1 “Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956,'] Jewish Social Studies , Fall 2011, Vol. 18, No. 1 pp. 1-32, p.5, p.20 of Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition, "The preoccupation of rabbinic literature in all its forms with the Land of Israel is without question intensive and constant. It is no wonder that this literature offers historians of the Land of Israel a wealth of information for the clarification of a wide variety of topics." an area deeply embedded in Jewish history, religion and the identity. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became an ideology that supports the development and protection of Israel as a Jewish state, in particular, a state with a Jewish demographic majority. It has also been described as Israel's national or state ideology. Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a national revival movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and as a consequence of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. During this period, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire.Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, pp. 10–11 The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, some Zionist figures, including Theodor Herzl, supported alternative options to Palestine in several places such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula, but this was rejected by most of the movement. This process was seen by the emerging Zionist movement as an "ingathering of exiles" (kibbutz galuyot), an effort to put a stop to the exoduses and persecutions that have marked Jewish history by bringing the Jewish people back to their historic homeland. From 1897 to 1948, the primary goal of the Zionist movement was to establish the basis for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and thereafter to consolidate it. The movement itself recognized that Zionism's claim to Palestine went against the commonly accepted interpretation of the principle of self-determination. In 1884, proto-Zionist groups established the Lovers of Zion, and in 1897 the first Zionist congress was organized. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a large number of Jews immigrated first to Ottoman and later to Mandatory Palestine. At the same time, some international recognition and support was gained, notably in the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the United Kingdom. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has continued primarily to advocate on behalf of Israel and to address threats to its continued existence and security. The term "Zionism" has been applied to various approaches to addressing issues faced by European Jews in the late 19th century. Modern political Zionism, different from religious Zionism, is a movement made up of diverse political groups whose strategies and tactics have changed over time. The common ideology among mainstream Zionist factions is support for territorial concentration and a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, through aliyah, colonization'Should the powers show themselves willing to grant us sovereignty over a neutral land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two regions come to mind: Palestine and Argentina. Significant experiments in colonization have been made in both countries, though on the mistaken principle of gradual infiltration of Jews. Infiltration is bound to end badly.'(b) 'Only settlement on a grand scale would bring about a solution to the Jewish problem: the Jews must colonize rather than infiltrate and assimilate. This principle was similar to the assertions of Herzl or Zangwill.' Theodor Herzl cited in Gur Alroey, [ http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.1.1 “Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956,'] Jewish Social Studies , Fall 2011, Vol. 18, No. 1 pp. 1-32, p.5, p.20, and gaining international acceptance. The Zionist mainstream has historically included liberal, labor, revisionist, and cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement. Different Zionist groups adopted similar political strategies and approaches in their interactions with the local Palestinian Arab population and their future in the Jewish state. Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (which were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors as noted in ancient history.Israel Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 4, 2007 – Special Issue: Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict – De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine. S. Ilan Troen"Zionism and British imperialism II: Imperial financing in Palestine", Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture. Volume 30, Issue 2, 2011. pp. 115–139. Michael J. Cohen Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist, racist, or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.See for example: M. Shahid Alam (2010), Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism Paperback, or "Through the Looking Glass: The Myth of Israeli Exceptionalism" , Huffington Post Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist. Terminology
The term "Zionism" is derived from the word Zion (), a hill in Jerusalem, widely symbolizing the Land of Israel.This is Jerusalem, Menashe Harel, Canaan Publishing, Jerusalem, 1977, pp. 194–195 Throughout eastern Europe in the late 19th century, numerous grassroots groups promoted the national resettlement of the Jews in their homeland, as well as the revitalization and cultivation of the Hebrew language. These groups were collectively called the "Lovers of Zion" and were seen as countering a growing Jewish movement toward assimilation. The first use of the term is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, founder of the Kadimah nationalist Jewish students' movement; he used the term in 1890 in his journal Selbst-Emancipation (Self-Emancipation), itself named almost identically to Leon Pinsker's 1882 book Auto-Emancipation. Overview
The common denominator among all modern Zionists is a claim to Palestine, a land traditionally known in Jewish writings as the Land of Israel ("Eretz Israel") as a national homeland of the Jews and as the legitimate focus for Jewish national self-determination.Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (1995) Historically, the consensus in Zionist ideology has been that a Jewish national home requires a Jewish majority.Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology, Oxford 1987 Zionism is based on historical ties and religious traditions linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.Aviel Roshwald, "Jewish Identity and the Paradox of Nationalism", in Michael Berkowitz, (ed.). Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, p. 15. Zionism does not have a uniform ideology, but modern political Zionism is typically associated with Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism which are not fundamentally different. thumb|The flag of the Zionist Movement adopted in 1891 became the flag of the State of Israel, established in 1948. For approximately 1,700 years after the last recorded Jewish majority in the region, most Jews lived in various countries without a national state as part of the post-Roman chapter of the Jewish diaspora. The Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising antisemitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.Wylen, Stephen M. Settings of Silver: An Introduction to Judaism, 2nd. ed., Paulist Press, 2000, p. 392. The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book (The Jewish State).Walter Laqueur, The History of Zionism (2003) p. 40 At that time, Herzl believed that Jewish migration to Ottoman Palestine, particularly among poor Jewish communities, unassimilated and whose 'floating' presence caused disquiet, would be beneficial to assimilated European Jews and Christians. Political Zionism was in some respects a dramatic break from the two thousand years of Jewish and rabbinical tradition. Deriving inspiration from other European nationalist movements, Zionism drew in particular from a German version of European enlightenment thought, with German nationalistic principles becoming key features of Zionist nationalism. The Jewish historian of nationalism Hans Kohn argued that Zionism nationalism "had nothing to do with Jewish traditions; it was in many ways opposed to them". Starting early on, Zionism had its critics, the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha'am in the early 20th century wrote that there was no creativity in Herzl's Zionist movement, and that its culture was European and specifically German. He viewed the movement as depicting Jews as simple transmitters of imperialist European culture. Although initially one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to Jewish assimilation and antisemitism, Zionism expanded rapidly. In its early stages, supporters considered setting up a Jewish state in the historic territory of Palestine. After World War II and the destruction of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe where these alternative movements were rooted, it became dominant in the thinking about a Jewish national state. During this period, Zionism would develop a discourse in which the religious, non-Zionist Jews of the Old Yishuv who lived in mixed Arab-Jewish cities were viewed as backwards in comparison to the secular Zionist New Yishuv. From the beginning of the development of the Zionism movement, the support of the European powers was seen as necessary by the Zionist leadership (Herzl, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion). Creating an alliance with Great Britain and securing support for some years for Jewish emigration to Palestine, Zionists also recruited European Jews to immigrate there, especially Jews who lived in areas of the Russian Empire where antisemitism was raging. The alliance with Britain was strained as the latter realized the implications of the Jewish movement for Arabs in Palestine, but the Zionists persisted. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel on May 14, 1948 (5 Iyyar 5708 in the Hebrew calendar), as the homeland for the Jewish people. The proportion of the world's Jews living in Israel has steadily grown since the movement emerged. By the early 21st century, more than 40% of the world's Jews lived in Israel, more than in any other country. These two outcomes represent the historical success of Zionism and are unmatched by any other Jewish political movement in the past 2,000 years. In some academic studies, Zionism has been analyzed both within the larger context of diaspora politics and as an example of modern national liberation movements.A.R. Taylor, "Vision and intent in Zionist Thought", in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. by I. Abu-Lughod, 1971, , p. 10
Zionism also sought the assimilation of Jews into the modern world. As a result of the diaspora, many of the Jewish people remained outsiders within their adopted countries and became detached from modern ideas. So-called "assimilationist" Jews desired complete integration into European society. They were willing to downplay their Jewish identity and in some cases to abandon traditional views and opinions in an attempt at modernization and assimilation into the modern world. A less extreme form of assimilation was called cultural synthesis. Those in favor of cultural synthesis desired continuity and only moderate evolution, and were concerned that Jews should not lose their identity as a people. "Cultural synthesists" emphasized both a need to maintain traditional Jewish values and faith and a need to conform to a modernist society, for instance, in complying with work days and rules.Tesler, Mark. Jewish History and the Emergence of Modern Political Zionism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Printing Press, 1994. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which designated Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination". Resolution 3379 was repealed in 1991 with Israel's conditioning of its participation in the Madrid peace talks on the passing of Resolution 46/86, which “ revoke[d] the determination contained in” 3379. Beliefs
Ethnic unity and descent from Biblical Jews
Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent". "The work of Jewish race scientists has been the subject of several recent studies (Efron 1994; R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000; Kiefer 1991; Lipphardt 2007; Y. Weiss 2002; see also Doron 1980). As these studies suggest, among Jewish physicians, anthropologists, and other 'men of science' in Central Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent (Doron 1980: 404; Y. Weiss 2002: 155). At the same time, many of these proponents agreed that the Jews were suffering a process of 'degeneration, and so their writings advanced the national project as a means of 'regeneration' and 'racial improvement' (R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000: 17)... In the Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization. 'Race' was an integral concept in certain versions of nationalist thinking, and in Western identity (Bonnett 2003), albeit in different ways. In the discourse of Zionist men of science, 'race' served different purposes, according to the context in question. In some contexts 'race' was mainly used to establish Jewish unity, while in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jews. The latter use was more common in texts which appeared in Palestine. It resulted from the encounter of European Zionists with Eastern Jews, and from the tension between the projects of nation-building and of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in the East." Zionist nationalism drew from a German ethnic-nationalist theory that people of common descent should seek separation and pursue the formation of their own state. In the words of Yulia Egorova, this "racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism" was originally a reaction to European antisemitism. According to Raphael Falk, as early as the 1870s, contrary to largely cultural perspectives among integrated and assimilated Jewish communities in the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Romanticism, "the Zionists-to-be stressed that Jews were not merely members of a cultural or a religious entity, but were an integral biological entity". This re-conceptualization of Jewishness cast the "volk" of the Jewish community as a nation-race, in contrast to centuries-old conceptions of the Jewish people as a religious socio-cultural grouping. The Jewish historians Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow are largely credited with this creation of Zionism as a nationalist project. They drew on religious Jewish sources and non-Jewish texts in reconstructing a national identity and consciousness. This new Jewish historiography divorced from and, at times at odds with, traditional Jewish collective memory. It was particularly important in early nation building in Israel, because Jews in Israel are ethnically diverse and the origins of Ashkenazi Jews, the original founders of Zionism, are "highly debated and enigmatic". "There is a “problem” regarding the origins of the Ashkenazim, which needs resolution: Ashkenazi Jews, who seem European—phenotypically, that is—are the normative center of world Jewry. No less, they are the political and cultural elite of the newly founded Jewish state. Given their central symbolic and political capital in the Jewish state and given simultaneously the scientific and social persistence of racial logics as ways of categorizing and understanding human groups, it was essential to find other evidence that Israel’s European Jews were not in truth Europeans. The normative Jew had to have his/her origins in ancient Palestine or else the fundamental tenet of Zionism, the entire edifice of Jewish history and nationalist ideology, would come tumbling down. In short, the Ashkenazi Jew is the Jew—the Jew in relation to whose values and cultural practices the oriental Jew in Israel must assimilate. Simultaneously, however, the Ashkenazi Jew is the most dubious Jew, the Jew whose historical and genealogical roots in ancient Palestine are most difficult to see and perhaps thus to believe—in practice, although clearly not by definition." Notable proponents of this racial idea included Max Nordau, Herzl's co-founder of the original Zionist Organization, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the prominent architect of early statist Zionism and the founder of what became Israel's Likud party, and Arthur Ruppin, considered the "father of Israeli sociology". Jabotinsky wrote that Jewish national integrity relies on “racial purity", whereas Nordau asserted the need for an "exact anthropological, biological, economic, and intellectual statistic of the Jewish people". According to Hassan S. Haddad, the application of the Biblical concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the "Promised Land" in Zionism, particularly to secular Jews, requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites. This is considered important to the State of Israel, because its founding narrative centers around the concept of an "Ingathering of the exiles" and the "Return to Zion", on the assumption that all modern Jews are the direct lineal descendants of the biblical Jews.: "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel." The question has thus been focused on by supporters of Zionism and anti-Zionists alike, as in the absence of this biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people," whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return". A Jewish "biological self-definition" has become a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers have never doubted that evidence will one day be found, even though so far proof for the claim has "remained forever elusive". "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to “see,” especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive… Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."
Rejection of the Identity of the Diaspora Jew
Israeli-Irish scholar Ronit Lentin has argued that the construction of Zionist identity as a militarized nationalism arose in contrast to the imputed identity of the Diaspora Jew as a "feminised" Other. She describes this as a relationship of contempt towards the previous identity of the Jewish Diaspora viewed as unable to resist anti-semitism and the Holocaust. Lentin argues that Zionism's rejection of this "feminised" identity and its obsession with constructing a nation is reflected in the nature of the symbolism of the movement, which are drawn from modern sources and appropriated as Zionist, instancing the fact that the melody of the Hatikvah anthem drew on the version composed by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Negation of the life in the Diaspora
Negation of life in the Diaspora is a central assumption in Zionism.E. Schweid, "Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought", in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. by Reinharz & Shapira, 1996, , p. 133 Some supporters of Zionism believed that Jews in the Diaspora were prevented from their full growth in Jewish individual and national life. The rejection of life in the diaspora was not limited to secular Zionism; many religious Zionists shared this opinion, but not all religious Zionism did. Rav Cook, considered one of the most important religious Zionist thinkers, characterized the diaspora as a flawed and alienated existence marked by decline, narrowness, displacement, solitude, and frailty. He believed that the diasporan way of life is diametrically opposed to a "national renaissance," which manifests itself not only in the return to Zion but also in the return to nature and creativity, revival of heroic and aesthetic values, and the resurgence of individual and societal power. Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe; it primarily seeks to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the Mandate for Palestine, governed by Britain, explicitly privileged Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. In 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence and the first Arab–Israeli war broke out. During the war, Israel expanded its territory to control over 78% of Mandatory Palestine. As a result of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, an estimated 160,000 of 870,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming a Palestinian minority in Israel. Zionist views have varied over time and are not uniform, resulting in a variety of types of Zionism. The Zionist mainstream has historically included Liberal, Labor, Revisionist, and Cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement. Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that brings together secular nationalism and religious conservatism. Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (who were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors. Opponents of Zionism often characterize it as a supremacist, colonialist, or racist ideology,
Quoting Mr. Abouchaer of Syria, on p. 31:
Citing Soviet ideology, on p. 136:
Harkabi, Yehoshafat, Arab attitudes to Israel, pp. 247–248 or as a settler colonialist movement.See for example: , or
Etymology and terminology
The word Zion itself derives from Mount Zion, which is a hill in Jerusalem and a term used in the Hebrew Bible. It has been used poetically as a synecdoche to refer to the Land of Israel since the period of the Babylonian Exile, with particular importance in Jewish messianic belief. The term also appeared in political contexts in antiquity, including on coinage issued during the First Jewish Revolt against Roman rule. The messianic conception of "Zion" was utilized by the Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who wrote Seeking Zion in 1862, a proto-Zionist text which was the first written work to demand that the Jews migrate en-masse to Palestine. The first time the term "Zion" was associated with a mass movement was with the (lit. 'Lovers of Zion'), also known as the (lit. 'Love of Zion'), who came together at the 1884 Katowice Conference, inspired by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The first use of the term as an -ism is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, in an 1890 article in his periodical , itself named after Pinsker's pamphlet. Birnbaum used the term "Zionism" in reference to the activities of the Lovers of Zion. In 1893, Birnbaum published The National Rebirth of The Jewish People in its Own Land, which advocated for the Jews to migrate to Palestine. In the same year, Birnbaum founded "Zion: Union of Austrian Societies for the Colonization of Palestine and Syria", to carry out his proposals. The paramount Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was unaware of Birnbaum's original usage of the term before popularizing the term "Zionism" himself. In Herzl's diary entries between 1895 and early 1896, he originally used the term "Zionist" to describe others, and not himself. Herzl used the term "Zionist" to describe those in the Lovers of Zion, who Herzl saw as fellow Jewish nationalists, but without a concrete plan. When Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, he used the term "Zionist" in the text, often in a critical light, to describe emigration advocates like the Lovers of Zion. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl called for the creation of a Jewish state, an idea which he claimed was "an ancient one" that he did not "discover". After the publication of Der Judenstaat, Birnbaum wrote a review of the book, attributing its success to the author proudly embracing Zionism, but also criticized the cultural proposals of Herzl. Birnbaum quickly struck up a correspondence with Herzl, and gave him a copy of The National Rebirth of The Jewish People in its Own Land, as a sort of Zionist education. Herzl did not begin self-identifying as a "Zionist" until months after the publication of . Herzl's usage of "Zionism" was later popularized when convening the 1897 First Zionist Congress and the Zionist Organization founded there. Beliefs
National self-determination
Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation, and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination. In contrast to the Zionist notion of nationhood the Judaic sense of being a nation was rooted in religious beliefs of unique chosenness and divine providence, rather than in ethnicity. Specifically, prayers emphasized distinctiveness from other nations where a connection to Eretz Israel and the anticipation of restoration were based on messianic beliefs and religious practices, not modern nationalist conceptions. A Jewish home and state in Palestine
Early Zionism was ambiguous about the form self-determination might take. While some texts spoke of a "Jewish state", others spoke only of a "Jewish homeland" (as in the Zionist movement’s Basel declaration) or "national home for the Jewish people" (the term used in the Balfour Declaration), usually under the sovereignty of the Ottoman and, later, the British Empire. According to Shlomo Avineri, it was only in the 1930s that a sovereign state rather than home became the fully articulated goal. Similarly, some early Zionists, including Herzl, considered possibilities for a Jewish national home or state outside Palestine, for example in the Americas or Africa. In 1905 (after Herzl's death), a majority of the Zionist Congress voted against the proposal to settle in East Africa, and the supporters of this proposal, led by Israel Zangwill, split from the movement to form the Jewish Territorial Organisation. Over time, the belief that Jews have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine became the dominant Zionist view. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a hereditary right to the land that outweighed the equivalent nationalist claims of the local Arabs. After suffering as a minority in Europe and the Middle East, establishing a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority, became a focus of the Zionist movement. Zionist organizations encouraged immigration to Palestine, and antisemitism produced a strong push factor. Claim to a Jewish demographic majority
The establishment of a Jewish demographic majority was an essential aspect of Zionism. Israeli historian Yosef Gorny argues that this demographic change required annulling the majority status of the Arabs.: "This was potentially a much more dangerous situation than the struggle of two peoples maintaining a constant balance of forces between them for the same territory. The logical, and even inevitable, corollary of the aspiration towards territorial concentration was the desire to create a Jewish majority in Palestine. Without it, Zionism would forfeit its meaning, since the history of Exile had demonstrated the danger inherent in perpetual minority status. Thus, the desire for a Jewish majority was the key issue in the implementation of Zionism, implying a basic change in the international standing of the Jewish people and marking a turning-point in their history. The significance of this demand, and of the untiring endeavour to realize it in various ways, lay in the annulling of the majority standing of the Arabs of Palestine. The roots of the Jewish-Arab confrontation, therefore, are embedded in the incessant process of disturbance of the status quo ante as regards national status in Palestine." Gorny argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed in Golda Meir’s 1969 interview comment that "there was no such thing as Palestinians" is a cornerstone of Zionist policy. After the Holocaust, even those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom, did not see the Arabs as having an equally weighty claim to nationhood in Palestine, and sought demographic parity. Judah Magnes, even after the Holocaust, continued to support a binational state, even one imposed by the Great Powers, but was unable to find any Arab interlocutors. British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs. Unlike other forms of nationalism, the Zionist claim to Palestine was aspirational and required a mechanism by which the claim could be realized. The territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine and the subsequent goal of establishing a Jewish majority there was the main mechanism by which Zionist groups sought to realize this claim.: "Zionism had always looked to the day when a Jewish majority would enable the movement to gain control over the country: The Zionist leadership had never posited Jewish statehood with a minority of Jews ruling over a majority of Arabs, apartheid style." By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, the political differences between the various Zionist groups had shrunk further, with almost all Zionist groups seeking a Jewish state in Palestine.: "Zionism is both a struggle for land and a demographic race; in essence, the aspiration for a territory with a Jewish majority...Zionist democratic diversity did not mean that there was no commonground between the major segments of the movement. Initially, Ben-Gurion preferred an 'iron wall of workers', namely settlements and Jewish infrastructure, on Jabotinsky's call for an iron wall of military might and deterrence... he even lashed out against what he defined as Jabotinsky's 'perverted national fanaticism', and against the Revisionists 'worthless prattle of sham heroes, whose lips becloud the moral purity of our national movement. . .' Eventually, however, under the growing chal-lenge of Arab nationalism and especially with the growth in the Yishuv of a collective mood of sacred Jewish nationalism following the Holocaust, the Labour Zionists, chief among them David Ben-Gurion, accepted forall practical purposes Jabotinsky's iron-wall strategy. The Jewish State could only emerge, and force the Arabs to accept it, if it erected around it an impregnable wall of Jewish might and deterrence." While not every Zionist group openly called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, every group in the Zionist mainstream was wedded to the idea of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.: "Within the Zionist ideological consensus there coexisted three relatively distinct tendencies—political Zionism, labor Zionism and cultural Zionism. Each was wedded to the demand for a Jewish majority, but not for entirely the same reasons."
