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Zionism, also known as Jewish nationalism, is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged amid the late 19th century European trend of national revivals and aimed for the establishment of a home for the Jewish people through the colonization of Palestine, an area roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel's national or state ideology.

Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. During this period, as Jewish assimilation in Europe was progressing, some Jewish intellectuals framed assimilation as a humiliating negation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The development of Zionism and other Jewish nationalist movements grew out of these sentiments, which began to emerge even before the appearance of modern antisemitism as a major factor. Assimilation progressed more slowly in Tsarist Russia where pogroms and official Russian policies led to the emigration of three million Jews between 1882 and 1914, only 1% of whom went to Palestine. Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by a sense of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than just in response to pogroms or economic insecurity. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs.

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. The support of a Great Power was seen as fundamental to the success of Zionism and in 1917 the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the British Mandate for Palestine would explicitly privilege the Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. The British would assist in the establishment and development of Zionist institutions and a Zionist quasi-state which operated in parallel to the British mandate government. After over two decades of British support for the movement, Britain restricted Jewish immigration with the White Paper of 1939 in an attempt to ease local tensions. Despite the White Paper, Zionist immigration and settlement efforts continued during WWII. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of the Nazi Holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned. The Zionist war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv, with little Zionist resources being deployed in support of European Jews. In 1948, following a civil war, the State of Israel was established in over 78% of mandatory Palestine, leading to the first Arab-Israeli war. As a result of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, only 100,000 of the 900,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming the Palestinian minority in Israel.

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. Mainstream Zionist groups for the most part differ more in style than substance, having in some cases adopted similar strategies to achieve their goals, such as violence or compulsory transfer to deal with the Palestinians. Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology which brings together secular nationalism and religious conservatism. 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. Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist, racist, or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement. Some proponents of Zionism accept the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.

Terminology

The term "Zionism" is derived from the word Zion (Hebrew: ציון, romanized: Tzi-yon) or Mount Zion, a hill in Jerusalem, widely symbolizing the Land of Israel. Mount Zion is also a term used in the Hebrew Bible. Throughout eastern Europe in the late 19th century, numerous grassroots groups promoted the national resettlement of the Jews in their homeland, as well as the revitalization and cultivation of the Hebrew language. These groups were collectively called the "Lovers of Zion" and were seen as countering a growing Jewish movement toward assimilation. The first use of the term is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, founder of the Kadimah nationalist Jewish students' movement; he used the term in 1890 in his journal Selbst-Emancipation (Self-Emancipation), itself named almost identically to Leon Pinsker's 1882 book Auto-Emancipation.

Beliefs

Claim to a Jewish demographic majority and a Jewish state in Palestine

Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation, and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine. This belief developed out of the experiences of European Jewry, which the early Zionists believed demonstrated the danger inherent to their status as a minority. In contrast to the Zionist notion of nationhood, the Judaic sense of being a nation was rooted in religious beliefs of unique chosenness and divine providence, rather than in ethnicity. Daily prayers emphasized distinctiveness from other nations; a connection to Eretz Israel and the anticipation of restoration were based on messianic beliefs and religious practices, not material nationalistic conceptions.

The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs. Israeli historian of Zionist ideology, Yosef Gorny, argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation "there was no such thing as Palestinians" was a cornerstone of Zionist policy initiated by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, and continued by their successors. Flapan further writes that the non-recognition of Palestinians remains a basic tenet of Israeli policy. This perspective was also shared by those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom. British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs regarding Jewish and Arab rights in Palestine.

Unlike other forms of nationalism, the Zionist claim to Palestine was aspirational and required a mechanism by which the claim could be realized. The territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine and the subsequent goal of establishing a Jewish majority there was the main mechanism by which Zionist groups sought to realize this claim. By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, the political differences between the various Zionist groups had shrunk further, with almost all Zionist groups seeking a Jewish state in Palestine. While not every Zionist group openly called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, every group in the Zionist mainstream was wedded to the idea of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.

The concept of "transfer"

In order to achieve a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement was faced with a problem, namely the presence of the local Arab (and primarily non-Jewish) population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental practical importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.

