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 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.[5][6] 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.
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, a colonial territory in the Levant, governed by Britain would explicitly privilege the Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. The British would assist in the establishment and development of 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. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned.
The term "Zion" was first associated with a mass movement as the Hovevei Zion (Hebrew: חובבי ציון, lit 'Lovers of Zion') also known as the Hibbat Zion (חיבת ציון, lit. 'Love of Zion'), that came together at the 1884 Katowice Conference, inspired by the Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The first use of the term as an -ism is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum; he coined the term 'Zionismus' in German in an 1890 article in the periodical Selbst-Emancipation, itself named after Pinsker's pamphlet.[17][18][19][20] This form was subsequently popularized by Herzl in convening the 1897 First Zionist Congress and the Zionist Organization founded there.
Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation, and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine.[c] This belief developed out of the experiences of European Jewry, which the early Zionists believed demonstrated the danger inherent to their status as a minority. 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, daily 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 material nationalistic conceptions.[25]
Claim to a Jewish demographic majority and a Jewish state in Palestine
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs.[26] Israeli historian of Zionist ideology, Yosef Gorny argues that the establishment of a Jewish demographic majority was an essential aspect of Zionism and depended on annulling the status of the Arabs.[27] Gorny argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance.[28] According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation "there was no such thing as Palestinians" was a cornerstone of Zionist policy initiated by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, and continued by their successors. Flapan further writes that the non-recognition of Palestinians remains a basic tenet of Israeli policy.[29] This perspective was also shared by those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom.[30][d] British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs regarding Jewish and Arab rights in Palestine.[e][f][34]
Unlike other forms of nationalism, the Zionist claim to Palestine was aspirational and required a mechanism by which the claim could be realized.[35] 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.[36] 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.[37][38] 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.[39]
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.[40][41] Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or what would now be called ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.[42] According to Morris, the idea of transfer was to play 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.[43] 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.[44] 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.[45]
The concept of "transfer" had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, with moral considerations rarely entering into the discussions of what was viewed as a logical solution—opposition to transferring the Arab population outside Palestine was typically expressed on practical, rather than moral grounds.[46][47][48] The concept of 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,[fn 1][49] from early on in the movement's development.[50] "Transfer" was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership.[41][51][52][53]
Zionism, antisemitism and an "existential need" for self-determination
From the perspective of some early Zionist thinkers, Jews living amongst non-Jews suffer from impediments which can only be addressed by rejecting the Jewish identity which developed while living amongst non-Jews.[54] Accordingly, the early Zionists sought to develop a nationalist Jewish political life in a territory where Jews constitute a demographic majority.[55][pageneeded][56][pageneeded][g] The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with the demographic minority status of the Jews in Europe) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.[57]Moses Hess, a leading precursor of Zionism, commented on the perceived insufficiency of assimilation: "The German hates the Jewish race more than the religion; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses." Some Zionist intellectuals, such as Yitzhak Elazari Volcani, even expressed an "understanding" of antisemitism, echoing its beliefs:
Anti-Semitism is not a psychosis... nor is it a lie. Anti-Semitism is a necessary outcome of a collision between two kinds of selfhood [or 'essence']. Hate is dependent upon the amount of 'agents of fermentation' that are pushed into the general organism [i.e., the non-Jewish group], whether they are active in it and irritate it, or are neutralized in it.[58]
In this sense, Zionism did not seek to challenge antisemitism, but rather accepted it as a reality. 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.[59][41][57]
In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, the founders of Zionism (Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, among others) 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,[60] and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel.[61][62] Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people who needed to be segregated or expelled, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories,[63][64][h] 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.[65]
The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the orthodox and liberal establishments, for different reasons, often rejected this idea.[66][67][68] 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.[69] The advent of World War II led to the implementation of the Holocaust's policies of genocidalethnic cleansing, which, by war's end, had utterly discredited race as the lethal product of pseudoscience.
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.[i] Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.[70]
Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in Jewish history and culture.[j] Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an essentialist approach to biology[k] in a similar manner to criticism of the interpretation of archaeological science in the region.[l] According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and anti-Zionism.[m] Falk wrote that every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity.[n]
Conquest of labor
With the arrival in Palestine of more ideologically motivated settlers after the turn of the century, the Zionist movement began to emphasize the importance of the productivization of Jewish society and the so-called "conquest of labor," the belief that the employment of exclusively Jewish labour was the pre-condition for the development of an independent Jewish society in Palestine.[59] The Zionist movement sought to build a "pure Jewish settlement" in Palestine on the basis of "100 per cent Jewish labor" and the claim to an exclusively Jewish economy.[71][72] 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 which had grown "abnormal" as a result of living amongst non-Jews.[73] 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 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.[74]
The employment of exclusively Jewish labor was also intended to avoid the development of a national conflict in conjunction with a class-based conflict.[75] 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.[76] 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.[77][pageneeded] 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-the fear that the "half-wild natives" would rise up against their "Jewish masters" motivated the movement on a practical level to work towards a society based on purely Jewish labor.[78][79][80]
Negation of the life in the Diaspora
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. Jewish religion is viewed as an essentially negative factor, even in religious Zionist ideology, and seen as responsible for the diminishing status of Jews living as a minority.[81] Responding to the challenges of modernity, Zionism sought to replace religious and community institutions with secular-nationalistic ones, defining Judaism in "terms of Christianity."[82] Indeed, Zionism maintained primarily the outward symbols of Jewish tradition, redefining them in a nationalistic context. It adapted traditional Jewish religious concepts, such as the devotion to the God of Israel, reverence for the biblical Land of Israel, and the belief in a future Jewish return during the messianic era, into a modern nationalist framework. To be sure, the yearning for a return to the land of Israel "was entirely quietistic" and the daily prayers of a return to Zion were all accompanied by an appeal to God, rather than a call to Jews to take it upon themselves to appropriate the land.[25][83] 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.[84]
Zionism and secular Jewish identity
Zionism sought to reconfigure Jewish identity and culture in nationalist and secular terms. 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 like peddling or acting as intermediaries. 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.[56][pageneeded][85][pageneeded]
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.[56][pageneeded] Prominent Zionist thinkers frame this development as nationalism serving the same role as religion, functionally replacing it.[86][pageneeded] Zionism sought to make Jewish ethnic-nationalism the distinctive trait of Jews rather than their commitment to Judaism.[85][pageneeded] Zionism instead adopted a racial understanding of Jewish identity, which paradoxically mirrored anti-Semitic views by suggesting that Jewishness is an inherent, unchangeable trait found in one's "blood."[56][pageneeded] Framed this way, Jewish identity is only secondarily a matter of tradition or culture.[87][pageneeded] 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. Zionist thinkers view the movement as a "revolt against a tradition of many centuries" of living parasitically at the margins of Western society. Indeed, 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 which they associated with the healthy and modern sabra. In Zionist thought, the new Jew would be productive and work the land, in contrast to the diaspora Jew who, mirroring the anti-semitic portrayals, was depicted as lazy and parasitic on society. Zionism linked the term "Jewish" with these negative characteristics prevalent in European anti-Semitic stereotypes, which Zionists believed could be remedied only through sovereignty.[88]
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 antisemitism 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.[88]
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. Abraham Isaac Kook, 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.[89]
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.[citation needed] This secularization of Hebrew, which included its use in novels, poems, and journalism, was met with resistance from rabbis who viewed it as a desecration of the sacred language. While some rabbinical authorities did support the development of Hebrew as a common vernacular, they did so on the basis of nationalistic ideas, rather than on the basis of Jewish tradition.[55]Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a key figure in the revival, envisioned Hebrew as serving a "national spirit" and cultural renaissance in the Land of Israel.[91] 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.[92] 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.[55]
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.[citation needed]
The transformation of a 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. The concept of the "return" remained a powerful symbol within religious Jewish belief which emphasized that their return should be determined by Divine Providence rather than human action.[86] Leading Zionist historian Shlomo Avineri describes this connection: "Jews did not relate to the vision of the Return in a more active way than most Christians viewed the Second Coming." The religious Judaic notion of being a nation was distinct from the modern European notion of nationalism.[85] Ultra-Orthodox and Reform[95] Jews opposed collective Jewish settlement in Palestine.[o] Ultra-orthodox Jews viewed it as a violation of the three oaths sworn to God: not to force their way into the homeland, not to hasten the end times, and not to rebel against other nations. They believed that any attempt to achieve redemption through human actions, rather than divine intervention and the coming of the Messiah, constituted a rebellion against divine will and a dangerous heresy.[p]
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,[96] a 'return to Zion' commemorated particularly at Passover and in Yom Kippur prayers.[q] 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.[98][99][100]
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.[101][102] The most notable precursors to Zionism were thinkers such as Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (who were both rabbinical figures), as well as Moses Hess who is regarded as the first modern Jewish nationalist.[103]
Proto-Zionist figures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries include the rabbis Yehuda Bibas (1789–1852), Tzvi Kalischer (1795–1874), and Judah Alkalai (1798–1878).[104] Alkalai and Kalischer developed their ideas as a reinterpretation of Messianism along traditionalist lines in which human intervention would prepare (and specifically only prepare) for the final redemption. Accordingly, the Jewish immigration in this vein was intended to be selective, involving only the most devout Jews.[103] Their idea of Jews as a collective was strongly tied to religious notions distinct from the secular movement referred to as Zionism which developed at the end of the century.[105]
In contrast, Hess advocated for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in pursuit of the economic and social normalization of the Jewish people.[106] Hess believed that emancipation alone was not a sufficient solution to the problems faced by European Jewry; he perceived a shift of anti-Jewish sentiment from a religious to a racial basis. For Hess, religious conversion would not fix this anti-Jewish hostility.[102]
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.[102] 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.[107]
Establishment of the Zionist movement
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.[108]
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 Hebrew: 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).
