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Zionism

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Zionism is an international political movement that regards the Jews as a national entity and seeks to preserve that entity. This has primarily focused on the creation of a homeland for the Jewish People in the Promised Land, and (having achieved this goal) continues as support for the modern state of Israel.

Although its origins are earlier, the movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish State. Described as a "diaspora nationalism, its proponents regard it as a national liberation movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people.

While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, where the concept of Jewish nationhood is thought to have first evolved somewhere between 1200 BCE and the late Second Temple era (i.e. up to 70 CE), the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe. It constituted a branch of the broader phenomenon of modern nationalism. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, and after the Holocaust became the dominant Jewish political movement. Opposition to Zionism has arisen on a number of grounds, ranging from religious objections to competing claims of nationalism to political dissent that considers the ideology either immoral or impractical.

Terminology

The word "Zionism" itself is derived from the word "Zion" (Hebrew: ציון, Tzi-yon), one of the names of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, as mentioned in the Bible. It was coined as a term for Jewish nationalism by Austrian Jewish publisher Nathan Birnbaum, founder of the first nationalist Jewish students' movement Kadimah, in his journal Selbstemanzipation (Self Emancipation) in 1890. (Birnbaum eventually turned against political Zionism and became the first secretary-general of the anti-Zionist Haredi movement Agudat Israel.)

Since the founding of the State of Israel, the term "Zionism" is generally considered to mean support for Israel as a Jewish nation state. However, a variety of different, and sometimes competing, ideologies that support Israel fit under the general category of Zionism, such as Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and Labor Zionism. Thus, the term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the programs of these ideologies, such as efforts to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel.

Certain individuals and groups have used the term "Zionism" as a pejorative to justify attacks on Jews. According to historians Walter Laqueur, Howard Sachar and Jack Fischel among others, in some cases, the label "Zionist" is also used as a euphemism for Jews in general by apologists for antisemitism.

Zionism should be distinguished from Territorialism which was a Jewish nationalist movement calling for a Jewish homeland, but not necessarily in Palestine. During the early history of Zionism, a number of proposals were made for settling Jews outside of Europe but these all ultimately were rejected or failed. The debate over these proposals helped define the nature and focus of the Zionist movement.

History of Zionism

Since the first century CE most Jews have lived in exile, although there has been a constant presence of Jews in the Land of Israel. According to Judaism the Jews would return to Eretz Israel with the coming of the Messiah. However in the nineteenth century the current in Judaism supporting an earlier return got more support. Even before 1882, which is generally seen as the year in which practical Zionism started, Jews immigrated to Palestine, the pre-Zionist Aliyah .

Demographics in Palestine
year Jews Arabs
1800 6,700 268,000
1880 24,000 525,000
1915 87,500 590,000
1931 174,000 837,000
1947 630,000 1,310,000

In the 1890s Theodor Herzl infused Zionism with a new and practical urgency. He brought the World Zionist Organization into being and, together with Nathan Birnbaum, planned its First Congress at Basel in 1897. This current in Zionism is known as political Zionism.

In 1882, in response to Herzl's ideas, Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest, the so-called First Aliyah which saw the arrival of about 30,000 Jews over twenty years. Most Jewish refugees came from Russia, where anti-semitism was rampant. They founded a number of agricultural settlements, or moshava, with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. The Second Aliyah followed in 1904. The Third Aliyah of 1919 grew to a constant stream of refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.

Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann and others culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government to Lord Rothschild. This declaration endorsed the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, and is seen as the first political support for Zionism. International support came from the League of nations with the 1922 text of the creation of the British mandate of Palestine :

The Mandatory (…) will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

The Labor Zionism movement in Palestine began to develop. Although it consisted of several parties, in 1920 these parties together founded the Histadrut. The Histadrut did many things for Jewish workers, such as offer a Labor Exchange, health services, and improved labor and living conditions. It was also the largest employer of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. An important task of the Histadrut was also the absorption of immigrants by offering them shelter, jobs and other necesitties. Under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion in the 1930s the dominant party of the labor movement, Mapai, also became the dominant party in the WZO.

To work out the details of the division of Palestine, the British mandate convened the 1937 Peel Commission which called for a two-state solution and forced migration of populations.Caught between conflicting demands by Arabs and Jews, the British repeatedly re-evaluated the Peel commission recommendations. They convened the Woodhead Commission in 1938, the St. James Conference in 1939 and finally the White Paper of 1939 which recommended a great reduction in Jewish immigration at the height of the Nazi Holocaust. This policy led to numerous dramatic incidents, the best known being the story of the Exodus. This also led to attacks by Zionist militants, the best known being the 1946 King David Hotel bombing and the assassination of UN envoy Folke Bernadotte in 1948.