The Zionist leadership viewed the mass transfer of the Arabs as morally permissible, but were unsure of its political effectiveness. Zionist leaders such as Herzl, Motzkin, Ruppin, and Zangwill saw the transfer of Arabs from Palestine to neighboring Arab countries like Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq as a practical solution to those demographic challenges of establishing a Jewish-majority state. They argued that such a transfer would not be akin to exile, as Arabs would merely be moving between different Arab territories, which they described as culturally and geographically similar. Furthermore, they believed that if these populations were adequately compensated, the transfer would be morally justifiable. This thinking reflected broader trends of population transfers during the early 20th century, such as the Greek-Turkish population swaps in the 1920s, which were seen by the Zionist leadership as effective in resolving ethnic tensions and creating more stable national borders. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader, drew inspiration from the Nazi demographic policies which resulted in the expulsion of 1.5 million Poles and Jews, in whose place Germans resettled. In Jabotinsky's assessment:

The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.

The concept of "transfer" had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, with moral considerations rarely entering into the discussions of what was viewed as a logical solution-opposition to transferring the Arab population outside Palestine was typically expressed on practical, rather than moral grounds. The concept of removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions, from early on in the movement's development. "Transfer" was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership. The notion of "forced transfer" was so appealing to the movement's leaders that it was considered the most attractive provision in the Peel Commission. Indeed, this sentiment was deeply ingrained to the extent that Ben Gurion's acceptance of partition was contingent upon the removal of the Palestinian population. He would go as far as to say that transfer was such an ideal solution that it "must happen some day".

Some leaders, such as Ruppin, Motzkin, and writers such as Israel Zangwill, referred to transfer as a "voluntary" action which would include some form of compensation. However, the Arabs of Palestine were unwilling to leave the land of their ancestors and expressed this firmly. This stance presented notable ethical challenges for the Yishuv residents.

Zionism, antisemitism and an "existential need" for self-determination

From the perspective of some early Zionist thinkers, Jews living amongst non-Jews suffer from impediments which can only be addressed by rejecting the Jewish identity which developed while living amongst non-Jews. Accordingly, the early Zionists sought to develop a nationalist Jewish political life in a territory where Jews constitute a demographic majority. The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with the demographic minority status of the Jews in Europe) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. Moses Hess, a leading precursor of Zionism, commented on the perceived insufficiency of assimilation: "The German hates the Jewish race more than the religion; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses." Some Zionist intellectuals, such as Yitzhak Elazari Volcani, even expressed an "understanding" of antisemitism, echoing its beliefs:

Anti-Semitism is not a psychosis... nor is it a lie. Anti-Semitism is a necessary outcome of a collision between two kinds of selfhood . Hate is dependent upon the amount of 'agents of fermentation' that are pushed into the general organism , whether they are active in it and irritate it, or are neutralized in it.

In this sense, Zionism did not seek to challenge antisemitism, but rather accepted it as a reality. The Zionist solution to the perceived deficiencies of diasporic life (or the "Jewish Question") was dependent on the territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine, with the longer-term goal of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.

Race and genetics

Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent". According to Raphael Falk, as early as the 1870s Zionist and pre-Zionist thinkers conceived of Jews as belonging to a distinct biological group. This re-conceptualization of Jewishness cast the "volk" of the Jewish community as a nation-race, in contrast to centuries-old conceptions of the Jewish people as a religious socio-cultural grouping. The Jewish historians Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow are largely credited with this creation of Zionism as a nationalist project. They drew on religious Jewish sources and non-Jewish texts in reconstructing a national identity and consciousness. This new Jewish historiography divorced from and, at times at odds with, traditional Jewish collective memory.

It was particularly important in early nation building in Israel, because Jews in Israel are ethnically diverse and the origins of Ashkenazi Jews were not known. Notable proponents of this racial idea included Max Nordau, Herzl's co-founder of the original Zionist Organization, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the prominent architect of early statist Zionism and the founder of what became Israel's Likud party, and Arthur Ruppin, considered the "father of Israeli sociology". Birnbaum, who is widely attributed with the first use of the term "Zionism" in reference to a political movement, viewed race as the foundation of nationality, Jabotinsky wrote that Jewish national integrity relies on "racial purity", and that "(t)he feeling of national self-identity is ingrained in the man's 'blood', in his physical-racial type, and only in it."

