Zionism

For other uses, see Zionism (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Ziaism.

Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.

Zionism[a] is an ethnocultural nationalist[b] 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 of the region of Palestine,[2] an area roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism,[3] and of central importance in 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.[4] Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel's national or state ideology.[5]

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.[6][7] During this period, as Jewish assimilation in Europe was progressing, some Jewish intellectuals framed assimilation as a humiliating negation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The development of Zionism and other Jewish nationalist movements grew out of these sentiments, which began to emerge even before the appearance of modern antisemitism as a major factor. The dangers and limitations associated with minority status in Europe meant that Zionists felt they had an existential need for a state where Jews would constitute a demographic majority. Assimilation progressed more slowly in Tsarist Russia where pogroms and official Russian policies led to the emigration of three million Jews between 1882 and 1914, only 1% of which went to Palestine. Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by a sense of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than in response to pogroms or economic insecurity. 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.

As a nationalist movement and ideology, the primary goal of the Zionist movement from 1897 to 1948 was to establish the basis for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and thereafter to consolidate and maintain it. The movement itself recognized that Zionism's position, that an extraterritorial population had the strongest claim to Palestine, went against the commonly accepted interpretation of the principle of self-determination.[8] 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. The support of a Great Power was seen as fundamental to the success of Zionism and in 1917 the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the British Mandate for Palestine would explicitly privilege the Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. The British would assist in the establishment and development of Zionist institutions and a Zionist quasi-state which operated in parallel to the British mandate government. After over two decades of British support for the movement, Britain restricted Jewish immigration with the White Paper of 1939 in an attempt to ease local tensions. Despite the White Paper, Zionist immigration and settlement efforts continued during WWII. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of the Nazi Holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned. The Zionist war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv, with little Zionist resources being deployed in support of European Jews. The State of Israel would be established in 1948 over 78% of mandatory Palestine following a civil war and the first Arab-Israeli war. Primarily due to expulsions by Zionist forces, and later the Israeli army, only a Palestinian minority would remain in the land over which Israel was established.

Zionism is a movement made up of diverse political groups whose strategies and tactics have changed over time. Up until the establishment of the State of Israel, the common ideology among the mainstream Zionist factions was support for territorial concentration and a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, through colonization. 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.[9] Differences within the mainstream Zionist groups lie primarily in their presentation and ethos, having in some cases adopted similar strategies to achieve their goals, such as violence or compulsory transfer to deal with the Palestinians.[10] Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology which 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 (which were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors as noted in ancient history.[11][12][13] Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist,[14] racist,[15] or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.[16][17] Some proponents of Zionism accept the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.[c][18][19][20]


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).

  1. ^ Gans 2008, p. 3.
  2. ^
    • Collins 2011, pp. 169–185: "and as subsequent work (Finkelstein 1995; Massad 2005; Pappe 2006; Said 1992; Shafir 1989) has definitively established, the architects of Zionism were conscious and often unapologetic about their status as colonizers"
    • Bloom 2011, p. 2,13,49,132: "Dr. Arthur Ruppin was sent to Palestine for the first time in 1907 by the heads of the German [World] Zionist Organization in order to make a pilot study of the possibilities for colonization. . . Oppenheimer was a German sociologist and political economist. As a worldwide expert on colonization he became Herzl's advisor and formulated the first program for Zionist colonization, which he presented at the 6th Zionist Congress (Basel 1903) ..... Daniel Boyarin wrote that the group of Zionists who imagined themselves colonialists inclined to that persona "because such a representation was pivotal to the entire project of becoming 'white men'." Colonization was seen as a sign of belonging to western and modern culture;"
    • Robinson 2013, p. 18: "Never before", wrote Berl Katznelson, founding editor of the Histadrut daily, Davar, "has the white man undertaken colonization with that sense of justice and social progress which fills the Jew who comes to Palestine." Berl Katznelson
    • Alroey 2011, p. 5: "Herzl further sharpened the issue when he tried to make diplomacy precede settlement, precluding any possibility of preemptive and unplanned settlement in the Land of Israel: "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."
    • Jabotinsky 1923: "Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.. .Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population". Ze'ev Jabotinsky quoted in Alan Balfour, The Walls of Jerusalem: Preserving the Past, Controlling the Future, Wiley 2019 ISBN 978-1-119-18229-0 p.59.
  3. ^
    • Safrai 2018, p. 76: "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."
    • Biger 2004, pp. 58–63: "Unlike the earlier literature that dealt with Palestine's delimitation, the boundaries were not presented according to their historical traditional meaning, but according to the boundaries of the Jewish Eretz Israel that was about to be established there. This approach characterizes all the Zionist publications at the time ... when they came to indicate borders, they preferred the realistic condition and strategic economic needs over an unrealistic dream based on the historic past.' This meant that planners envisaged a future Palestine that controlled all the Jordan's sources, the southern part of the Litanni river in Lebanon, the large cultivatable area east of the Jordan, including the Houran and Gil'ad wheat zone, Mt Hermon, the Yarmuk and Yabok rivers, the Hijaz Railway..."
    • Motyl 2001, p. 604
    • Herzl, Theodor (1988) [1896]. "Biography, by Alex Bein". Der Judenstaat [The Jewish state]. Translated by Sylvie d'Avigdor (republication ed.). New York: Courier Dover. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-486-25849-2. Archived from the original on January 1, 2014. Retrieved September 28, 2010.[page needed]
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference ZionistLandJewsArabs was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^
  6. ^
    • Conforti 2024, p. 485: "The crisis in the Enlightenment movement in the late nineteenth century gave way to the rise of alternative ideologies, such as Jewish nationalism and socialism. Early Zionist thinkers, such as Peretz Smolenskin (1842–1885), sharply criticized the Enlightenment scholars and their universalist approach."
    • Shillony 2012, p. 88:"[Zionism] arose in response to and in imitation of the current national movements of Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe"
    • LeVine & Mossberg 2014, p. 211: "The parents of Zionism were not Judaism and tradition, but anti-Semitism and nationalism. The ideals of the French Revolution spread slowly across Europe, finally reaching the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire and helping to set off the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. This engendered a permanent split in the Jewish world, between those who held to a halachic or religious-centric vision of their identity and those who adopted in part the racial rhetoric of the time and made the Jewish people into a nation. This was helped along by the wave of pogroms in Eastern Europe that set two million Jews to flight; most wound up in America, but some chose Palestine. A driving force behind this was the Hovevei Zion movement, which worked from 1882 to develop a Hebrew identity that was distinct from Judaism as a religion."
    • Gelvin 2014, p. 93: "The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some "other". Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose. As we have seen, Zionism itself arose in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary nationalist movements in Europe. It would be perverse to judge Zionism as somehow less valid than European anti-Semitism or those nationalisms. Furthermore, Zionism itself was also defined by its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. Both the "conquest of land" and the "conquest of labor" slogans that became central to the dominant strain of Zionism in the Yishuv originated as a result of the Zionist confrontation with the Palestinian "other""
  7. ^
  8. ^ Butenschøn, Nils A. (2006). "Accommodating Conflicting Claims to National Self-determination. The Intractable Case of Israel/Palestine". International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. 13 (2/3): 285–306. doi:10.1163/157181106777909858. ISSN 1385-4879. JSTOR 24675372. [T]he Zionist claim to Palestine on behalf of world Jewry as an extra-territorial population was unique, and not supported (as admitted at the time) by established interpretations of the principle of national self-determination, expressed in the Covenant of the League of later versions, and as applied to the other territories with the same status as Palestine ('A' mandate).
  9. ^ Gorny 1987, p. [page needed].
  10. ^