In pursuing a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement encountered the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Arab population, which was predominantly non-Jewish. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental importance for the Zionist movement.: "Thus, the desire for a Jewish majority was the key issue in the implementation of Zionism, implying a basic change in the international standing of the Jewish people and marking a turning-point in their history. The significance of this demand, and of the untiring endeavour to realize it in various ways, lay in the annulling of the majority standing of the Arabs of Palestine." Many Zionist activists intended to establish a Jewish majority through Jewish immigration to the region. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or what would now be called ethnic cleansing, of the Palestinian population.: "In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionist leadership found it expedient to euphemize, using the term "transfer" or "ha'avara" – the Hebrew euphemism for ethnic cleansing – one of most enduring themes of Zionist settler-colonization (see below). Other themes included demographic transformation of the land and physical separation between the immigrant-settlers and the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. All these colonizing themes were central to Zionist muscular nationalism, with its rejection of both liberal forms of universalism and Marxism, along with individual rights and class struggle. Instead, Zionism gave precedence to the realization of its ethnocratic völkisch project: the establishment of a biblically ordained state." According to Benny Morris, the idea of transfer played a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement and was seen as the main method of maintaining the "Jewishness" of the Zionist's state.: "The idea of transferring the Arabs out of the Jewish State area to the Arab state area or to other Arab states was seen as the chief means of assuring the stability of the 'Jewishness' of the proposed Jewish State" He argues that "transfer" was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" and that a land that was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population.: "transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism—because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure." Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population's fear of displacement. He argues that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population. The concept of "transfer" had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, as it was considered both moral and practical, as a way to deal with the Palestinian problem, create a Jewish homeland and avoid ethnic conflict. The concept of removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, eventually including its farthest left factions, who, after realizing the extent of the destruction of European Jewry, viewed it as a lesser evil.: "The archival and documentary evidence shows that in the pre-1948 period, "transfer"/ethnic cleansing was embraced by the highest levels of Zionist leadership, representing almost the entire political spectrum. Nearly all the founding fathers of the Israeli state advocated transfer in one form or another, including Theodor Herzl, Leon Motzkin, Nahman Syrkin, Menahem Ussishkin, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Avraham Granovsky, Israel Zangwill, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, Pinhas Rutenberg, Aaron Aaronson, Vladmir Jabotinsky and Berl Katznelson (Masalha, 1992). Supporters of "voluntary" removal included Arthur Ruppin, a co-founder of Brit Shalom, a movement advocating bi-nationalism and equal rights for Arabs and Jews; moderate leaders of Mapai (later the Labour party) such as Moshe Shertok and Eli'ezer Kaplan, Israel's first finance minister; and leaders of the Histadrut (Hebrew Labour Federation) such as Golda Meyerson (later Meir) and David Remez (Masalha, 1992)." Transfer thought began early in the movement's development in various forms. "Transfer" was seen not only as desirable but also as an ideal solution by some in the Zionist leadership, but it remained controversial. Perceived deficiencies of assimilation, negation of diasporic life
From the perspective of some early Zionist thinkers, Jews living amongst non-Jews suffer from impediments that can be addressed only by rejecting the Jewish identity that developed while living amongst non-Jews. Accordingly, the early Zionists sought to develop a nationalist Jewish political life in a territory where Jews constitute a demographic majority.: "Unsatisfactory and simplistic as Pinsker's quasi-medical diagnosis may be, it does try to address itself to the exceptional conditions of Jewish existence. If Jews are a nation and they continue to exist as a nation despite the lack of the effective attributes of national life, this is an obvious anomaly, and an explanation has to be found. Krochmal and Graetz tried to explain this deviation from the norms of universal historical development by rearranging the conventional norms of universal history itself. Pinsker lacks this philosophical dimension of history, and he therefore limits himself to stating what he conceives as an anomaly and attempting to suggest a clinical diagnosis for it. Pinsker's diagnosis may appear irrelevant, but his cure is radical. If the nations of the world see the Jew as a soul without a body, a shadowless Ahasver, an eternal Wandering Jew, lacking real, corporeal existence, the cure surely has to be radical. If the Jews are hated because they have no homeland, normalization will become possible only if they acquire one. Were this to happen, then the nations of the world would view the Jews as normal human beings and would consequently lose their inordinate fear of them. No concrete, real attribute of the Jews causes Judeophobia; it is the abnormality of the Jews being somewhere between a national existence and a lack of a real foundation for that existence. For the Jews to appear like any other people they need a homeland, Pinsker argues: then everybody will relate to them as normal people and Judeophobia will wither away." The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with demographic minority status) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The Zionist solution to the perceived deficiencies of diasporic life (or the "Jewish Question") was dependent on the territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine, with the longer-term goal of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there. Negation of the Diaspora is a concept that asserts that Jews living in the Diaspora—that is, outside of the Land of Israel—are in an environment that is inherently harmful and so must be fixed to ensure the survival and the cohesion of the Jews as a people, often to the extent that the Jewish people have no future without amassing at their "spiritual centre" in the Land of Israel. Zionism and secular Jewish identity
Zionism sought to reconfigure Jewish identity and culture in nationalist and secular terms.: "Indeed, Zionism has celebrated itself as the modernization of the Jews, manifested in the dual revolution of allegedly secularizing Jewish identity and nationalizing, or politicizing it." According to Yaacov Yadgar, Zionism rejected traditional Judaic definitions of what it means to be Jewish, but struggled to offer a new interpretation of Jewish identity independent of rabbinical tradition. Yagdar argues that Jewish religion is viewed as an essentially negative factor in Zionism, even in religious Zionist ideology, and as responsible for the diminishing status of Jews living as a minority. Responding to the challenges of modernity, Zionism sought to replace religious and community institutions with secular-nationalistic ones.Avineri, cited in Indeed, Zionism maintained primarily the outward symbols of Jewish tradition, redefining them in a nationalistic context. Zionism saw itself as bringing Jews into the modern world by redefining what it means to be Jewish in terms of identification with a sovereign state, rather than Judaic faith and tradition. This new identity would be based on a rejection of the life of exile. Zionism portrayed the Diaspora Jew as mentally unstable, physically frail, and prone to engaging in transient businesses. They were seen as detached from nature, purely materialistic, and focused solely on their personal gains. In contrast, the vision for the new Jew was radically different: an individual of strong moral and aesthetic values, not shackled by religion, driven by ideals and willing to challenge degrading circumstances; a liberated, dignified person eager to defend both personal and national pride.: "This poem, published in Warsaw, epitomizes the youth rebellion that was part of the Zionist experience. Old Judaism seemed aged and ailing, lacking relevance to the new world dawning in the wake of World War One. The old Jew, the Jew of the Diaspora, was depicted as psychologically flawed, physically weak, inclined toward luftgesheftn (lit., "air business", meaning peddling, acting as middlemen, and engaging in other ephemeral trades), a stranger to nature and anything natural and spontaneous, materialistic and incapable of acting on anything but his or her own immediate interests. The new Jew was to be the complete opposite: an ethical, aesthetic person guided by ideals who rebels against a debasing reality; a free, proud individual ready to fight for his or her own and the nation's honor. Yearning for freedom and equality among peoples, admiring nature, beauty, and open spaces, the new Jew relinquished the pleasures of a hypocritical, bourgeois world shackled by outdated conventions and sought the challenge of a life in which dedication to the collective was congruent with maintaining inner truth and a life of simplicity, honesty, and self-realization. The new Jew aspired to equality, justice, and truth in human relations, and was prepared to die for them." This was the "New Jew" posited by Nordau's Muscular Judaism and later the pioneering "Sabra" celebrated in Israeli nationalism - not the feminine, over-intellectual, degenerate Luftmenschen (people of air) of the diaspora, as Nordau characterised them. According to Yadgar, the Zionist goal of reframing of Jewish identity in secular-nationalist terms meant primarily the decline of the status of religion in the Jewish community.: "This secularization means primarily the "decline of the status of religion in the Jewish community"7 and a gradual "liberation" from the shackles of "religious tradition"." Prominent Zionist thinkers frame the development of secular identity as nationalism functionally serving the same role as religion.: "Zionism was the most fundamental revolution in Jewish life. It substituted a secular self-identity of the Jews as a nation for the traditional and Orthodox self-identity in religious terms. It changed a passive, quietistic, and pious hope of the Return to Zion into an effective social force, moving millions of people to Israel. It transformed a language relegated to mere religious usage into a modern, secular mode of intercourse of a nation-state... This does not mean that Israel is a substitute for Jewish religion, only that functionally it plays a role similar to that of religion in pre-Emancipation days. For Jews today who are still religious in the traditional sense, religion has a deep collective existential meaning. But since not all Jews can identify today with the religious symbols, religion is merely a partial focus of identity, and Israel, more than any other factor, now plays this unifying role." Zionism sought to make Jewish ethnic-nationalism the distinctive trait of Jews rather than their commitment to Judaism. According to Yadgar, Zionism instead adopted a racial understanding of Jewish identity.: "Failing (or neglecting) to offer a fully-fledged national identity that would be independent from rabbinical readings of Jewish identity, yet zealously rebelling against rabbinical authority and "religion" in general, Zionism was left with a racial notion of Jewish identity: Tautologically, echoing antisemitic notions of Jewishness, it would argue that a Jew, simply, is a Jew; that Jewishness is something some-one is born with. One does not choose it, nor can one rid oneself of his Jewishness; it is in one's "blood"." According to Yadgar, framed this way (for instance by A. B. Yehoshua), Jewish identity is only secondarily a matter of tradition or culture.: "The author, essayist, and public intellectual A. B. Yehoshua is one of the more committed and outspoken spokespersons of the State of Israel's political theology. As such, Yehoshua also functions as an influential formulator of the ideological bed upon which statist Jewishness is founded... Yehoshua's reply to this criticism repeats the claim that Jewish political sovereignty renders assimilation impossible and guarantees, no matter what, that meaningful Jewish content is to be produced. For him, "the cultural matter" is secondary, and as such not deserving of judgment. Political sovereignty, on the other hand, is primary and absolute: Jewishness is not only culture and not only religion." Nur Masalha says Zionist thinkers view the movement as a "revolt against a tradition of many centuries" of living parasitically at the margins of Western society. Indeed, he says, Zionism was uncomfortable with the term "Jewish," associating it with passivity, spirituality and the stain of "galut". Instead, Zionist thinkers preferred the term "Hebrew" to describe their identity. Zionism linked the term "Jewish" with negative characteristics prevalent in European anti-Semitic stereotypes, which Zionists believed could be remedied only through sovereignty. Revival of the Hebrew language
thumb|Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), founder and leader of the movement to revive the Hebrew language, is considered the father of Modern Hebrew. Zionists generally preferred to speak Hebrew, a Semitic language which flourished as a spoken language in the ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE,אברהם בן יוסף ,מבוא לתולדות הלשון העברית (Avraham ben-Yosef, Introduction to the History of the Hebrew Language), p. 38, אור-עם, Tel-Aviv, 1981. and continued to be used in some parts of Judea during the Second Temple period and up until 200 CE. It is the language of the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah, central texts in Judaism. Hebrew was largely preserved throughout later history as the main liturgical language of Judaism. Zionists worked to modernize Hebrew and adapt it for everyday use. They sometimes refused to speak Yiddish, a language they thought had developed in the context of European persecution. Once they moved to Israel, many Zionists refused to speak their (diasporic) mother tongues and adopted new, Hebrew names. Hebrew was preferred not only for ideological reasons, but also because it allowed all citizens of the new state to have a common language, thus furthering the political and cultural bonds among Zionists. The revival of the Hebrew language in Eastern Europe as a secular literary medium marked a significant cultural shift among Jews, who per Judaic tradition used Hebrew only for religious purposes.: "The political movement of Zionism was preceded in Eastern Europe by a revival of the Hebrew language as a nonreligious, literary medium. Jews always used Hebrew in their prayers and religious writings, but this was a revival of Hebrew as a language of novels and poems, polemical articles, and journalistic feuilletons. This development was an anathema to the rabbis who saw in it a desecration of the Holy Tongue. The origins of this movement are found in ethnically mixed Lithuania and later in Galicia, where the German Kultursprache of the Austrian rulers contended with both Polish and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) nationalism. Secularized, modern Jews began to ask for the origins of their culture, for the roots of their history; to extol the glories of Jerusalem; to ask whether they should not look into their own past just as members of other groups were doing." The primary motivator for establishing modern Hebrew as a national language was the sense of legitimacy it gave the movement, by suggesting a connection between the Jews of ancient Israel and the Jews of the Zionist movement. These developments are seen in Zionist historiography as a revolt against tradition, with the development of Modern Hebrew providing the basis on which a Jewish cultural renaissance might develop. The revival of the Hebrew language and the establishment of Modern Hebrew is most closely associated with the linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Committee of the Hebrew Language (later replaced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language). In the Israeli Declaration of Independence
Major aspects of the Zionist idea are represented in the Israeli Declaration of Independence:
History
Historical and religious background
The Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation "The Jews are a nation and were so before there was a Jewish state of Israel" "Jews are a people, a nation (in the original sense of the word), an ethnos" originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The people of the Kingdom of Israel and the ethnic and religious group known as the Jewish people that descended from them have been subjected to a number of forced migrations in their history" and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah, two Israelite kingdoms that emerged in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Jews are named after the Kingdom of Judah, the southern of the two kingdoms, which was centered in Judea with its capital in Jerusalem. The Kingdom of Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, which was at the center of ancient Judean worship. The Judeans were subsequently exiled to Babylon, in what is regarded as the first Jewish diaspora. thumb|"Hezekiah ... king of Judah" – Royal seal written in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, unearthed in Jerusalem
Seventy years later, after the conquest of Babylon by the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.Max Mallowan (1972) Cyrus the Great (558–529 B.C.), Iran, 10:1, 1–17, DOI: 10.1080/05786967.1972.11834152 This event came to be known as the Return to Zion. Under Persian rule, Judah became a self-governing Jewish province. After centuries of Persian and Hellenistic rule, the Jews regained their independence in the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, which led to the establishment of the Hasmonean Kingdom in Judea. It later expanded over much of modern Israel, and into some parts of Jordan and Lebanon. The Hasmonean Kingdom became a client state of the Roman Republic in 63 BCE, and in 6 CE, was incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Judaea. During the Great Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE), the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple. Of the 600,000 (Tacitus) or 1,000,000 (Josephus) Jews of Jerusalem, all of them either died of starvation, were killed or were sold into slavery. The Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE) led to the destruction of large parts of Judea, and many Jews were killed, exiled, or sold into slavery. The province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina. These actions are seen by many scholars as an attempt to disconnect the Jewish people from their homeland.H.H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976, , p. 334: "In an effort to wipe out all memory of the bond between the Jews and the land, Hadrian changed the name of the province from Iudaea to Syria-Palestina, a name that became common in non-Jewish literature."Ariel Lewin. The archaeology of Ancient Judea and Palestine. Getty Publications, 2005 p. 33. "It seems clear that by choosing a seemingly neutral name—one juxtaposing that of a neighboring province with the revived name of an ancient geographical entity (Palestine), already known from the writings of Herodotus—Hadrian was intending to suppress any connection between the Jewish people and that land." In the following centuries, many Jews emigrated to thriving centers in the diaspora. Others continued living in the region, especially in the Galilee, the coastal plain, and on the edges of Judea, and some converted.David Goodblatt, 'The political and social history of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel,' in William David Davies, Louis Finkelstein, Steven T. Katz (eds.) The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, Cambridge University Press, 2006 pp. 404–430 [406]. By the fourth century CE, the Jews, who had previously constituted the majority of Palestine, had become a minority. A small presence of Jews has been attested for almost all of the period. For example, according to tradition, the Jewish community of Peki'in has maintained a Jewish presence since the Second Temple period. thumb|Coin of the Bar-Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). Front shows trumpets surrounded by "To the freedom of Jerusalem". Back shows a lyre surrounded by "Year two to the freedom of Israel". Jewish religious belief holds that the Land of Israel is a God-given inheritance of the Children of Israel based on the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis and Exodus, as well as on the later Prophets. According to the Book of Genesis, Canaan was first promised to Abraham's descendants; the text is explicit that this is a covenant between God and Abraham for his descendants. The belief that God had assigned Canaan to the Israelites as a Promised Land is also conserved in ChristianWalter C. Kaiser, http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/01-genesis/text/articles-books/kaiser_promisedland_bsac.pdf 'The Promised Land: A Biblical–Historical View,' Biblioteca Sacra 138 (1981) pp. 302–312 Dallas Theological College. and Islamic traditions.Between Bible and Qurʾān: The Children of Israel and the Islamic Self-Image Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 17, (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1999), 57 f. Among Jews in the diaspora, the Land of Israel was revered in a cultural, national, ethnic, historical, and religious sense. They thought of a return to it in a future messianic age.Taylor, A.R., 1971, Vision and intent in Zionist Thought, pp. 10, 11 The Return to Zion remained a recurring theme among generations, particularly in Passover and Yom Kippur prayers, which traditionally concluded with "Next year in Jerusalem", and in the thrice-daily Amidah (Standing prayer)."Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise the banner to gather our exiles and gather us together from the four corners of the earth (Isaiah 11:12) Blessed are you, O Lord, Who gathers in the dispersed of His people Israel." The biblical prophecy of Kibbutz Galuyot, the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel as foretold by the Prophets, became a central idea in Zionism.Russell, C. T., Gordon, H. L., & America, P. P. F. O. (1917). Zionism in Prophecy. Reprinted in Pastor Russell's Sermons. Brooklyn, NY: International Bible Students Association. Pre-Zionist initiatives
thumb|The Abuhav synagogue, established by Sephardic Jews in Safed in the 15th century
Pre-Zionist resettlement in Palestine met with various degrees of success. In late antiquity, many Babylonian Jews immigrated to centers of religious study in the Land of Israel.The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel, "Aliya from Babylonia During the Amoraic Period (200–500 AD)", Joshua Schwartz, pp.58–69, ed. Lee Levine, 1983, Yad Izhak Ben Zvi & Wayne State University Press In the 10th century, leaders of the Karaite Jewish community, mostly living under Persian rule, urged their followers to settle in the Land of Israel, where they established their own quarter in Jerusalem.The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel, "Aliya and Pilgrimage in the Early Arab Period (634–1009)", Moshe Gil, 1983, Yad Izhak Ben Zvi & Wayne State University Press
The number of Jews migrating to the land of Israel rose significantly between the 13th and 19th centuries, mainly due to a general decline in the status of Jews across Europe and an increase in religious persecution, including the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), France (1391), Austria (1421), and Spain (the Alhambra decree of 1492). In the middle of the 16th century, the Portuguese Sephardi Joseph Nasi, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, tried to gather the Portuguese Jews, first to migrate to Cyprus, then owned by the Republic of Venice, and later to resettle in Tiberias. Nasi—who never converted to Islam—eventually obtained the highest medical position in the empire, and actively participated in court life. He convinced Suleiman I to intervene with the Pope on behalf of Ottoman-subject Portuguese Jews imprisoned in Ancona. In the 17th century Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) announced himself as the Messiah and gained many Jews to his side, forming a base in Salonika. He first tried to establish a settlement in Gaza, but moved later to Smyrna. After deposing the old rabbi Aaron Lapapa in the spring of 1666, the Jewish community of Avignon, France, prepared to emigrate to the new kingdom. In the early 19th century, a group of Jews known as the perushim left Lithuania to settle in Ottoman Palestine. Establishment of the Zionist movement
In the 19th century, a current in Judaism supporting a return to Zion grew in popularity, particularly in Europe, where antisemitism and hostility toward Jews were growing. The idea of returning to Palestine was rejected by the conferences of rabbis held in that epoch. Individual efforts supported the emigration of groups of Jews to Palestine, pre-Zionist Aliyah, even before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the year considered as the start of practical Zionism.C.D. Smith, 2001, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 4th ed., , pp. 1–12, 33–38
Reform Jews rejected this idea of a return to Zion. The conference of rabbis held at Frankfurt am Main over July 15–28, 1845, deleted from the ritual all prayers for a return to Zion and a restoration of a Jewish state. The Philadelphia Conference, 1869, followed the lead of the German rabbis and decreed that the Messianic hope of Israel is "the union of all the children of God in the confession of the unity of God". In 1885 the Pittsburgh Conference reiterated this interpretation of the Messianic idea of Reform Judaism, expressing in a resolution that "we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community; and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning a Jewish state".thumb|"Memorandum to the Protestant Powers of the North of Europe and America", published in the Colonial Times (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia), in 1841Jewish settlements were proposed for establishment in the upper Mississippi region by W.D. Robinson in 1819.American Jewish Historical Society, Vol. 8, p. 80
Moral but not practical efforts were made in Prague to organize a Jewish emigration, by Abraham Benisch and Moritz Steinschneider in 1835. In the United States, Mordecai Noah attempted to establish a Jewish refuge opposite Buffalo, New York, on Grand Isle, 1825. These early Jewish nation building efforts of Cresson, Benisch, Steinschneider and Noah failed. Sir Moses Montefiore, famous for his intervention in favor of Jews around the world, including the attempt to rescue Edgardo Mortara, established a colony for Jews in Palestine. In 1854, his friend Judah Touro bequeathed money to fund Jewish residential settlement in Palestine. Montefiore was appointed executor of his will, and used the funds for a variety of projects, including building in 1860 the first Jewish residential settlement and almshouse outside of the old walled city of Jerusalem—today known as Mishkenot Sha'ananim. Laurence Oliphant failed in a like attempt to bring to Palestine the Jewish proletariat of Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and the Turkish Empire (1879 and 1882). Theodor Herzl and the birth of modern political Zionism
The official beginning of the construction of the New Yishuv in Palestine is usually dated to the arrival of the Bilu group in 1882, who commenced the First Aliyah. In the following years, Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest. Most immigrants came from the Russian Empire, escaping the frequent pogroms and state-led persecution in what are now Ukraine and Poland. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. Additional Aliyahs followed the Russian Revolution and its eruption of violent pogroms. At the end of the 19th century, Jews were a small minority in Palestine. thumb|The Great Synagogue of Rishon LeZion was founded in 1885.In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl (the father of political Zionism) infused Zionism with a new ideology and practical urgency, leading to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the Zionist Organization (ZO), renamed in 1960 as World Zionist Organization (WZO).Zionism & The British In Palestine , by Sethi, Arjun (University of Maryland) January 2007, accessed May 20, 2007. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl was explicit in mentioning that the "state of the Jews" could be established only with the support of a European power. He described the Jewish state as an "outpost of civilization against Barbarism". In separate writing, Herzl compared himself to Cecil Rhodes, who was a strong supporter of British colonialist and imperialist ideologies. In 1896, Theodor Herzl expressed in his views on "the restoration of the Jewish state".Laqueur, W. (2009). A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. p. 84 Herzl considered antisemitism to be an eternal feature of all societies in which Jews lived as minorities, and that only a sovereignty could allow Jews to escape eternal persecution: "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the Earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people, then we will do the rest!" he proclaimed exposing his plan. Success and stumbles in Russia
Before World War I, although led by Austrian and German Jews, Zionism was primarily composed of Russian Jews. Initially, Zionists were a minority, both in Russia and worldwide. Russian Zionism quickly became a major force within the movement, making up about half the delegates at Zionist Congresses. Despite its success in attracting followers, Russian Zionism faced fierce opposition from the Russian intelligentsia across the political spectrum and socioeconomic classes. It was condemned by different groups as reactionary, messianic, and unrealistic, arguing that it would isolate Jews and exacerbate their circumstances rather than integrate them into European societies. Religious Jews such as Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum viewed in Zionism a desecration of their sacred beliefs and a Satanic plot, while others hardly thought it deserved serious attention. For them, Zionism was seen as an attempt to defy the divine order to await the coming of the Messiah. However, many of these religious Jews still believed in the Messiah coming soon. For example, Rabbi Israel Meir Kahan "was so convinced of the imminent arrival of the Messiah that he urged his students to study the laws of the priesthood so that the priests would be prepared to carry out their duties when the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt."