According to Hassan S. Haddad, the application of the Biblical concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the "Promised Land" in Zionism, particularly to secular Jews, requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites. This is considered important to the State of Israel, because its founding narrative centers around the concept of an "Ingathering of the exiles" and the "Return to Zion", on the assumption that all modern Jews are the direct lineal descendants of the biblical Jews. The question has thus been focused on by supporters of Zionism and anti-Zionists alike, as in the absence of this biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as 'settler colonialism' pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people," whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return". A Jewish "biological self-definition" has become a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers have never doubted that evidence will one day be found, even though so far proof for the claim has "remained forever elusive".

Conquest of labor

With the arrival in Palestine of more ideologically motivated settlers after the turn of the century, the Zionist movement began to emphasize the importance of the productivization of Jewish society and the so-called "conquest of labor," the belief that the employment of exclusively Jewish labour was the pre-condition for the development of an independent Jewish society in Palestine. The Zionist movement sought to build a "pure Jewish settlement" in Palestine on the basis of "100 per cent Jewish labor" and the claim to an exclusively Jewish economy. The Zionist leadership aimed to establish a fully autonomous and independent Jewish economic sector to create a new type of Jewish society. This new society was intended to reverse the traditional economic structure seen in the Jewish Diaspora, characterized by a high number of middlemen and a scarcity of productive workers. By developing fundamental sectors such as industry, agriculture, and mining, the goal was to "normalize" Jewish life which had grown "abnormal" as a result of living amongst non-Jews. Most of the Zionist leadership saw it as imperative to employ strictly Jewish workers in order to ensure the Jewish character of the colonies. Another factor, according to Benny Morris, was the worry that that "employment of Arabs would lead to 'Arab values' being passed on to Zionist youth and nourish the colonists’ tendency to exploit and abuse their workers", as well as security concerns.

The employment of exclusively Jewish labor was also intended to avoid the development of a national conflict in conjunction with a class-based conflict. The Zionist leadership believed that by excluding Arab workers they would stimulate class conflict only within Arab society and prevent the Jewish-Arab national conflict from attaining a class dimension. While the Zionist settlers of the first aliyah had ventured to create a "pure Jewish settlement," they did grow to rely on Arab labor due to the lack of availability of Jewish laborers during this period. With the arrival of the more ideologically driven settlers of the second aliyah, the idea of "avoda ivrit" would become more central. The future leaders of the Zionist movement saw an existential threat in the employment of Arab labor-the fear that the "half-wild natives" would rise up against their "Jewish masters" motivated the movement on a practical level to work towards a society based on purely Jewish labor.

Negation of the life in the Diaspora

Zionism rejected traditional Judaic definitions of what it means to be Jewish, but struggled to offer a new interpretation of Jewish identity independent of rabbinical tradition. Jewish religion is viewed as an essentially negative factor, even in religious Zionist ideology, and seen as responsible for the diminishing status of Jews living as a minority. Responding to the challenges of modernity, Zionism sought to replace religious and community institutions with secular-nationalistic ones, defining Judaism in "terms of Christianity." Indeed, Zionism maintained primarily the outward symbols of Jewish tradition, redefining them in a nationalistic context. It adapted traditional Jewish religious concepts, such as the devotion to the God of Israel, reverence for the biblical Land of Israel, and the belief in a future Jewish return during the messianic era, into a modern nationalist framework. To be sure, the yearning for a return to the land of Israel "was entirely quietistic" and the daily prayers of a return to Zion were all accompanied by an appeal to God, rather than a call to Jews to take it upon themselves to appropriate the land. Zionism saw itself as bringing Jews into the modern world by redefining what it means to be Jewish in terms of identification with a sovereign state, rather than Judaic faith and tradition.

Zionism and secular Jewish identity

Zionism sought to reconfigure Jewish identity and culture in nationalist and secular terms. This new identity would be based on a rejection of the life of exile. Zionism portrayed the Diaspora Jew as mentally unstable, physically frail, and prone to engaging in transient businesses like peddling or acting as intermediaries. They were seen as detached from nature, purely materialistic, and focused solely on their personal gains. In contrast, the vision for the new Jew was radically different: an individual of strong moral and aesthetic values, not shackled by religion, driven by ideals and willing to challenge degrading circumstances; a liberated, dignified person eager to defend both personal and national pride.