Among Palestinian Arabs there was a lot of popular resistance against Zionism. Riots broke out in 1920, 1921 and 1929, sometimes accompanied by massacres of Jews. From 1936 to 1939 a general Revolt broke out. This revolt was suppressed by the British.

The Zionist goal of a Jewish commonwealth in all of Palestine, as demanded at the Biltmore Conference of 1942, conflicted with the demands of the Palestinian Arabs.

Following the failures of the multiple British conferences on the subject, the Mandatory authorities referred the issue to the newly created United Nations. The UNSCOP was mandated to the region and, in 1947, recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem This partition plan was adopted on November 29th, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote itself, which required a two-third majority, was a very dramatic affair and led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities . On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel.

The next day, the Arab League officially rejected the UN decision, refused to recognize a the Jewish state and declared that, "in order to fill the gap brought about (...) as a result of the termination of the mandate and the non-establishment of a lawful successor authority, the Governments of the Arab States have found themselves compelled to intervene in Palestine" . The same day, the armies of seven Arab countries invaded Palestine, starting the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. During the following eight months, the newly created Israel Defense Forces defended the Jewish partition and conquered portions of the Arab partition to the occupying Arab armies. The 1949 Armistice Agreements made official the enlargement of the Jewish state and proposed a border that, to this day, constitutes the internationally-recognized border of the State of Israel. During the war, 711,000 Palestinian refugees fled the Jewish state.

After the creation of the State of Israel the WZO continued to exist as an organisation that supported Israel.

Types of Zionism

Labor Zionism

Around 1900 the chief rival to Zionism among young Jews in Eastern Europe was the socialist movement. Many Jews were abandoning Judaism in favour of Communism or supported the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement which called for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish language.

Opposition to this led to the emergence of a new Zionist movement, the socialist Zionists, who believed that the Jews' centuries of being oppressed in anti-Semitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence which invited further 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 socialist Zionists rejected religion as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people and established rural communes in Israel called "Kibbutzim". Major theoreticians of Socialist Zionism included Moses Hess, Nahum Syrkin, Ber Borochov and Aaron David Gordon, and leading figures in the movement included David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson. Most Socialist Zionists rejected Yiddish as a language of exile, embracing Hebrew as the common Jewish tongue. A major exception was Borochov, committed Yiddishist and Yiddish philologist who wrote extensively on the importance of the language. Socialist and Labor Zionism was ardently secularist with many Labor Zionists being committed atheists or opposed to religion. Consequently, the movement often had an antagonistic relationship with Orthodox Judaism.

Labor Zionism was the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine - partly as a consequence of its role in organizing Jewish economic life through the Histadrut - and was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election when the Labor Party was defeated.

General Zionism

General Zionism (or Liberal Zionism) was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the first Zionist Congress in 1897 until the First World War, after which Labour Zionism was ascendant and the Zionist movement was becoming polarized between the Labour Zionists on the left and Revisionists on the right. The General Zionist movement identified with the liberal European Jewish middle class (or bourgeois) from which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann came and believed that a Jewish state could be accomplished through lobbying the Great Powers of Europe and influential circles in European society. The decline of General Zionism within the Zionist movement and the growing polarization within the movement was reflected in 1922 by the need of General Zionists to officially declare themselves a tendency in the Zionist Congress where, previously, they enjoyed such hegemony over the movement that it was not necessary to organize themselves as a formal faction.

Religious Zionism

In the 1920s and 1930s, a small but vocal group of religious Jews began to develop the concept of Religious Zionism under such leaders as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine) and his son Zevi Judah, and gained substantial following during the latter half of the 20th century. Kook was concerned that growing secularization of Zionism and antagonism towards it from the Orthodox Jews would lead to a schism. He therefore sought to create a brand of Judaism which would serve as a bridge between Orthodoxy and secular Jews.

Revisionist Zionism

The Revisionist Zionists were a group led by Jabotinsky who advocated pressing Britain to allow mass Jewish emigration and the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine. The army would force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration and promote British interests in the region.

Revisionist Zionism was detested by the Socialist Zionist movement which saw them as being influenced by Fascism and the movement caused a great deal of concern among Arab Palestinians. After the 1929 Arab riots, the British banned Jabotinsky from entering Palestine.

Revisionism was popular in Poland but lacked large support in Palestine. In 1935 the Revisionists left the Zionist Organization and formed an alternative, the New Zionist Organization. They rejoined the ZO in 1946.

The negation of the Diaspora

According to Eliezer Schweid the rejection of life in the Diaspora is a central assumption in all currents of Zionism. Underlying this attitude was the feeling that the Diaspora restricted the full growth of Jewish national life. For instance the poet Bialik wrote:
And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ...
How burned, how blasted must our portion be,
If seed like this is withered in its soil. ...
According to Schweid Bialik meant that the “seed” was the potential of the Jewish people, which they preserved in the Diaspora, where it could only give rise to deformed results. However once conditions changed the “seed” could still give a plentiful harvest.