Criticism was not limited to religious Jews. Bundist socialists and liberals of the Voskhod newspaper attacked Zionism for distracting from class struggle and blocking the path to Jewish emancipation in Russia, respectively. Figures like historian Simon Dubnow saw potential value in Zionism promoting Jewish identity but fundamentally rejected a Jewish state as messianic and unfeasible. They provided alternative emancipatory solutions, such as assimilation, emigration, and Diaspora nationalism. The opposition to Zionism, rooted in the intelligentsia's rationalist worldview, weakened its appeal among potential adherents like the Jewish working class and intelligentsia. Ultimately, the Russian intelligentsia was united in the view that Zionism was an aberrant ideology that ran counter to their beliefs in Jewish assimilation. thumb|upright=1.15|Front page of The Jewish Chronicle, January 17, 1896, showing an article by Theodor Herzl, a month prior to the publication of his pamphlet
upright=1.35|right|thumb|The delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland (1897)
Pre-state institutions
Zionist Organization (ZO), est. 1897
Zionist Congress (est. 1897), the supreme organ of the ZO
Palestine Office (est. 1908), the executive arm of the ZO in Palestine
Jewish National Fund (JNF), est. 1901 to buy and develop land in Palestine
Keren Hayesod, est. 1920 to collect funds
Jewish Agency, est. 1929 as the worldwide operative branch of the ZO
Funding
The Zionist enterprise was mainly funded by major benefactors who made large contributions, sympathisers from Jewish communities across the world (see for instance the Jewish National Fund's collection boxes), and the settlers themselves. The movement established a bank for administering its finances, the Jewish Colonial Trust (est. 1888, incorporated in London in 1899). A local subsidiary was formed in 1902 in Palestine, the Anglo-Palestine Bank. A list of pre-state large contributors to Pre-Zionist and Zionist enterprises would include, alphabetically,
Isaac Leib Goldberg (1860–1935), Zionist leader and philanthropist from Russia
Maurice de Hirsch (1831–1896), German Jewish financier and philanthropist, founder of the Jewish Colonization Association
Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), British Jewish banker and philanthropist in Britain and the Levant, initiator and financier of Proto-Zionism
Edmond James de Rothschild (1845–1934), French Jewish banker and major donor of the Zionist project
Pre-state paramilitary organizations
A list of Jewish pre-state paramilitary and defense organisations in Palestine would include:
Direct precursors of the IDF
Bar-Giora (1907–1909)
Hashomer (1909–1920)
Haganah (1920–1948)
Palmach (1941–1948)
Not sanctioned by central Zionist administration
Irgun (1931–1948)
Lehi (1940–1948)
Unrelated
Mahane Yehuda, 'Judah's Camp', a mounted guards company founded by Michael Halperin in 1891 (see Ness Ziona)
HaNoter, 'The Guard' (1912–1913), distinct from the British Mandate-period Notrim
HaMagen, 'The Shield' (1915–1917)Hemmingby, Cato. Conflict and Military Terminology: The Language of the Israel Defense Forces . Master's thesis, University of Oslo, 2011. Accessed January 8, 2021. Territories considered
Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, supported a Jewish state in places outside Palestine, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula. Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Conquest of labor
In the early 20th century a more ideologically motivated wave of Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine. With them, the Zionist movement began to emphasize the so-called "conquest of labor", the belief that the employment of exclusively Jewish labor was the pre-condition for the development of an independent Jewish society in Palestine. The goal was to build a "pure Jewish settlement" in Palestine on the basis of "100 per cent Jewish labor" and the claim to an exclusively Jewish, highly productive economy. The Zionist leadership aimed to establish a fully autonomous and independent Jewish economic sector to create a new type of Jewish society. This new society was intended to reverse the traditional economic structure seen in the Jewish Diaspora, characterized by a high number of middlemen and a scarcity of productive workers. By developing fundamental sectors such as industry, agriculture, and mining, the goal was to "normalize" Jewish life that had grown "abnormal" as a result of living amongst non-Jews. Most of the Zionist leadership saw it as imperative to employ strictly Jewish workers in order to ensure the Jewish character of the colonies. Another factor, according to Benny Morris, was the worry that "employment of Arabs would lead to 'Arab values' being passed on to Zionist youth and nourish the colonists' tendency to exploit and abuse their workers", as well as security concerns. The employment of exclusively Jewish labor was also intended to avoid the development of a national conflict in conjunction with a class-based conflict. The Zionist leadership believed that by excluding Arab workers they would stimulate class conflict only within Arab society and prevent the Jewish-Arab national conflict from attaining a class dimension. While the Zionist settlers of the First Aliyah had ventured to create a "pure Jewish settlement," they did grow to rely on Arab labor due to the lack of availability of Jewish laborers during this period. With the arrival of the more ideologically driven settlers of the second aliyah, the idea of "avoda ivrit" would become more central. The future leaders of the Zionist movement saw an existential threat in the employment of Arab labor, motivating the movement to work towards a society based on purely Jewish labor. Racial conceptions of Jewish identity
In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, some of the founders of Zionism (such as Max Nordau) sought to reformulate conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and the "race science" of the time. They believed that this concept would allow them to build a new framework for collective Jewish identity, and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel. Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories, to argue that only a home for the Jewish people could enable the physical regeneration of the Jewish people and a renaissance of pride in their ancient cultural traditions. According to Nur Masalha, Zionist nationalism embraced pan-Germanic ideologies, which stressed the concept of das völk: people of shared ancestry should pursue separation and establish a unified state. The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the orthodox and liberal establishments often rejected this idea. Subsequently, Zionist and non-Zionist Jews vigorously debated aspects of this proposition in terms of the merits or otherwise of diaspora life. While Zionism embarked on its project of social engineering in Mandatory Palestine, ethnonationalist politics on the European continent strengthened and, by the 1930s, some German Jews, acting defensively, asserted Jewish collective rights by redefining Jews as a race after Nazism rose to power. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the "ingathering of the exiles", and the Law of Return, the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief. Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently. Historical and religious background
The concept of the "return" was a powerful symbol within religious Jewish belief, traditionally emphasizing that their return should be determined by Divine Providence rather than human action. The cultural memory of Jews in the diaspora revered the Land of Israel. Religious tradition held that a future messianic age would usher in their return as a people, a 'return to Zion' commemorated particularly at Passover and in Yom Kippur prayers. The biblical prophecy of Kibbutz Galuyot, the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel as foretold by the Prophets, became a central idea in Zionism.: "A number of factors motivated Israel's open immigration policy. First of all, open immigration—the ingathering of the exiles in the historic Jewish homeland—had always been a central component of Zionist ideology and constituted the raison d'etre of the State of Israel. The ingathering of the exiles (kibbutz galuyot) was nurtured by the government and other agents as a national ethos, the consensual and prime focus that united Jewish Israeli society after the War of Independence": "Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the "ingathering of the exiles". Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably "outside of history", Jews could once again "enter history" as subjects, as "normal" actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel" The transformation of this religious, and primarily passive connection between Jews and Palestine, into an active, secular, nationalist movement arose in the context of ideological developments within modern European nations in the 19th century. According to Gideon Shimoni, the religious Judaic notion of being a nation was distinct from the modern European notion of nationalism. Proto-national characteristics in ancient Jewish identity
Multiple scholars have argued that Jewish identity in antiquity exhibited national or proto-national characteristics. Political scientist Tom Garvin described ancient Jewish identity as "something strangely like modern nationalism." Anthony D. Smith wrote that Jews during the late Second Temple period closely approximated the modern concept of a nation. Similarly, Adrian Hastings referred to the Jews as the "true proto-nation."
Historians have identified elements within the Jewish–Roman wars that they describe as expressions of ancient nationalism, and some have drawn analogies with modern Zionism. The Great Jewish Revolt against Roman rule (66–73 CE) is frequently cited as a major example of ancient Jewish nationalism. Historian David Goodblatt draws parallels between the revolt and modern national liberation movements, citing the adoption of coins inscribed with "Israel" and the use of a dating system based on the "freedom of Israel" era. According to historian Doron Mendels, the rebels' nationalist sentiment was reinforced by collective memory of the earlier Maccabean revolt, which had resulted in a period of Jewish sovereignty under the Hasmonean kingdom—a time during which Jewish national consciousness expanded. Goodblatt also compares the rebels' use of the term "Zion" to rally popular support on their coins has been compared to modern Zionism. The later Diaspora Revolt (115–117 CE) is believed to have been motivated, in part, by aspirations among Jewish communities to return to Judaea and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple,; ; an impulse that historian E. Mary Smallwood likened to an ancient form of Zionism. The final large-scale Jewish uprising against Roman rule, the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE), temporarily restored Jewish control over parts of Judaea but was ultimately crushed by the Romans, resulting in extensive casualties, enslavement, and widespread displacement of Jews. Following the Jewish–Roman wars, active expressions of Jewish nationalism (such as armed resistance and attempts to restore political sovereignty) largely ceased. However, scholars argue that Jewish national identity persisted in a more passive form, surviving in collective memory and religious tradition. Jewish law, language, and cultural practices continued to reinforce a sense of peoplehood, preserving national consciousness in exile and dispersion.; ; According to Adrian Hastings, the persistence of Jewish national awareness (rather than merely an ethnic identity) made it possible for modern Zionism to emerge when new political conditions arose. Forerunners of Zionism
The forerunners of Zionism, rather than being causally connected to the later development of Zionism, are thinkers and activists who expressed some notion of Jewish national consciousness or advocated for the migration of Jews to Palestine. These attempts were not continuous as national movements typically are. The most notable proto-Zionists were rabbis such as Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. Their idea of Jews as a collective was strongly tied to religious notions distinct from the secular movement referred to as Zionism that developed at the end of the century. In contrast, Moses Hess, who is regarded as the first modern Jewish nationalist, advocated for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in pursuit of the economic and social normalization of the Jewish people. Hess believed that emancipation alone was not a sufficient solution to the problems faced by European Jewry. Christian restorationist ideas promoting the migration of Jews to Palestine contributed to the ideological and historical context that gave a sense of credibility to these pre-Zionist initiatives. Restorationist ideas were a prerequisite for the success of Zionism, since although it was created by Jews, Zionism was dependent on support from Christians, although it is unclear how much Christian ideas influenced the early Zionists. Zionism was also dependent on the thinkers of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, such as Peretz Smolenskin in 1872, although it often depicted it as its opponent. History
thumb|"Memorandum to the Protestant Powers of the North of Europe and America", published in the Colonial Times (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia), in 1841
Jewish nationalism and emancipation
Ideas of Jewish cultural unity developed a specifically political expression in the 1860s as Jewish intellectuals began promoting the idea of Jewish nationalism. This emerged amid the late 19th century European trend of national revivals. Zionism emerged towards the end of the "best century" for Jews who for the first time were allowed as equals into European society and gained access to schools, universities, and professions that were previously closed to them. By the 1870s, Jews had achieved almost complete civic emancipation in all the states of western and central Europe. By 1914, Jews had moved from the margins to the forefront of European society. In the urban centers of Europe and America, Jews played an influential role in professional and intellectual life. During this period, as Jewish assimilation was still progressing most promisingly, some Jewish intellectuals and religious traditionalists framed assimilation as a humiliating negation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.: "While assimilation was still progressing most promisingly, and also quite independently of antisemitism when it later arose, not only religious traditionalists but also part of the Jewish intelligentsia decried the humiliating self-negation that assimilation exacted and rose to the defense of Jewish cultural distinctiveness." The development of Zionism and other Jewish nationalist movements grew out of these sentiments. In this sense, Zionism can be read as a response to the Haskala and the challenges of modernity and liberalism, rather than purely a response to antisemitism. Emancipation in Eastern Europe progressed more slowly, to the point that Deickoff writes "social conditions were such that they made the idea of individual assimilation pointless". Antisemitism, pogroms and official policies in Tsarist Russia led to the emigration of three million Jews in the years between 1882 and 1914, only 1% of which went to Palestine. Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by ideas of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than just in response to pogroms or economic insecurity. Zionism's emergence in the late 19th century was among assimilated Central European Jews who, despite their formal emancipation, still felt excluded from high society. Many of these Jews had moved away from traditional religious observances and were largely secular, mirroring a broader trend of secularization in Europe. Despite their efforts to integrate, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were frustrated by continued lack of acceptance by the local national movements that tended toward intolerance and exclusivity. For the early Zionists, if nationalism posed a challenge to European Jewry, it also proposed a solution. Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl and the birth of modern political Zionism
In the wake of the 1881 Russian pogroms, Leo Pinsker, who was previously an assimilationist, came to the conclusion that the root of the Jewish problem was that Jews formed a distinctive element that could not be assimilated. For Pinsker, emancipation could not resolve the problems of the Jewish people. In Pinsker's analysis, Judeophobia was the cause of antisemitism and was primiarily driven by Jews' lack of a homeland. The solution Pinsker proposed in his pamphlet Autoemancipation (1882) was for Jews to become a "normal" nation and acquire a homeland over which Jews would have sovereignty. Pinsker primarily viewed Jewish emigration a solution for dealing with the "surplus of Jews, the inassimilable residue" from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Germany in response to the pogroms. The pogroms motivated a small number of Jews to establish various groups in the Pale of Settlement (a region in western Russia) and in Poland, aimed at supporting Jewish emigration to Palestine. The publication of Autoemancipation provided these groups with an ideological charter around which they would be confederated into Hibbat Zion ("Lovers of Zion") in 1887 where Pinsker would take a leading role. The settlements established by Hibbat Zion lacked sufficient funds and were ultimately not very successful but are seen as the first of several aliyahs, or waves of settlement, that led to the eventual establishment of the state of Israel. The conditions in Eastern Europe would eventually provide Zionism with a base of Jews seeking to overcome the challenges of external ostracism, from the Tsarist regime, and internal changes within the Jewish communities there. The groups that formed Hibbat Zion included the Bilu group, which established its first settlement in 1882. Anita Shapira describes the Bilu as serving the role of a prototype for the settlement groups that followed. At the end of the 19th century, Jews remained a small minority in Palestine. A key event that put the modern Zionist movement in motion was the Dreyfus affair, which erupted in France in 1894. The case had a profound impact on Central and Western European Jews. Among those who witnessed the event was Herzl. At this point, Zionism remained a scattered movement. In the 1890s, Herzl infused Zionism with a practical urgency and worked to unify the various strands of the movement. The title of Herzl's 1896 manifesto providing the ideological basis for Zionism, , is typically translated as The Jewish State. Herzl sought to establish a state where Jews would be the majority and as a result, politically dominant. Ahad Ha'am, the founder of cultural Zionism, criticized the lack of Jewish cultural activity and creativity in Herzl's envisioned state, which Ha'am referred to as "the state of the Jews". He pointed to the envisioned European and German culture of the state where Jews were simply the transmitters of imperialist culture rather than producers or creators of culture. Like Pinsker, Herzl saw antisemitism as a reality that could only be addressed by the territorial concentration of Jews in a Jewish state. Herzl's project was purely secular; the selection of Palestine, after considering other locations, was motivated by the credibility the name would give to the movement. From early on, Herzl recognized that Zionism could not succeed without the support of a great power.: "Notwithstanding the growing participation of East European Jewry in Zionist activities, Herzl recognized that the movement would not succeed until it secured the diplomatic support of a Great Power and the financial assistance of members of the Western Jewish community." He hoped that his state would support the great powers' interests and would "form part of a defensive wall for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism."