The Zionist goal of reframing of Jewish identity in secular-nationalist terms meant primarily the decline of the status of religion in the Jewish community. Prominent Zionist thinkers frame this development as nationalism serving the same role as religion, functionally replacing it. Zionism sought to make Jewish ethnic-nationalism the distinctive trait of Jews rather than their commitment to Judaism. Zionism instead adopted a racial understanding of Jewish identity, which paradoxically mirrored anti-Semitic views by suggesting that Jewishness is an inherent, unchangeable trait found in one's "blood." Framed this way, Jewish identity is only secondarily a matter of tradition or culture. Zionist nationalism embraced pan-Germanic ideologies, which stressed the concept of das völk: people of shared ancestry should pursue separation and establish a unified state. Zionist thinkers view the movement as a "revolt against a tradition of many centuries" of living parasitically at the margins of Western society. Indeed, Zionism was uncomfortable with the term "Jewish," associating it with passivity, spirituality and the stain of "galut". Instead, Zionist thinkers preferred the term "Hebrew" to describe their identity which they associated with the healthy and modern sabra. In Zionist thought, the new Jew would be productive and work the land, in contrast to the diaspora Jew who, mirroring the anti-semitic portrayals, was depicted as lazy and parasitic on society. Zionism linked the term "Jewish" with these negative characteristics prevalent in European anti-Semitic stereotypes, which Zionists believed could be remedied only through sovereignty.

Israeli-Irish scholar Ronit Lentin has argued that the construction of Zionist identity as a militarized nationalism arose in contrast to the imputed identity of the Diaspora Jew as a "feminised" Other. She describes this as a relationship of contempt towards the previous identity of the Jewish Diaspora viewed as unable to resist antisemitism and the Holocaust. Lentin argues that Zionism's rejection of this "feminised" identity and its obsession with constructing a nation is reflected in the nature of the symbolism of the movement, which are drawn from modern sources and appropriated as Zionist, instancing the fact that the melody of the Hatikvah anthem drew on the version composed by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

The rejection of life in the diaspora was not limited to secular Zionism; many religious Zionists shared this opinion, but not all religious Zionism did. Abraham Isaac Kook, considered one of the most important religious Zionist thinkers, characterized the diaspora as a flawed and alienated existence marked by decline, narrowness, displacement, solitude, and frailty. He believed that the diasporan way of life is diametrically opposed to a "national renaissance," which manifests itself not only in the return to Zion but also in the return to nature and creativity, revival of heroic and aesthetic values, and the resurgence of individual and societal power.

Revival of the Hebrew language

The revival of the Hebrew language in Eastern Europe as a secular literary medium marked a significant cultural shift among Jews, who per Judaic tradition used Hebrew only for religious purposes. This secularization of Hebrew, which included its use in novels, poems, and journalism, was met with resistance from rabbis who viewed it as a desecration of the sacred language. While some rabbinical authorities did support the development of Hebrew as a common vernacular, they did so on the basis of nationalistic ideas, rather than on the basis of Jewish tradition. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a key figure in the revival, envisioned Hebrew as serving a "national spirit" and cultural renaissance in the Land of Israel. The primary motivator for establishing modern Hebrew as a national language was the sense of legitimacy it gave the movement, by suggesting a connection between the Jews of ancient Israel and the Jews of the Zionist movement. These developments are seen in Zionist historiography as a revolt against tradition, with the development of Modern Hebrew providing the basis on which a Jewish cultural renaissance might develop.

Zionists generally preferred to speak Hebrew, a Semitic language which flourished as a spoken language in the ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE, and continued to be used in some parts of Judea during the Second Temple period and up until 200 CE. It is the language of the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah, central texts in Judaism. Hebrew was largely preserved throughout later history as the main liturgical language of Judaism.

