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.[29][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.[30] 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 colonization.[31] 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.[16] Differences within the mainstream Zionist groups lie primarily in their presentation and ethos, having adopted similar strategies to achieve their political goals, in particular in the use of violence and compulsory transfer to deal with the presence of the local Palestinian, non-Jewish population.[32][33][34][35][36] 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.[37][38][39] Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist,[40]racist,[41] or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.[42][43][44][45][46] Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.[47][48][49]
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^"Should the powers show themselves willing to grant us sovereignty over a neutral land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two regions come to mind: Palestine and Argentina. Significant experiments in colonization have been made in both countries, though on the mistaken principle of gradual infiltration of Jews. Infiltration is bound to end badly." Theodor Herzl quoted in “Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956,'Jewish Social Studies , Fall 2011, Vol. 18, No. 1 pp. 1-32, p.5, p.20
^'Dr. Arthur Ruppin was sent to Palestine for the first time in 1907 by the heads of the German [World] Zionist Organization in order to make a pilot study of the possibilities for colonization. . . Oppenheimer was a German sociologist and political economist. As a worldwide expert on colonization he became Herzl’s advisor and formulated the first program for Zionist colonization, which he presented at the 6th Zionist Congress (Basel 1903) ….. Daniel Boyarin wrote that the group of Zionists who
imagined themselves colonialists inclined to that persona “because sucha representation was pivotal to the entire project of becoming ‘white men’.” Colonization was seen as a sign of belonging to western and modern culture;' Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture,Brill 2011 ISBN978-90-04-20379-2 pp.2,13,n.49,132.
^Safrai, Zeʾev (May 2, 2018), "The Land in Rabbinic Literature", Seeking out the Land: Land of Israel Traditions in Ancient Jewish, Christian and Samaritan Literature (200 BCE – 400 CE), Brill, pp. 76–203, ISBN978-90-04-33482-3, archived from the original on June 27, 2023, retrieved July 6, 2023 "The preoccupation of rabbinic literature in all its forms with the Land of Israel is without question intensive and constant. It is no wonder that this literature offers historians of the Land of Israel a wealth of information for the clarification of a wide variety of topics."
^Biger, Gideon (2004). The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947. Routledge. pp. 58–63. ISBN978-1-135-76652-8. 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 ...
^Shlomo Ben-Ami (2007). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-532542-3. Archived from the original on June 24, 2024. Retrieved June 23, 2024. 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.
^LeVine, Mark; Mossberg, Mathias (2014). One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States. University of California Press. p. 211. ISBN978-0-520-95840-1. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. 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.
^Gelvin, James L. (2014). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge University Press. p. 93. ISBN978-1-107-47077-4. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. 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".
^Butenschøn, Nils A. (2006). "Accommodating Conflicting Claims to National Self-determination. The Intractable Case of Israel/Palestine". International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. 13 (2/3): 285–306. doi:10.1163/157181106777909858. ISSN1385-4879. JSTOR24675372. Archived from the original on March 10, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023. [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).
^'Should the powers show themselves willing to grant us sovereignty over a neutral land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two regions come to mind: Palestine and Argentina. Significant experiments in colonization have been made in both countries, though on the mistaken principle of gradual infiltration of Jews. Infiltration is bound to end badly.'(b) 'Only settlement on a grand scale would bring about a solution to the Jewish problem: the Jews must colonize rather than infiltrate and assimilate. This principle was similar to the assertions of Herzl or Zangwill.' Theodor Herzl cited in Gur Alroey, [ http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.1.1 “Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956,'] Jewish Social Studies , Fall 2011, Vol. 18, No. 1 pp. 1-32, p.5, p.20
^Cite error: The named reference Avi Shlaim was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Israel Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 4, 2007 – Special Issue: Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict – De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine. S. Ilan Troen
^"Zionism and British imperialism II: Imperial financing in Palestine", Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture. Volume 30, Issue 2, 2011. pp. 115–139. Michael J. Cohen
^Cite error: The named reference CHARCOL was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cite error: The named reference CHARRAS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Morris, Benny (October 2008). 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War. Yale University Press. p. 3. ISBN978-0-300-14524-3. Archived from the original on March 11, 2024. Retrieved January 27, 2024. 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.'
^Jabotinsky, Ze'ev (November 4, 1923). "The Iron Wall"(PDF). pp. 6–7. Archived(PDF) from the original on May 9, 2024. Retrieved April 17, 2024. 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.
^G. Finkelstein, Norman (2003). Image and reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Verso Books. p. 109. ISBN978-1-85984-442-7. Archived from the original on July 26, 2023. Retrieved January 27, 2024. 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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