"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.[109][110] Zionism would be just one of several Jewish national movements which would develop, others included diaspora nationalist groups such as the Bund.[111][pageneeded]
Zionism emerged towards the end of the "best century"[84] for Jews who for the first time were allowed as equals into European society. During this time, Jews would have equality before the law and gain access to schools, universities, and professions which were previously closed to them.[84] By the 1870s, Jews had achieved almost complete civic emancipation in all the states of western and central Europe.[85] By 1914, a century after the beginnings of emancipation, 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, considered in proportion to their numbers.[84] 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.[112] 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.[113] 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.[84]
Emancipation in Eastern Europe progressed more slowly,[114] 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.[84] 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 which tended toward intolerance and exclusivity.[115] For the early Zionists, if nationalism posed a challenge to European Jewry, it also proposed a solution.[116]
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 which could not be assimilated.[85] For Pinsker, emancipation could not resolve the problems of the Jewish people.[117] 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, was for Jews to become a "normal" nation and acquire a homeland over which Jews would have sovereignty.[84][106] 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.[77][r]
The pogroms motivated a small number of Jews to establish various groups in the Pale of Settlement and 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.[119] 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.[120] 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.[121] The groups which formed Hibbat Zion included the Bilu group which began its settlements in 1882. Shapira describes the Bilu as serving the role of a prototype for the settlement groups that followed.[122] At the end of the 19th century, Jews remained a small minority in Palestine.[123]
At this point, Zionism remained a scattered movement. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl (the father of political Zionism) infused Zionism with a practical urgency and would work to unify the various strands of the movement.[124] The title of Herzl's 1896 manifesto providing the ideological basis for Zionism, Der Judenstaat, is typically translated as The Jewish State.[111][pageneeded] 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." Specifically, Ha'am points 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.[48] Like Pinsker, Herzl saw antisemitism as a reality that could only be addressed by the territorial concentration of Jews in a Jewish state. He wrote in his diary: "I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism."[125]
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.[125] From early on, Herzl recognized that Zionism could not succeed without the support of a Great Power.[126] His view was that this Judenstaat would serve the interests of the Great Powers, and would "form part of a defensive wall for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism."[127]
Herzl's efforts would lead to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the Zionist Organization (ZO), renamed in 1960 as World Zionist Organization (WZO),[128] and adopted the Basel Program, which served as the formal platform of the movement until the 1950s, including the official objective of establishing a legally recognized home for the Jewish people in Palestine.[124] 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.
In 1902, Herzl published Altneuland, a utopian novel which portrays a Jewish state where Jews and Arabs live together. In the novel, Jewish immigration had not forced the Arabs to leave, orange exports had multiplied tenfold, and Arab landowners profited from selling land to the Jews. Walter Laqueur describes Herzl in real life as emphasizing the importance of close relationships between Jews and Muslims on several occasions.[129]
Front page of The Jewish Chronicle, January 17, 1896, showing an article by Theodor Herzl, a month prior to the publication of his pamphlet Der JudenstaatThe delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland (1897)
Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, considered 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.[130] Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state.[131] Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch.[132] It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan;[133] however, he later affirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jews with that area.[134][non-primary source needed]
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.[135] However, other Zionists emphasized the memory, emotion and tradition linking Jews to the Land of Israel.[136]Zion became the name of the movement, after the place where King David established his kingdom, following his conquest of the Jebusite fortress there (2 Samuel 5:7, 1 Kings 8:1). 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.[137]
In 1903, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Herzl 5,000 square miles (13,000km2) in the Uganda Protectorate for Jewish settlement in Great Britain's East African colonies.[138] Herzl accepted to evaluate Joseph Chamberlain's proposal,[139] 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".
After Herzl died in 1904, the Congress decided in July 1905 to decline the British offer and to "direct all future settlement efforts solely to Palestine."[138][140]Israel Zangwill's Jewish Territorialist Organization aimed for a Jewish state anywhere, having been established in 1903 in response to the Uganda Scheme.
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.[141]
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, including the first locally headquartered bank and credit cooperative societies. Despite their small numbers, the Zionists instilled a fear of territorial displacement and dispossession in the local Palestinian population.[142] This fear would be the main driver of antagonism from the Arabs,[143] leading to physical resistance and the eventual use of military force by settlers. 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 purchase increased, the rural population began to experience dramatic changes. From almost the beginning of Zionist settlement, the 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.[144] Early warnings from local leaders in the 1880s about the destabilizing effects of Jewish immigration went largely unheeded until these later developments.[145] By the early 20th century, there were fourteen Zionist settlements in Palestine, established through land purchases from both local and external landowners.[145]
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 World Zionist Organization 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.[146] 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.[147] Herzl publicly opposed this dispossession, but wrote privately in his diary: "We must expropriate gently... 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." Support for expulsion of the Arab population in Palestine was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement's inception.[148] The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession would be the main driver of Arab antagonism to Zionism for the next several decades.[149]
The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[150][151][152] Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.[4]
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.[145] 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."[153]
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.[77] 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, including David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Yosef Sprinzak, Yitzhak Tabenkin, and Aharon David Gordon, were products of the Second Aliyah.[154] 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.[155]
Palestine as claimed by the World Zionist Organization in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference
At the start of the war, the Zionist leadership initiated attempts 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,[156] with official negotiations beginning in 1916. The ensuing Balfour declaration came shortly afterwards in November 1917 in which 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.[157][158] Though his decision was also motivated by religious convictions,[s] Balfour himself had passed the Aliens Act 1905 which aimed to keep Eastern European Jews out of Britain.[t] 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.[161][162] 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.
King-Crane Commission
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.[163] 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."[164][165] 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.[165]
The 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 Feisal 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.[166]
The British mandate over Palestine, established in 1922, was based on the Balfour declaration, explicitly privileging the Jewish minority over the Arab majority.[167] 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.[166] 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.[167]
The British mandate effectively established a Jewish quasi-state in Palestine, lacking only full sovereignty, which was held by the British High Commissioner. 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.[168]
British policies and the development of Zionist institutions
British policies supporting these efforts were pursued at the expense of the socioeconomic development of the Arab sector. For example, the taxation system imposed by the mandatory government extracted greater relative costs (as well as in absolute numbers) from the Arab population. At the same time, the main British mandatory expenditures from 1933 to 1937 were for economic development and security expenses, in support of the Jewish population. In this sense, the growth of the Jewish economic sector came at the expense of the Arab population.[169] British policies encouraged the proletarianization of the Arab peasantry and reinforced the wage gap between Jewish and Arab laborers.[170] 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 Palestinian majority at any point during the time of the mandate.[167]
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).[170] 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 dominate Jewish economy; for example, over 80% of the JNF's income came from contributions.[170]
Following the Balfour declaration, Jewish immigration to Palestine would grow from 9,149 immigrants in 1921 to 33,801 in 1925—by the end of the mandate period, the Jewish population in Palestine would have nearly tripled, eventually reaching one third of the country's population.[171]
The nucleus of the Jewish quasi-state was the Histadrut, established in 1920 as an independent social, political and economic institution.[172][u] The Histadrut also developed a military arm, the Haganah, which evolved into a permanent underground reserve army with a command structure integrated into the Jewish community's political institutions. Although the British authorities disapproved of the Haganah, particularly its method of stealing arms from British bases, they did not disband it.[174] 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.[175]
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.[176] The middle class grew dramatically in size with the arrival of the fourth aliyah in 1924, motivating a political shift within the labor movement.[177] It was during this period that the political strategy of the labor movement would solidify.[178] The founding of the Mapai party unified the labor movement, making it the dominant force. The labor 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."[179] Indeed, the Mapai prioritized nationalism over socialism to the extent that the "only qualification required for membership in Mapai was not ideological commitment but possession of a Histadrut membership card."[180] 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.[181]
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.[179] 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. The JNF and Histadrut aimed to remove land and labor from the market, effectively excluding Palestinian Arabs. Despite the universalist ideals of Zionist pioneering, this new Jewish economic sector was fundamentally based on exclusionary practices.[77] Throughout the duration of the British Mandate, the labor movement was largely driven by the goal of achieving "100 percent of Hebrew labour." This was primary driver of the territorial, economic and social separation between Jews and Arabs.[73]
The Zionist economic platform was partially based on the assumption (eventually demonstrated incorrect[182]) 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 be 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.[183]
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, for example, 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.[184][pageneeded] The Arab community openly pressured the mandatory government to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases.[185]
Sporadic attacks in the country-side (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.[186] The British appointed a commission of inquiry in 1937 in response to the revolt which recommended the partition of the land. The proposal included creating a small Jewish state occupying 17 percent of Mandatory Palestine's territory,[187] 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.[188][189]
The Peel Commission transfer proposal
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.[185] The commission also proposed a population transfer of the Palestinian Arabs from the areas designated for the Jewish state as part of its partition plan. For Ben-Gurion, the transfer proposal was the most appealing recommendation put forward by the commission.[190] 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.[191] He would go as far as to say that transfer was such an ideal solution that it "must happen some day".[192]
The Zionist leadership viewed the mass transfer of the Arabs as morally permissible, but were unsure of its political effectiveness.[193][pageneeded] Much of the Zionist leadership spoke in strong support of the transfer plan, including Ussishkin, Ruppin and Katznelson. In giving their support for compulsory transfer, they asserted their stance that there is nothing immoral about it.[v] 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.".[195] 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.[31][196] The revolt was inflamed by the partition proposal and continued until 1939 when it was forcefully suppressed by the British.[167]
The Peel Commission transfer recommendation was influenced by the precedent of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange.[197][198] Later, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader, drew inspiration from the Nazi demographic policies which resulted in the expulsion of 1.5 million Poles and Jews, in whose place Germans resettled.[199] In Jabotinsky's assessment:
The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.[199]
Some leaders, such as Ruppin, Motzkin, and writers such as Israel Zangwill, referred to transfer as a "voluntary" action which would include some form of compensation.[200] However, the Arabs of Palestine were unwilling to leave the land of their ancestors and expressed this firmly. This stance presented notable ethical challenges for the Yishuv residents.[201]
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."[202] The main debates within the movement at this time were concerning partition of Palestine and the nature of the relationship with the British. The dominant feeling within the movement was that Jewish considerations took precedance over those of the Arabs and the Zionist movement was in a struggle for survival. From this perspective, the leadership believed that the movement could not afford to compromise.[203]