Zionists worked to modernize Hebrew and adapt it for everyday use. They sometimes refused to speak Yiddish, a language they thought had developed in the context of European persecution. Once they moved to Israel, many Zionists refused to speak their (diasporic) mother tongues and adopted new, Hebrew names. Hebrew was preferred not only for ideological reasons, but also because it allowed all citizens of the new state to have a common language, thus furthering the political and cultural bonds among Zionists.

The revival of the Hebrew language and the establishment of Modern Hebrew is most closely associated with the linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Committee of the Hebrew Language (later replaced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language).

History

Historical and religious background

The transformation of a religious and primarily passive connection between Jews and Palestine into an active, secular, nationalist movement arose in the context of ideological developments within modern European nations in the 19th century. The concept of the "return" remained a powerful symbol within religious Jewish belief which emphasized that their return should be determined by Divine Providence rather than human action. Leading Zionist historian Shlomo Avineri describes this connection: "Jews did not relate to the vision of the Return in a more active way than most Christians viewed the Second Coming." The religious Judaic notion of being a nation was distinct from the modern European notion of nationalism. Ultra-Orthodox Jews strongly opposed collective Jewish settlement in Palestine, viewing it as a violation of the three oaths sworn to God: not to force their way into the homeland, not to hasten the end times, and not to rebel against other nations. They believed that any attempt to achieve redemption through human actions, rather than divine intervention and the coming of the Messiah, constituted a rebellion against divine will and a dangerous heresy.

The cultural memory of Jews in the diaspora revered the Land of Israel. Religious tradition held that a future messianic age would usher in their return as a people., a 'return to Zion' commemorated particularly at Passover and in Yom Kippur prayers. In late medieval times, there arose among the Ashkenazi an augury—"Next year in Jerusalem—which was then included in the thrice-daily Amidah (Standing prayer). The biblical prophecy of Kibbutz Galuyot, the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel as foretold by the Prophets, became a central idea in Zionism.

Forerunners of Zionism

The forerunners of Zionism, rather than being causally connected to the later development of Zionism, are thinkers and activists who expressed some notion of Jewish national consciousness or advocated for the migration of Jews to Palestine. These attempts were not continuous as national movements typically are. The most notable precursors to Zionism were thinkers such as Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (who were both rabbinical figures), as well as Moses Hess who is regarded as the first modern Jewish nationalist.

The Jewish expulsion from Spain led to some Jewish refugees fleeing to Ottoman Palestine. In 1564, Joseph Nasi, with the support of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, attempted to create a Jewish province in the Galilee, but he died in 1579 and his plans weren't completed. However, the community in Safed continued as did small-scale aliyah into the 17th century.

In the 17th century Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) announced himself as the Messiah and gained many Jews to his side, forming a base in Salonika. He first tried to establish a settlement in Gaza, but moved later to Smyrna. After deposing the old rabbi Aaron Lapapa in the spring of 1666, the Jewish community of Avignon, France, prepared to emigrate to the new kingdom.

Proto-Zionist figures in the eighteeenth and nineteenth centuries include the rabbis Yehuda Bibas (1789–1852), Tzvi Kalischer (1795–1874), and Judah Alkalai (1798–1878). Alkalai and Kalischer developed their ideas as a reinterpretation of Messianism along traditionalist lines in which human intervention would prepare (and specifically only prepare) for the final redemption. Accordingly, the Jewish immigration in this vein was intended to be selective, involving only the most devout Jews. Their idea of Jews as a collective was strongly tied to religious notions distinct from the secular movement referred to as Zionism which developed at the end of the century.

In contrast, Hess advocated for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in pursuit of the economic and social normalization of the Jewish people. Hess believed that emancipation alone was not a sufficient solution to the problems faced by European Jewry; he perceived a shift of anti-Jewish sentiment from a religious to a racial basis. For Hess, religious conversion would not fix this anti-Jewish hostility.

Christian restorationist ideas promoting the migration of Jews to Palestine contributed to the ideological and historical context that gave a sense of credibility to these pre-Zionist initiatives. Restorationist ideas were a prerequisite for the success of Zionism, since although it was created by Jews, Zionism was dependent on support from Christians, although it is unclear how much Christian ideas influenced the early Zionists. Zionism was also dependent on the thinkers of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, such as Peretz Smolenskin in 1872, although it often depicted it as its opponent.

