Zionism is a political movement among Jews holding that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland. Formally founded in 1897, Zionism embraced a variety of opinions in its early years on where that homeland might be established. From 1917 it focussed on the establishment of a Jewish homeland or state in Palestine, the location of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Since 1948, Zionism has been a movement to support the development and defence of the State of Israel, and to encourage Jews to settle there.
(Although this article defines Zionism as a political movement among Jews, the term Zionist can be applied to any supporter of Zionism. Some Christians support Zionism for religious reasons: See Christian Zionism.)
The word "Zionist" derives from the word "Zion" (Hebrew: ציון, Tziyyon), being one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible. To diaspora Jews Zion has been a symbol of the Holy Land and of their return to it, as promised by God in Biblical prophecies.
Zionism has always had both religious and secular aspects, reflecting the dual nature of Jewish identity, as both a religion (Judaism) and as a national or ethnic identity (Jewishness). Many religious Jews opposed Zionism, while some of the founders of the State of Israel were atheists.
Religious Jews believe that since the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) was given to the ancient Israelites by God, the right of the Jews to that land is permanent and inalienable. Despite this, most religious Jews were not enthusiastic about Zionism before the 1930s, and many religious organisations opposed it outright, on the grounds that an attempt to re-establish Jewish rule in Israel by human agency is blasphemous, since only the Messiah can accomplish this. The secular, socialist language used by many pioneer Zionists was contrary to the outlook of most religious Jewish communities. There was, however, a small but vocal group of religious Jews, led by the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, that supported Zionism and cooperation with the secular majority in Palestine. Only the desperate circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s converted most (though not all) of these communities to Zionism.
Secular Jewish opinion was also ambivalent in its attitudes to Zionism. Many argued that Jews should join with other progressive forces in bringing about changes which would eradicate anti-Semitism and make it possible for Jews to live in safety in the various countries where they lived. Before the 1930s, many Jews believed that socialism offered a better strategy for improving the lot of European Jews. In the United States, most Jews embraced the liberalism of their adopted country and were lukewarm towards Zionism.
The chain of events between the 1890s and 1945, however, beginning with anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and culminating in the Holocaust, in which perhaps a third of all Jews were killed, converted the great majority of surviving Jews to the belief that a Jewish homeland was an urgent necessity, particularly given the large population of disenfranchised Jewish refugees after World War II. Most also became convinced that Palestine was the only location that was both acceptable to all strands of Jewish thought and within the realms of practical possibility. This led to the great majority of Jews supporting the struggle between 1945 and 1948 to establish the State of Israel, though many did not condone the violent tactics used by some Zionist groups.
Since 1948 most Jews have continued to identify as Zionists, in the sense that they support the State of Israel even if they do not choose to live there. This worldwide support has been of vital importance to Israel, both politically and financially. This has been particularly true since 1967, as the rise of Palestinian nationalism and the resulting political and military struggles have eroded sympathy for Israel among non-Jews, at least outside the United States. In recent years, many Jews have criticised the morality and expediency of Israel's continued occupation of the territories captured in 1967.
The desire of Jews to return to their ancestral homeland became a universal Jewish theme after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 AD, the defeat of Simeon Bar Kochba in 135, and the dispersal of the Jews to other parts of the Empire that followed. Until the rise of political Zionism, however, most Jews believed that the Jewish people would only return to Israel with the coming of the Messiah, that is, after divine intervention.
The Emancipation of Jews in European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the spread of western liberal ideas among a section of newly emancipated Jews, created for the first time a class of secular Jews, who absorbed the prevailing ideas of rationalism, romanticism and, most importantly, nationalism. Jews who had abandoned Judaism, at least in its traditional forms, began to develop a new Jewish identity, as a "nation" in the European sense. They were inspired by various national struggles, such as those for German and Italian unification, and for Polish and Hungarian independence. If Italians and Poles were entitled to a homeland, they asked, why were Jews not so entitled?
Before the 1890s there had already been attempts to settle Jews in Palestine, which was in the 19th century a part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by about 450,000 people, mostly Muslim and Christian Arabs (although there had never been a time when there were no Jews in Palestine). Pogroms in Russia and Russian Poland led Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and the Rothschilds to sponsor agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in Palestine in the late 1870s, culminating in a small group of immigrants from Russia arriving in the country in 1882. This has become known in Zionist history as the First Aliyah (aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning "ascent.")