According to Zionist historian Yosef Gorny, these considerations would drive the Zionist belief in the necessity of the use of force against the Arabs whose motives "were of no moral or historical significance."[28] 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.[204] 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 which faded away in the face of both Arab and Zionist opposition.[205]
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.[206]
Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust
In 1939, a British White Paper would recommend limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase with the objective of maintaining the status quo while the threat of war loomed in Europe.[207][208] This planned to allow no more than 75,000 additional Jewish migrants over a five-year period. With Nazi expansionism in Europe, the limits on immigration prompted further militarization, land takeover and illegal immigration efforts by the Zionist movement. The second world war 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.[205][w] 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.[209][210] The development of this force would further train and enable the already substantial Zionist military capacity.[167][209][184][pageneeded] The Haganah was allowed by the British to openly acquire weapons and worked with the British to prepare for a possible Axis invasion.[211]
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 Zionist war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv. 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.[212]
In the Biltmore Program of 1942, the Zionist movement would openly declare for the first time its goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.[213] At this point, the United States, with its growing economy and unprecedented military force, became a focal point of Zionist political activity which engaged with the American electorate and politicians. US 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.[214]
Population of Palestine by ethno-religious groups, excluding nomads, from the 1946 Survey of Palestine[215]
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.[216] 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.[217] 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.[218][fn 2]
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.[x] The Irgun, the military arm of the revisionist Zionists, led by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, which at one point sought an alliance with the Nazis,[220] 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.[211]
The UNSCOP found that Jews were a minority in Palestine, owning 6% of the total land. 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.[211]
Outbursts of violence slowly grew into a wider civil war between the Arabs and Zionist militias.[221] By mid-December, the Haganah had shifted to a more "aggressive defense",[222] 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. In response, Arabs planted bombs in Jewish civilian areas, particularly in Jerusalem.[223]
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.[224] In March 1948, Zionist forces began implementing Plan D, which warranted the expulsion of civilians and the destruction of Arab towns and villages in pursuit of eliminating potentially hostile Arab elements.[225][116][226] According to Benny Morris Zionist forces committed 24 massacres of Palestinians in the ensuing war,[227] in part as a form of psychological warfare, 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.[7][184][pageneeded]
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;[214] a fully functioning Jewish quasi-state had already been operating under the British for the past several decades.[228] The same day, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state of Israel.[229] 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.[230] Masalha notes that the declaration states equality on the basis of citizenship but not nationality.[y]
The establishment of the State of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine, instead of the 55% outlined in the UN partition plan, resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and the Arab landscape. 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.[48]
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."[231] The project of "Hebraization" of the map, for which the JNF Naming Committee was established,[232] 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.[231] This effort also sought to demonstrate continuous Jewish ownership over the land to ancient times.[231]Moshe Dayan would later speak to the appropriation of Arab place names:
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Hunefis; and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that didn’t have a former Arab population.[232]
Prior to 1948, the Zionist movement had limited authority over the use of place names in Palestine. After 1948, the Zionist movement systematically eliminated mention of "Palestine" from the names of its 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".[88][pageneeded]
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.[233] 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.[234] 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.[235]
David Ben-Gurion proclaiming Israel's establishment beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl
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."[241] 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"[242] as well as those who argued that the absorption process caused "undue hardship".[243] However, the force of Ben-Gurion's influence and insistence ensured that his immigration policy was carried out.[244][245]
Prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, religious Zionism mostly described support for political Zionism among Orthodox Jews.[246] 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.[247][248] 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."[249]
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."[250] 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.[31] 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.[251]
From the turn of the century until the Arab revolt of 1936, there was room for political flexibility within the Zionist movement, different currents of Zionism had a shared core framework.[154][252] Most mainstream histories of the movement delineate a few key strains: political, practical, socialist, cultural and revisionist.[253][254][255] Some scholars emphasise the heterogeneity of these strains of Zionism.[256][257][258]
Early Zionist Strains
Political Zionism was led by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. This approach was espoused at the Zionist Organization's First Zionist Congress and aimed at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine through diplomatic negotiation with the established powers that controlled the area.[259][255] It focused on a Jewish home as a solution to the "Jewish question" and antisemitism in Europe, centred 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 loctions other than Palestine (e.g. in Africa) and did not foresee migration by many Western Jews to the new homeland.[259]
Known in Hebrew as Tzionut Ma'asit, Practical Zionism was led by Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker and molded by the Hovevei Zion organization.[citation needed] This approach believed that firstly there was a need in practical terms to implement Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, Aliyah, and settlement of the land, as soon as possible, even if a charter over the Land is not obtained.[255] 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".[259] It also differed from Political Zionism in "distrust[ing] grand political actions" and preferring "an evolutionary incremental process toward the establishment of t he national home".[259]
Led by socialists Nachman Syrkin, Haim Arlosoroff, and Berl Katznelson and Marxist Ber Borochov,[260][261][262][pageneeded][77] Labor or Socialist Zionism was a form of Zionism that also espoused socialist or social democratic politics.[263][77] The labor Zionists promoted immigration and settlement, establishing "facts on the ground", as the main path towards statebuilding.[264] Ben-Gurion would eventually recognize the national character of Arab rejection of Zionism and concluded that only war, not an agreement, would resolve the conflict.[156]
Although there were socialist Zionists in the nineteenth century (such as Moses Hess), 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.[265] In the wake of the 1917 death of Borochov and the Russian revolution, Poale Zion split into a Right, aligned with the Second International, and a Left, aligned with the Third International.[265][266][267] In Palestine, the Right PZ disbanded to make way for the formation of the nationalist socialist Ahdut HaAvoda, led by David Ben Gurion,[268][269] in 1919.[270]Hapoel Hatzair, founded by A. D. Gordon, would merge with Ahdut Ha'avoda in 1930 to form Mapai,[271][269] at which point, according to Gorny, Poale Zion became of marginal political importance in Palestine.[272]
Labor Zionism, represented by Mapai, 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.[263] Until the 1970s, the Histadrut, the trade union formed by Labor Zionists in the 1920s, was the largest employer in Israel after the Israeli government.[273]Hashomer Hatzair in the early twentieth century, Mapam in the late twentieth century, and Meretz into the present period represent the left wing of this tradition.[citation needed]
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"[274] a form of cooperative agriculture where 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.[275][276]
Synthetic Zionism, led by Chaim Weizmann, Leo Motzkin and Nahum Sokolow, was an approach that advocated a combination of practical and political Zionism.[277] It was the ideology of General Zionism, the centrist current between Labor Zionism and religious Zionism, that was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 until after the First World War. General Zionists identified with the liberal European middle class to which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann aspired. 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. The current had a left wing ("General Zionists A"), who supported a mixed economy and good relations with Britain, and a right wing ("General Zionists B"), who were anti-socialist and anti-British. After independence, neither arm played a significant role in Israeli politics, the "A" group allying with Mapai and the "B" group forming a dwindling right-wing opposition party.[278]
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.[279] 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.[156] According to Zionist Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the essential assumptions of Weizmann's strategy were later adopted by Ben-Gurion and subsequent Zionist leaders.[280]
Ze'ev Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party in 1925 which took on a more militant ethos and openly maximalist agenda. 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.[156] 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.[156]
Revisionist Zionists believed that a Jewish state must expand to both sides of the Jordan River, i.e. taking Transjordan in addition to all of Palestine.[281][282] 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.[283]
Historian Avi Shlaim describes Jabotinsky's perspective[284]
Although the Jews originated in the East, they belonged to the West culturally, morally, and spiritually. Zionism was conceived by Jabotinsky not as the return of the Jews to their spiritual homeland but as an offshoot or implant of Western civilization in the East. This worldview translated into a geostrategic conception in which Zionism was to be permanently allied with European colonialism against all the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1935 the Revisionists left the WZO because it refused to state that the creation of a Jewish state was an objective of Zionism.[citation needed] According to Israeli historian Yosef Gorny, the Revisionists remained within the ideological mainstream of the Zionist movement even after this split.[154] The Revisionists advocated the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine to force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration.[citation needed]
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.[285]
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.[286] 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.[citation needed] 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.[287] Their ideology revolves around three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel.[288]
The Labor Movement wing of Religious Zionism, founded in 1921 under the Zionist slogan "Torah va'Avodah" (Torah and Labor), was called HaPoel HaMizrachi.[citation needed] It represented religiously traditional Labour Zionists, both in Europe and in the Land of Israel, where it represented religious Jews in the Histadrut.[citation needed] In 1956, Mizrachi, HaPoel HaMizrachi, and other religious Zionists formed the National Religious Party (NRP), which operated as an independent political party until the 2003 elections.[citation needed]
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 and evolved into what is sometimes known as Neo-Zionism.[citation needed] In the current period, this right-wing form of religious Zionism, powerful within the settlement movement, is represented 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.[citation needed]
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. The Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, which espouses Kahanism, won six seats in the 2022 Israeli legislative election, forming what has been called the most right-wing government in Israeli history.[289][290]
Liberal Zionism
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.[citation needed]
Philosopher Carlo Strenger describes a modern-day version of Liberal Zionism, 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. 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.[291][292] 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."[293]
Cultural Zionism or Spritual 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 spritual centre of Jewish life. Ha'am inaugerated 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.[294] 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.[259]
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,[259] Gorny describes it as an ultimately marginal group.[154]
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."[295]
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.[296]
From the start of the development of the Zionist movement it was dependent on support from the Christian world.[297] 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.[298] In this sense, Christian ideas of "restoration" were a prerequisite for Zinoism.[299]
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 like Jerry Falwell believe the establishment of Israel is a pivotal event signaling the Second Coming of Christ and the eventual End of the World. 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.[300]
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".[301] Evangelical Christian anticipation of and political lobbying within the UK for Restorationism was widespread in the 1820s and common beforehand.[302] It was common among the Puritans to anticipate and frequently to pray for a Jewish return to their homeland.[303][304][305]
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.[306] However, others like C H Spurgeon,[307]both Horatius[308] and Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray M'Chyene,[309] and J C Ryle[310] 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".[311]
Notable early supporters of Zionism include British Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, American President Woodrow Wilson and British Major-GeneralOrde 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.[citation needed]
Some Arab Christians publicly supporting Israel include US author Nonie Darwish, and former Muslim Magdi Allam, author of Viva Israele,[313] 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".[314]
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.[318] 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.[319]
Israeli Druze Scouts march to Jethro's tomb. Today, thousands of Israeli Druze belong to 'Druze Zionist' movements.