Establishment of the Zionist movement

The idea of returning to Palestine was rejected by the conferences of rabbis held in that epoch. Individual efforts supported the emigration of groups of Jews to Palestine, pre-Zionist Aliyah, even before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the year considered as the start of practical Zionism.

Moral but not practical efforts were made in Prague to organize a Jewish emigration, by Abraham Benisch and Moritz Steinschneider in 1835. In the United States, Mordecai Noah attempted to establish a Jewish refuge opposite Buffalo, New York, on Grand Isle, 1825. These early Jewish nation building efforts of Cresson, Benisch, Steinschneider and Noah failed.

Sir Moses Montefiore, famous for his intervention in favor of Jews around the world, including the attempt to rescue Edgardo Mortara, established a colony for Jews in Palestine. In 1854, his friend Judah Touro bequeathed money to fund Jewish residential settlement in Palestine. Montefiore was appointed executor of his will, and used the funds for a variety of projects, including building in 1860 the first Jewish residential settlement and almshouse outside of the old walled city of Jerusalem—today known as Hebrew: Mishkenot Sha'ananim. Laurence Oliphant failed in a like attempt to bring to Palestine the Jewish proletariat of Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and the Turkish Empire (1879 and 1882).

Reform Jews rejected this idea of a return to Zion. The conference of rabbis held at Frankfurt am Main over July 15–28, 1845, deleted from the ritual all prayers for a return to Zion and a restoration of a Jewish state. The Philadelphia Conference, 1869, followed the lead of the German rabbis and decreed that the Messianic hope of Israel is "the union of all the children of God in the confession of the unity of God". In 1885 the Pittsburgh Conference reiterated this interpretation of the Messianic idea of Reform Judaism, expressing in a resolution that "we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community; and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning a Jewish state".

Jewish settlements were proposed for establishment in the upper Mississippi region by W.D. Robinson in 1819.

Jewish nationalism and emancipation

Ideas of Jewish cultural unity developed a specifically political expression in the 1860s as Jewish intellectuals began promoting the idea of Jewish nationalism. Zionism would be just one of several Jewish national movements which would develop, others included diaspora nationalist groups such as the Bund.

Zionism emerged towards the end of the "best century" for Jews who for the first time were allowed as equals into European society. During this time, Jews would have equality before the law and gain access to schools, universities, and professions which were previously closed to them. By the 1870s, Jews had achieved almost complete civic emancipation in all the states of western and central Europe. By 1914, a century after the beginnings of emancipation, Jews had moved from the margins to the forefront of European society. In the urban centers of Europe and America, Jews played an influential role in professional and intellectual life, considered in proportion to their numbers. During this period as Jewish assimilation was still progressing most promisingly, some Jewish intellectuals and religious traditionalists framed assimilation as a humiliating negation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The development of Zionism and other Jewish nationalist movements grew out of these sentiments, which began to emerge even before the appearance of modern antisemitism as a major factor. In this sense, Zionism can be read as a response to the Haskala and the challenges of modernity and liberalism, rather than purely a response to antisemitism.

Emancipation in Eastern Europe progressed more slowly, to the point that Deickoff writes "social conditions were such that they made the idea of individual assimilation pointless." Antisemitism, pogroms and official policies in Tsarist Russia led to the emigration of three million Jews in the years between 1882 and 1914, only 1% of which went to Palestine. Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by ideas of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than just in response to pogroms or economic insecurity. Zionism's emergence in the late 19th century was among assimilated Central European Jews who, despite their formal emancipation, still felt excluded from high society. Many of these Jews had moved away from traditional religious observances and were largely secular, mirroring a broader trend of secularization in Europe. Despite their efforts to integrate, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were frustrated by continued lack of acceptance by the local national movements which tended toward intolerance and exclusivity. For the early Zionists, if nationalism posed a challenge to European Jewry, it also proposed a solution.

