Zionism

Zionism is an international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine and continues primarily as support for the modern state of Israel.

The term "Zionism" is derived from the word Zion (Hebrew: ציון, Tzi-yon), originally referring to Mount Zion, a mountain near Jerusalem. In many biblical verses, the Israelites were called the people, sons or daughters of Zion. Although its origins are earlier, the Zionist movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late nineteenth century. The movement was eventually succeeded in establishing the state of Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish nation.

While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the situtiona of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, becoming the dominant Jewish political movement after the Holocaust.

History

Since the first century C.E. most Jews have lived in exile, although there has been a constant presence of Jews in the Land of Israel. In Jewish tradition, Eretz Israel, or Zion, is a land promised to the Jews by God, dating back to God's covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Following the second century Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were expelled from Palestine to form the Jewish diaspora.

Jews are known to have immigrated to Palestine and lived in the region throughout the last millennium, though not in large numbers. In the nineteenth century a current in Judaism supporting the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the traditional Land of Israel grew in popularity.

Demographics in Palestine

year	Jews	Non-Jews
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

Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest in 1882. The so-called First Aliyah (first return) saw the arrival of about 30,000 Jews over 20 years. Most immigrants came from Russia, where antisemitism was a major problem. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. The Second Aliyah started in 1904. Further Aliyahs followed between the two World Wars, fueled in the 1930s by Nazi persecution.

In the 1890s Theodor Herzl infused Zionism with a new and practical urgency. He founded the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and, together with Nathan Birnbaum, planned its first congress at Basel in 1897. The ruling power of the area up until 1917 was the Ottoman Empire, followed by Britain on behalf of the League of Nations until after WWII.

Population of Palestine by religions

year	Muslims	Jews	Christians	Others
1922	486,177	83,790	71,464	7,617
1931	493,147	174,606	88,907	10,101
1941	906,551	474,102	125,413	12,881
1946	1,076,783	608,225	145,063	15,488

Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann and others culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government. This declaration endorsed the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. In 1922, the League of nations endorsed the declaration in the mandate it gave to Britain:

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.

Palestinian Arabs resisted Zionist migration. There were riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, sometimes accompanied by massacres of Jews. Britain supported Jewish immigration in principle, but in reaction to Arab violence imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration to the area.

In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany and, in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws made German Jews (and later Austrian and Czech Jews) stateless refugees. Similar rules were subsequently applied by Nazi allies in Europe. The subsequent growth in Jewish migration led to the1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine which in turn led the British to establish the Peel Commission to investigate the situation. The commission called for a two-state solution and compulsory transfer of populations. This solution was rejected by the British and instead the White Paper of 1939 proposed an end to Jewish immigration by 1944, with a further 75,000 to be admitted by then. In principle, the British stuck to this policy until the end of the Mandate.

After WWII and the Holocaust, support for Zionism increased, especially among Jewish Holocaust survivors and those who sympathized with them. Because of the restrictions on Jewish immigration, the British were attacked in Palestine by some Zionist groups, the best known being the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. Unable to resolve the conflict, the British referred the issue to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, the UNSCOP recommended the partition of western Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem. This partition plan was adopted on November 29, 1947 with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote itself, which required a two-thirds majority, was a very dramatic affair and led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities.

The Arab states rejected the UN decision, demanding a single state with an Arab majority, and violence immediately exploded in Palestine]] between Jews and Arabs. On May 14, 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency led by David Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel. On the same day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Saudi Arabia joined forces against the newly created Israel.

During the following eight months, Israel forces defended the Jewish partition and conquered portions of the Arab partition, enlarging its portion to 78 percent of British mandatory Palestine. The conflict led to an exodus of about more than 700,000 Arab Palestinians , of whom about 46,000 became internally displaced persons in Israel. The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which included new cease-fire lines, the so-called Green line.

After the war the Arab nations continued to reject Israel's right to exist and demanded that it retreat to the 1947 partition lines. They sustained this demand until 1967 when the rest of western Palestine was conquered by Israel during the Six-Day War, after which Arab states demanded that Israel retreat to the 1949 cease fire line, the only "borders" currently recognized by the international community. These borders are commonly referred as the "pre-1967 borders" or the "green line." The border with Egypt was legalized in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, and the border with Jordan in the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace.

After the creation of the State of Israel the WZO continued to exist as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel, as well as providing political support for Israel.