Herzl's efforts led to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the Zionist Organization (ZO), renamed in 1960 as World Zionist Organization (WZO), and adopted the Basel Program, which codified the official objective of establishing a legally recognized home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The Zionist Organization was to be the main administrative body of the movement and would go on to establish the Jewish Colonial Trust, whose objectives were to encourage European Jewish emigration to Palestine and to assist with the economic development of the colonies. Territories considered
thumb|upright=1.15|Front page of The Jewish Chronicle, January 17, 1896, showing an article by Theodor Herzl, a month prior to the publication of his pamphlet
upright=1.35|right|thumb|The delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland (1897)
Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, Herzl and other Zionist figures considered locations for a Jewish state outside of the Land of Israel, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa that are today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula.: "European Jews swayed and prayed for Zion for nearly two millennia, and by the end of the nineteenth century their descendants had transformed liturgical longing into a political movement to create a Jewish national entity somewhere in the world. Zionism's prophet, Theodor Herzl, considered Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula as potential Jewish homelands. It took nearly a decade for Zionism to exclusively concentrate its spiritual yearning on the spatial coordinates of Ottoman Palestine." Herzl was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan,Friedman, M. (Motti) (2021). Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Journey – Exodus and Return. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. pp. 239–240 however he later reaffirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jews with that area. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan; however, he later affirmed that only Palestine could gain enough Jewish support because of the historic ties of Jews with that area. A major concern and driving reason for considering other territories was the Russian pogroms, in particular the Kishinev massacre, and the resulting need for quick resettlement in a safer place. However, other Zionists emphasized the memory, emotion and tradition linking Jews to the Land of Israel. Zion became the name of the movement, after the place where King David established his kingdom, following his conquest of the Jebusite fortress there (, ). The name Zion was synonymous with Jerusalem. Palestine only became Herzl's main focus after his Zionist manifesto 'Der Judenstaat' was published in 1896, but even then he was hesitant to focus efforts solely on resettlement in Palestine when speed was of the essence. In 1903, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Herzl in the Uganda Protectorate for Jewish settlement in Great Britain's East African colonies. Herzl accepted to evaluate Joseph Chamberlain's proposal, and it was introduced the same year to the World Zionist Organization's Congress at its sixth meeting, where a fierce debate ensued. Some groups felt that accepting the scheme would make it more difficult to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the African land was described as an "ante-chamber to the Holy Land". It was decided to send a commission to investigate the proposed land by 295 to 177 votes, with 132 abstaining. The following year, Congress sent a delegation to inspect the plateau. A temperate climate due to its high elevation, was thought to be suitable for European settlement. However, the area was populated by a large number of Maasai, who did not seem to favour an influx of Europeans. Furthermore, the delegation found it to be filled with lions and other animals. After Herzl died in 1904, the Congress decided on the fourth day of its seventh session in July 1905 to decline the British offer and, according to Adam Rovner, "direct all future settlement efforts solely to Palestine". Israel Zangwill's Jewish Territorialist Organization aimed for a Jewish state anywhere, having been established in 1903 in response to the Uganda Scheme. It was supported by a number of the Congress's delegates. Following the vote, which had been proposed by Max Nordau, Zangwill charged Nordau that he "will be charged before the bar of history," and his supporters blamed the Russian voting bloc of Menachem Ussishkin for the outcome of the vote. The subsequent departure of the JTO from the Zionist Organization had little impact. The Zionist Socialist Workers Party was also an organization that favored the idea of a Jewish territorial autonomy outside of Palestine.Ėstraĭkh, G. In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism. Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005. p. 30
As an alternative to Zionism, Soviet (USSR) authorities established a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934, which remains extant as the only autonomous oblast of Russia. According to Elaine Hagopian, in the early decades it foresaw the homeland of the Jews as extending not only over the region of Palestine, but into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, with its borders more or less coinciding with the major riverine and water-rich areas of the Levant. Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine
thumb|right|Palestine as claimed by the World Zionist Organization in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference
Lobbying by Russian Jewish immigrant Chaim Weizmann, together with fear that American Jews would encourage the US to support Germany in the war against Russia, culminated in the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917. It endorsed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as follows:
thumb|left|During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, an Inter-Allied Commission was sent to Palestine to assess the views of the local population; the report summarized the arguments received from petitioners for and against Zionism. In 1922, the League of Nations adopted the declaration, and granted to Britain the Palestine Mandate:
Weizmann's role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration led to his election as the Zionist movement's leader. Early Zionist settlement
In the early twentieth century, Zionism advanced by establishing towns, colonies, and an independent monetary system to channel Jewish capital into Palestine. Due to the unstable local economy and fluctuating currency values under Ottoman rule, Zionists created their own financial institutions. Despite their small numbers, the Zionists instilled a fear of territorial displacement in the local population, which led to Palestinian resistance and the settlers' eventual use of military force.: "The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (and indeed after 1967 as well)." Initially, the impact on rural Palestinians was minimal, with only a few villages encountering Jewish colonies. However, after World War I and as Zionist land purchases increased, the rural population began to experience dramatic changes. From almost the beginning of Zionist settlement, Palestinians viewed Zionism as an expansionist endeavor. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Zionism was inherently expansionist and always had the goal of turning the entirety of Palestine into a Jewish state. In addition, Morris describes the Zionists as intent on politically and physically dispossessing the Arabs. Early warnings from local leaders in the 1880s about the destabilizing effects of Jewish immigration went largely unheeded until these later developments. By the early 20th century, there were fourteen Zionist settlements in Palestine, established through land purchases from both local and external landowners. From the outset, the Zionist leadership saw land acquisition as essential to achieving their goal of establishing a Jewish state. This acquisition was strategic, aiming to create a continuous area of Jewish land. The WZO established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901, with the stated goal "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people." The notion of land "redemption" entailed that the land could not be sold and could not be leased to a non-Jew nor should the land be worked by Arabs, though most Zionists continued to employ fellaheen to perform labor on their lands. The land purchased was primarily from absentee landlords, and upon purchase of the land, the tenant farmers who traditionally had rights of usufruct were often expelled. Herzl publicly opposed this dispossession, but wrote privately in his diary: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. In 1903, 'the Eretz Israel assembly' was held by Menachem Ussishkin. This assembly marked the beginning of a more formalized Zionist colonization effort. Under his leadership, both professional and political organizations were established, paving the way for a sustained Zionist presence in the region. Ussishkin delineated three methods for the Zionist movement to acquire land: by force and conquest, by expropriation via governmental authority, and by purchase. The only option available to the movement at the moment in his perspective was the last one, "until at some point we become rulers". Second Aliyah
The second wave of Zionist settlement came with the Second Aliyah starting in 1904. The settlers of this period laid the foundational elements for the Jewish society in Palestine envisioned by the Zionist movement. They established the first two political parties, the socialist Po'alei Zion and the non-socialist Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir and initiated the first collective agricultural settlements known as kibbutzim, which were fundamental in the formation of the Israeli state. They also formed the first underground military group, Ha-Shomer, which later evolved into the Haganah and eventually became the core of the Israeli army. Many leaders of the Zionist national movement were products of the Second Aliyah. The Zionists of the second aliyah were also more ideologically motivated than those of the first aliyah. In particular, they sought the "conquest of labor", which entailed the exclusion of Arabs from the labor market. The Balfour Declaration and World War I
thumb|right|Palestine as claimed by the World Zionist Organization in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference
World War I period
While there were 85,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1914, that number went down to 56,000 by 1917. The Arab population also suffered greatly during this time. When the Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany's side in October 1914, tens of thousands of Russian Jews became enemy citizens, and many opted to leave rather than become Ottoman citizens and be subject to conscription. This gave the Ottomans an opportunity to suppress the Zionist movement. The war also had a negative effect on trade in Yishuv. On January 17, 1914, the Ottomans announced, with no prior warning, that all foreign nationals must immediately board a ship in Jaffa to be taken to Alexandria. In April 1917, the Ottomans orders all Jews to leave Jaffa. In October 1917, after the Ottomans discovered that Nili had been giving intelligence to the British, they arrested people at random and imposed a curfew as collective punishment. Most Zionists came to the conclusion that there was no hope of change under the Ottomans and therefore supported the British conquest of Palestine, and they viewed the British as redeemers. At the start of World War I, the Zionist leadership attempted to persuade the British government of the benefits of sponsoring a Jewish colony in Palestine. Their main initial success was in establishing a lobbying group centered around the Rothschild family, largely driven by Chaim Weizmann. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain declared its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". The declaration was largely motivated by war-time considerations and antisemitic preconceptions about the putative influence Jews had on the Tsarist government and in the shaping of American policy. Though his decision was also motivated by religious convictions, Balfour himself had passed the Aliens Act 1905, which aimed to keep Eastern European Jews out of Britain. More decisive were Britain's colonial and imperial geopolitical goals in the region, specifically in retaining control over the Suez Canal by establishing a pro-British state in the region. Weizmann's role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration led to his election as the Zionist movement's leader. He remained in that role until 1948, and then was elected as the first President of Israel after the nation gained independence. A number of high-level representatives of the international Jewish women's community participated in the First World Congress of Jewish Women, which was held in Vienna, Austria, in May 1923. One of the main resolutions was: "It appears ... to be the duty of all Jews to co-operate in the social-economic reconstruction of Palestine and to assist in the settlement of Jews in that country."
In 1927, Ukrainian Jew Yitzhak Lamdan wrote an epic poem titled Masada to reflect the plight of the Jews, calling for a "last stand". Nazism and the Holocaust
In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made German Jews (and later Austrian and Czech Jews) stateless refugees. Similar rules were applied by the many Nazi allies in Europe. The subsequent growth in Jewish migration fostered the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. Britain established the Peel Commission to investigate the situation. The commission called for a two-state solution and compulsory transfer of populations. The Arabs opposed the partition plan and Britain later rejected this solution and instead implemented the White Paper of 1939. This planned to end Jewish immigration by 1944 and to allow no more than 75,000 additional Jewish migrants. At the end of the five-year period in 1944, only 51,000 of the 75,000 immigration certificates provided for had been utilized, and the British offered to allow immigration to continue beyond cutoff date of 1944, at a rate of 1500 per month, until the remaining quota was filled.Study (June 30, 1978): The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem Part I: 1917–1947 , access-date: November 10, 2018 According to Arieh Kochavi, at the end of the war, the Mandatory Government had 10,938 certificates remaining and gives more details about government policy at the time. The British maintained the policies of the 1939 White Paper until the end of the Mandate. + Population of Palestine by ethno-religious groups, excluding nomads, from the 1946 Survey of PalestineSurvey of Palestine (1946), Vol I, Chapter VI, p. 141 and Supplement to Survey of Palestine (1947), p. 10.YearMuslimsJewsChristiansOthersTotal Settled1922486,177 (74.9%)83,790 (12.9%)71,464 (11.0%)7,617 (1.2%)649,0481931693,147 (71.7%)174,606 (18.1%)88,907 (9.2%)10,101 (1.0%)966,7611941906,551 (59.7%)474,102 (31.2%)125,413 (8.3%)12,881 (0.8%)1,518,94719461,076,783 (58.3%)608,225 (33.0%)145,063 (7.9%)15,488 (0.8%)1,845,559
The growth of the Jewish community in Palestine and the devastation of European Jewish life sidelined the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The Jewish Agency for Palestine under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion increasingly dictated policy with support from American Zionists who provided funding and influence in Washington, D.C., including via the American Palestine Committee. In 1938, Ben-Gurion argued that a significant source of fear for Zionists was the defensive political strength of the Palestinian position, stating:Flapan, Simha (1979), Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Croom Helm, pp. 141–142. A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. thumb|David Ben-Gurion proclaiming Israel's independence beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl
During World War II, as the horrors of the Holocaust became known, the Zionist leadership formulated the One Million Plan, a reduction from Ben-Gurion's previous target of two million immigrants. Weizmann's ultimate goal was the establishment of a Jewish state, even beyond the borders of "Greater Israel." For Weizmann, Palestine was a Jewish and not an Arab country. The state he sought would contain the east bank of the Jordan River and extend from the Litani River (in present-day Lebanon). Weizmann's strategy involved incrementally approaching this goal over a long period, in the form of settlement and land acquisition. Weizmann was open to the idea of Arabs and Jews jointly running Palestine through an elected council with equal representation, but he did not view the Arabs as equal partners in negotiations about the country's future. In particular, he was steadfast in his view of the "moral superiority" of the Jewish claim to Palestine over the Arab claim and believed these negotiations should be conducted solely between Britain and the Jews. According to Zionist Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the essential assumptions of Weizmann's strategy were later adopted by David Ben-Gurion and subsequent Zionist leaders.: "The importance of analysing Weizmann's strategy derives from the fact that the assumptions on which they were based were, with slight modifications, adopted by Ben-Gurion and his successors. If one substitutes 'United States' for 'Great Britain' and the 'Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan' for the 'Arab National Movement', Weizmann's basic strategic concepts might be taken as descriptive of Israel's present foreign policy."
King–Crane Commission
thumb|During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, an Inter-Allied Commission was sent to Palestine to assess the views of the local population; the report summarized the arguments received from petitioners for and against Zionism. In 1919, the US-based King–Crane Commission started with a strongly sympathetic disposition towards Zionism but concluded that the maximum Zionist demands implied subjection of Palestinians to Jewish rule and that this was a violation of the principle of self-determination, given the anti-Zionist sentiment of the non-Jewish population. The report stated that "The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered." Consequently, it recommended a considerably "modified" or "reduced" version of the Zionist programme, with Palestine as a Jewish national home but not a Jewish state. Beginning of Revisionist Zionism
Ze'ev Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party in 1925, which took on a more militant ethos and openly maximalist agenda than Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky rejected Weizmann's strategy of incremental state building, instead preferring to immediately declare sovereignty over the entire region, which extended to both the East and West bank of the Jordan river. Like Weizmann and Herzl, Jabotinsky also believed that the support of a Great Power was essential to the success of Zionism. From early on, Jabotinksy openly rejected the possibility of a "voluntary agreement" with the Arabs of Palestine. He instead believed in building an "iron wall" of Jewish military force to break Arab resistance to Zionism, at which point an agreement could be established. Jabotinsky's "iron wall" strategy would have a lasting effect on the Zionist perspective towards the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Palestinian population.: "In short, the Iron Wall concept—together with the premises, values, and historical myths that underlie it—has been and still is the dominant political and military strategy of Zionism. Summarizing its consequences, Flapan wrote that Jabotinsky "left an indelible mark on the Zionist attitudes towards the Arab question"": "Combined with the justification for using force to impose Zionism's minimum requirements, Jabotinsky's practical proposal for coercive pedagogy quickly filled the void that was Zionism's official policy on the Arab question." Both the left and right factions of Zionism would rely on this strategy of leveraging military strength in pursuit of political aspirations. British Mandate and development of the Zionist quasi-state
After the war, the plan for a greater Arab kingdom under the Hashemite family was abandoned when King Faisal was expelled from Damascus by the French in 1920. In parallel, the Zionist demand for a clear British acknowledgment of the entirety of Palestine as the Jewish national home was rejected. Instead, Britain committed only to establishing a Jewish national home "in Palestine" and promised to facilitate this without prejudicing the rights of existing "non-Jewish communities"these qualifying statements aroused the concern of Zionist leaders at the time. The British mandate over Palestine, established in 1922, was based on the Balfour Declaration, explicitly privileging the Jewish minority over the Arab majority. In addition to declaring British support for the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, the mandate included provisions facilitating Jewish immigration, and granting the Zionist movement the status of representing Jewish national interests. In particular, the Jewish Agency, the embodiment of the Zionist movement in Palestine, was made a partner of the mandatory government, acquiring international diplomatic status and representing Zionist interests before the League of Nations and other international venues. The British mandate effectively established a Jewish quasi-state in Palestine, lacking only full sovereignty. This lack of sovereignty was crucial for Zionism at this early stage, as the Jewish population was too small to defend itself against the Arabs of Palestine. The British presence provided a necessary safeguard for Jewish nationalism. To achieve political independence, Jews needed Britain's support, particularly in land purchase and immigration. Following the Balfour Declaration, Jewish immigration to Palestine grew from 9,149 immigrants in 1921 to 33,801 in 1925—by the end of the mandate period, the Jewish population in Palestine nearly tripled, eventually reaching one third of the country's population. The mandatory administration implemented policies that favored the development of the capitalist sector, predominantly associated with the Jewish community, while disadvantaging the Arab non-capitalist sector. Between 1933 and 1937, government spending was concentrated in two main areas—development and economic services, and defense—with the former focusing on infrastructural improvements (such as railways, roads, bridges, and other public works) that were particularly beneficial for capitalist production. In contrast to the Jewish population, the Arabs did not benefit from any government protections such as social security, employment benefits, trade union protection, job security and training opportunities. Arab wages were one third of their Jewish counterparts (including when paid by the same employer). The mandate also included an article describing self-governing institutions intended only for the Jewish population of Palestine. No similar support or recognition was provided to the Arab majority during the time of the mandate. By enabling the Zionist institutions to serve as a parallel government to the Mandate, the British facilitated the separation of the economy and legitimized their quasi-state status. Accordingly, these institutions, which purported to act in the interests of Jews everywhere, were able to funnel resources into the Jewish sector in Palestine, heavily subsidizing the dominant Jewish economy. The nucleus of the Jewish quasi-state was the Histadrut, established in 1920 as an independent social, political and economic institution. The Histadrut also exercised significant control over the Haganah, a Jewish defense force formed in 1920 in reaction to Arab riots. Originally created to defend the community, Haganah evolved into a permanent underground reserve army fully integrated into the Jewish political structure. Although the British authorities disapproved of the Haganah, particularly its method of stealing arms from British bases, they did not disband it. The Histadrut operated as a completely independent entity, without interference from the British mandate authorities. Ben-Gurion saw the Histadrut's detachment from socialist ideology to be one of its key strengths; indeed it was the General Organization of Workers in Israel. In particular, the Histadrut worked towards national unity and aimed to dominate the capitalist system en route to gaining political power, not to create a socialist utopia. As secretary general of the Histadrut and leader of the Zionist labor movement, Ben-Gurion adopted similar strategies and objectives as Weizmann during this period, disagreeing primarily on issues of specific tactical moves up until 1939. The middle class grew dramatically in size with the arrival of the fourth aliyah in 1924, motivating a political shift within the labor movement. It was during this period that the political strategy of the labor movement would solidify. The founding of the Mapai party unified the labor movement, making it the dominant force. The party saw economic control as essential to facilitating Zionist settlement and achieving political power: "the economic question is not one of class; it is a national question". For Ben-Gurion, the transformation from "working class to nation" was intertwined with his rejection of diaspora life, as he would declare: the "weak, unproductive, parasitical Jewish masses" must be converted "to productive labor" in service of the nation. Zionist policies and the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt
For the Zionist movement, economic development and policies were a mechanism by which political aims could be achieved. A new economic sector exclusively for Jews, controlled by the Labor Zionist movement, was established with support from the Jewish National Fund and the agricultural workers' Histadrut. Despite the universalist ideals of Zionist pioneering, this new Jewish economic sector was fundamentally based on exclusionary practices. The goal of achieving "100 percent of Hebrew labour" was the primary driver of the territorial, economic and social separation between Jews and Arabs. The Zionist economic platform was partially based on the assumption (eventually demonstrated incorrect) that economic benefits to the Arabs of Palestine would pacify opposition to the movement. For the Zionist leadership, the economic status and development of the Arabs of Palestine should be compared with Arabs of other countries, rather than with the Jews of Palestine. Accordingly, disproportionate gains in Jewish development were acceptable as long as the status of the Arab sector did not worsen. While British support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine established the parameters within which the Arab economy could develop, Zionist policies reinforced these limitations. Most notable are the exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish enterprise and the expulsion of Arab peasants from Jewish-owned land. Both of these had limited impact in scope but reinforced the structural limitations put in place by British policies. With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, the Jewish community was increasingly persecuted and driven out. The discriminatory immigration laws of the US, UK and other countries preferable to German Jews, led to in 1935 alone more than 60,000 Jews arriving in Palestine (more than the total number of Jews in Palestine as of the establishment of the Balfour declaration in 1917). Ben-Gurion would subsequently declare that immigration at this rate would allow for the maximalist Zionist goal of a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The Arab community openly pressured the mandatory government to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases. Sporadic attacks in the countryside (described by Zionists and the British as "banditry") reflected widespread anger over the Zionist land purchases that displaced local peasants. Meanwhile, in urban areas, protests against British rule and the increasing influence of the Zionist movement intensified and became more militant in the early 1930s. The outbreak of violence in the course of the 1936 Arab Revolt was a turning point in Jewish-Arab relations, unifying previously divided factions within the Zionist movement and leading them to view the use of force as a necessary means of defense and deterrence. During the revolt, the Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in the use of terror attacks against the Arabs of Palestine. Similarly, for the labor Zionist Palmah, the lines delineating what was acceptable and unacceptable while dealing with Arab villagers were "vague and intentionally blurred". These ambiguous limits practically did not differ from those of the self-described "terrorist" group, Irgun. According to Anita Shapira, beginning in this period, Labor Zionism's use of violence against Palestinians for political means was essentially the same as that of radical conservative Zionist groups. The Peel Commission partition proposal
thumb|right|Provisional frontiers of the Palestine partition from the Peel Commission
In response to the revolt, the British appointed in 1937 a commission of inquiry that eventually recommended the partition of the land. The proposal included creating a small Jewish state occupying 17 percent of Mandatory Palestine's territory, while Jerusalem and a corridor to the sea would remain under British control, and the remaining 75 percent of the territory would form a Palestinian state connected to Transjordan under King Abdullah's rule. At this point, Jews owned 5.6% of the land in Palestine; the land allocated to the Jewish state would contain 40 percent of the country's fertile land. The commission also proposed a population transfer of the Palestinian Arabs from the areas designated for the Jewish state, based on the precedent of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange.: "The Commission, however, believed that a secure peace could not be achieved solely by partition and the establishment of a boundary between the two countries. In its opinion, the attainment of peace would necessitate the implementation of population exchanges and land transfers between the Jewish and Arab states on the model of the Greco-Turkish precedent" For Ben-Gurion, the transfer proposal was the most appealing recommendation put forward by the commission. Indeed, this sentiment was deeply ingrained to the extent that Ben Gurion's acceptance of partition was contingent upon the removal of the Palestinian population.: "Ben-Gurion declared unequivocally that sovereignty of the Jewish state, especially in matters of immigration and transfer of Arabs, were the two conditions sine qua non for his agreement to partition."