Theodor Herzl and the birth of modern political Zionism

In the wake of the 1881 Russian pogroms, Leo Pinsker, who was previously an assimilationist, came to the conclusion that the root of the Jewish problem was that Jews formed a distinctive element which could not be assimilated. For Pinsker, emancipation could not resolve the problems of the Jewish people. In Pinsker's analysis, Judeophobia was the cause of antisemitism and was primiarily driven by Jews' lack of a homeland. The solution Pinsker proposed in his pamphlet, Autoemancipation, was for Jews to become a "normal" nation and acquire a homeland over which Jews would have sovereignty. Pinsker primarily viewed Jewish emigration a solution for dealing with the "surplus of Jews, the inassimilable residue" from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Germany in response to the pogroms.

The pogroms motivated a small number of Jews to establish various groups in the Pale of Settlement and Poland aimed at supporting Jewish emigration to Palestine. The publication of Autoemancipation provided these groups with an ideological charter around which they would be confederated into Hibbat Zion ("Lovers of Zion") in 1887 where Pinsker would take a leading role. The settlements established by Hibbat Zion lacked sufficient funds and were ultimately not very successful but are seen as the first of several aliyahs, or waves of settlement, that led to the eventual establishment of the state of Israel. The conditions in Eastern Europe would eventually provide Zionism with a base of Jews seeking to overcome the challenges of external ostracism, from the Tsarist regime, and internal changes within the Jewish communities there. The groups which formed Hibbat Zion included the Bilu group which began its settlements in 1882. Shapira describes the Bilu as serving the role of a prototype for the settlement groups that followed. At the end of the 19th century, Jews remained a small minority in Palestine.

At this point, Zionism remained a scattered movement. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl (the father of political Zionism) infused Zionism with a practical urgency and would work to unify the various strands of the movement. His efforts would lead to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the Zionist Organization (ZO), renamed in 1960 as World Zionist Organization (WZO). The Zionist Organization was to be the main administrative body of the movement and would go on to establish the Jewish Colonial Trust, whose objectives were to encourage European Jewish emigration to Palestine and to assist with the economic development of the colonies. The first Zionist Congress would also adopt the official objective of establishing a legally recognized home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

The title of Herzl's 1896 manifesto providing the ideological basis for Zionism, Der Judenstaat, is typically translated as The Jewish State. Herzl sought to establish a state where Jews would be the majority and as a result, politically dominant. Ahad Ha'am, the founder of cultural Zionism criticized the lack of Jewish cultural activity and creativity in Herzl's envisioned state which Ha'am referred to as "the state of the Jews." Specifically, Ha'am points to the envisioned European and German culture of the state where Jews were simply the transmitters of imperialist culture rather than producers or creators of culture. Like Pinsker, Herzl saw antisemitism as a reality that could only be addressed by the territorial concentration of Jews in a Jewish state. He wrote in his diary: "I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism."

Herzl's project was purely secular, the selection of Palestine, after considering other locations, was motivated by the credibility the name would give to the movement. From early on, Herzl recognized that Zionism could not succeed without the support of a Great Power. His view was that this Judenstaat would serve the interests of the Great Powers, and would "form part of a defensive wall for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism."

In 1902, Herzl published Altneuland, a utopian novel which portrays a Jewish state where Jews and Arabs live together. In the novel, Jewish immigration had not forced the Arabs to leave, orange exports had multiplied tenfold, and Arab landowners profited from selling land to the Jews. Walter Laqueur describes Herzl in real life as emphasizing the importance of close relationships between Jews and Muslims on several occasions. Altneuland also reflected Herzl's belief in the importance of technology and progress. The Jewish state in the novel is a highly advanced society, where scientific and technological innovation is celebrated and valued.

Success and stumbles in Russia

Before World War I, although led by Austrian and German Jews, Zionism was primarily composed of Russian Jews. Initially, Zionists were a minority, both in Russia and worldwide. Russian Zionism quickly became a major force within the movement, making up about half the delegates at Zionist Congresses.

Despite its success in attracting followers, Russian Zionism faced fierce opposition from the Russian intelligentsia across the political spectrum and socioeconomic classes. It was condemned by different groups as reactionary, messianic, and unrealistic, arguing that it would isolate Jews and exacerbate their circumstances rather than integrate them into European societies. Religious Jews such as Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum viewed in Zionism a desecration of their sacred beliefs and a Satanic plot, while others hardly thought it deserved serious attention. For them, Zionism was seen as an attempt to defy the divine order to await the coming of the Messiah. However, many of these religious Jews still believed in the Messiah coming soon. For example, Rabbi Israel Meir Kahan "was so convinced of the imminent arrival of the Messiah that he urged his students to study the laws of the priesthood so that the priests would be prepared to carry out their duties when the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt."