The key event triggering the modern Zionist political movement was the Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in France in 1894. Jews were profoundly shocked to see this outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism in a country which they thought of as the home of enlightenment and liberty. Among those who witnessed the Affair was an Austrian-Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, who published his pamphlet Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896. In 1897 Herzl organised a congress in Basel, Switzerland, which founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and elected Herzl as its first President.
The WZO's initial strategy was to obtain the permission of the Ottoman Sultan to allow systematic Jewish settlement in Palestine. The good offices of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, were sought, but nothing came of this. Instead the WZO pursued a strategy of building a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration, and the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund in 1901 and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in 1903.
Before 1917 some Zionist leaders took seriously proposals for Jewish homelands in places other than Palestine. Herzl's Der Judenstaat argued for a Jewish state in either Argentina or Palestine, both being equally acceptable. In 1903, Herzl introduced a controversial proposal to the 6th Zionist Congress to investigate an offer brought to him for Jewish settlement in Uganda (actually in Kenya). Although the proposal proved very divisive and sparked a walkout led by the Russian Jewish delegation to the Congress, a majority voted to establish a committee for the investagation of the possibility. It was not dismissed until the 7th Zionist Congress in 1905. In response to this, the Jewish Territorialist Organization led by Israel Zangwill split off from the main Zionist movement. The territoralists attempted to establish a Jewish homeland wherever possible, but went into decline after 1917 and were dissolved in 1925. From that time Palestine was the sole focus of Zionist aspriations. Few Jews took seriously the establishment by the Soviet Union of a Jewish Autonomous Republic in the Russian Far East.
One of the major motivations for Zionism was the belief that the Jews needed a country of their own, not just as a refuge from anti-Semitism, but in order to become a "normal people." Some Zionists, mainly socialist Zionists, believed that the Jews' centuries of marginalised existence in anti-Semitic societies had distorted the Jewish character, reducing Jews to a parasitic existence which further fostered anti-Semitism. They argued that Jews should redeem themselves from their history by becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. These Zionists generally rejected religion as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people.
One such Zionist ideologue, Ber Borochov, proposed the creation of a society based on an "inverted pyramid," where the "proletariat," both Jewish and Arab, dominated the society. Another, A. D. Gordon, was influenced by the volkisch ideas of European romantic nationalism, and proposed establishing a society of Jewish peasants. These two thinkers, and others like them, motivated the establishment of the first Jewish collective settlement, or kibbutz, Deganiah, on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, in 1909 (the same year that the city of Tel Aviv was established). Deganiah, and many other kibbutzim that were soon to follow, attempted to realise these thinkers' vision by creating a communal villages, where newly arrived European Jews would be taught agriculture and other manual skills.
Another aspect of this strategy was the revival and fostering of an "indigenous" Jewish culture and the Hebrew language. One early Zionist thinker, Asher Ginsberg, better known by his penname Ahad Ha'am ("One of the People") rejected what he regarded as the over-emphasis of political Zionism on statehood, at the expense of the revival of Hebrew culture. Ahad Ha'am recognised that the effort to achieve independence in Palestine would bring Jews into conflict with the native Palestinian Arab population, as well as with the Ottomans and European colonial powers then eying the country. Instead, he proposed that the emphasis of the Zionist movement shift to efforts to revive the Hebrew language and create a new culture, free from Diaspora influences, that would unite Jews and serve as a common denominator between diverse Jewish communities once independence was achieved.
The most prominent follower of this idea was Eliezer Ben Yehudah, a linguist intent on reviving Hebrew as a spoken language among Jews (see History of the Hebrew language). Most European Jews in the 19th century spoke Yiddish, a language based on mediaeval German, but as of the 1880s, Ben Yehudah and his supporters began promoting the use and teaching of a modernised form of biblical Hebrew, which had not been a living language for nearly 2,000 years. Despite Herzl's efforts to have German proclaimed the official language of the Zionist movement, the use of Hebrew was adopted as official policy by Zionist organisations in Palestine, and served as an important unifying force among the Jewish settlers, many of whom also took new Hebrew names.
The development of the first Hebrew-speaking city (Tel Aviv), the kibbutz movement, and other Jewish economic institutions, plus the use of Hebrew, began by the 1920s the lay the foundations of a new nationality, which would come into formal existence in 1948. Meanwhile, other cultural Zionists attempted to create new Jewish artforms, including graphic arts. (Boris Schatz, a Bulgarian artist, founded the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1906). Others, such as dancer and artist Baruch Agadati, fostered popular festivals such as the Adloyada carnival on Purim.