The Zionist leadership viewed the mass transfer of the Arabs as morally permissible, but were unsure of its political effectiveness.: "In any event, the idea of a mass transfer did not strike them as morally deplorable at any time, and their hesitations related only to its political effectiveness." Much of the Zionist leadership spoke in strong support of the transfer plan, asserting that there is nothing immoral about it. Within the Zionist movement, two perspectives developed with respect to the partition proposal; the first was a complete rejection of partition, the second was acceptance of the idea of partition on the basis that it would eventually allow for expansion to all territories within "the boundaries of Zionist aspirations.". It was the right wing of the Zionist movement that put forward the main arguments against transfer, with Jabotinsky strongly objecting it on moral grounds,: "...Jabotinsky also rejected the [partition] plan on moral grounds, fiercely opposing the idea of transferring the Arab population from Palestine. Jabotinsky underscored this point in several letters and speeches from 1937, and expanded on it in an article published in the Revisionist Zionist publication Hayarden...Jabotinsky could not have been more clear about his opposition to transferring a single Arab from Palestine. He also argued that the Peel Commission drew the wrong lesson from the Greek–Turkish case. It was not a 'great precedent', as the commission noted in its report, but a tragedy that involved the expulsion of one million Greeks from Turkey." and others mainly focusing on its impracticality. However, in his last book "The Jewish War Front" published in 1940, after the outbreak of WWII, Jabotinsky no longer ruled out the possibility of voluntary population transfer, though he still didn't view it as a necessary solution.: "...in early 1940...Jabotinsky for the first time publicly proposed expelling Arabs from Palestine, even as he still noted that population transfers was by no means a necessary solution and repeated his promise for minority rights in the future Jewish state.": "In his last book... he fully endorsed the idea of a voluntary Arab transfer from Palestine, though still insisting that it was not mandatory since, objectively, "Palestine, astride the Jordan, has room for the million of Arabs, room for another million of their eventual progeny, for several million Jews, and for peace."": "...in his last book, The Jewish War Front, Jabotinsky did not rule out the possibility of population transfer—that is, expulsion of Arabs. The book was published in 1940, shortly before his death, and was written in the gloomy context of World War II:'I see no need for this exodus, and it would be undesirable from many perspectives. But if it becomes clear that the Arabs prefer to emigrate, this may be discussed without a trace of sorrow in the heart.'" Some leaders, such as Ruppin, Motzkin, and writers such as Israel Zangwill, also referred to transfer as a "voluntary" action that would include some form of compensation. However, "Palestine's Arabs did not wish to evacuate the land of their ancestors... The matter raised ethical questions that troubled the Yishuv". The revolt was inflamed by the partition proposal and continued until 1939 when it was forcefully suppressed by the British. Later, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader, drew inspiration from the Nazi demographic policies that resulted in the expulsion of 1.5 million Poles and Jews, in whose place Germans resettled. In Jabotinsky's assessment:The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitleras odious as he is to ushas given this idea a good name in the world. By the time of the 1936 Arab revolt, almost all groups within the Zionist movement wanted a Jewish state in Palestine, "whether they declared their intent or preferred to camouflage it, whether or not they perceived it as a political instrument, whether they saw sovereign independence as the prime aim, or accorded priority to the task of social construction". The main debates within the movement at this time were concerning partition of Palestine and the nature of the relationship with the British. The intensity of the revolt, Britain's ambiguous support for the movement and the increasing threat against European Jewry during this period motivated the Zionist leadership to prioritize immediate considerations. The movement ultimately favored the notion of partition, primarily out of practical considerations and partially out of a belief that establishing a Jewish state over all of Palestine would remain an option.: "In the end, all of them accepted partition, less out of inner conviction than because of international pressure and force of national discipline, and in some cases were comforted by the thought that the path to a greater Palestine was still open." At the 1937 Zionist congress, the Zionist leadership adopted the stance that the land allocated to the Jewish state by the partition plan was inadequate—effectively rejecting the partition plan that faded away in the face of both Arab and Zionist opposition. In response to Ben-Gurion's 1938 quote that "politically we are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves", Israeli historian Benny Morris says, "Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement", and that "Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist." Morris describes the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as necessarily displacing and dispossessing the Arab population. Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust
In 1939, a British White Paper recommended limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase with the objective of maintaining the status quo while the threat of war loomed in Europe.: "A British White Paper of 1939 tried to make provision for Palestinian sensibilities. It repeated the promises made in 1930 of withdrawal from the Balfour Declaration and limits to Jewish immigration and land purchase. The objective was to maintain the status quo until the situation in Europe was clear. The limitation on immigration came at a time when Nazi expansion in Europe was making life for Jews there unbearable and impossible. The Yishuv now waged its own kind of rebellion, a clandestine operation of illegal immigration, land takeover, and formation of a paramilitary organization, helped by sympathetic British officers such as the legendary Orde Wingate." The immigration was to be limited to no more than 75,000 people over the next five years. With Nazi expansionism in Europe, the limits on immigration prompted further militarization, land takeover and illegal immigration efforts by the Zionist movement. World War II broke out as the Zionists were developing their campaign against the White Paper—unable to accept the White Paper or to side against the British, the Zionist movement would ultimately support the British war effort while working to upend the White Paper. From the start of the second world war, the Zionists pressured the British to organize and train a Jewish "army", culminating in the establishment of a Jewish Brigade and accompanying blue and white flag. The development of this force would further train and enable the already substantial Zionist military capacity. The Haganah was allowed by the British to openly acquire weapons and worked with the British to prepare for a possible Axis invasion. Despite the White Paper, Zionist immigration and settlement efforts continued during the war period. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of the Holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned. The official Zionist movement's war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv; Pappe argues that scarce Zionist energy was deployed in support of European Jews.: "This was selective, in which the physically fit and those with the right ideological bent were given priority and, at times, exclusivity. This mode of selection was abandoned for a while when the horrific news of Nazi exterminations reached Palestine around 1942. The news even prompted the symbolic act of sending Zionist parachutists into Nazi Europe as a gesture of support to the Jews dying in the death camps rather than as a real attempt to save them. Little Zionist energy was invested in saving Jews, as the priority in those difficult days remained the survival of the Jewish community in Palestine." Many of those fleeing Nazi terror in Europe preferred to leave for the United States, however, strict American immigration policies and Zionist efforts led to 10% of the 3 million Jews leaving Europe to settle in Palestine. In the Biltmore Program of 1942, the Zionist movement would openly declare for the first time its goal of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine.: "With this resolution the Zionist movement for the first time openly staked a claim to the whole of mandatory Palestine." At this point, the United States, with its growing economy and unprecedented military force, became a focal point of Zionist political activity that engaged with the American electorate and politicians. American President Truman supported the Biltmore program for the duration of his time in office, largely motivated by humanitarian concerns and the growing influence of the Zionist lobby. + Population of Palestine by ethno-religious groups, excluding nomads, from the 1946 Survey of Palestine and YearMuslimsJewsChristiansOthersTotal Settled1922486,177 (74.9%)83,790 (12.9%)71,464 (11.0%)7,617 (1.2%)649,0481931693,147 (71.7%)174,606 (18.1%)88,907 (9.2%)10,101 (1.0%)966,7611941906,551 (59.7%)474,102 (31.2%)125,413 (8.3%)12,881 (0.8%)1,518,94719461,076,783 (58.3%)608,225 (33.0%)145,063 (7.9%)15,488 (0.8%)1,845,559
During World War II, as the horrors of the Holocaust became known, the Zionist leadership formulated the One Million Plan, a reduction from Ben-Gurion's previous target of two million immigrants. Following the end of the war, many stateless refugees, mainly Holocaust survivors, began migrating to Palestine in small boats in defiance of British rules. The Holocaust united much of the rest of world Jewry behind the Zionist project. The British either imprisoned these Jews in Cyprus or sent them to the British-controlled Allied Occupation Zones in Germany. The British, having faced Arab revolts, were now facing opposition by Zionist groups in Palestine for subsequent restrictions on Jewish immigration. In January 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a joint British and American committee, was tasked to examine political, economic and social conditions in Mandatory Palestine and the well-being of the peoples now living there; to consult representatives of Arabs and Jews, and to make other recommendations 'as necessary' for an interim handling of these problems as well as for their eventual solution. Following the failure of the 1946–47 London Conference on Palestine, at which the United States refused to support the British leading to both the Morrison–Grady Plan and the Bevin Plan being rejected by all parties, the British decided to refer the question to the UN on February 14, 1947. Post-World War II
thumb|Arab offensive at the beginning of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war
With the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Stalin reversed his long-standing opposition to Zionism, and tried to mobilize worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort. A Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in Moscow. Many thousands of Jewish refugees fled the Nazis and entered the Soviet Union during the war, where they reinvigorated Jewish religious activities and opened new synagogues. In May 1947 Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko told the United Nations that the USSR supported the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The USSR formally voted that way in the UN in November 1947. However once Israel was established, Stalin reversed positions, favoured the Arabs, arrested the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and launched attacks on Jews in the USSR.Gabriel Gorodetsky, "The Soviet Union's role in the creation of the state of Israel." Journal of Israeli History 22.1 (2003): 4–20. In 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended that western Palestine should be partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory, Corpus separatum, around Jerusalem.United Nations Special Committee on Palestine; report to the General Assembly, A/364, September 3, 1947 This partition plan was adopted on November 29, 1947, with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote led to celebrations in Jewish communities and protests in Arab communities throughout Palestine. Violence throughout the country, previously an Arab and Jewish insurgency against the British, Jewish-Arab communal violence, spiralled into the 1947–1949 Palestine war. According to various assessments of the UN, the conflict led to an exodus of 711,000 to 957,000 Palestinian Arabs,General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Covering the period from December 11, 1949 to October 23, 1950 , (doc.nr. A/1367/Rev.1); October 23, 1950 outside of Israel's territories. More than a quarter had already fled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Following the failure of the 1946–47 London Conference on Palestine, at which the United States refused to support the British, leading to both the Morrison–Grady Plan and the Bevin Plan being rejected by all parties, the British decided to refer the question to the UN on February 14, 1947. End of the Mandate and expulsion of the Palestinians
Towards the end of the war, the Zionist leadership was motivated more than ever to establish a Jewish state. Since the British were no longer sponsoring its development, many Zionists considered it would be necessary to establish the state by force by upending the British position in Palestine. In this the IRA's tactics against Britain in the Irish War of Independence served as a both a model and source of inspiration. The Irgun, the military arm of the revisionist Zionists, and Lehi, who at one point sought an alliance with the Nazis, would lead a series of terrorist attacks against the British starting in 1944. This included the King David Hotel bombing, British immigration and tax offices and police stations. It was only by the war's end that the Haganah joined in the sabotage against the British. The combined impact of US opinion and the attacks on British presence eventually led the British to refer the situation to the United Nations in 1947. In response to a United Kingdom government request that the General Assembly "make recommendations under article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine", the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created on 15 May 1947. The urgency of the condition of the Jewish refugees in Europe motivated the committee to unanimously vote in favor of terminating the British mandate in Palestine. The disagreement came with regards to whether Palestine should be partitioned or if it should constitute a federal state. American lobbying efforts, pressuring UN delegates with the threat of withdrawal of US aid, eventually secured the General Assembly votes in favor of the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which was passed 29 November 1947. Outbursts of violence slowly grew into a wider civil war between the Arabs and Zionist militias. By mid-December, the Haganah had shifted to a more "aggressive defense", abandoning notions of restraint it had espoused from 1936 to 1939. The Haganah reprisal raids were often disproportionate to the initial Arab offenses, which led to the spread of violence to previously unaffected areas. The Zionist militias, employed terror attacks against Arab civilian and militia centers and many Palestinians were evicted from their houses. In response, Arabs planted bombs in Jewish civilian areas, particularly in Jerusalem. The first expulsion of Palestinians began 12 days after the adoption of the UN resolution, and the first Palestinian village was eliminated a month later, in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on convoys and Jewish settlements. In March 1948, Zionist forces began implementing Plan D, an ethnic cleansing operation that involved the expulsion of civilians and the destruction of Arab towns and villages in pursuit of eliminating Palestinians seen as potentially hostile, resulting in the loss of Palestine to much of its indigenous population.: "The prospect and need to prepare for the invasion gave birth to Plan D, prepared in early March. It gave the Haganah brigade and battalion-level commanders carte blanche to completely clear vital areas; it allowed the expulsion of hostile or potentially hostile Arab villages. Many villages were bases for bands of irregulars; most villages had armed militias and could serve as bases for hostile bands. During April and May, the local Haganah units, sometimes with specific instruction from the Haganah General Staff, carried out elements of Plan D, each interpreting and implementing the plan in his area as he saw fit and in relation to the prevailing local circumstances. In general, the commanders saw fit to completely clear the vital roads and border areas of Arab communities -Allon in Eastern Galilee, Carmel around Haifa and Western Galilee, Avidan in the south. Most of the villagers fled before or during the fighting. Those who stayed put were almost invariably expelled." According to Benny Morris Zionist forces committed 24 massacres of Palestinians in the ensuing war, in part as a form of psychological warfare,: "Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition. Demoralisation of the enemy was a primary aim; it was seen to be as important to the outcome of the battle as the physical destruction of the armed Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the Haganah infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The 22nd Battalion (Carmeli Brigade) orders to its troops were "to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered" and to set alight with firebombs "all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route."" the most notorious of which is the Deir Yassin massacre. The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated that between 1948 and 1949, 710,000 Palestinians were driven out of the country and another 40,000 were internally displaced, primarily as a result of these expulsions and massacres. The British left Palestine (having done little to maintain order) on May 14 as planned. The British did not facilitate a formal transfer of power; a fully functioning Jewish quasi-state had already been operating under the British for the past several decades.: "When the British left Palestine in 1948, there was no need to create the apparatus of a Jewish state ab novo. That apparatus had in fact been functioning under the British aegis for decades. All that remained to make Herzl's prescient dream a reality was for this existing para-state to flex its military muscle against the weakened Palestinians while obtaining formal sovereignty, which it did in May 1948. The fate of Palestine had thus been decided thirty years earlier, although the denouement did not come until the very end of the Mandate, when its Arab majority was finally dispossessed by force." The same day, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The Declaration of Independence of Israel described a democracy with equality of social and political rights for all citizens, and extended a peace offering to neighboring states and their Arab citizens. Masalha notes that the declaration states equality on the basis of citizenship but not nationality. The ensuing war led to the State of Israel establishing control over 78% of Mandatory Palestine, instead of the 55% outlined in the UN partition plan, and resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and the Arab landscape.: "The 'War of Liberation', which led to the creation of the State of Israel on 78 per cent of historic Palestine (not the 55 per cent according to the UN partition resolution), resulted not in 'equality for all citizens' 'as taught by the Hebrew prophets' but in the destruction of much of Palestinian society, and much of the Arab landscape, in the name of the Bible, by the Zionist Yishuv, a European settler community that emigrated to Palestine in the period between 1882 and 1948." This war, led by the Zionist Yishuv was framed by its leaders in biblical and messianic terms as a 'miraculous clearing of the land,' akin to the biblical War of Joshua. Masalha writes that it is not clear who the Yishuv was declaring independence from, as it was neither from the British colonial rule, which facilitated Jewish settlement against Palestinian wishes, nor from the land's indigenous inhabitants, who had long cultivated and owned it. After the 1949 Armistice Agreements, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented displaced Palestinians from claiming private property or returning on the state's territories. They and many of their descendants remain refugees supported by UNRWA.Kodmani-Darwish, p. 126; Féron, Féron, p. 126Féron, Féron, p. 94. thumb|Yemenite Jews on their way to Israel during Operation Magic Carpet
Since the creation of the State of Israel, the World Zionist Organization has functioned mainly as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel. Hebraization of names
As part of the effort to consolidate its new ownership over the land it had taken over in the 1948 war, the Israeli state worked towards "erasing all traces of its former owners". The project of "Hebraization" of the map, for which the JNF Naming Committee was established, aimed to replace what remained of the Arab towns and villages with newly named Israeli settlements. These names were often based on the Arab names but with a "Hebrew pronunciation" or based on old Hebrew biblical names. This effort also sought to demonstrate continuous Jewish ownership over the land to ancient times. Prior to 1948, the Zionist movement had limited authority over the use of place names in Palestine. After 1948, the name "Palestine" was removed from Zionist organizations; for example, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which played a critical role in the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 was renamed to the "Jewish Agency for Israel". Post-World War II
thumb|Arab offensive at the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war
thumb|David Ben-Gurion proclaiming Israel's establishment beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl
thumb|Yemenite Jews on their way to Israel during Operation Magic Carpet
Since the creation of the State of Israel, the World Zionist Organization has functioned mainly as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel. It has provided political support for Israel in other countries but plays little role in internal Israeli politics. The movement's major success since 1948 was in providing logistical support for Jewish migrants and refugees and, most importantly, in assisting Soviet Jews in their struggle with the authorities over the right to leave the USSR and to practice their religion in freedom, and the exodus of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world, mostly to Israel. In 1944–45, Ben-Gurion described the One Million Plan to foreign officials as being the "primary goal and top priority of the Zionist movement." The immigration restrictions of the British White Paper of 1939 meant that such a plan could not be put into large scale effect until the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948. The new country's immigration policy had some opposition within the new Israeli government, such as those who argued that there was "no justification for organizing large-scale emigration among Jews whose lives were not in danger, particularly when the desire and motivation were not their own" as well as those who argued that the absorption process caused "undue hardship". However, the force of Ben-Gurion's influence and insistence ensured that his immigration policy was carried out. Role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In response to Ben-Gurion's 1938 quote that "politically we are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves", Israeli historian Benny Morris says, "Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement", and that "Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist." Morris describes the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as necessarily displacing and dispossessing the Arab population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish and Arab region was a fundamental issue for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing, of the Arab Palestinian population. According to Benny Morris, "the idea of transferring the Arabs out... was seen as the chief means of assuring the stability of the 'Jewishness' of the proposed Jewish State". In fact, the concept of forcibly removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions, from early on in the movement's development. Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992), "It should not be imagined that the concept of transfer was held only by maximalists or extremists within the Zionist movement. On the contrary, it was embraced by almost all shades of opinion, from the Revisionist right to the Labor left. Virtually every member of the Zionist pantheon of founding fathers and important leaders supported it and advocated it in one form or another, from Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion and Menahem Ussishkin. Supporters of transfer included such moderates as the “Arab appeaser" Moshe Shertok and the socialist Arthur Ruppin, founder of Brit Shalom, a movement advocating equal rights for Arabs and Jews. More importantly, transfer proposals were put forward by the Jewish Agency itself, in effect the government of the Yishuv." Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: 2001), pp. 404–5 The concept of transfer was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership. The notion of forcible transfer was so appealing to this leadership that it was considered the most attractive provision in the Peel Commission. Indeed, this sentiment was deeply ingrained to the extent that Ben Gurion's acceptance of partition was contingent upon the removal of the Palestinian population. He would go as far as to say that transfer was such an ideal solution that it "must happen some day". It was the right wing of the Zionist movement that put forward the main arguments against transfer, their objections being primarily on practical rather than moral grounds. According to Morris, the idea of ethnically cleansing the land of Palestine was to play a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement. He explains that "transfer" was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" and that a land which was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population. Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population's fear of displacement. He explains that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population. Types
+ Members and delegates at the 1939 Zionist congress, by country/region (Zionism was banned in the Soviet Union). 70,000 Polish Jews supported the Revisionist Zionism movement, which was not represented.Source: A Survey of Palestine, prepared in 1946 for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Volume II p. 907 HMSO 1946. Country/Region Members Delegates Poland299,165109 US263,741114 Palestine167,562134 Romania60,01328 United Kingdom23,51315 South Africa22,34314 Canada15,2208
The multi-national, worldwide Zionist movement is structured on representative democratic principles. Congresses are held every four years (they were held every two years before the Second World War) and delegates to the congress are elected by the membership. Members are required to pay dues known as a shekel. At the congress, delegates elect a 30-man executive council, which in turn elects the movement's leader. The movement was democratic from its inception and women had the right to vote. Until 1917, the World Zionist Organization pursued a strategy of building a Jewish National Home through persistent small-scale immigration and the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund (1901 – a charity that bought land for Jewish settlement) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (1903 – provided loans for Jewish businesses and farmers). In 1942, at the Biltmore Conference, the movement included for the first time an express objective of the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel.American Jewish Year Book Vol. 45 (1943–1944) Pro-Palestine and Zionist Activities, pp. 206–214
The 28th Zionist Congress, meeting in Jerusalem in 1968, adopted the five points of the "Jerusalem Program" as the aims of Zionism today. They are:
Unity of the Jewish People and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life
Ingathering of the Jewish People in its historic homeland, Eretz Israel, through Aliyah from all countries
Strengthening of the State of Israel, based on the prophetic vision of justice and peace
Preservation of the identity of the Jewish People through fostering of Jewish and Hebrew education, and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values
Protection of Jewish rights everywhere
Since the creation of modern Israel, the role of the movement has declined. It is now a peripheral factor in Israeli politics, though different perceptions of Zionism continue to play roles in Israeli and Jewish political discussion. After the state's establishment, Zionism has come to be described as Israel's national or state ideology. Labor Zionism
thumb|upright=0.75|Israeli author Amos Oz, who today is described as the 'aristocrat' of Labor ZionismTo Rule Jerusalem
By Roger Friedland, Richard Hecht, University of California Press, 2000, p. 203
Labor Zionism originated in Eastern Europe. Socialist Zionists believed that centuries of oppression in antisemitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence that invited further antisemitism, a view originally stipulated by Theodor Herzl.http://humanities1.tau.ac.il/zionism/templates/ol_similu/files/israel16/Israel16_conforti.pdf
היהודי החדש במחשבה הציונית: לאומיות, אידאולוגיה והיסטוריוגרפיה יצחק קונפורטי
2009
The new Jew in Zionist thought: nationalism, ideology and historiography
Yitzhak Conforti They argued that a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Most socialist Zionists rejected the observance of traditional religious Judaism as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people, and established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim". The kibbutz began as a variation on a "national farm" scheme, a form of cooperative agriculture where the Jewish National Fund hired Jewish workers under trained supervision. Religious Zionism and the Six-Day War
Prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, religious Zionism mostly described support for political Zionism among Orthodox Jews. However, the war and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, invigorated and popularized a religious Zionist ideology associated with the Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, which believes that Zionism is a part of the historical process that will bring about the messianic age. This ideology considered secular Zionism and secular state policies to be holy and part God's divine plan: "The spirit of Israel... is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter how secularist his intention may be, is, despite himself, imbued with the divine spirit even against his own will."