    |Chomsky 1999[page needed]

  11. ^ Troen, S. Ilan (2007). "De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine". Israel Affairs. 13 (4: Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict): 872–884. doi:10.1080/13537120701445372.
  12. ^ Aaronson, Ran (1996). "Settlement in Eretz Israel – A Colonialist Enterprise? "Critical" Scholarship and Historical Geography". Israel Studies. 1 (2). Indiana University Press: 214–229. Archived from the original on December 21, 2013. Retrieved July 30, 2013.
  13. ^ Cohen, Michael J. (2011). "Zionism and British imperialism II: Imperial financing in Palestine". Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture. 30 (2): 115–139. doi:10.1080/13531042.2011.610119.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference CHARCOL was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference CHARRAS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ See for example: M. Shahid Alam (2010), Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism Paperback, or Gould-Wartofsky, Michael (June 3, 2010). "Through the Looking Glass: The Myth of Israeli Exceptionalism". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on September 21, 2017.
  17. ^
  18. ^ "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state.' Avraham Burg cited Tony Judt, Israel:The Alternative New York Review of Books 23 October 2003
  19. ^
    • Morris 2008, p. 3: "But once there, the settlers could not avoid noticing the majority native population. It was from them, as two of the first settlers put it, that 'we shall... take away the country... through stratagems, without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and populous ones.'"
    • Jabotinsky 1923, pp. 6–7: "It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's. Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab... Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population."
  20. ^ Finkelstein 2003, p. 109: "The 'defensive ethos' was never the operative ideology of mainstream Zionism. From beginning to end, Zionism was a conquest movement. The subtitle of Shapira's study is 'The Zionist Resort to Force'. Yet, Zionism did not 'resort' to force. Force was—to use Shapira's apt phrase in her conclusion—'inherent in the situation' (p. 357). Gripped by messianism after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement sought to conquer Palestine with a Jewish Legion under the slogan 'In blood and fire shall Judea rise again' (pp. 83–98). When these apocalyptic hopes were dispelled and displaced by the mundane reality of the British Mandate, mainstream Zionism made a virtue of necessity and exalted labor as it proceeded to conquer Palestine 'dunum by dunum, goat by goat'. Force had not been abandoned, however. Shapira falsely counterposes settlement ('by virtue of labor') to force ('by dint of conquest'). Yet, settlement was force by other means. Its purpose, in Shapira's words, was to build a 'Jewish infrastructure in Palestine' so that 'the balance of power between Jews and Arabs had shifted in favor of the former' (pp. 121, 133; cf. p. 211). To the call of a Zionist leader on the morrow of Tel Hai that 'we must be a force in the land', Shapira adds the caveat: 'He was not referring to military might but, rather, to power in the sense of demography and colonization' (p. 113). Yet, Shapira willfully misses the basic point that 'demography and colonization' were equally force. Moreover, without the 'foreign bayonets' of the British Mandate, the Zionist movement could not have established even a toehold, let alone struck deep roots, in Palestine. Toward the end of the 1930s and especially after World War II, a concatenation of events—Britain's waning commitment to the Balfour Declaration, the escalation of Arab resistance, the strengthening of the Yishuv, etc.—caused a consensus to crystallize within the Zionist movement that the time was ripe to return to the original strategy of conquering Palestine 'by blood and fire'."