In this matter Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism. One was the liberal or utilitarian school of Herzl and Nordau. Especially after the Dreyfus Affair they held that anti-Semitism would never disappear, and saw Zionism as a rational solution for Jewish individuals. The other was the organic nationalist school. It was prevalent among the Zionists in Palestine, and saw Zionism as a project to rescue the Jewish nation and not as a project to rescue Jewish individuals. Zionism was a matter of the "Rebirth of the Nation".

Anti-Zionism and post-Zionism

There are a number of critics of Zionism, ranging from Jewish anti-Zionists to pro-Palestinian activists. Some of the most vocal critics of Zionism have tended to be Palestinians and other Arabs, many of whom view Israel as wrongfully occupying what they view as the Arab land of Palestine. Such critics generally opposed Israel's creation in 1948, and continue to criticize the Zionist movement which underlies it. These critics view the changes in demographic balance which accompanied the creation of Israel, including the displacement of some 700,000 Arab refugees,, and the accompanying violence, as negative but inevitable consequences of Zionism and the concept of a Jewish State. Critics of Zionism, such as Joseph Massad have asserted that Zionism is a form of racism, both in its support of Israel as a Jewish State, and in its continuing policies such as the Law of Return.

While most Jewish groups are pro-Zionist, some small liberal and Haredi Jewish communities (most vocally the Satmar Hasidim and the Neturei Karta group), oppose Zionism on religious grounds. Other non-Zionist Israeli movements, such as the Canaanite movement led by poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s, have argued that "Israeli" should be a new pan-ethnic nationality. A related modern movement is known as post-Zionism, which asserts that Israel should abandon the concept of a "state of the Jewish people" and instead strive to be a state of all its citizens. Another opinion favors a binational state in which Arabs and Jews live together while enjoying some type of autonomy, as in Belgium.

In defense of criticism, Zionists reject the charges that Zionism is racist, insisting it is no different than any other national liberation movement of oppressed peoples, and argue that since criticism of both the state of Israel and Zionism is often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, much of it can be attributed to antisemitism.

Non-Jewish Zionism

Marcus Garvey and "Black Zionism"

Zionist success in winning British support for formation of a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine helped inspire the African-American Nationalist Marcus Garvey to form a movement dedicated to returning Americans of African origin to Africa. During a speech in Harlem in 1920 Garvey stated that
other races were engaged in seeing their cause through---the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement---and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro's interest through.
Garvey established a shipping company, the Black Star Line, to ship Black Americans to Africa, but for various reasons failed in his endeavour. His ideas helped inspire the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, the Black Jews and the Black Hebrews who initially moved to Liberia before settling in Israel.

Christian Zionism

In addition to Jewish Zionism, there was always a small number of Christian Zionists that existed from the early days of the Zionist movement. According to Charles Merkley of Carleton University, Christian Zionism strengthened significantly after the 1967 Six-Day War, and many dispensationalist Christians, especially in the United States, now strongly support Zionism.

Throughout the entire 19th century and early 20th century, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land was widely supported by such eminent figures as Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, John Adams, the second President of the United States, General Smuts of South Africa, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, British Prime Ministers Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, President Woodrow Wilson, Benedetto Croce, Italian philosopher and historian, Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and author of the Geneva Conventions, Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian scientist and humanitarian. The French government through Minister M. Cambon formally committed itself to “the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago". In China, Wang, Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared that "the Nationalist government is in full sympathy with the Jewish people in their desire to establish a country for themselves.

Muslims supporting Zionism

Most Muslim public figures oppose Zionism; there is no organized Zionist movement among Muslims. There are, however, a few Muslim thinkers who publicly express Zionist views. The best known is Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the leader of Italian Muslim Assembly and a co-founder of the Islam-Israel Fellowship. In 2005, Palazzi told FrontPage Magazine "I find in the Qur'an that God granted the Land of Israel to the Children of Israel and ordered them to settle therein and that before the Last Day He will bring the Children of Israel to retake possession of their Land, gathering them from different countries and nations (). Consequently, as a Muslim who abides by the Qur'an, I believe that opposing the existence of the State of Israel means opposing a Divine decree."

Other public Muslim figures supporting Zionism include Magdi Allam, Salah Choudhury and Tashbih Sayyed, who calls himself a 'Muslim Zionist'..

Footnotes

References

  • Taylor, A.R., 1971, 'Vision and intent in Zionist Thought', in 'The transformation of Palestine', ed. by I. Abu-Lughod, ISBN 0-8101-0345-1, Northwestern university press, Evanston, USA
  • David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael B. Oren, eds., "New Essays on Zionism," Shalem Press, 2007.

See also

Types of Zionism

Zionist institutions and organizations

History of Zionism and Israel

Other

External links



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