The Zionist leaders always saw Britain as a key potential ally in the struggle for a Jewish homeland. Not only was Britain the world's greatest imperial power; it was also a country where Jews lived in peace and security, among them influential political and cultural leaders, such as Benjamin Disraeli and Walter, Lord Rothschild. There was also a peculiar streak of philo-Semitism among the classically educated British elite to which the Zionist leaders hoped to appeal, just as the Greek independence movement had appealed to British phil-Hellenism during the Greek War of Independence. Chaim Weizmann, who became the leader of the Zionist movement after Herzl's death in 1904, was a professor at a British university, and used his extensive contacts to lobby the British government for a statement in support of Zionist aspirations.
This hope was realised in 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, made his famous Declaration in favour of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Balfour was motived partly by philo-Semitic sentiment, partly by a desire to weaken the Ottoman Empire (an ally of Germany during the First World War), and partly by a desire to strengthen support for the Allied cause in the United States, home to the world's most influental Jewish community. In the Declaration, however, Balfour was careful to use the word "homeland" rather than "state," and also to specify that the establishment of a Jewish homeland must not "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
The early Zionists were well aware that Palestine was already occupied by Arabs, who had constituted the majority of the population there for over a thousand years. The Zionist leaders generally shared the attitudes of other Europeans of the period in the matters of race and culture. In this view the Arabs were one of the world's many primitive races, who could only benefit from Jewish colonisation. This attitude led to the opposition of the Arabs being ignored, or even to their presence being denied, as in Israel Zangwill's famous slogan "A land without a people, for a people without a land". Generally though, such myths were propaganda invented by leaders who saw the Arabs as an obstacle to overcome, but not a serious one. It was hoped that the wishes of the local Arabs could be simply bypassed by forging agreements with the Ottoman authorities, or with Arab rulers outside Palestine.
One of the earlier Zionists to warn against these ideas was Ahad Ha'am, who warned in his 1891 essay "Truth from Eretz Israel" that in Palestine "it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled", and moreover
Nevertheless, despite clear signs that a true Palestinian nationalism was arising, much the same range of opinion could be found among Zionist leaders after 1920. However, the division between these camps did not match the main threads in Zionist politics so cleanly as is often portrayed. To take an example, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Vladimir Jabotinsky, is often presented as having had an extreme pro-expulsion view but the proofs offered for this are rather thin. According to Jabotinsky's Iron Wall (1923), an agreement with the Arabs was impossible, since they
The situation with socialist Zionists such as David Ben-Gurion was also ambiguous. In public Ben-Gurion upheld the official position of his party that denied the necessity of force in achieving Zionist goals. The argument was based on the denial of a unique Palestinian identity coupled with the belief that eventually the Arabs would realise that Zionism was to their advantage. Privately, however, Ben-Gurion knew that the Arab opposition amounted to a total rejection of Zionism grounded in fundamental principle, and that a confrontation was unavoidable. In 1937, Ben-Gurion and almost all of his party leadership supported a British proposal to create a small Jewish state from which the Arabs had been removed by force. The British plan was soon shelved, but the idea of a Jewish state with a minimal population of Arabs remained an important thread in Labour Zionist thought throughout the remaining period until the creation of Israel.
The attitude of the Zionist leaders towards the Arab population of Palestine in the lead-up to the 1948 conflict is one of the most hotly debated issues in Zionist history. This article does not cover it; see Israel-Palestinian conflict and Palestinian exodus.
With the defeat and dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations in 1922, the Zionist movement entered a new phase of activity. Its priorities were the escalation of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the building of the institutional foundations of a Jewish state, raising funds for these purposes, and persuading - or forcing - the British authorities not to take any steps which would lead to Palestine moving towards independence as an Arab-majority state. The 1920s did see a steady growth in the Jewish population and the construction of state-like Jewish institutions, but also saw the emergence of Palestinian Arab nationalism and growing resistance to Jewish immigration.
International Jewish opinion remained divided on the merits of the Zionist project. Many prominent Jews in Europe and the United States opposed Zionism, arguing that a Jewish homeland was not needed because Jews were able to live in the democratic countries of the West as equal citizens. Albert Einstein, one of the best-known Jews in the world, said: "I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain, especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks." The many Jews who embraced socialism opposed Zionism as a form of reactionary nationalism. The General Jewish Labor Union, or Bund, which represented socialist Jews in eastern Euopope, was strongly anti-Zionist. The Communist parties, which attracted substantial Jewish support during the 1920s and 1930s, were even more violently anti-Zionism. At the other extreme, some American Jews went so far as to say that the United States was Zion, and the successful absorption of 2 million Jewish immigrants in the 30 years before the First World War lent force to this argument.