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 fully and unreservedly.[324]
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).[325]
In more current times, conservative Indian parties and organizations tend to support Zionism.[326] A 2012 international opinion survey found that India was the most pro-Israel country in the world.[327] 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."[328]
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. Until World War II, anti-Zionism was widespread among Jews for varying reasons.[330][331] Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on religious grounds, as preempting the Messiah,[z] many secular or assimilationist Jewish anti-Zionists identified more with ideals of the Enlightenment and saw Zionism as a reactionary ideology,[332][333] while left-wing Jews (including in the Bund) believed that the Jewish question was best solved in the diaspora through building a socialist society.[334][335]
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.[336][337] 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
Although the left was initially mostly supportive of Zionism,[342]Soviet anti-Zionism was influential in spreading anti-Zionism on the global left,[343] and much of the New Left of the 1960s took on anti-Zionism as a key tenet.[344][345]
The fascist far right have also generally espoused anti-Zionism, for antisemitic reasons.[351][352]
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.[353][354] Arab states in particular have historically strongly opposed Zionism.[355] The preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been ratified by 53 African countries as of 2014[update], includes an undertaking to eliminate Zionism together with other practices including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, "aggressive foreign military bases" and all forms of discrimination.[356][357]
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."[358] 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".[358]
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".[359] 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."[360]
Pro-Palestinian protest with placards demanding the US to stop funding of "Israeli apartheid" in Washington, DC, 2017
Zionism is often considered to be an example of a colonial[13] or racist[14] 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."[361] Some criticisms of Zionism claim that Judaism's notion of the "chosen people" is the source of racism in Zionism,[362] despite, according to Gustavo Perednik, that being a religious concept unrelated to Zionism.[363] This characterization of Zionism as a colonialism has been made by, among others, Gershon Shafir, Michael Prior, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling.[13]Noam Chomsky, John B. Quigley, Nur Masalha, and Cheryl Rubenberg have criticized Zionism, saying that it unfairly confiscates land and expels Palestinians.[364]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.[365]Saleh Abdel Jawad, Nur Masalha, Michael Prior, and Ian Lustick 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.[366]
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."[367]Derek Penslar says that Herzl may have been considering either South America or Palestine when he wrote the diary entry about expropriation.[368] According to Walter Laqueur, although many Zionists proposed transfer, it was never official Zionist policy and in 1918 Ben-Gurion "emphatically rejected" it.[369]
The exodus of the Arab Palestinians during the 1947–1949 war has been controversially described as having involved ethnic cleansing.[370][371] 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.[372][373] While some 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),[374][375] the scholarly consensus now dismisses this claim,[376] and as such, Benny Morris concurs that Arab instigation was not the major cause of the refugees' flight,[377] 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.[378]Ilan Pappe said that Zionism resulted in ethnic cleansing.[379] This view diverges from other New Historians, such as Benny Morris, who place the Palestinian exodus in the context of war, not ethnic cleansing.[380] 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."[381]
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".[382] 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?"[383][bettersourceneeded] 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".[384] 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".[385] 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".[386][bettersourceneeded]
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."[387] At the time there was little cooperation between Israel and South Africa,[388] although the two countries would develop a close relationship during the 1970s.[389] 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.[390]
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. 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.[391] In 1991 the resolution was repealed with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86,[392][bettersourceneeded] after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked.[393]
Arab countries sought to associate Zionism with racism in connection with a 2001 UN conference on racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa,[394] which caused the United States and Israel to walk away from the conference as a response. 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".[395]
Haredi Jews number some 2,100,000 world-wide, constituting 14% of the total Jewish population in the world.[396] Most accept the secular Israeli state.[397] 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 Hungarianrebbe and Talmudic scholar Joel Teitelbaum.[398] 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.[399]
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, a tiny Orthodox Haredi sect, is considered "the most radical of the Extreme Orthodox groups", which overall have a membership in Israel of 10,000 to 12,000 individuals.[400] Some of its members have said that Israel is a "racist regime",[401] compared Zionists to Nazis,[402] claimed that Zionism is contrary to the teachings of the Torah,[403] or accused it of promoting antisemitism.[404] According to the Jewish Chronicle, their approximately 5,000 members worldwide make up about 0.03 percent of the world's Jewish population.[405]
Critics of anti-Zionism have argued that opposition to Zionism can be hard to distinguish from antisemitism,[406][407] and that criticism of Israel may be used as an excuse to express viewpoints that might otherwise be considered antisemitic.[408][409] 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".[410]
According to Thomas Mitchell, the terms Jewish and Zionist are at times used interchangeably by some Arab leadership, a perspective that has been influenced by the introduction of European antisemitism into the Arab world in the 1930s and 1940s by the Axis powers. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has always positioned itself as being anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, although its leadership have in a few instances used the terms interchangeably.[411]
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."[412]
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."[413]
Zionism and colonialism
Through history various proponents of Zionism have characterized Zionism as colonial or settler-colonial.[414][415]
According to Arab politics professor Joseph Massad, Zionism was connected with European colonial thought from early on in its development. Massad describes antisemitism and a shared interest in the colonial project as the basis of the collaboration between Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists during the beginning of the movement's development. He argues that the collaboration between the Zionist movement and European imperialism was essential to the movement's development. In his prominent pro-Zionist book Auto-Emancipation (1882), Jewish thinker Leon Pinsker wrote that the "auto-emancipation of the Jewish people as a nation [would take place through] the foundation of a colonial community belonging to the Jews". In Rome and Jerusalem (1862), early Jewish Zionist Moses Hess asked those who were unconvinced of the merits of the Zionist movement if "you still doubt that France will help the Jews to found colonies which may extend from Suez to Jerusalem and from the banks of the Jordan to the coast of the Mediterranean?" Massad wrote that, for political and ideological reasons, starting in the 1930s, some Zionist thinkers, such as Zionist Executive chairman F. H. Kisch, proposed that the Zionist movement should avoid using terms related to colonialism.[aa][417]
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.[418]
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 which had previously been played by the British.[419] 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.[420][421][422] 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.[423] Ze'ev Sternhell agrees that Zionism was a movement of "conquest" from the outset, but disagrees that Jews arriving in Palestine had a colonial mindset.[424] The conquest of 1967 was, for Sternhell, the first time the Zionist movement created a "colonial situation."[425] 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.[426]
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.[427][428] 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.[429]
The "pure settlement colonies" of the Second Aliyah and its exclusion of Palestinian labor, Shafir says "did not originate from opposition to colonialism," but instead out of a desire to secure employment for Jewish settlers.[428] Similarly, Morris and traditionalist historian Anita Shapira describe the labor Zionist rejection of the ethnic plantation model as motivated by practical as well as moral justifications, stemming from their socialist outlook.[430][431][ab] For Shapira, studying Zionism as a colonial movement is "both legitimate and desirable," comparable to colonialism in North America and Australia. She argues that the settler-colonial framing may help "clarify the relations between the settling nation and the native one."[432]
Sternberg argues that it is important to clearly distinguish between colonization and colonialism as concepts.[433] For Shafir and Peled, "colonization, namely territorial dispossession and the settlement of immigrant populations,"[434] cannot happen without colonialism and "the means of violence of a colonial metropole."[418] In contrast, Sternberg considers classical definitions of colonization as broad enough to include cases which did not require the dispossession of the native population.[433]
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.[435] 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.[436] Friling argues that in contrast to European colonial projects, the early Zionist leadership was dominated by the labor movement with a socialist ethos.[437] Shafir points to ideological drives in American and Rhodesian settler colonies which developed in service of the colonial project. Similarly, Shafir says, the Zionist labor movement used socialist ideals largely in service of the national movement.[438]
Sternhell rejects the depiction of the Zionist settlers arriving in Palestine as colonialists.[425] 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 "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."[438]
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.[439][440] Efraim Karsh adopts a similar definition and similarly concludes that Zionism is not colonialism.[441][pageneeded] Dowty elaborates that Zionism did not control the local population since it ultimately failed to remove the native people from Palestine.[439] 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.[442]
Zionism has also been framed as national liberation movement. Masalha cites the Zionist relationship with the British in arguing that Zionism could not be understood in terms of national liberation. Specifically, he says that despite the tensions between the Zionists and the British, "the State of Israel owes its very existence to the British colonial power in Palestine."[251] Shapira and Ben-Ami emphasize the importance of the Zionist ethos, describing Zionism as a national liberation movement that was "destined" or "forced" to use colonial methods.[443][422]
In his work on Zionism, Edward Said described the movement as following the European colonial model. According to Said, Zionism's alliances with the Great Powers and its patronizing attitude toward the native Palestinian population, whom it regarded as backward, were consistent with other colonial projects. For Said, Zionists dismissed native resistance as either driven by primitive emotions or manipulated by elite figures, inherently refusing to recognize Palestinians as a people with their own desires and rights.[444] In a similar vein, Penslar, who considers Zionism within the settler-colonial frame, writes that the clearest connection between Zionism and colonialism is in the perception of the Palestinians and the Zionist movement's practices towards them.[445] He also describes the Zionists as perceiving Palestinians as backward and primitive, seeing themselves as forming a "rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism."[446]
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, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths.[449][ac] 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.[450][451][452]
Sociologist Rachel Busbridge[453] 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.[454][455]
↑ On this topic, Ben-Ami writes: "This is how a Brit-Shalom Ihud, non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency, Werner Senator, put it: 'If I weigh the catastrophe of five million Jews against the transfer of one million Arabs, then with a clean and easy conscience I can state that even more drastic acts are permissible.'"[31]
↑ The reasons for this decision were explained by His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in a speech to the House of Commons on February 18, 1947, in which he said: "His Majesty's Government have been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. The discussions of the last month have quite clearly shown that there is no prospect of resolving this conflict by any settlement negotiated between the parties. But if the conflict has to be resolved by an arbitrary decision, that is not a decision which His Majesty's Government are empowered, as Mandatory, to take. His Majesty's Government have of themselves no power, under the terms of the Mandate, to award the country either to the Arabs or to the Jews, or even to partition it between them."