According to followers of the Mercaz HaRav ideology, the Six Day War was a demonstration of the work of the Divine Hand and the "beginning of redemption". Proponents of this ideology venerate the land as sacred, and consider its sanctity a core principle of religious Zionism. Religious Zionists view the settlement of the West Bank as a commandment of God, necessary for the redemption of the Jewish people. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, a major religious Zionist leader and thinker, would declare in 1967 following the Six Day War in the presence of Israeli leadership including the president, ministers, members of the Knesset, judges, chief rabbis and senior civil servants:
I tell you explicitly... that there is a prohibition in the Torah against giving up even an inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign land; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our forefathers. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God—the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for it and for all of us. In the 1970s, religious Zionists, such as Shlomo Aviner and Hanan Porat, campaigned against Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula. Religious Zionist ideology motivated the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, who ceded some territory to the PLO as a part of the Oslo Accords, and several religious Zionist rabbis reacted to the assassination with approval. Types of Zionism
From the turn of the century until the Arab revolt of 1936, there was room for political flexibility within the Zionist movement, many scholars argue that different currents of Zionism have had a shared core framework.: "Relatively recent examples of the search for this "core" idea in Zionism (which tends to label ideological diversity as "heresy" or "deviation") can be found in Gorny and Netzer, "'Avodat ha-hoveh ha-murhevet'"; Halpern and Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society; and Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology. Older studies that are based on a similar presupposition include Heller, The Zionist Idea, and most famously Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea." Most mainstream histories of the movement delineate a few key strains, many following a taxonomy introduced during the period starting in the late 19th century and continuing into the 1930s: political, practical, socialist, cultural and revisionist. Some scholars emphasise the heterogeneity of these strains of Zionism.: "conflicting founding designs...express the formative ideological background underlying the very idea of the State of Israel."}: "What we call Zionism, despite the existence of a World Zionist Organization and then a Zionist state, is in fact a catchall for numerous, often contradictory currents of thought.": "Zionism was never a monolithic movement. It would be more correct to speak of a range of different varieties of Zionism. Herzl's General Zionism immediately began to flow into different ideological streams."
Early Zionist Strains: Political and practical Zionism
Political Zionism was led by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. This approach was espoused at the Zionist Organization's First Zionist Congress. It focused on a Jewish home as a solution to the "Jewish question" and antisemitism in Europe, centered on gaining Jewish sovereignty (probably within the Ottoman or later British or French empire), and was opposed to mass migration until after sovereignty was granted. It initially considered locations other than Palestine (e.g., in Africa) and did not foresee migration by many Western Jews to the new homeland. Known in Hebrew as , Practical Zionism was led by Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker and molded by the Hovevei Zion organization. It became dominant after Herzl's death, and differed from Political Zionism in not seeing Zionism as justified primarily by the Jewish Question but rather as an end in itself; it "aspired to the establishment of an elite utopian community in Palestine" through Aliyah. It also differed from Political Zionism in "distrust[ing] grand political actions" and preferring "an evolutionary incremental process toward the establishment of the national home".: "practical Zionism. This designation referred to those who supported the redemption of Palestine by small-sized, but ideologically-driven, aliya and settlement, which would progress gradually and steadily, if slowly. Political Zionism, its ideological rival, disagreed. Its most prominent spokesman, Theodor Herzl, feared that this unorganized colonization of Palestine would jeopardize his diplomatic negotiations with the great powers; and in his address to the first Zionist congress in 1897 he defined this method as "infiltration"."
These initially dominant strains faded after the First World War and Balfour Declaration. Labor Zionism
120px|thumb|right|Dov Ber Borochov, one of the leaders of Labor ZionismLed by socialists Nachman Syrkin, Haim Arlosoroff, Berl Katznelson, and Marxist Ber Borochov, Labor or Socialist Zionism was a form of Zionism that combined messianic tendencies and socialist or social democratic politics.: "The Socialist-Zionist movement played a key role in Zionist colonization of Palestine. Its ideology became the most influential and persistent in the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Socialist-Zionism has been associated with most of the pioneer and colonizing efforts, institutions and procedures since the second Zionist immigration wave (hadAliya ha-Shnia) to Palestine in 1904–05, and became the chief force in the nation-building of Israel. It dominated Zionist immigration, consolidated the nationalist movement, and diffused the principles of an egalitarian social system into the Yishuv in Palestine... Socialist-Zionist ideology was not a unitary, totalitarian, and single ideology. It was iconoclastic-as all ideologies are. It blended messianic with programmist tendencies and integrated a variety of trends, doctrines and formulations of socialism and Zionism. It contained elements of the Russian Social Democratic variety of Marxism, Bundism, the Austrian and German Social Democracy, Russian Anarchism, Bolshevism and even of utopian pre-Marxian socialism." The labor Zionists promoted immigration and settlement, establishing "facts on the ground" as the main path towards state-building.: "The tactics that Labor Zionists used to build the Jewish community in Palestine were completely different. They believed less in "rights" and more in incrementally established facts on the ground". Labor Zionism became a mass movement with the founding of Poale Zion ("Workers of Zion") groups in Eastern and Western Europe and North America in the 1900s. Poale Zion split between Left and Right after 1917. In 1919, the Right Poale Zion in Palestine disbanded to form the nationalist socialist Ahdut HaAvoda, led by David Ben Gurion;: "The formal decision to found Ahdut Ha'avoda was made at the Convention of Agricultural Workers, held in February 1919. This was the first country-wide gathering of all regional agricultural workers' organizations. The elections took place according to the system of proportional representation, with 1 representative for every 25 people; small settlements were allowed to send 1 representative for every 12 people. Altogether, 58 representatives were elected to the convention, 28 of whom were nonparty, 11 from Hapo'el Hatza'ir, and 19 from Po'alei Tzion. Thus, a clear majority supported non-socialist, if not antisocialist, principles. Prior to this agricultural gathering, the two political parties also held conventions, and at the Po'alei Tzion convention in Jaffa on 21–23 February, the party disbanded in order to clear the way for the founding of Ahdut Ha'avoda." in 1930, it merged with Hapoel Hatzair, founded by A. D. Gordon, to form Mapai.: "The two largest of them, Ahdut Ha'avoda and Hapoel Hatzair, merged in January 1930 to form Mapai." Labor Zionism, represented by Mapai, became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine. It was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election, when the Israeli Labor Party was defeated. During the early twentieth century, the left wing of this tradition was represented by Hashomer Hatzair, followed by Mapam in the late twentieth century, and Meretz until 2022. thumb|Kibbutznikiyot (female Kibbutz members) in Mishmar HaEmek, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Kibbutz is the historical heartland of Labor Zionism. In Labor Zionist thought, a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was believed necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Labor Zionists established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim", a form of cooperative agriculture in which the Jewish National Fund hired Jewish workers under trained supervision. The kibbutzim were a symbol of the Second Aliyah in that they put great emphasis on communalism and egalitarianism, representing Utopian socialism to a certain extent. Furthermore, they stressed self-sufficiency, which became an essential aspect of Labor Zionism. Though socialist Zionism draws its inspiration and is philosophically founded on the fundamental values and spirituality of Judaism, its progressive expression of that Judaism has often fostered an antagonistic relationship with Orthodox Judaism. Traditionalist Israeli historian Anita Shapira describes labor Zionism's use of violence against Palestinians for political means as essentially the same as that of radical conservative Zionist groups. For example, Shapira notes that during the 1936 Palestine revolt, the Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in the "uninhibited use of terror", "mass indiscriminate killings of the aged, women and children", "attacks against British without any consideration of possible injuries to innocent bystanders, and the murder of British in cold blood". Shapira argues that there were only marginal differences in military behavior between the Irgun and the labor Zionist Palmah. In following with policies laid out by Ben-Gurion, the prevalent method among field squads was that if an Arab gang had used a village as a hideout, it was considered acceptable to hold the entire village collectively responsible. The lines delineating what was acceptable and unacceptable while dealing with these villagers were "vague and intentionally blurred". As Shapira suggests, these ambiguous limits practically did not differ from those of the openly terrorist group, Irgun. Labor Zionism became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine and was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election when the Israeli Labor Party was defeated. The Israeli Labor Party continues the tradition, although the most popular party in the kibbutzim is Meretz.Gilbert, Israel: A History (London 1997), pp. 594–607 Labor Zionism's main institution is the Histadrut (general organisation of labor unions), which began by providing strikebreakers against a Palestinian worker's strike in 1920 and until 1970s was the largest employer in Israel after the Israeli government. Liberal Zionism
thumb|Kibbutznikiyot (female Kibbutz members) in Mishmar HaEmek, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Kibbutz is the historical heartland of Labor Zionism. General Zionism (or Liberal Zionism) was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 until after the First World War. Synthetic and General Zionism
Synthetic Zionism, led by Chaim Weizmann, Leo Motzkin and Nahum Sokolow, was an approach that advocated a combination of practical and political Zionism and distanced themselves from the growing Labour, Religious and Revisionist Zionist groups as the movement became polarised between those. General Zionists identified with the liberal European middle class to which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann aspired. Liberal Zionism, although not associated with any single party in modern Israel, remains a strong trend in Israeli politics advocating free market principles, democracy and adherence to human rights. Their political arm was one of the ancestors of the modern-day Likud. Kadima, the main centrist party during the 2000s that split from Likud and is now defunct, however, did identify with many of the fundamental policies of Liberal Zionist ideology, advocating among other things the need for Palestinian statehood in order to form a more democratic society in Israel, affirming the free market, and calling for equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel. In 2013, Ari Shavit suggested that the success of the then-new Yesh Atid party (representing secular, middle-class interests) embodied the success of "the new General Zionists."
Dror Zeigerman writes that the traditional positions of the General Zionists—"liberal positions based on social justice, on law and order, on pluralism in matters of State and Religion, and on moderation and flexibility in the domain of foreign policy and security"—are still favored by important circles and currents within certain active political parties. Philosopher Carlo Strenger describes a modern-day version of Liberal Zionism (supporting his vision of "Knowledge-Nation Israel"), rooted in the original ideology of Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, that stands in contrast to both the romantic nationalism of the right and the Netzah Yisrael of the ultra-Orthodox. As head of the World Zionist Organization, Weizmann's policies had a sustained impact on the Zionist movement, with Abba Eban describing him as a dominant figure in Jewish life during the interwar period. Revisionist Zionism
right|thumb|upright=0.75|Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism
Revisionist Zionism, developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, was a right-wing strain of Zionism. It initially believed that a Jewish state must expand to both sides of the Jordan River, i.e. taking Transjordan in addition to all of Palestine. It broke with the WZO in 1935 because of the latter's refusal to declare the establishment of a Jewish state as its immediate aim, and had its own paramilitary organisation, Irgun, from 1931 to 1948. Followers of Revisionist Zionism developed the Likud Party in Israel, which has dominated most governments since 1977. It advocates Israel's maintaining control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and takes a hard-line approach in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Religious Zionism
Initially led by Yitzchak Yaacov Reines and by Abraham Isaac Kook, Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that combines religious conservatism and secular nationalism into a theology with patriotism as its basis. One of the core ideas in Religious Zionism is the belief that the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel and the establishment of Israel is the beginning of the redemption, the initial stage of the geula.: "Highlighting and infusing the unsolved tension between religion and nationality rooted in Israeli Jewish identity, the father of religious Zionism Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), and his son and most influential interpreter Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982), assigned primary religious significance to settling the (Greater) Land of Israel, sacralising Israel's national symbols, and, more generally, perceiving the contemporary historical period of statehood as Atchalta De'Geulah [the beginning of the redemption]"
After the Six-Day War and the capture of the West Bank, a territory referred to by the movement as Judea and Samaria, the movement turned right as it integrated revanchist and irredentist forms of nationalism; this right-wing form of religious Zionism, powerful within the settlement movement, is represented today by Gush Emunim (founded by students of Abraham Kook's son Zvi Yehuda Kook in 1974), Jewish Home (HaBayit HaYehudi, formed in 2009), Tkuma, and Meimad. Kahanism, a radical branch of religious Zionism, was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party, Kach, was eventually banned from the Knesset, but has been increasingly influential on Israeli politics. Liberal Zionism
Today, the liberal Zionist perspective criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory since 1967 while also promoting the idea of a Jewish state as a necessity. In this vein, liberal Zionism sees Zionist and Israeli activity before 1967, such as the military conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, as a necessity.: "'liberal Zionist,' widely defined to mean someone who is a strong critic of Israel's policies and treatment of the Palestinians since 1967 but who accepts the need for a Jewish state and regards Israel's early policies as a tragic necessity.": "Sternhell — like other liberal Zionist intellectuals and authors, Martin Buber, Amos Oz, Amos Elon, S. Yizhar and A.B. Yehoshua included — embodies the liberal coloniser who promotes the myth of 'the clash of two rights and two justices', of (Buber's idea) the 'land of two people',37 and of the fallacy of balance and false symmetry between the colonised and the coloniser, between the indigenous and the European settler, between the ethnically cleansed and the ethnic cleanser. The conscientious liberal Zionist, represented in S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khiz'ah (1949) and A.B. Yehoshua's 'Facing the Forests' (1968) and Between Right and Right (Bein Zechut Le-Zechut) (1980, 1981) — whose narrative found strong echoes in the enthusiastic reception accorded in the West to the 'heroic new historians' — is always torn by the demands of Zionist patriotism and the need for human decency. At the Paris conference, expressing a view that is typical of the Israeli liberal narrative, Sternhell acknowledged the colonising aspects of Zionism and recognised the great injustice done to Palestinians. But he insisted that, in view of the European Jewish catastrophe, the Zionist military conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of the Palestinians was dictated by necessity."
Liberal Zionism, although not associated with any single party in modern Israel, remains a strong trend in Israeli politics advocating free market principles, democracy and adherence to human rights. Philosopher Carlo Strenger describes a modern-day version of Liberal Zionism, rooted in the original ideology of Herzl and Ahad Ha'am. It is marked by a concern for democratic values and human rights, freedom to criticize government policies without accusations of disloyalty, and rejection of excessive religious influence in public life. "Liberal Zionism celebrates the most authentic traits of the Jewish tradition: the willingness for incisive debate; the contrarian spirit of davka; the refusal to bow to authoritarianism."Carlo Strenger, Knowledge-Nation Israel: A New Unifying Vision , Azure Winter 2010, No. 39, pp. 35–57 Liberal Zionists see that "Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity or gender."
Revisionist Zionism
right|thumb|upright=0.75|Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism
Revisionist Zionists, led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, believed that a Jewish state must expand to both sides of the Jordan River, i.e. taking Transjordan in addition to all of Palestine. The movement developed what became known as Nationalist Zionism, whose guiding principles were outlined in the 1923 essay Iron Wall, a term denoting the force needed to prevent Palestinian resistance against colonization. Jabotinsky wrote that
Historian Avi Shlaim states that
In 1935 the Revisionists left the WZO because it refused to state that the creation of a Jewish state was an objective of Zionism. The Revisionists advocated the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine to force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration. Supporters of Revisionist Zionism developed the Likud Party in Israel, which has dominated most governments since 1977. It advocates Israel's maintaining control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and takes a hard-line approach in the Arab–Israeli conflict. In 2005, the Likud split over the issue of creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Party members advocating peace talks helped form the Kadima Party. Religious Zionism
Religious Zionism is an ideology that combines Zionism and observant Judaism. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Religious Zionists were mainly observant Jews who supported Zionist efforts to build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. One of the core ideas in Religious Zionism is the belief that the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel and the establishment of Israel is Atchalta De'Geulah ("the beginning of the redemption"), the initial stage of the geula. After the Six-Day War and the capture of the West Bank, a territory referred to in Jewish terms as Judea and Samaria, right-wing components of the Religious Zionist movement integrated nationalist revindication and evolved into what is sometimes known as Neo-Zionism. Their ideology revolves around three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel.Adriana Kemp, Israelis in Conflict: Hegemonies, Identities and Challenges, Sussex Academic Press, 2004, pp. 314–315. Non-Jewish support
The French government, through Minister M. Cambon, formally committed itself to "... the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago."
In China, top figures of the Nationalist government, including Sun Yat-sen, expressed their sympathy with the aspirations of the Jewish people for a National Home. Christian support for Zionism
thumb|upright|Martin Luther King Jr. was a notable Christian supporter of Israel and Zionism. Some Christians actively supported the return of Jews to Palestine even prior to the rise of Zionism, as well as subsequently. Anita Shapira, a history professor emerita at Tel Aviv University, suggests that evangelical Christian restorationists of the 1840s "passed this notion on to Jewish circles". Evangelical Christian anticipation of and political lobbying within the UK for Restorationism was widespread in the 1820s and common beforehand. It was common among the Puritans to anticipate and frequently to pray for a Jewish return to their homeland. One of the principal Protestant teachers who promoted the biblical doctrine that the Jews would return to their national homeland was John Nelson Darby. Liberal Zionists see that "Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity or gender."
Cultural Zionism
Cultural Zionism or Spiritual Zionism is a strain of Zionism that focused on creating a center in historic Palestine with its own secular Jewish culture and national history, including language and historical roots, rather than on mass migration or state-building. The founder of Cultural Zionism was Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha'am. Like Hibbat Zion and unlike Herzl, Ha'am saw Palestine as the spiritual centre of Jewish life. Ha'am inaugurated the movement in his 1880 essay "This is not the way", which called for the cultivation of a qualitative Jewish presence in the land over [the] quantitative one" pursued by Hibbat Zion. Ha'am was also a sharp critic of Herzl; spiritual Zionism believed that the realpolitik engaged in by Political Zionism corrupted Jewry, and opposed any political solutions that victimised non-Jewish people in the land. Brit Shalom, which promoted Arab-Jewish cooperation, was established in 1925 by supporters of Ahad Ha'am's Spiritual Zionism, including Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, "and other important figures of the intellectual elite of the pre-independence yishuv, Gorny describes it as an ultimately marginal group. Non-Jewish support
Christian support
From the beginning of the Zionist movement's development, it was dependent on support from the Christian world.: "The Zionist movement was created by Jews, but from the start it was dependent on support from the Christian world." The Christian restorationist movement held the belief that the "return" of Jews to Palestine would trigger the second coming of the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and ultimately lead to the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.: "Zionism in many ways began as a Christian project, as part of a restorationist movement believing that the 'return' of the Jews to Palestine would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead and eventually the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. These ideas influenced Jews looking for a haven when it was clear that anti-Semitic Europe will not allow them to be assimilated or integrate." In this sense, according to Penslar, Christian ideas of "restoration" were a prerequisite for the success of Zionism.: "Restorationism was therefore a prerequisite for the success of Zionism."
Christian Zionism is primarily driven by the belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land will either lead to their conversion to Christianity or their destruction. This belief is criticized by Gershom Gorenberg in his book "The End of Days," where he highlights the troubling aspect of this messianic scenario—the disappearance of Jews. Evangelical figures such as Jerry Falwell believe the establishment of Israel is a pivotal event signaling the Second Coming of Christ and the eventual End times. As a result, Christian Zionists have significantly contributed politically and financially to Israeli nationalist forces, with the understanding that Israel's role is to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ and the elimination of Judaism.: "The massive support extended to the State of Israel by the millions of Christian supporters of Zionism is overtly motivated by a single consideration: that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land will be a prelude to their acceptance of Christ or, for those who fail to do so, to their physical destruction. In his book, The End of Days, Gershom Gorenberg, a religious Jewish author, deplores the messianic scenario dear to many Christian Zionists, which includes the conversion to Christianity of great numbers of Jews and the destruction of those who refuse. In his view, "the evangelical scenario is a drama in five acts, where the Jews disappear in the fourth" (Cypel).For the evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell, the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 has been the most crucial event in history since the ascension of Jesus to heaven, and "proof that the second coming of Jesus Christ is nigh.... Without a State of Israel in the Holy Land, there cannot be the second coming of Jesus Christ, nor can there be a Last Judgement, nor the End of the World" (Tremblay, 118).These groups have provided massive political and financial assistance to the most resolute nationalist forces in Israeli society. In their view, the principal function of the State of Israel is to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ and to eliminate Judaism and those who profess it. This would explain why Christian Zionists have come to play an increasingly significant role in the financial and political support of the State of Israel."