Types of Zionism

Labor Zionism

Around 1900 the chief rival to Zionism among young Jews in Eastern Europe was the socialist movement in its various manifestations. Many Jews were abandoning Judaism in favor of democratic socialism and communism, and many others supported the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement which called for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish language.

Many socialist Zionists originated in Russia. They believed that centuries of being oppressed in antisemitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence which invited further antisemitism. In their view, the best protection for Jews was to become farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Most labor Zionists rejected religion as perpetuating a "diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people. After emigrating, they established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim," which became a mainstay of the Jewish population there in the early twentieth century.

Major theoreticians of labor Zionism included Moses Hess, Nahum Syrkin, Ber Borochov and Aaron David Gordon. Leading political figures in the movement included David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson. Most labor Zionists embraced Hebrew as the common Jewish tongue, rejecting Yiddish as part of the Jewish experience as second-class citizens of Europe. Labor Zionism was ardently secularist with many labor Zionists opposed to religion, some on Marxist grounds. Consequently, the movement often had an antagonistic relationship with Orthodox Judaism.

Labor Zionism became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Jewish in the Land of Israel during the British Mandate of Palestine—partly as a consequence of its role in organizing Jewish economic life through the Histadrut political party. Labor Zionism the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until Israel's 1977 election.

Liberal Zionism

General Zionism (or Liberal Zionism) was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 until after the First World War. Many of the liberal Zionists were German or Russian liberals. However, following the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions, the liberal tend last ground and the more militant Labor Zionists came to dominate the movement. Liberal Zionists identified with the European Jewish middle class from which many Zionist leaders, such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, originated. They believed that a Jewish state could be accomplished through lobbying the Great Powers of Europe and influential circles in European society. General Zionism declined in the face of growing extremism and antisemitism in Central Europe, and because of the superiour ability of labor Zionism to generate migration to Palestine.

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 labor Zionist movement which saw the revisionists 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.

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 and his son Rabbi Zevi Judah Kook. They saw great religious and traditional value in many of Zionism's ideals, while rejecting its anti-religious undertones. They were also motivated by a concern that growing secularization of Zionism and antagonism towards it from Orthodox Jews would lead to a schism in the Jewish people. As such, they sought to forge a branch of Orthodox Judaism which would properly embrace Zionism's positive ideals while also serving as a bridge between Orthodox and secular Jews.

After the Six Day War the movement came to play a significant role in Israeli Political life.

Critics of Zionism

There have been a number of critics of Zionism, including Jewish anti-Zionists, pro-Palestinian activists, academics, and politicians. Some of the most vocal critics of Zionism have been Arabs, many of whom view Israel as occupying Arab land. 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, the inevitable consequences of Zionism and the concept of a Jewish State.

While most Jewish groups are pro-Zionist, some haredi Jewish communities (most vocally the Satmar Hasidim and the small Neturei Karta group), oppose Zionism on religious grounds and denounce all cooperation with Zionists. The primary haredi anti-Zionist work is Vayoel Moshe by Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum. Some other haredi groups support Israeli political parties which are also anti-Zionist but work through the political structure in order that their interests not be neglected.

There are also individual Jews who have taken strong public stands against various aspects of Israeli policy, but who resist the claim that they oppose Zionism itself. On of the most famous of this is the linguist and left-wing political activist Noam Chomsky. The non-Zionist Israeli Canaanite movement led by poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s 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 Jewish state. Some critics of Zionism have accused it of racism, an accusation endorsed by the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which was revoked in 1991.

See Also

• Israel
• Theodor Herzl

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Almog, S., Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira. Zionism and Religion. The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series, 30. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. ISBN 0585307202 ISBN 9780585307206
• Berkowitz, Michael. Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond. IJS studies in Judaica, v. 2. Leiden: Brill, 2004. ISBN 9004131841 ISBN 9789004131842
• Dowty, Alan. The Jewish State: A Century Later, Updated With a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998. [The Jewish State: A Century Later, Updated With a New Preface] Retrieved June 7, 2007.
• Journal of Israeli History: V. 24, No. 1 March 2005. Routledge, 2005. ISSN 1353-1042
• Rose, John. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto Press, 2004. ISBN 0745320562 ISBN 9780745320564 ISBN 0745320554 ISBN 9780745320557
• Shapiro, Yonathan. Leadership of the American Zionist Organization, 1897-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. ISBN 025200132X ISBN 9780252001321
• Sofer, Sasson, and Dorothea Shefer-Vanson. Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521630126 ISBN 9780521630122
• Stoessinger, John George. Why Nations Go to War. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2008. ISBN 9780495097075 ISBN 0495097071

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