Zionism[a] (derived from Zion) is an ethnic or ethno-cultural nationalist[1][fn 1] movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization[4] of Palestine,[5][6][7][8] a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition,[9][10][11][12] an area of central importance in Jewish history and religion. Following the establishmen of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became an ideology that supports its protection and development and has been described as Israel's national or state ideology.[13][14][1][15][16][17]
Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a national revival movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and as a consequence of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.[1][18][19][20] During this period, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire.[21][22][23] The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, some Zionist figures, including Theodor Herzl, supported alternative options to Palestine in several places such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula,[24] but this was rejected by most of the movement. This process was seen by the emerging Zionist movement as an "ingathering of exiles" (kibbutz galuyot), an effort to put a stop to the exoduses and persecutions that have marked Jewish history by bringing the Jewish people back to their historic homeland.[25]
From 1897 to 1948, the primary goal of the Zionist movement was to establish the basis for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and thereafter to consolidate it. The movement itself recognized that Zionism's claim to Palestine went against the commonly accepted interpretation of the principle of self-determination.[26][clarification needed] In 1884, proto-Zionist groups established the Lovers of Zion, and in 1897 the first Zionist congress was organized. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a large number of Jews immigrated first to Ottoman and later to Mandatory Palestine. At the same time, some international recognition and support was gained, notably in the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the United Kingdom. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has continued primarily to advocate on behalf of Israel and to address threats to its continued existence and security.
The term "Zionism" has been applied to various approaches to addressing issues faced by European Jews in the late 19th century.[27] Modern political Zionism, different from religious Zionism, is a movement made up of diverse political groups whose strategies and tactics have changed over time. The common ideology among mainstream Zionist factions is support for territorial concentration and a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, through aliyah, colonization[28], and gaining international acceptance. The Zionist mainstream has historically included liberal, labor, revisionist, and cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement.[13] Different Zionist groups adopted similar political strategies and approaches in their interactions with the local Palestinian Arab population and their future in the Jewish state.[29][30][31][32][33] Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (which were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors as noted in ancient history.[34][35][36] Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist,[37] racist,[38] or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.[39][40][41][42][43] Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.[44][45][46]
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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 ...
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.
vox
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).(Zionism) arose in response to and in imitation of the current national movements of Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe
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.
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".
Zionism Colonize palestine.
Rovner2014
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).[T]he Zionist claim to Palestine on behalf of world Jewry as an extra-territorial population was unique, and not supported (as admitted at the time) by established interpretations of the principle of national self-determination, expressed in the Covenant of the League of later versions), and as applied to the other territories with the same status as Palestine ('A' mandate).
Avi Shlaim
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).CHARCOL
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).CHARRAS
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).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.'
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.
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'.
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