Zionist
The movement seeks to encourage Jewish migration to the Promised Land and 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 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.
Terminology
The word "Zionism" itself is derived from the word Zion (Hebrew: ציון, Tzi-yon). This name originally referred to Mount Zion, a mountain near Jerusalem, and to the Fortress of Zion on it.
Later, under King David, the term "Zion" became a synecdoche referring to the entire city of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. In many Biblical verses, the Israelites were called the people, sons or daughters of Zion.
"Zionism" 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.)
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, the label "Zionist" is in some cases also used as a euphemism for Jews in general by apologists for antisemitism.
Zionism can be distinguished from Territorialism, a Jewish nationalist movement calling for a Jewish homeland not necessarily in Palestine.
During the early history of Zionism, a number of proposals were made for settling Jews outside of Europe, but ultimately all of these were rejected or failed. According to Judaism, Eretz Israel, or Zion, is a land promised to the Jews by God according to the Bible.
Following the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were expelled from Palestine to form the Jewish diaspora. Even before 1897, which is generally seen as the year in which practical Zionism started, Jews immigrated to Palestine, the pre-Zionist Aliyah.
Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest in 1882.
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 because it aimed at reaching a political agreement with the Power ruling Palestine. Up to 1917 this was the Ottoman Empire, and then until 1948 it was Britain on behalf of the League of Nations.
The WZO also supported small scale settlement in Palestine.
Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann (cultural Zionists) and others culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government. 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 Jewish migration.
Britain supported Jewish immigration in principle, but in reaction to Arab violence imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration.
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. The subsequent growth in Jewish migration led to the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine which in turn led the British to establish the Peel Commission to investigate the situation.
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. The British were attacked in Palestine by Zionist groups because of their restrictions on Jewish immigration, the best known attack 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 29th, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. 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 and the same day, the armies of four Arab countries invaded 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 the area of mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River.
The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which included new cease-fire lines, the so-called Green line.
After the war the Arabs 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". They argued that Jews could escape their situation by becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own.
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. Socialist and Labor Zionism was ardently secularist with many Labor Zionists being committed atheists or opposed to religion.
Many of the General Zionists were German or Russian Liberals but following the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions, Labour Zionists came to dominate the movement. General Zionists 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 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.
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. Zionists sometimes refused to speak Yiddish, a language they considered affected by Christian persecution.
Once they moved to Israel, many Zionists refused to speak their (diasporic) mother tongues and gave themselves new, Hebrew names.
Reaction to antisemitism
In this matter Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism. The Arab League and Arab Higher Committee rejected the UN Partition Plan (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) approving the creation of a Jewish and Arab state in Palestine, and 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, as negative but 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.
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.
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. 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.
During the last quarter of 20th century, the decline of classic nationalism in Israel lead to the rise of two antagonistic movements: neo-Zionism and post-Zionism. During the negotiations for Syria at the 1919 Paris Conference , King Faisal endorsed the Balfour declaration.