One of the principal Protestant teachers who promoted the biblical doctrine that the Jews would return to their national homeland was John Nelson Darby. His doctrine of dispensationalism is credited with promoting Zionism, following his 11 lectures on the hopes of the church, the Jew and the gentile given in Geneva in 1840. However, others like C H Spurgeon,Sermon preached in June 1864 to the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews both Horatius'The Jew', July 1870, The Quarterly Journal of Prophecy and Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray M'Chyene,Sermon preached November 17, 1839, after returning from a "Mission of Inquiry into the State of the Jewish People" and J C RyleSermon preached June 1864 to London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews were among a number of prominent proponents of both the importance and significance of a Jewish return, who were not dispensationalist. Pro-Zionist views were embraced by many evangelicals and also affected international foreign policy. The Russian Orthodox ideologue Hippolytus Lutostansky, also known as the author of multiple antisemitic tracts, insisted in 1911 that Russian Jews should be "helped" to move to Palestine "as their rightful place is in their former kingdom of Palestine". Notable early supporters of Zionism include British Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, American President Woodrow Wilson and British Major-General Orde Wingate, whose activities in support of Zionism led the British Army to ban him from ever serving in Palestine. According to Charles Merkley of Carleton University, Christian Zionism strengthened significantly after the Six-Day War of 1967, and many dispensationalist and non-dispensationalist evangelical Christians, especially Christians in the United States, now strongly support Zionism. Martin Luther King Jr. was a strong supporter of Israel and Zionism,Sundquist, Eric J. (2005). Strangers in the land: Blacks, Jews, post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 110. although the Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend is a work falsely attributed to him. In the last years of his life, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, Joseph Smith, declared, "the time for Jews to return to the land of Israel is now." In 1842, Smith sent Orson Hyde, an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to Jerusalem to dedicate the land for the return of the Jews. Some Arab Christians publicly supporting Israel include US author Nonie Darwish, and former Muslim Magdi Allam, author of Viva Israele, both born in Egypt. Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-born Christian US journalist and founder of the American Congress for Truth, urges Americans to "fearlessly speak out in defense of America, Israel and Western civilization". The largest Zionist organisation is Christians United for Israel, which has 10 million members and is led by John Hagee. Muslim support for Zionism
thumb|upright=1.15|Israeli Druze Scouts march to Jethro's tomb. Druze support
thumb|Israeli Druze Scouts march to Jethro's tomb. Today, thousands of Israeli Druze belong to 'Druze Zionist' movements. Muslims who have publicly defended Zionism include Tawfik Hamid, Islamic thinker and reformer and former member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist militant group that is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union, Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic CommunityBehrisch, Sven. "The Zionist Imam " at The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, July 19, 2010 and Tashbih Sayyed, a Pakistani-American scholar, journalist, and author. On occasion, some non-Arab Muslims such as some Kurds and Berbers have also voiced support for Zionism."Islam, Islam, Laїcité, and Amazigh Activism in France and North Africa" (2004 paper), Paul A. Silverstein, Department of Anthropology, Reed College
While most Israeli Druze identify as ethnically Arab, today, tens of thousands of Israeli Druze belong to "Druze Zionist" movements. During the Palestine Mandate era, As'ad Shukeiri, a Muslim scholar ('alim) of the Acre area, and the father of PLO founder Ahmad Shukeiri, rejected the values of the Palestinian Arab national movement and was opposed to the anti-Zionist movement.Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, Volume 4, Reeva S. Simon, Philip Mattar, Richard W. Bulliet. Macmillan Reference US, 1996. p. 1661 He met routinely with Zionist officials and had a part in every pro-Zionist Arab organization from the beginning of the British Mandate, publicly rejecting Mohammad Amin al-Husayni's use of Islam to attack Zionism.Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948. By Hillel Cohen. University of California Press, 2009. p. 84
Some Indian Muslims have also expressed opposition to Islamic anti-Zionism. In August 2007, a delegation of the All India Organization of Imams and mosques led by its president Maulana Jamil Ilyas visited Israel. The meeting led to a joint statement expressing "peace and goodwill from Indian Muslims", developing dialogue between Indian Muslims and Israeli Jews, and rejecting the perception that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is of a religious nature. The visit was organized by the American Jewish Committee. The purpose of the visit was to promote meaningful debate about the status of Israel in the eyes of Muslims worldwide and to strengthen the relationship between India and Israel. It is suggested that the visit could "open Muslim minds across the world to understand the democratic nature of the state of Israel, especially in the Middle East". Hindu support for Zionism
After Israel's creation in 1948, the Indian National Congress government opposed Zionism. Some writers have claimed that this was done in order to get more Muslim votes in India (where Muslims numbered over 30 million at the time). While most Israeli Druze identify as ethnically Arab, today, tens of thousands of Israeli Druze belong to "Druze Zionist" movements. A survey conducted in 2008 by Dr. Yusuf Hassan of Tel Aviv University found that out of 764 Druze participants, more than 94% identify as "Druze-Israelis" in the religious and national context. In 1973, Amal Nasser el-Din founded the Zionist Druze Circle, a group whose aim was to encourage the Druze to support the state of Israel. The Druze have aligned themselves more with the Zionist ethos and have distanced themselves from other Arab and Islamic nationalist causes in Israeli society. Israeli Druze citizens serve in the Israel Defense Forces. The Jewish-Druze partnership was often referred to as "a covenant of blood" () in recognition of the shared responsibility of defending Israel. Hindu support
Before and after Israel's creation in 1948, the Indian National Congress and the Indian government initially opposed Zionism. Zionism, seen as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of the Jewish people to their homeland then under British colonial rule, appealed to many Hindu nationalists, who viewed their struggle for independence from British rule and the Partition of India as national liberation for long-oppressed Hindus. An international opinion survey has shown that India is the most pro-Israel country in the world. In more current times, conservative Indian parties and organizations tend to support Zionism. This has invited attacks on the Hindutva movement by parts of the Indian left opposed to Zionism, and allegations that Hindus are conspiring with the "Jewish Lobby."
Anti-Zionism
thumb|upright=1.35|right|The Palestinian Arab Christian-owned Falastin newspaper featuring a caricature on its June 18, 1936, edition showing Zionism as a crocodile under the protection of a British officer telling Palestinian Arabs: "Don't be afraid!!! Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, drew a connection between the conflict in Palestine and Hindu-Muslim relations in India, calling it a British "imperialist diversion."
In more current times, conservative Indian parties and organizations tend to support Zionism. A 2012 international opinion survey found that India was the most pro-Israel country in the world. This has invited attacks on the Hindutva movement by parts of the Indian left opposed to Zionism, and allegations that Hindus are conspiring with the "Jewish Lobby."
Anti-Zionism
thumb|upright=1.35|right|The Palestinian Arab Christian-owned Falastin newspaper featuring a caricature on its June 18, 1936, edition showing Zionism as a crocodile under the protection of a British officer telling Palestinian Arabs: "Don't be afraid!!! I will swallow you peacefully...". Zionism has been opposed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals. In 1919, the US-based King–Crane Commission found that the subjection of Palestinians to Zionist rule was a violation of the principle of self-determination. The report stated that "The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered."
Among those opposing Zionism before their dissolution were the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Today, opponents include Palestinian nationalists, several states of the Arab League and in the Muslim world, some secular, Satmar and Neturei Karta Jews.*"Holocaust Victims Accuse" by Reb. Moshe Shonfeld; Bnei Yeshivos NY; (1977)Nadler, Allan. 2010. Satmar Hasidic Dynasty. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Satmar_Hasidic_Dynasty (accessed March 22, 2022). Reasons for opposing Zionism have been varied, and they include: fundamental disagreement that foreign born Jews have rights of resettlement, the perception that land confiscations are unfair; expulsions of Palestinians; violence against Palestinians; and alleged racism. Zionism has been criticized and opposed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals. Until World War II, anti-Zionism was widespread among Jews for varying reasons. Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on religious grounds, as preempting the Messiah. Many secular or assimilationist Jewish anti-Zionists identified more with ideals of the Enlightenment and saw Zionism as a reactionary ideology, while left-wing Jews (including in the Bund) believed that the Jewish question was best solved in the diaspora through building a socialist society. Opposition to Zionism in the Jewish diaspora was surmounted only from the 1930s onward, as conditions for Jews deteriorated radically in Europe and, with the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust was felt. Thereafter, Jewish anti-Zionist groups generally either disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, though many small groups, and bodies like the American Council for Judaism, conserved an earlier Reform tradition of rejection of Zionism. There was a shift in the meaning of anti-Zionism after the events of the 1940s. Whereas pre-1948 anti-Zionism was against the hypothetical establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, post-1948 anti-Zionism had to contend with the existence of the State of Israel. This often meant taking a retaliatory position to the new reality of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The overriding impulse of post-1948 anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else. Opposition to Zionism was overwhelmingly common among the non-Jewish communities of Palestine from the 1880s onwards. Palestinian nationalism, the national movement of the Palestinians that espouses self-determination and sovereignty over the region of Palestine,de Waart, 1994, p. 223. Referencing Article 9 of The Palestinian_National_Charter of 1968. The Avalon_Project has a copy here cohered in the early 20th century, along with broader Arab nationalism and the ideology of Greater Syria. Palestinian nationalism later internationalized and attached itself to other ideologies, in particular Third World socialism and Islamism, and was embodied in particular by the broadly secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and later also by the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Islamist Hamas. Although the left was initially mostly supportive of Zionism, Soviet anti-Zionism was influential in spreading anti-Zionism on the global left, and much of the New Left of the 1960s took on anti-Zionism as a key tenet. Today, opponents include Palestinian nationalists, several states of the Arab League and in the Muslim world, many on the political left, and some secular Jews (such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in the US), as well as the Satmar and Neturei Karta Jewish sects. Many Jewish anti-Zionist groups operate both in Israel and the United States, most notably Jewish Voice for Peace, whose thousands of members opposes Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. These groups outwardly reject an inherent union between Judaism and Zionism and, as a result, face animosity and marginalization from Zionist Jews in their community. The fascist far-right have also generally espoused anti-Zionism, for antisemitic reasons. Reasons for opposing Zionism have been varied, and they include: fundamental disagreement that foreign born Jews have rights of resettlement, the perception that land confiscations are unfair; expulsions of Palestinians; violence against Palestinians; and alleged racism and supremacism. Arab states in particular have historically strongly opposed Zionism. The preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been ratified by 53 African countries , includes an undertaking to eliminate Zionism together with other practices including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, "aggressive foreign military bases" and all forms of discrimination.Ratification Table: African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights , African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, 2014
In 1945 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud pointed out that it was Germany who had committed crimes against the Jews and so Germany should be punished. Palestinian Arabs had done no harm to European Jews and did not deserve to be punished by losing their land. Roosevelt on return to the US concluded that Israel "could only be established and maintained by force."
Catholic Church and Zionism
Shortly after the First Zionist Congress, the semi-official Vatican periodical (edited by the Jesuits) Civiltà Cattolica gave its biblical-theological judgement on political Zionism: "1827 years have passed since the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilled ... that [after the destruction of Jerusalem] the Jews would be led away to be slaves among all the nations and that they would remain in the dispersion [diaspora, galut] until the end of the world." The Jews should not be permitted to return to Palestine with sovereignty: "According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and vagabondo [vagrant, wandering] among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures ... but by their very existence". Nonetheless, Theodor Herzl travelled to Rome in late January 1904, after the sixth Zionist Congress (August 1903) and six months before his death, looking for support. On January 22, Herzl first met the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. According to Herzl's private diary notes, the Cardinal's interpretation of the history of Israel was the same as that of the Catholic Church, but he also asked for the conversion of the Jews to Catholicism. Three days later, Herzl met Pope Pius X, who replied to his request of support for a Jewish return to Israel in the same terms, saying that "we are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it ... The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people." In 1922, the same periodical published a piece by its Viennese correspondent, "anti-Semitism is nothing but the absolutely necessary and natural reaction to the Jews' arrogance... Catholic anti-Semitism—while never going beyond the moral law—adopts all necessary means to emancipate the Christian people from the abuse they suffer from their sworn enemy". This initial attitude changed over the next 50 years, until 1997, when at the Vatican symposium of that year, Pope John Paul II rejected the Christian roots of antisemitism, stating that "... the wrong and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relating to the Jewish people and their supposed guilt [in Christ's death] circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility toward this people."Rev. Thomas F. Stransky, Paulist. "A Catholic Views – Zionism and the State of Israel" . The Holy land. Characterization as colonialist and racist
David Ben-Gurion stated that "There will be no discrimination among citizens of the Jewish state on the basis of race, religion, sex, or class." Likewise, Vladimir Jabotinsky avowed "the minority will not be rendered defenseless... [the] aim of democracy is to guarantee that the minority too has influence on matters of state policy." Supporters of Zionism, such as Chaim Herzog, argue that the movement is non-discriminatory and contains no racist aspects. thumb|upright=1.35|right|Pro-Palestinian protest with placards demanding the US to stop funding of "Israeli apartheid" in Washington, DC, 2017
However, some critics of Zionism consider it a colonialist or racist Zionism, imperialism, and race, Abdul Wahhab Kayyali, ʻAbd al-Wahhāb Kayyālī (Eds), Croom Helm, 1979
Gerson, Allan, "The United Nations and Racism: the Case of Zionism and Racism", in Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1987, Volume 17; Volume 1987, Yoram Dinstein, Mala Tabory (Eds), Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988, p. 68
Hadawi, Sami, Bitter harvest: a modern history of Palestine, Interlink Books, 1991, p. 183
Beker, Avi, Chosen: the history of an idea, the anatomy of an obsession, Macmillan, 2008, pp. 131, 139, 151
Dinstein, Yoram, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1987, Volume 17; Volume 1987, pp. 31, 136
Harkabi, Yehoshafat, Arab attitudes to Israel, pp. 247–248 movement. According to historian Avi Shlaim, throughout its history up to present day, Zionism "is replete with manifestations of deep hostility and contempt towards the indigenous population." Shlaim balances this by pointing out that there have always been individuals within the Zionist movement that have criticized such attitudes. He cites the example of Ahad Ha'am, who after visiting Palestine in 1891, published a series of articles criticizing the aggressive behaviour and political ethnocentrism of Zionist settlers. Ha'am reportedly wrote that the Yishuv "behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it, and nobody stands to check this contemptible and dangerous tendency" and that they believed that "the only language that the Arabs understand is that of force." Some criticisms of Zionism claim that Judaism's notion of the "chosen people" is the source of racism in Zionism, Korey, William, Russian antisemitism, Pamyat, and the demonology of Zionism, Psychology Press, 1995, pp. 33–34
Beker, Avi, Chosen: the history of an idea, the anatomy of an obsession, Macmillan, 2008, p. 139
Shimoni, Gideon, Community and conscience: the Jews in apartheid South Africa, UPNE, 2003, p. 167 despite, according to Gustavo Perednik, that being a religious concept unrelated to Zionism."… This identity is often explicitly worded by its spokespersons. Thus, Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the UN, declared in 1973: "The Zionists have come forward with the theory of the Chosen People, an absurd ideology." (As it is well known, the biblical concept of "Chosen People" is part of Judaism; Zionism has nothing to do with it). " This characterization of Zionism as a colonialism has been made by, among others, Gershon Shafir, Michael Prior, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling. Shafir, Gershon, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 37–38
Bareli, Avi, "Forgetting Europe: Perspectives on the Debate about Zionism and Colonialism", in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, Psychology Press, 2003, pp. 99–116
Pappé Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 72–121
Prior, Michael, The Bible and colonialism: a moral critique, Continuum International Publishing Group, 1997, pp. 106–215
Shafir, Gershon, "Zionism and Colonialism", in The Israel / Palestinian Question, by Ilan Pappe, Psychology Press, 1999, pp. 72–85
Lustick, Ian, For the Land and the Lord ... Zuriek, Elia, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, Routledge & K. Paul, 1979
Penslar, Derek J., "Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism", in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, Psychology Press, 2003, pp. 85–98
Pappe, Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2007
Noam Chomsky, John P. Quigly, Nur Masalha, and Cheryl Rubenberg have criticized Zionism, saying that it unfairly confiscates land and expels Palestinians. Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007) "Zionist Massacres: the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War" in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees, Eyal Benvenistî, Chaim Gans, Sari Hanafi (Eds.), Springer, p. 78. Raphael Israeli, Palestinians Between Israel and Jordan, Prager, 1991, pp. 158–159, 171, 182. Isaac Deutscher has called Israelis the 'Prussians of the Middle East', who have achieved a 'totsieg', a 'victorious rush into the grave' as a result of dispossessing 1.5 million Palestinians. Israel had become the 'last remaining colonial power' of the twentieth century. Saleh Abdel Jawad, Nur Masalha, Michael Prior, Ian Lustick, and John Rose have criticized Zionism for having been responsible for violence against Palestinians, such as the Deir Yassin massacre, Sabra and Shatila massacre, and Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. Weisburd, David, Jewish Settler Violence, Penn State Press, 1985, pp. 20–52
Lustick, Ian, "Israel's Dangerous Fundamentalists", Foreign Policy, 68 (Fall 1987), pp. 118–139
Tessler, Mark, "Religion and Politics in the Jewish State of Israel", in Religious Resurgence and Politics in the Contemporary World, (Emile Sahliyeh, Ed)., SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 263–296. Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007) "Zionist Massacres: the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War" in Israel and the Palestinian refugees, Eyal Benvenistî, Chaim Gans, Sari Hanafi (Eds.), Springer, p. 78:
".. the Zionist movement, which claims to be secular, found it necessary to embrace the idea of 'the promised land' of Old Testament prophecy, to justify the confiscation of land and the expulsion of the Palestinians. For example, the speeches and letter of Chaim Weizman, the secular Zionist leader, are filled with references to the biblical origins of the Jewish claim to Palestine, which he often mixes liberally with more pragmatic and nationalistic claims. By the use of this premise, embraced in 1937, Zionists alleged that the Palestinians were usurpers in the Promised Land, and therefore their expulsion and death was justified. The Jewish-American writer Dan Kurzman, in his book Genesis 1948 ... describes the view of one of the Deir Yassin's killers: 'The Sternists followed the instructions of the Bible more rigidly than others. They honored the passage (Exodus 22:2): 'If a thief be found ...' This meant, of course, that killing a thief was not really murder. And were not the enemies of Zionism thieves, who wanted to steal from the Jews what God had granted them?'"
Ehrlich, Carl. S., (1999) "Joshua, Judaism, and Genocide", in Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Judit Targarona Borrás, Ángel Sáenz-Badillos (Eds). 1999, Brill. p. 117–124. Hirst, David, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East. 1984, p. 139. Lorch, Netanel, The Edge of the Sword: Israel's War of Independence, 1947–1949, Putnam, 1961, p. 87
Pappe, Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2007, p. 88
Edward Said and Michael Prior claim that the notion of expelling the Palestinians was an early component of Zionism, citing Herzl's diary from 1895 which states "we shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed—the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Said, Edward, The Edward Said Reader, Random House, Inc., 2000, pp. 128–129
Prior, Michael P. Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry, Psychology Press, 1999, pp. 191–192
Penslar, Derek, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective, Taylor & Francis, 2007, p. 56. Derek Penslar says that Herzl may have been considering either South America or Palestine when he wrote the diary entry about expropriation.*Penslar, Derek, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective, Taylor & Francis, 2007, p. 56. According to Walter Laqueur, although many Zionists proposed transfer, it was never official Zionist policy and in 1918 Ben-Gurion "emphatically rejected" it. The exodus of the Arab Palestinians during the 1947–1949 war has been controversially described as having involved ethnic cleansing. According to a growing consensus between 'new historians' in Israel and Palestinian historians, expulsion and destruction of villages played a major role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem.Were they expelled? by Pappé, Ilan (Zochrot) "the important point is a growing consensus among Israeli and Palestinian historians about the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 (expulsion and the destruction of villages and towns)" (...) "The gist of the common ground is a consensus between the 'new historians' in Israel and many Palestinian historians that Israel bore the main responsibility for the making of the problem." While traditionalist scholars such as Efraim Karsh state that most of the Arabs who fled left of their own accord or were pressured to leave by their fellow Arabs (and that Israel attempted to convince them to stay)Efraim Karsh, Palestine betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010) pp. 1–15.cf. the scholarly consensus now dismisses this claim, and as such, Benny Morris concurs that Arab instigation was not the major cause of the refugees' flight, and state that the major cause of Palestinian flight was instead military actions by the Israeli Defence Force and fear of them and that Arab instigation can only explain a small part of the exodus and not a large part of it.Morris, Benny (1988): The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 286, 294.Morris, Benny (1986): "Yosef Weitz and the Transfer Committees, 1948–49", Middle Eastern Studies 22, October 1986, pp. 522–561.Morris, Benny (1986): "The Harvest of 1948 and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem". Middle East Journal 40, Autumn 1986, pp. 671–685.Morris, Benny (1985): The Crystallization of Israeli Policy Against a Return of the Arab Refugees: April–December 1948. Studies in Zionism 6, l (1985), pp. 85–118.Flapan, Simha (1987): The Birth of Israel, Myths and Realities. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987.Flapan, Simha (1987): "The Palestinian Exodus of 1948". Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 16, no. 4. (Summer, 1987), pp. 3–26. Ilan Pappe said that Zionism resulted in ethnic cleansing.Pappe, Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2007 This view diverges from other New Historians, such as Benny Morris, who place the Palestinian exodus in the context of war, not ethnic cleansing.Rane, Halim. Islam and Contemporary Civilisation. Academic Monographs, 2010. . p. 198 When Benny Morris was asked about the Expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle, he responded "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."