↑ 'Zionism belongs to the category of ethnocultural nationalism, according to which groups sharing a common history and culture have fundamental and morally significant interests in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. Cultural nationalism holds that such interests warrant political recognition and support, primarily by the means of granting the groups in question the right to national self-determination or self-rule.'[1]
↑ "The basic assumption regarding the right of Jews to Palestine—a right that required no proof—was a fundamental component of all Zionist programs. In contrast with other prospective areas for Jewish settlement, such as Argentina or East Africa, it was generally believed that no one could deny the right of the Jews to their ancestral land. Even Ahad Ha-Am, the eternal skeptic, commented that this was 'a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs.' Others, such as Lilienblum, did not even think it necessary to dwell on this matter."[24]
↑ "When faced with the apocalyptic dimensions of the Jewish catastrophe, the Holocaust, even Brit-Shalom Ihud moved to endorse first the necessity of demographic parity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and then, as 'a necessary evil', the idea of a Jewish independent state, that is the partition of Palestine. It was no longer the time for moral scruples or guilt feelings towards the dispossessed Arab population. This is how a Brit-Shalom Ihud, non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency, Werner Senator, put it: 'If I weigh the catastrophe of five million Jews against the transfer of one million Arabs, then with a clean and easy conscience I can state that even more drastic acts are permissible.'"[31]
↑ Lord Balfour would write, "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."[32]
↑ While Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill spoke to the Peel Commission: "I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."[33]
↑ "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." Avineri 2017, Chapter 7
↑ "If anything, the first decades of Zionism bear out an affinity with some of the more unsavoury 'regenerative' discourses of the late nineteenth century, particularly Social Darwinism, eugenics, nationalism, and colonialism, precisely because Zionism – partly as a project of self-legitimacy – was both a Jewish response to and extension of these very same discourses." (Presner 2007, pp.1–23, 4)
↑ "throughout all of the de-racializing stages of twentieth-century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity...'race' is a significant component not only of scholarly or academic modern Jewish thought, but also of popular or everyday Jewish thought. It is one of the building blocks of contemporary Jewish identity construction, even if there are many who would dispute the applicability of biological or racial categories to Jews." (Hart 2011, pp.xxxiv–xxxv)
↑ "To be sure, 'Jewish genetics' is only one of many examples for the search of origins of today's population groups with the help of DNA analysis. Whether it is 'the origin of modern Japanese populations' ... the "genetics of ancient Romans"... or an analysis of the genomes from 'Bronze Age Bulgaria' ... to give only a few examples, ancient forefathers and -mothers are a fascinating topic for scientists as well as for the general public. In the case of "Jewish genetics, however, scientific work can get easily politicized... But rather than dealing with politicians and their use of scientific papers for populistic ends, this essay highlights, delineates, and contextualizes the ongoing debate between various geneticists and social scientists on two main points. One is whether or how narratives impact the work of the researchers. In our case, it is the association of modern Jews as the (biological) descendants of the biblical Hebrews or today's Cohanim as descendants of the biblical priestly caste. As the debate on the Khazars exemplifies, genetic research can be politically loaded. Scientific theories or research results about the origin of Ashkenazi Jews are used for political purposes – but interest in the topic also places the researchers into a context of ideology and identity politics, which is closely linked to real or perceived national interests... The other point is the discussion about the danger that genetic studies on population groups reify race. Neither of these questions applies only to genetic research on Jews, but for Jews they have a special meaning that is rooted in Jewish history and culture (Kohler 2022, pp.1–2).
↑ "The extent to which today's human population genetics are compared to past theories of race varies greatly, and thus the emphasis on an inherent danger of racism. In the Jewish context, the genetic studies on collective Jewish ancestry are mainly criticized as being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative', as essentializing biology, or both" (Kohler 2022, p.8).
↑ "A second critique of genetics research is one that has been made about archaeological evidence as well. Here too the evidence does not speak for itself: it has to be interpreted; and geneticists do not realize the extent to which their interpretations read into the evidence more than is really there." (Weitzman 2019, p.310)
↑ "The biological dimension of Judaism, namely the debate about whether Judaism is 'only' a religion, or Jews are a 'people', a 'nation' or a 'race', has become central to both how Jews were thought of and to the ways in which they thought about themselves during modern times, as modern genetics was expected to both establish the determinants of "Jewishness" and to find out whether particular individuals or groups fit into this category... As has been argued elsewhere (Prainsack 2007; Falk 2006; Kirsh 2003), the interpretation of the data on different Jewish "ethnic" groups and their relatedness to one another as well as to non-Jewish neighbouring/hosting populations has always been influenced by political ideologies. While many Zionists favour a view of Jews as a distinct, non-European "ethnicity" which has remained relatively homogenous throughout history (see, for example, Cochran et al. 2006), during the 1950s and early 1960s Israeli geneticists found many genetic differences between the diverse Jewish groups gathering in Israel. Yet Kirsh (2003) argues that an unconscious internalisation of Zionist ideology by the Israeli geneticists of the time led them to emphasise points of similarity rather than points of difference between the studied groups, thereby in turn reinforcing Zionist convictions." (Prainsack & Hashiloni-Dolev 2009, p.410)
↑ "In every generation there are still Zionists as well as non-Zionists who are not satisfied with the mental and social notions which bind Jews together, and who seek to find the link between the national and the biological aspects of being Jews." Footnote: An interesting aspect is that of orthodox-religious circles that seek support of the "biological" argument for the Jewishness (or for membership in the Ten Lost Tribes) of tribes and congregations all over the world. Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, the founder of the "Amishav" (Hebrew for "My People Return") organization and the author of the book Israel's Tribes, followed on his journeys "the footprints of forgotten Jewish communities, who lost their contact with the Jewish world... at the same time he also located tribes that have no biological relationship to the people of Israel but who want very much to join them" (Yair Sheleg, "All want to be Jewish", Haaretz, 17 September 1999, p. 27). In recent years, Rabbi Avichail "discovered" the tribe of Menasheh among the Koki, Mizo and Chin in the Manipur mountains at the border between India and Burma. In a TV program on "the search after the lost tribes", Hillel Halkin, a demographer of cultures, claimed that whereas the Jews of Ethiopia converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages and are not of ancient Jewish stock, the Koki, Mizo and Chin people are direct progeny of the Biblical tribe of Menasheh (Falk 2017, p.16).
↑ "The Talmud does take up the right of individuals to settle in Israel, but there is a consensus against collective settlement.", "Several rabbinical sources through the centuries have interpreted these oaths to assert that even if all the nations were to encourage the Jews to settle in the Land of Israel, it would still be necessary to abstain from doing so, for fear of committing yet other sins and of being punished by an exile even cruder still." " Traditional Jewish culture discourages political and military activism of any variety, particularly in the Land of Israel... In the traditional view, settlement in the Land of Israel will be brought, about by the universal effect of good deeds rather than by military force or diplomacy... The Talmud (BT Ketubot, 111a) relates the three oaths sworn on the eve of the dispersal of what remained of the people of Israel to the four corners of the earth: not to return en masse and in an organized fashion to the Land of Israel; not to rebel against the nations; and that the nations do not subjugate Israel exceedingly... The idea of return to the Land of Israel achieved by political means is alien to the idea of salvation in Jewish tradition."Rabkin 2006
↑ "To ultra-Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, the idea of Jews returning to their homeland flew in the face of the fate decreed for them. To them such an act ran counter to the three oaths the Jewish people swore to the Almighty: not to storm the wall, not to rush the End, and not to rebel against the nations of the world, while the Almighty adjured the nations of the world not to destroy the Jewish people. They saw an attempt to bring about redemption by natural, man-made means as rebelling against divine decrees, as Jews taking their fate into their own hands and not waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Consequently ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently opposed this perilous heresy" Shapira 2014, p.5
↑ Pinsker wrote: "The fact that, as it seems, we can mix with the nations only in the smallest proportions, presents a further obstacle to the establishment of amicable relations. Therefore, we must see to it that the surplus of Jews, the inassimilable residue, is removed and provided for elsewhere. This duty can be incumbent upon no one but ourselves," Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation," in Hertzberg, 1959, p. 193. And Nordau wrote, in a otherwise sympathetic presentation of the Ostjuden, that: "'the contempt created by the impudent, crawling beggar in dirty caftan... falls back on all of us,'" quoted in Aschheim, 1982, p. 88.[118]
↑ "The irony here is in the now well-documented understanding that Lord Balfour was himself deeply religious and that his thinking on the projected post-World War 1 fate of Palestine was influenced by his expectations of the fulfullment of biblical prophecy. What disappointed Balfour, Hechler and Kook was that the secular Jewish settlers of British Mandate Palestine did not see divine Providence at work in international affairs."[159]
↑ Brian Klug states that "Keeping Jews out of Britain and packing them off to Palestine were just two sides of the same antisemitic coin"[160]
↑ "The Histadrut is not a trade union, not a political party, not acooperative society, nor is it a mutual aid association, although it doesengage in trade union activity, in politics, cooperative organizationand mutual aid. But it is much more than that. The Histadrut is a covenant of builders of a homeland, founders of a state, renewers of anation, builders of an economy, creators of culture, reformers of a society."[173]
↑ Various leaders spoke strongly in favor of transfer. Ussishkin said, "We cannot start the Jewish state with … half the population being Arab … Such a state cannot survive even half an hour." There was nothing immoral about transferring sixty thousand Arab families: "It is most moral.… I am ready to come and defend … it before the Almighty." Ruppin said: "I do not believe in the transfer of individuals. I believe in the transfer of entire villages." Berl Katznelson, coleader with Ben-Gurion of Mapai, said the transfer would have to be by agreement with Britain and the Arab states: "But the principle should be that there must be a large agreed transfer." Ben-Gurion summed up: "With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] …. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it."[194]
↑ David Ben Gurion famously would say: we shall "fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler and fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper."