But the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 produced a powerful new impetus for Zionism. Not only did it create a flood of Jewish refugees — at a time when the United States had closed its doors to further immigration — but it undermined the faith of Jews that they could live in security as minorities in non-Jewish societies. Jewish opinion began to shift in favour of Zionism, and pressure for more Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. But the more Jews settled in Palestine, the more aroused Palestinian Arab opinion became, and the more difficult the situation became in Palestine. In 1936 serious Arab rioting broke out, and in response the British authorities issued the White Paper, severely restricting further Jewish immigration.
The Jewish community in Palestine responded by organising armed forces, based on smaller units developed to defend remote agricultural settlements. Two military movements were founded, the Labor-dominated Haganah and the Revisionist Irgun. The latter group did not hesitate to take military action against the Arab population. With the advent of World War II, both groups decided that defeating Hitler took priority over the fight against the British. However, attacks against British targets were recommenced in 1940 by a splinter group of the Irgun, later known as Lehi, and in 1944 by the Irgun itself.
The revelation of the fate of six million European Jews killed during the Holocaust had several consequences. Firstly, it left hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees (or displaced persons) in camps in Europe, unable or unwilling to return to homes in countries which they felt had betrayed them to the Nazis. Not all of these refugees wanted to go to Palestine, and in fact many of them eventually went to other countries, but large numbers of them did, and they resorted to increasingly desperate measures to get there.
Secondly, it evoked a world-wide feeling of sympathy with the Jewish people, mingled with guilt that more had not been done before the war to deter Hitler's aggressions or help Jews escape from Europe. This was particularly the case in the United States. Among those who became strong supporters of the Zionist ideal was President Harry Truman, who used the great power of his position to mobilise support at the United Nations for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine (despite considerable opposition from his State Department). Since Britain was desperate to withdraw from Palestine, this was the crucial factor in the creation of Israel.
Thirdly, it swung world Jewish opinion almost unanimously behind the project of a Jewish state in Palestine, and within Palestine it led to a greater resolution to use force to achieve that objective. American Reform Judaism was among the elements of Jewish thought which changed their opinions about Zionism after the Holocaust. The proposition that Jews could live in peace and security in non-Jewish societies was certainly a difficult one to defend in 1945, although it one of the ironies of Zionist history that in the decades since World War II anti-Semitism has greatly declined as a serious political force in most western countries, and Jewish communities continue to live and prosper outside Israel.
In 1947 Britain announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine, and on 29 November the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state (with Jerusalem becoming an international enclave). Civil war between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine erupted immediately. On 14 May 1948 the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine made a declaration of independence, and the state of Israel was established. This marked a major turning point in the Zionist movement, as its principal goal had now been accomplished. Many Zionist institutions were reshaped: the three military movements combined to form the Israel Defence Forces. The majority of the Arab population having either fled or been expelled during the War of Indendence, Jews were now a majority of the population within the 1948 ceasefire lines, which became Israel's de facto borders until 1967. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return which granted all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel. This, together with the influx of Jewish refugees from Europe and the later flood of Jews from Arab countries, had the effect of creating a large and apparently permanent Jewish majority in Israel.
Since 1948 the international Zionist movement has undertaken a variety of roles in support of Israel. These have included the encouragement of immigration, assisting the absorption and integration of immigrants, fundraising on behalf of settlement and development projects in Israel, the encouragement of private capital investment in Israel, and mobilisation of world public opinion in support of Israel.
The 1967 war between Israel and the Arab states (the "Six-Day War") marked a major turning point in the history of Israel and of Zionism. Israeli forces occupied the western half of Jerusalem, including the holiest of Jewish religious sites, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple. They also occupied the remaining territories of pre-1948 Palestine, the West Bank (seized from Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (from Egypt). Religious Jews regarded the West Bank (ancient Judaea and Samaria) as an integral part of Eretz Israel, and within Israel voices of the political right soon began to argue that these territories should be permanently retained. Zionist groups began to build Jewish settlements in the territories as a means of establishing "facts on the ground" that would make an Israeli withdrawal impossible.
The 1968 conference of the WZO adopted the following principles:
From this point the history of Israel and the Palestinians can be followed in the article Israel-Palestinian conflict.
In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution which said that "Zionism is a form of racism." This resolution was rescinded in 1991. This issue is discussed in the article on anti-Zionism.