In 1938, Mahatma Gandhi said in the letter "The Jews", that the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine must be performed by non-violence against the Arabs, comparing it to the Partition of India into Hindu and Muslim countries. He proposed to the Jews to "offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them". He expressed his "sympathy" for the Jewish aspirations, but said: "The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?" and warned them against violence: "It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs ... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home ... They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart".William R. Slomanson. Fundamental Perspectives on International Law. p. 50 Gandhi later told American journalist Louis Fischer in 1946 that "Jews have a good case in Palestine. If the Arabs have a claim to Palestine, the Jews have a prior claim". He expressed himself again in 1946, nuancing his views: "Hitherto I have refrained practically from saying anything in public regarding the Jew-Arab controversy. I have done so for good reasons. That does not mean any want of interest in the question, but it does mean that I do not consider myself sufficiently equipped with knowledge for the purpose". He concluded: "If they were to adopt the matchless weapon of non-violence ... their case would be the world's and I have no doubt that among the many things that the Jews have given to the world, this would be the best and the brightest". In December 1973, the UN passed a series of resolutions condemning South Africa and included a reference to an "unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, Apartheid and Zionism."Resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of December 14, 1973, by the UN General Assembly At the time there was little cooperation between Israel and South Africa,Israel and Black Africa: A Rapprochement? Ethan A. Nadelmann. Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1981), pp. 183–219 although the two countries would develop a close relationship during the 1970s. The preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been ratified by 53 African countries , includes an undertaking to eliminate Zionism together with other practices including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, "aggressive foreign military bases" and all forms of discrimination. Characterization as racist
thumb|upright=1.35|right|Pro-Palestinian protest with placards demanding the US to stop funding of "Israeli apartheid" in Washington, DC, 2017
In December 1973, the UN passed a series of resolutions condemning South Africa and included a reference to an "unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, Apartheid and Zionism."Resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of December 14, 1973, by the UN General Assembly At the time there was little cooperation between Israel and South Africa, although the two countries developed a close relationship during the late 1970s. Parallels have also been drawn between aspects of South Africa's apartheid regime and certain Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, which are seen as manifestations of racism in Zionist thinking. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which said "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". According to the resolution, "any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous." The resolution named the occupied territory of Palestine, Zimbabwe, and South Africa as examples of racist regimes. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which determined that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". The resolution quotes from the 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous". The resolution named the occupied territory of Palestine, Zimbabwe, and South Africa as examples of racist regimes. Resolution 3379 was pioneered by the Soviet Union and passed with numerical support from Arab and African states amidst accusations that Israel was supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1991 the resolution was repealed with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86, after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked.Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York: Basic Books. p. 320. . Arab countries sought to associate Zionism with racism in connection with a 2001 UN conference on racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa, which caused the United States and Israel to walk away from the conference as a response. In 1991 the resolution was repealed with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86, after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked. Arab countries sought to associate Zionism with racism in connection with a 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, which caused the United States and Israel to walk away from the conference. The final text of the conference did not connect Zionism with racism. A human rights forum arranged in connection with the conference, on the other hand, did equate Zionism with racism and censured Israel for what it called "racist crimes, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". Haredi Judaism and Zionism
Some Haredi Orthodox organizations reject Zionism as they view it as a secular movement and reject nationalism as a doctrine. Hasidic groups in Jerusalem, most famously the Satmar Hasidim, as well as the larger movement they are part of, the Edah HaChareidis, are opposing its ideology for religious reasons. They number in the tens of thousands in Jerusalem, and hundreds of thousands worldwide. One of the best known Hasidic opponents of political Zionism was Hungarian rebbe and Talmudic scholar Joel Teitelbaum. thumb|right|Members of Neturei Karta holding Palestinian flags and placards saying that "Judaism condemns the state of Israel and its atrocities" in London, 2022
The Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Haredi sect viewed as a cult on the "farthest fringes of Judaism" by most mainstream Jews, reject Zionism. The Anti-Defamation League estimates that fewer than 100 members of the community (around 5,000 members), actually take part in anti-Israel activism. Some have said that Israel is a "racist regime","We oppose the Zionists and their 'state' vigorously and we continue our prayers for the dismantlement of the Zionist 'state' and peace to the world." Rabbi E Weissfish, Neturei Karta, Representatives of Orthodox Jewry, US, London, Palestine and worldwide. compared Zionists to Nazis, claimed that Zionism is contrary to the teachings of the Torah,"What is Zionism?" Jews against Zionism. or accused it of promoting antisemitism."Zionism promotes antisemitism" , Jews against Zionism According to the Anti-Defamation League, members of Neturei Karta have a history of extremist statements and support for notable antisemites and Islamic extremists. Anti-Zionism or antisemitism
Critics of anti-Zionism have argued that opposition to Zionism can be hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and that criticism of Israel may be used as an excuse to express viewpoints that might otherwise be considered antisemitic. In discussion of the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, "one theory holds that anti-Zionism is no more than veiled anti-Semitism". This is contrasted with the theory "that criticism of Israeli politics has been discredited as anti-Zionism, and thus linked with anti-Semitism, in order to prevent such criticism". In the Arab world, the words "Jew" and "Zionist" are often used interchangeably. To avoid accusations of antisemitism, the Palestine Liberation Organization has historically avoided using the word "Jewish" in favor of using "Zionist," though PLO officials have sometimes slipped. Some antisemites have alleged that Zionism was, or is, part of a Jewish plot to take control of the world.Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, Serif 2001 chapter 3 One particular version of these allegations, a fake document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion claiming to outline Jewish plans to take over the world, achieved global notability. A 1920 German version renamed them The Zionist Protocols.Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, Serif 2001 pp. 75–76 The protocols were extensively used as propaganda by the Nazis and remain widely distributed in the Arab world. They are referred to in the 1988 Hamas charter.Hamas charter, article 32: "The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" ..."
Anti-Zionist writers such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Marder, and Tariq Ali have argued that the characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitic obscures legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions, and that it is used as a political ploy in order to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Jewish American linguist Noam Chomsky argues: "There have long been efforts to identify anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in an effort to exploit anti-racist sentiment for political ends; 'one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all,' Israeli diplomat Abba Eban argued, in a typical expression of this intellectually and morally disreputable position (Eban, Congress Bi-Weekly, March 30, 1973). But that no longer suffices. It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism—or in the case of Jews, as 'self-hatred,' so that all possible cases are covered." – Chomsky, 1989 "Necessary Illusions
Philosopher Michael Marder argues: "To deconstruct Zionism is ... to demand justice for its victims—not only for the Palestinians, who are suffering from it, but also for the anti-Zionist Jews, 'erased' from the officially consecrated account of Zionist history. By deconstructing its ideology, we shed light on the context it strives to repress and on the violence it legitimises with a mix of theological or metaphysical reasoning and affective appeals to historical guilt for the undeniably horrific persecution of Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere."
Jewish American political scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that anti-Zionism and often just criticism of Israeli policies have been conflated with antisemitism, sometimes called new antisemitism for political gain: "Whenever Israel faces a public relations débâcle such as the Intifada or international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Jewish organizations orchestrate this extravaganza called the 'new anti-Semitism.' The purpose is several-fold. First, it is to discredit any charges by claiming the person is an anti-Semite. It's to turn Jews into the victims, so that the victims are not the Palestinians any longer. As people like Abraham Foxman of the ADL put it, the Jews are being threatened by a new holocaust. It's a role reversal—the Jews are now the victims, not the Palestinians. So it serves the function of discrediting the people leveling the charge. It's no longer Israel that needs to leave the Occupied Territories; it's the Arabs who need to free themselves of the anti-Semitism."
Marcus Garvey and Black Zionism
Zionist success in winning British support for the formation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine helped inspire the Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey to form a movement dedicated to returning Americans of African origin to Africa. During a speech in Harlem in 1920, Garvey stated: "other races were engaged in seeing their cause through—the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement—and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro's interest through."Negro World March 6, 1920, cited in University of California, Los Angeles (accessed November 29, 2007) Garvey established a shipping company, the Black Star Line, to allow Black Americans to emigrate to Africa, but for various reasons he failed in his endeavor. Garvey helped inspire the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, the Black Jews and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem who initially moved to Liberia before settling in Israel. Zionism as settler colonialism
Beyond characterizing it as a colonial movement, Zionism has been more recently described as a form of settler colonialism, with proponents of this paradigm including Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal, and Rosemary Sayigh. The current form of this conceptual framework emerged in the 1990s among Palestinian scholars in Israel who "reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring" in response to their marginalization by the two-state Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It built of the work of Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies who has defined settler colonialism as an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population rather than exploiting it. Rachel Busbridge says the framework's subsequent popularity is inseparable from frustration at the stagnation of that process and resulting Western left-wing sympathy for Palestinian nationalism. Busbridge writes that while a settler colonial analysis "offers a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than...has conventionally been painted", Wolfe's zero-sum approach is limited in practical application because almost all Israeli Jews naturally reject it, as a form of antisemitism that denies their long-standing history in the land of Israel and aspirations for self-determination. See also
American Council for Judaism
Gathering of Israel
Golus nationalism
Jewish Agency for Israel
Jewish Autonomism
List of Zionist figures
Romanistan
Yehud Medinata
Zio (pejorative)
References
Explanatory notes
Citations
Bibliography
Primary sources
Herzl, Theodor. Haredi Judaism and Zionism
Haredi Jews number some 2,100,000 world-wide, constituting 14% of the total Jewish population in the world. Most accept though do not support the secular Israeli state. A small number of Orthodox organizations among these Haredi reject Zionism as they view it as a secular movement and reject nationalism as a doctrine. in Jerusalem, certain Hasidic groups, most famously the Satmar Hasidim, as well as the larger movement they are part of, the Edah HaChareidis, are opposed to its ideology for religious reasons. Despite having his life saved by a leader of the Zionist movement in 1944, one of the best known Hasidic opponents of political Zionism was Hungarian rebbe and Talmudic scholar Joel Teitelbaum. Although this group of ultra-observant Jews do not support or identify with Zionism as a movement or ideology, in a poll taken in February 2024, 83% said they have a "very strong emotional connection" to Israel, only a small percentage less than the 87% of Modern Orthodox Jews who reported having those same feelings. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism
Critics of anti-Zionism have argued that opposition to Zionism can be hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and that criticism of Israel may be used as an excuse to express viewpoints that might otherwise be considered antisemitic. Anti-Zionist writers such as Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Michael Marder, and Tariq Ali have argued that the characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitic obscures legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions, and that it is used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Zionism and colonialism
European colonialism
Zionism has been characterized as a form of colonialism or settler colonialism by various scholars. Joseph Massad argues that Zionism was intrinsically linked to European colonial thought from its inception, shaped by antisemitism and European imperial interests. Edward Said similarly described the movement as following the European colonial model, particularly in its patronizing view of the native Palestinian population, which it regarded as backward. Zeev Sternhell describes Zionism as a movement of "conquest", but disagrees that Jews arriving in Palestine had a colonial mindset.: "Berl Katznelson, the labour-movement ideologist, never thought there could be any doubt about it: 'The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest', he said in 1929. And in the same breath: 'It is not by chance that I use military terms when speaking of settlement.' In 1922 Ben-Gurion had already said the same: 'We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it.'... [B]ut to claim that the arrivals were white settlers driven by a colonialist mind-set does not correspond to historical reality." Anita Shapira and Shlomo Ben-Ami also emphasize the importance of the "ethos" of the movement, framing Zionism as a national liberation movement that was "destined" or "forced" to use colonial methods. Conversely, Nur Masalha argues that Zionism cannot be understood as a national liberation movement because it relied on British colonial support, asserting that "the State of Israel owes its very existence to the British colonial power in Palestine". Various proponents of Zionism have characterized Zionism as colonial or settler-colonial.: "As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."" Joseph Massad wrote that, for political and ideological reasons, starting in the 1930s, some Zionist thinkers proposed that the Zionist movement should avoid using terms related to colonialism. Rashid Khalidi describes this move as an attempted rebranding of Zionism as an anticolonial movement. Benny Morris dismisses the charge that Zionism is a "classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture," due to the fact that it existed as a movement not to exploit the populace or resources, but to provide a safe haven for a native population experiencing oppression internationally.: "Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition. Zionism was a movement of desperate, idealistic Jews from Eastern and Central Europe bent on immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not “another” country, and regaining sovereignty over it. The settlers were not the sons of an imperial power, and the settlement enterprise was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire. The land was known to lack natural resources. And most Zionists, rather than wanting to exploit the natives, were indifferent to their fate or wanted to simply see them leave"
The transition from British sponsored colonialism to the Israeli state
Gershon Shafir describes the use of violence by a colonial metropole as essential to settler colonization. Shafir defines settler-colonialism as the creation of a permanent home in which settlers benefit from privileges withheld from the indigenous population. He describes colonization, the establishment of settlements against the wishes of the indigenous people, as the distinctive characteristic of settler colonialism. Shafir distinguishes between the pre-1948 era and the post-1967 era in the sense that after 1967, the Israeli state became the sponsor of the Zionist movement's colonial efforts, a role that had previously been played by the British. For Shafir, Jerome Slater and Shlomo Ben-Ami, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Zionist movement more closely resembled other colonial movements. Similarly, Avi Shlaim describes 1967 as a milestone in the development of the "Zionist colonial project" rather than as a qualitative shift in its nature. Israeli historian Yitzhak Sternberg cites Sivan, Halamish and Efrat as similarly describing 1967 as a turning point in which Zionism became involved in colonial efforts. Shafir and Morris both further distinguish between Zionist colonialism during the First Aliyah and following the arrival of the Second Aliyah. Shafir describes the First Aliyah as following the ethnic plantation colony model, exploiting low wage Palestinian workers.: "The colonialism of the First Aliya was based on sparse settlement and exploitation and the employment of low-paid Palestinian workers on Jewish-owned farms." Morris describes this relationship:
These Jews were not colonists in the usual sense of sons or agents of an imperial mother country, projecting its power beyond the seas and exploiting Third World natural resources. But the settlements of the First Aliyah were still colonial, with white Europeans living amid and employing a mass of relatively impoverished natives. Colonization and colonialism
Sternberg argues that it is important to clearly distinguish between colonization and colonialism as concepts. For Shafir and Peled, "colonization, namely territorial dispossession and the settlement of immigrant populations", cannot happen without colonialism and "the means of violence of a colonial metropole". In contrast, Sternberg considers classical definitions of colonization as broad enough to include cases that did not require the dispossession of the native population. Tuvia Friling depicts the Zionist movement as operating differently from colonial movements in terms of land acquisition. Specifically, the Zionist movement acquired land in the early years by purchasing it. Sternberg in contrast explains that it was not unique for colonial movements to purchase land as part of land acquisition, pointing to similarities in North American colonialism. Friling argues that in contrast to European colonial projects, the early Zionist leadership was dominated by the labor movement with a socialist ethos. Shafir points to ideological drives in American and Rhodesian settler colonies that developed in service of the colonial project. Similarly, Shafir says, the Zionist labor movement used socialist ideals largely in service of the national movement. In response to the argument that Zionism could not be a colonial project, but should instead be described as a project of immigration, Shafir quotes Lorenzo Veracini's statement that settlers sometimes hide "behind the persecuted, the migrant, even the refugee... behind his labor and hardship." Shafir goes on to characterize Zionism as not unique, in the sense that "[t]he ruthless ethnic cleanser is commonly hidden behind the peaceful settler who arrived in an 'empty land' to start a new life."
Alan Dowty describes the debate over the relationship between Zionism and colonialism as essentially a discussion of "semantics". He defines colonialism as the imposition of control by a "mother country" on another people, for economic gain or for the spreading of culture or religion. Dowty argues that Zionism does not fit this definition on the basis that "there was... no mother country" and that Zionism did not consider the local population in its plans.: "They did not recognize the Arab population of Palestine as another people with their own collective claims..." Efraim Karsh adopts a similar definition and similarly concludes that Zionism is not colonialism. Dowty elaborates that Zionism did not control the local population since it ultimately failed to remove the native people from Palestine. In his assessment of whether Zionism is colonialism, Penslar works with a broader definition of colonialism than Dowty, which allows for the country sponsoring the colonial enterprise to be different from the country of origin of the settlers. Zionism as settler colonialism
Beyond characterizing it as a colonial movement, Zionism has been more recently described as a form of settler colonialism, with scholarly proponents of this paradigm including Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, , Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, , Rosemary Sayigh "Calling Israel a settler colonial regime is an argument increasingly gaining purchase in activist and, to a lesser extent, academic circles." and Nur Masalha. The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, who challenged some of Israel's foundational myths. It built on the work of Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies who has defined settler colonialism as an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population rather than exploiting it. See also
Zionist lobby
History of Zionism
List of Zionists
Zionist as a pejorative
Notes
References
Works cited
Further reading
Primary sources
Herzl, Theodor. A Jewish state: an attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish question (1896) full text online
Herzl, Theodor. Theodor Herzl: Excerpts from His Diaries (2006) excerpt and text search
Secondary sources
Armborst-Weihs, Kerstin: The Formation of the Jewish National Movement Through Transnational Exchange: Zionism in Europe up to the First World War, European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: August 17, 2011. A. B. Masilamani, Zionism in Melu Kolupu (Telugu), Navajeevana Publications, Vijayanagar Colony, Hyderabad, 1984, pp. 121–126. Beller, Steven. Herzl (2004)
Brenner, Michael, and Shelley Frisch. Zionism: A Brief History (2003) excerpt and text search
Butler, Judith: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Columbia University Press, 2013. Cohen, Naomi. The Americanization of Zionism, 1897–1948 (2003). 304 pp. essays on specialized topics
Friedman, Isaiah. "Theodor Herzl: Political Activity and Achievements," Israel Studies 2004 9(3): 46–79, online in EBSCO
David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael B. Oren, eds., "New Essays on Zionism," Shalem Press, 2007. "Theodor Herzl: Political Activity and Achievements," Israel Studies 2004 9(3): 46–79, online in EBSCO
David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael B. Oren, eds., New Essays on Zionism, Shalem Press, 2007. Idels, Ofer. Zionism: Emotions, Language and Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2024. Kloke, Martin: The Development of Zionism Until the Founding of the State of Israel, European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2010, retrieved: June 13, 2012. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel (2003) survey by a leading scholar excerpt and text search
Pawel, Ernst. The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (1992) excerpt and text search
Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (2007) excerpt and text search
Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology (1995)
Taub, Gadi. The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (2010, Hebrew, English)
Taylor, A.R., 1971, "Vision and intent in Zionist Thought'" in The transformation of Palestine, ed. by I. Abu-Lughod, , Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL
Urofsky, Melvin I. Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (2007) excerpt and text search
Pawel, Ernst. The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (1992) excerpt and text search
Taub, Gadi. The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (2010, Hebrew, English)
Urofsky, Melvin I. American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (1995), a standard history
Wigoder, Geoffrey, ed. New Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (2nd ed. 2 vol. 1994); 1521 pp
External links
Central Zionist Archives site in Jerusalem
WZO website
Exodus1947.com – PBS Documentary Film focusing on the secret American involvement in Aliyah Bet, narrated by Morley Safer
Reverend William H. Hechler – The Christian minister who legitimized Theodor Herzl by Jerry Klinger. Jewish Magazine, July 2010
Is Zionism in Crisis? A Follow-Up Debate with Peter Beinart and Alan Dershowitz at The Graduate Center, CUNY
Category:Jewish movements
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Category:Political movements
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Category:Jewish nationalism
Category:Ethnic nationalism 1994); 1521 pp
External links
Zionism at the National Library of Israel
Official website of the Central Zionist Archives
Official website of the World Zionist Organization
Category:Jewish movements
Category:Land of Israel
Category:Political movements
Category:State ideologies
Category:1890s neologisms
Category:Jewish nationalism
Category:Ethnic nationalism
Category:Jewish settlement schemes
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