↑ "that a small, determined group of revolutionaries representing a minority view within the wider population could achieve some success against the British Empire helped to convince Zionist radicals that they could be successful. Members of Jewish underground groups . .studied Irish rebels' victory over the superior might of Britain. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, leader of the Irgun, had travelled to ireland, meeting Irish Volunteer and IRA gunrunner Robert Briscoe, to discuss drilling, training and strategy in fighting the British and to 'learn all he could in order to form a physical force movement in Palestine on the same lines as the IRA'."[219]
↑ "In Israel, '"nationality" (Hebrew: "le'um") and "citizenship" (Hebrew: "ezrahut") are two separate, distinct statuses, conveying different rights and responsibilities’. Palestinians in Israel, as non-Jews, can be citizens, but never nationals, and are thus denied 'rights and privileges' enjoyed by those 'who would qualify for Israeli citizenship under the 1950 Law of Return'."White 2012, Spot the Difference
↑ "Though a little religious support for Zionism existed, 'the majority of Orthodox leaders condemned Zionism from its very outset,' particularly the rabbis of Eastern Europe. Their concerns were twofold: they feared that Zionists were overidealistic and were misleading the Jewish people about what was possible; they were also concerned that the Zionist millennial vision was an attempt to preempt the Messiah."[citation needed]
↑ Massad depicts the transition in the choice of terminology within the Zionist movement in the mid-20th century, as "colonialism" began to more broadly develop a negative association.[416][pageneeded] Khalidi writes: "In fact, Zionism—for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism—rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement"[186][pageneeded]
↑ Morris: "Though it inflamed Arab antagonism to Zionism, the socialists saw the fight over jobs as a struggle for survival, the social struggle meshing with the national one. But, in reality, rather than "meshing," the nationalist ethos had simply overpowered and driven out the socialist ethos." (Morris 1999, p.51)
↑ "The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm's reformulation.Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, first section
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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, pp.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."
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..."
Manna 2022, pp. 2 ("the principal objective of the Zionist leadership to keep as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish state"), 4 ("in the 1948 war, when it became clear that the objective that enjoyed the unanimous support of Zionists of all inclinations was to establish a Jewish state with the smallest possible number of Palestinians"), and 33 ("The Zionists had two cherished objectives: fewer Arabs in the country and more land in the hands of the settlers.")
Khalidi 2020, p.76: "The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land."
Slater 2020, pp. 49 ("There were three arguments for the moral acceptability of some form of transfer. The main one—certainly for the Zionists but not only for them—was the alleged necessity of establishing a secure and stable Jewish state in as much of Palestine as was feasible, which was understood to require a large Jewish majority."), 81 ("From the outset of the Zionist movement all the major leaders wanted as few Arabs as possible in a Jewish state"), 87 ("The Zionist movement in general and David Ben-Gurion in particular had long sought to establish a Jewish state in all of “Palestine,” which in their view included the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria."), and 92 ("As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand wrote: 'During every round of the national conflict over Palestine, which is the longest running conflict of its kind in the modern era, Zionism has tried to appropriate additional territory.'")
Segev 2019, p.418, "the Zionist dream from the start—maximum territory, minimum Arabs"
Cohen 2017, p.78, "As was suggested by Masalha (1992), Morris (1987), and other scholars, many preferred a state without Arabs or with as small a minority as possible, and plans for population transfers were considered by Zionist leaders and activists for years."
Lustick & Berkman 2017, pp.47–48, "As Ben-Gurion told one Palestinian leader in the early 1930s, 'Our final goal is the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River, not as a minority, but as a community numbering millions" (Teveth 1985:130). Ipso facto, this meant Zionism's success would produce an Arab minority in Palestine, no matter what its geographical dimensions."
Stanislawski 2017, p.65, "The upper classes of Palestinian society quickly fled the fight to places of safety within the Arab world and outside of it; the lower classes were caught between the Israeli desire to have as few Arabs as possible remaining in their new state and the Palestinians’ desire to remain on the lands they regarded as their ancient national patrimony."
Finkelstein 2016, Ch. 1 ("Justifying the Zionist Enterprise"), "Zionism’s claim to the whole of Palestine not only precluded a modus vivendi based on partition with the indigenous Arab population, it called into question any Arab presence in Palestine."
Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2014, p.6, "It was obvious to most approaches within the Zionist movement—certainly to the mainstream as represented by Labor Zionism and its leadership headed by Ben Gurion, that a Jewish state would entail getting rid of as many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land as possible ... Following Wolfe, we argue that the logic of demographic elimination is an inherent component of the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project, although it has taken different manifestations since the founding of the Zionist movement."
Engel 2013, pp. 96 ("From the outset Zionism had been the activity of a loose coalition of individuals and groups united by a common desire to increase the Jewish population of Palestine ..."), 121 ("... the ZO sought ways to expand the territory a partitioned Jewish state might eventually receive ... Haganah undertook to ensconce small groups of Jews in parts of Palestine formerly beyond their sights ... their leaders had hoped for more expansive borders ..."), and 138 ("The prospect that Israel would have only the barest Jewish majority thus loomed large in the imagination of the state’s leaders. To be sure, until the late 1930s most Zionists would have been delighted with any majority, no matter how slim; the thought that Jews in Palestine would ever be more numerous than Arabs appeared a distant vision. But in 1937 the Peel Commission had suggested ... to leave both the Jewish state and Arab Palestine with the smallest possible minorities. That suggestion had fired Zionist imaginations; now it was possible to think of a future state as 'Jewish' not only by international recognition of the right of Jews to dominate its government but by the inclinations of virtually all of its inhabitants. Such was how the bulk of the Zionist leadership understood the optimal 'Jewish state' in 1948: non-Jews (especially Arabs) might live in it and enjoy all rights of citizenship, but their numbers should be small enough compared to the Jewish population that their impact on public life would be minimal. Israel's leaders were thus not sad at all to see so many Arabs leave its borders during the fighting in 1947–48 ... the 150,000 who remained on Israeli territory seemed to many to constitute an unacceptably high proportion relative to the 650,000 Jews in the country when the state came into being. This perception not only dictated Israel’s adamant opposition to the return of Arab refugees, it reinforced the imperative to bring as many new Jewish immigrants into the country as possible, as quickly as possible, no matter how great or small their prospects for becoming the sort of 'new Jews' the state esteemed most.")
Masalha 2012, p.38, "From the late nineteenth century and throughout the Mandatory period the demographic and land policies of the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine continued to evolve. But its demographic and land battles with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were always a battle for 'maximum land and minimum Arabs' (Masalha 1992, 1997, 2000)."
Lentin 2010, p.7, "'the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space ... Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state' (Pappe 2008: 94)."
Shlaim 2009, p.56, "That most Zionist leaders wanted the largest possible Jewish state in Palestine with as few Arabs inside it as possible is hardly open to question."
Ben-Ami 2007, p.50, "The ethos of Zionism was twofold; it was about demography–ingathering the exiles in a viable Jewish state with as small an Arab minority as possible–and land."
Pappé 2006, p.250, "In other words, hitkansut is the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible."
Morris 2004, p.588, "But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority."
Morris 2001, pp.676–682, "Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement ... Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist ... Zionism was politically expansionist in the sense that from the start, its aim was to turn all of Palestine (and in the movement's pre-1921 maps, the East Bank of the Jordan and the area south of the Litani River as well) into a Jewish state ... The Zionists were intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs; their enterprise, however justified in terms of Jewish suffering and desperation, was tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness ... Zionism had always looked to the day when a Jewish majority would enable the movement to gain control over the country ... Palestine would not be transformed into a Jewish state unless all or much of the Arab population was expelled."
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""
Sternhell 1999: "The difference between religious and secular Zionism, be- tween the Zionism of the Left and the Zionism of the Right, was merely a difference of form and not an essential difference."
Gorny 1987, p.165: "As a member of the Zionist Executive in 1921-3, he [Jabotinsky] soon discovered that what divided him from his colleagues in the Zionist leadership was not political differences, but mainly his style of political action"
Chomsky 1999, Rejectionism and Accommodation: "In essence, then, the two programs are not very different. Their difference lies primarily in style. Labor is, basically, the party of the educated Europe-oriented elite—managers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, etc. Its historical practice has been to "build facts" while maintaining a low-keyed rhetoric with conciliatory tones, at least in public. In private, the position has been that "it does not matter what the Gentiles say, what matters is what the Jews do" (Ben-Gurion) and that "the borders [of Israel] are where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map" (Golda Meir).21 This has been an effective method for obtaining the ends sought without alienating Western opinion—indeed, while mobilizing Western (particularly American) support."
↑ 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.
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
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 Pappé, 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
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
↑ Kühntopf-Gentz, Michael (1990). Nathan Birnbaum: Biographie[Nathan Birnbaum: Biography] (in German). Eberhard-Karls-Universität zu Tübingen. p.39. Archived from the original on July 7, 2023. Retrieved July 7, 2023. Nathan Birnbaum wird immer wieder als derjenige erwähnt, der die Begriffe "Zionismus" und "zionistisch" eingeführt habe, auch sieht er es selbst so, obwohl er es später bereut und Bedauern darüber äußert, wie die von ihm geprägten Begriffe verwendet werden. Das Wort "zionistisch" erscheint bei Birnbaum zuerst in einem Artikel der "Selbst-Emancipation" vom 1 April 1890: "Es ist zu hoffen, dass die Erkenntnis der Richtigkeit und Durchführbarkeit der zionistischen Idee stets weitere Kreise ziehen und in der Assimilationsepoche anerzogene Vorurteile beseitigen wird"[Nathan Birnbaum is repeatedly mentioned as the person who introduced the terms "Zionism" and "Zionist", and he himself sees it that way, although he later regrets it and expresses regret about how the terms he coined are used. The word "Zionist" first appears in Birnbaum's article in "Selbst-Emancipation" on April 1, 1890: "It is to be hoped that the recognition of the correctness and feasibility of the Zionist idea will continue to spread and eliminate prejudices acquired during the assimilation era."]