More than 50 years after the founding of Israel, and after more than 80 years of Arab-Jewish conflict over the territory that is now Israel, the great majority of Jews in all countries continue to regard themselves as Zionists and to support Israel in all circumstances, although many have misgivings about current Israeli policies. Some liberal or socialist Jews outside Israel, as well as some Orthodox Jewish communities, still oppose Zionism as a matter of principle. Well-known Jewish scholars and statesmen who have opposed Zionism include Bruno Kreisky, Hans Fromm and Michael Selzer. In the United States Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein have continued to oppose Zionism, although few argue that the Jewish settlement of Palestine should actually be reversed. Most argue for the establishment of a secular binational state in which Arabs and Jews live together.
Criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories has become sharper since Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel, but the majority of Jews in all countries continue to publicly support Israel in all circumstances, whatever misgivings they may have about current Israeli policies. Some elements of Orthodox Judaism remain anti-Zionist, although important Orthodox groups such as the Agudat Israel have changed their positions since 1948 and now actively support Israel, often assuming very right-wing stances regarding important political questions such as the peace process. Today, the overwhelming majority of Jewish organisations and denominations are strongly pro-Zionist.
Among the important minority threads within Zionism is one that holds Israelis to be new nationality, not merely the representatives of world Jewry. The "Canaanite" or "Hebrew Renaissance" movement led by poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s was built on this idea. A modern movement which is partly based on the same idea is known as Post-Zionism. There is no agreement on how this movement is defined, nor even of which persons belong to it, but the most common idea is that Israel should leave behind the concept of a "state of the Jewish people" and instead strive to be a state of all its citizens according to pluralistic democratic values. Self-identified Post-Zionists differ on many important details, such as the status of the Law of Return. Critics tend to associate Post-Zionism with anti-Zionism or postmodernism, both charges strenuously denied.
Another persistent opinion favors a binational state in which Arabs and Jews live together while enjoying some type of ethnic autonomy. Variants of the idea were proposed by Chaim Weizmann in the 1930s and by the Ichud (Unity) group in the 1940s, which included such prominent figures as Judah Magnes (first dean of The Hebrew University) and Martin Buber. The emergence of Israel as a Jewish state with a small Arab minority made the idea irrelevant, but it was revived after the 1967 war left Israel in control of a large Arab population. Never more than the opinion of a small minority, the idea is nevertheless supported by a few prominent intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and (since 2003) Meron Benvenisti.
Zionist is frequently used by anti-Semitic groups as a euphemism for "Jew." This was also a common practice in the Soviet Union and its satellites, notably Poland, before their collapse in 1991. See Zionist Occupied Government for an example of the current use of the term Zionist in this way.The Jews and Zion
Establishment of the Zionist Movement
Zionist strategies
Zionism and the Arabs
Though there had already been Arab protests to the Ottoman authories in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist enterprise became known. This opposition did not arise out of Palestinian nationalism, which was in its mere infancy at the time, but out of a sense of threat to the livelihood of the Arabs. This sense was heightened in the early years of the 20th century by the Zionist attempts to develop an economy in which Arabs were largely redundant, such as the "Hebrew labor" movement that campaigned against the employment of Arabs. The severing of Palestine from the rest of the Arab world in 1918 and the Balfour Declaration were seen by the Arabs as proof that their fears were coming to fruition.
The solution, according to Jabotinsky, was not expulsion (which he was "prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never [do]") but to impose the Jewish presence on the Arabs by force of arms until eventually they came to accept it. Only late in his life did Jabotinsky speak of the desirability of Arab emigration though still without unequivocally advocating an expulsion policy. The struggle for Palestine
Zionism and Israel
The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza placed Israel in the position of an occupying power over a large population of Palestinian Arabs. Whether or not there had been a distinct Palestinian national identity in the 1920s may be debated, but there is no doubt that by the 1960s such an identity was firmly established - the founders of Zionism had thus, ironically, created two new nationalities, Israeli and Palestinian, instead of one. The faith of the Palestinians in the willingness and ability of the Arab states to defeat Israel and return Palestine to Arab rule was detroyed by the war, and the death of the most militant Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in 1969 reinforced the belief of Palestinians that they had been abandoned. The Palestine Liberation Organisation, created in 1965 as an Egyptian-controlled propaganda device, took on new life as an autonomous movement led by Yasser Arafat, and soon turned to armed struggle (or "terrorism" as it's enemies would label it) as its principal means of struggle.Zionism today
Relevant articles
References
External links
Jewish denominations' view of Zionism