Gorny 1987, p.210: "This set of assumptions was intended to stress the equal status of the Jews vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and to provide the basis for their superior right to Palestine."
Shapira 1992, pp.41–42: "The basic assumption regarding the right of Jews to Palestine—a right that required no proof—was a fundamental component of all Zionist programs. In contrast with other prospective areas for Jewish settlement, such as Argentina or East Africa, it was generally believed that no one could deny the right of the Jews to their ancestral land... The slogan 'A land without a people for a people without a land' was common among Zionists at the end of the nineteenth, and the beginning of the twentieth, century. It contained a legitimation of the Jewish claim to the land and did away with any sense of uneasiness that a competitor to this claim might appear."
Slater 2020: "According to the standard Zionist and then the Israeli narrative, for a number of reasons the land of Palestine rightfully belongs to the Jewish people—and no others, including today's Palestinians."
Khalidi 2006: "[T]he Zionist claim to Palestine, which since even before the establishment of the state of Israel had depended in some measure on arguing that there was no legitimacy to the competing Arab claim"
Alam 2009: "Zionism was a messianic movement to restore Palestine to its divinely appointed Jewish owners... Conversely, the Palestinian, whether his ancestors were the ancient Canaanites or Hebrews, would forfeit all rights to his lands; he had become a usurper."
Sternhell 1999: "Like all Zionists, Gordon did not recognize the principle of majority rule, and he refused to acknowledge the right of the majority to 'take from us what we have acquired through our work and creativity.' Moreover, he had confidence in the spiritual vitality of the Yishuv, its energy and motivation, and believed it was supported by the entire Jewish people. In 1921, he spoke in much stronger terms than he had between 1909 and 1918: 'For Eretz Israel, we have a charter that has been valid until now and that will always be valid, and that is the Bible, and not only the Bible.'... And now came the decisive argument: 'And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country? Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative, especially since the people that came after us did not create such works in this country, or did not create anything at all.' The founders accepted this point of view. This was the ultimate Zionist argument."
↑ Gorny 1987: "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."
↑ Jacobs 2017, p.274: "In fact Buber also shared the common European Orientalist perspective, by which the local Arabs did not really have a national concern and may be appeased by the cultural and economic benefits that will accrue from Jewish immigration to Palestine."
↑ Penslar 2023, pp.1–2, "Zionism, in turn, is the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine ... Unlike other nationalisms, however, pre-1948 Zionism's claim on territory was aspirational, based in ancient memories and future hopes. Until well into the twentieth century, a negligible number of Jews lived in the Land of Israel ... It is a belief that Jews have a moral right and historic need for self-determination within historic Palestine."
↑ Morris 1999, p.682: "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."
↑ Ben-Ami 2007, pp.22–23: "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."
↑ Finkelstein 2003, Chapter 1: "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."
↑ Gorny 1987, p.2: "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."
↑ Masalha 2014: "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."
↑ Morris 2001: "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"
↑ Morris 2004: "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."
↑ Morris 1999, p.139: "The transfer idea did not originate with the Peel Commission. It goes back to the fathers of modern Zionism and, while rarely given a public airing before 1937, was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement’s inception. It was always clear to the Zionists that a Jewish state would be impossible without a Jewish majority; this could theoretically be achieved through massive immigration, but even then the Arabs would still be a large, threatening minority."
↑ Masalha 2014, Chapter 2: "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)."
Masalha, Nur (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. Institute for Palestine Studies. p.2. 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.
Morris 2001, p.139: "For many Zionists, beginning with Herzl, the only realistic solution lay in transfer. From 1880 to 1920, some entertained the prospect of Jews and Arabs coexisting in peace. But increasingly after 1920, and more emphatically after 1929, for the vast majority a denouement of conflict appeared inescapable. Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream leader was able to conceive of future coexistence and peace without a clear physical separation between the two peoples—achievable only by way of transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and agitators. But this was merely a public pose, designed to calm the worried inhabitants and the troubled British: To speak out loud of inevitable bloodshed and expulsion could only have undermined both internal self-confidence and external support for their cause."
Segev, Tom (2001). One Palestine, Complete. New York: Picador. pp.404–405. ISBN9780805065879.
1 2 Flapan 1979, The Policy of Economic and Social Separation.
↑ Morris 1999, p.51 'Continued 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. Moreover, Arabs living in or on the periphery of colonies were suspected of pilfering and of passing information to hostile villagers and officials.'
↑ "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."
↑ 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.
↑ Penslar 2023, p.27, "The Zionist movement was created by Jews, but from the start it was dependent on support from the Christian world. Restorationism was therefore a prerequisite for the success of Zionism. It is harder to establish, however, whether Christian ideas influenced the nineteenth-century Jews who championed a return to the Land of Israel. It is difficult indeed to trace any such external influences...it may be that direct influence was scant or nonexistent but that the men were all influenced by the dynamic spirit of the age..."
↑ Smith, C. D. (2001). Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (4thed.). Bedford: St. Martin's. pp.1–12, 33–38. ISBN978-0-312-20828-8.
↑ Shimoni 1995: "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."
↑ Cleveland 2010, Chapter 13: "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."
↑ Rovner, Adam (2014). In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York University Press. p.45. ISBN978-1-4798-1748-1. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. 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.
↑ Hazony 2000, p.150: "Recalling his views when he had written "The Jewish State" eight years earlier, he [Herzl] pointed out that at the time, he had openly been willing to consider building on Baron de Hirsch's beginning and establishing the Jewish state in Argentina. But those days were long gone."
↑ Friedman, Motti (2021). Theodor Herzl's Zionist Journey – Exodus and Return. Walter de Gruyter. pp.239–240.
↑ Hazony 2000, p.369: "Herzl decided to explore the East Africa proposal in the wake of the pogrom, writing to Nordau: "We must give an answer to Kishinev, and this is the only one...We must, in a word, play the politics of the hour.""
↑ Tessler, Mark A. (1994). A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. Indiana University Press. p.55–56. ISBN978-0-253-20873-6. Retrieved June 22, 2016. The suggestion that Uganda might be suitable for Jewish colonization was first put forward by Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, who said that he had thought about Herzl during a recent visit to the interior of British East Africa. Herzl, who at that time had been discussing with the British a scheme for Jewish settlement in Sinai, responded positively to Chamberlain's proposal, in part because of a desire to deepen Zionist-British cooperaion and, more generally to show that his diplomatic efforts were capable of bearing fruit.
↑ Rovner, Adam (2014). In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York University Press. p.81. ISBN978-1-4798-1748-1. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. On the afternoon of the fourth day of the Congress a weary Nordau brought three resolutions before the delegates: (1) that the Zionist Organization direct all future settlement efforts solely to Palestine; (2) that the Zionist Organization thank the British government for its other of an autonomous territory in East Africa; and (3) that only those Jews who declare their allegiance to the Basel Program may become members of the Zionist Organization." Zangwill objected... When Nordau insisted on the Congress's right to pass the resolutions regardless, Zangwill was outraged. "You will be charged before the bar of history," he challenged Nordau... From approximately 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1905, a Zionist would henceforth he defined as someone who adhered to the Basel Program and the only "authentic interpretation" of that program restricted settlement activity exclusively to Palestine. Zangwill and his supporters could not accept Nordau's "authentic interpretation" which they believed would lead to an abandonment of the Jewish masses and of Herzl's vision. One territorialist claimed that Ussishkin's voting bloc had in fact "buried political Zionism".
↑ Morris 1999, p.37: "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)."
↑ "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." Flapan 1979, p.261
↑ Gorny 1987: "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."
↑ Robson, Laura (2017). States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. University of California Press. pp.115–116. ISBN978-0-520-29215-4. The members cited the Greek-Turkish exchange as a model for population exchange: "The courage of the Greek and Turkish statesmen has been justified by the result. Before the operation the Greek and Turkish minorities had been a constant irritant. Now Greco-Turkish relations are friendlier than they have ever been before."
↑ Morris 2001, p.140: "But Palestine’s Arabs did not wish to evacuate the land of their ancestors, and they made this very clear... The matter raised ethical questions that troubled the Yishuv from within..."
↑ Gorny 1987, p.323: "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."
↑ Pappé 2004: "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."
↑ Morris 2004: "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."
↑ "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." Khalidi 2020, Chapter 1
↑ Hacohen 1991, p.262 #2:"In meetings with foreign officials at the end of 1944 and during 1945, Ben-Gurion cited the plan to enable one million refugees to enter Palestine immediately as the primary goal and top priority of the Zionist movement.
↑ Hakohen 2003, p.46: "After independence, the government presented the Knesset with a plan to double the Jewish population within four years. This meant bringing in 600,000 immigrants in a four-year period. or 150,000 per year. Absorbing 150,000 newcomers annually under the trying conditions facing the new state was a heavy burden indeed. Opponents in the Jewish Agency and the government of mass immigration 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."
↑ Hakohen 2003, p.246–247: "Both the immigrants' dependence and the circumstances of their arrival shaped the attitude of the host society. The great wave of immigration in 1948 did not occur spontaneously: it was the result of a clear-cut foreign policy decision that taxed the country financially and necessitated a major organizational effort. Many absorption activists, Jewish Agency executives, and government officials opposed unlimited, nonselective immigration; they favored a gradual process geared to the country's absorptive capacity. Throughout this period, two charges resurfaced at every public debate: one, that the absorption process caused undue hardship; two, that Israel's immigration policy was misguided."
↑ Hakohen 2003, p.47: "But as head of the government, entrusted with choosing the cabinet and steering its activities, Ben-Gurion had tremendous power over the country's social development. His prestige soared to new heights after the founding of the state and the impressive victory of the IDF in the War of Independence. As prime minister and minister of defense in Israel's first administration, as well as the uncontested leader of the country's largest political party, his opinions carried enormous weight. Thus, despite resistance from some of his cabinet members, he remained unflagging in his enthusiasm for unrestricted mass immigration and resolved to put this policy into effect."
↑ Hakohen 2003, p.247: "On several occasions, resolutions were passed to limit immigration from European and Arab countries alike. However, these limits were never put into practice, mainly due to the opposition of Ben-Gurion. As a driving force in the emergency of the state, Ben-Gurion—both prime minister and minister of defense—carried enormous weight with his veto. His insistence on the right of every Jew to immigrate proved victorious. He would not allow himself to be swayed by financial or other considerations. It was he who orchestrated the large-scale action that enabled the Jews to leave Eastern Europe and Islamic countries, and it was he who effectively forged Israel's foreign policy. Through a series of clandestine activities carried out overseas by the Foreign Office, the Jewish Agency, the Mossad le-Aliyah, and the Joint Distribution Committee, the road was paved for mass immigration."
↑ Dubnov, Arie M. (2011). "Zionism on the diasporic front". Journal of Israeli History. 30 (2). Informa UK Limited: 211–224. doi:10.1080/13531042.2011.610125. ISSN1353-1042. 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 which are based on a similar presupposition include Heller, The Zionist Idea, and most famously Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea.
1 2 3 Shoham (2013). "From "Great History" to "Small History": The Genesis of the Zionist Periodization". Israel Studies. 18 (1): 31. doi:10.2979/israelstudies.18.1.31. 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".17 by no means could political Zionists consider the existing immigration to Palestine a new wave that could be analogized to the ancient aliyot.
↑ Seidler (2012). "Zionism's Conflicting Founding Designs and Their Ideological Impact". Israel Studies. 17 (3): 176. doi:10.2979/israelstudies.17.3.176. conflicting founding designs...express the formative ideological background underlying the very idea of the State of Israel.
↑ Boyarin, Jonathan (January 6, 2025). "5 Hegel's Zionism?". Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. University of Minnesota Press. pp.137–160. Retrieved January 6, 2025. 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.
↑ Shindler 2015[pageneeded] "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.
↑ Sternhell, Zeev (1998). The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.35.
↑ Cohen, Mitchell (1984). "Ber Borochov and Socialist Zionism". In Cohen, Mitchell (ed.). Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation: Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.
1 2 Perlmutter, Amos (1969). "Dov Ber-Borochov: A Marxist-Zionist Ideologist". Middle Eastern Studies. 5 (1). Taylor & Francis, Ltd.: 32–43. ISSN0026-3206. JSTOR4282273. Retrieved January 6, 2025. 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.
↑ Kimmerling 2006: "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."
↑ McGeever, Brendan (September 26, 2019). The Bolshevik Response to Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-107-19599-8.
↑ Sternhell 1999: "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."
↑ Laqueur 2009: "The two largest of them, Ahdut Ha'avoda and Hapoel Hatzair, merged in January 1930 to form Mapai."
↑ Gorny 1987: "[I]n the thirties... Po'alei-Zion were of marginal political importance"
↑ Flapan 1979: "The importance o f 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."
↑ Jabotinsky 1923: "Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."
↑ Yadgar 2017, Main Zionist Streams and Jewish Traditions.
↑ Asscher, Omri (2021). "Exporting political theology to the diaspora: translating Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook for Modern Orthodox consumption". Meta. 65 (2): 292–311. doi:10.7202/1075837ar. ISSN1492-1421. S2CID234914976. 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]
↑ Kemp, Adriana (2004). Israelis in Conflict: Hegemonies, Identities and Challenges. Sussex Academic Press. pp.314–315.
↑ Goldstein, Jonathan (1999), "The Republic of China and Israel", in Goldstein, Jonathan (ed.), China and Israel, 1948–1998: A Fifty Year Retrospective, Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, pp.1–39
↑ Penslar 2023, p.27: "The Zionist movement was created by Jews, but from the start it was dependent on support from the Christian world."
↑ Pappé 2004: "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."
↑ Penslar 2023, p.27: "Restorationism was therefore a prerequisite for the success of Zionism."
↑ "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." Rabkin 2006
↑ Shapira, Anita (2014). Israel a history. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. p.15. ISBN978-0-297-87158-3.
↑ Allam, Magdi (2007). Viva Israele: Dall'ideologia della morte alla civiltà della vita: La mia storia[Long Live Israel: From the Ideology of Death to the Civilization of Life: My Story] (in Italian). Mondadori. ISBN978-88-04-56777-6.
↑ anonymous. "Mission/Vision". American Congress for Truth. Archived from the original on March 24, 2008. Retrieved April 17, 2008.
↑ Cohen, Stuart A. (1987–1988). "Ideological components in Anglo-Jewish opposition to Zionism before and during the First World War: a restatement". Jewish Historical Studies. 30: 149–162. JSTOR29779843.
↑ Penkower, Monty Noam (Spring 1985). "American Jewry and the Holocaust: From Biltmore to the American Jewish Conference". Jewish Social Studies. 47 (2): 95–114. JSTOR4467289.
↑ Nadler, Allan (2010). "Satmar Hasidic Dynasty". YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Archived from the original on March 18, 2022. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
↑ Bland, Benjamin (2019). "Holocaust inversion, anti-Zionism and British neo-fascism: the Israel–Palestine conflict and the extreme right in post-war Britain". Patterns of Prejudice. 53 (1): 86–97. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2018.1536347. ISSN0031-322X.
↑ Ardi Imseis, "Zionism, Racism, and the Palestinian People: Fifty Years of Human Rights Violations in Israel and the Occupied Territories" (1999) 8 Dal J Leg Stud 1.
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
↑ Perednik, Gustavo. "Judeophobia". The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism. Archived from the original on July 28, 2017. Retrieved December 14, 2018.
"... 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)."
Chomsky, Noam (1999). Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (2nd Ed, revised). South End Press. pp.153–154. ISBN978-0-89608-601-2.
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.
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.
↑ Pappé, Ilan. "Were they expelled?". Zochrot. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. 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.
↑ Slomanson, William R. Fundamental Perspectives on International Law. p.50.
↑ Bishku, Michael B. (February 12, 2011). "India's Israel Policy (review)". The Middle East Journal. 65 (1): 169–170. Archived from the original on March 13, 2018. Retrieved March 12, 2018– via Project MUSE.
↑ Keren-Kratz, Menachem (Winter 2016). "Westernization and Israelization within Israel's Extreme Orthodox Haredi Society". Israel Studies Review. 31 (2): 101–129 [103, 110]. doi:10.3167/isr.2016.310207.
↑ "We oppose the Zionists and their 'state'". Archived from the original on May 15, 2011. 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.
↑ Marcus, Kenneth L. (2007). "Anti-Zionism as Racism: Campus Anti-Semitism and the Civil Rights Act of 1964". William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal. 15 (3): 837–891.
↑ Mitchell, Thomas G. (2000). Native vs. Settler. Greenwood Press. p.48. ISBN978-0-313-31357-8. Archived from the original on May 16, 2015. Retrieved February 14, 2015. To most Arabs the terms Jew or Jewish and Zionist are interchangeable. After the introduction of European anti-Semitism into the Arab world in the thirties and forties through the Axis powers, Arab propaganda has displayed many classic Nazi anti-Semitic claims about the Jews. For public relations purposes the PLO has never wanted to be accused of being anti-Semitic but rather only of being anti-Zionist. Occasionally its leaders slip, as Arafat did when he referred to the "Jewish invasion" in his speech.
Masalha 2012, p.2: "... for decades Zionists themselves used terms such as 'colonisation' (hityashvut) to describe their project in Palestine."
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."
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'."
Liu, James H. (2022). Collective Remembering and the Making of Political Culture. Cambridge University Press. p.190.
Bar-Yosef, Eitan (2012). "A Villa in the Jungle: Herzl, Zionist Culture, and the Great African Adventure". In Gelber, Mark H.; Liska, Vivian (eds.). Theodor Herzl: From Europe to Zion. De Gruyter. pp.100–101. ISBN978-3110936056.
↑ Sternhell 2010: "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."
↑ Shafir 1996, p.xii: "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."
↑ "The first colonists did exploit the cheap native labor, but subsequent generations of immigrants tried to avoid this, for reasons both of morality and expediency, aiming at an exclusive, separate Jewish economy as a basis for an autarchic society and state." (Morris 1999, p.676)
Baker, Cynthia M. (2017). "Zionism's New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew". Jew. Key Words in Jewish Studies. Rutgers University Press. pp.99–110. ISBN978-0-813-57386-1. Retrieved July 10, 2023.
Beauchamp, Zack (May 14, 2018). "What is Zionism?". Vox. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved May 2, 2024.
Doron, Joachim (1980). "Rassenbewusstsein und naturwissenschaftliches Denken im deutschen Zionismus während der wilhelminischen Ära" [Racial Consciousness and Scientific Thinking in German Zionism during the Wilhelminian Era]. Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte (in German). 9: 389–427.
Hacohen, Dvorah (1991). "BenGurion and the Second World War". In Frankel, Jonathan (ed.). Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume VII: Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-536198-8.
Herzl, Theodor (1896). "Palästina oder Argentinien?"[Palestine or Argentina?]. Der Judenstaat[The Jewish State] (in German). sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de. p.29 (31). Archived from the original on August 25, 2016. Retrieved May 27, 2016.
Exodus1947.comArchived December 18, 2021, at the Wayback Machine – PBS Documentary Film focusing on the secret American involvement in Aliyah Bet, narrated by Morley Safer
Note: Forms of nationalism based primarily on ethnic groups are listed above. This does not imply that all nationalists with a given ethnicity subscribe to that form of ethnic nationalism.
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