Criticism was not limited to religious Jews. Bundist socialists and liberals of the Voskhod newspaper attacked Zionism for distracting from class struggle and blocking the path to Jewish emancipation in Russia, respectively. Figures like historian Simon Dubnow saw potential value in Zionism promoting Jewish identity but fundamentally rejected a Jewish state as messianic and unfeasible. They provided alternative emancipatory solutions, such as assimilation, emigration, and Diaspora nationalism. The opposition to Zionism, rooted in the intelligentsia's rationalist worldview, weakened its appeal among potential adherents like the Jewish working class and intelligentsia. Ultimately, the Russian intelligentsia was united in the view that Zionism was an aberrant ideology that ran counter to their beliefs in Jewish assimilation.

Territories considered

Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, considered a Jewish state in places outside Palestine, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula. Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan; however, he later affirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jews with that area.

A major concern and driving reason for considering other territories was the Russian pogroms, in particular the Kishinev massacre, and the resulting need for quick resettlement in a safer place. However, other Zionists emphasized the memory, emotion and tradition linking Jews to the Land of Israel. Zion became the name of the movement, after the place where King David established his kingdom, following his conquest of the Jebusite fortress there (2 Samuel 5:7, 1 Kings 8:1). The name Zion was synonymous with Jerusalem. Palestine only became Herzl's main focus after his Zionist manifesto 'Der Judenstaat' was published in 1896, but even then he was hesitant to focus efforts solely on resettlement in Palestine when speed was of the essence.

In 1903, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Herzl 5,000 square miles (13,000 km) in the Uganda Protectorate for Jewish settlement in Great Britain's East African colonies. Herzl accepted to evaluate Joseph Chamberlain's proposal, and it was introduced the same year to the World Zionist Organization's Congress at its sixth meeting, where a fierce debate ensued. Some groups felt that accepting the scheme would make it more difficult to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the African land was described as an "ante-chamber to the Holy Land". It was decided to send a commission to investigate the proposed land by 295 to 177 votes, with 132 abstaining. The following year, Congress sent a delegation to inspect the plateau. A temperate climate due to its high elevation, was thought to be suitable for European settlement. However, the area was populated by a large number of Maasai, who did not seem to favour an influx of Europeans. Furthermore, the delegation found it to be filled with lions and other animals.

After Herzl died in 1904, the Congress decided in July 1905 to decline the British offer and to "direct all future settlement efforts solely to Palestine." Israel Zangwill's Jewish Territorialist Organization aimed for a Jewish state anywhere, having been established in 1903 in response to the Uganda Scheme. It was supported by a number of the Congress's delegates. Following the vote, which had been proposed by Max Nordau, Zangwill charged Nordau that he "will be charged before the bar of history," and his supporters blamed the Russian voting bloc of Menachem Ussishkin for the outcome of the vote.

The subsequent departure of the JTO from the Zionist Organization had little impact. The Zionist Socialist Workers Party was also an organization that favored the idea of a Jewish territorial autonomy outside of Palestine.

According to Elaine Hagopian, in the early decades it foresaw the homeland of the Jews as extending not only over the region of Palestine, but into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, with its borders more or less coinciding with the major riverine and water-rich areas of the Levant.

Early Zionist settlement

In the early twentieth century, Zionism advanced by establishing towns, colonies, and an independent monetary system to channel Jewish capital into Palestine. Due to the unstable local economy and fluctuating currency values under Ottoman rule, Zionists created their own financial institutions, including the first locally headquartered bank and credit cooperative societies. Despite their small numbers, the Zionists instilled a fear of territorial displacement and dispossession in the local Palestinian population. This fear would be the main driver of antagonism from the Arabs, leading to physical resistance and the eventual use of military force by settlers. Initially, the impact on rural Palestinians was minimal, with only a few villages encountering Jewish colonies. However, after World War I and as Zionist land purchase increased, the rural population began to experience dramatic changes. From almost the beginning of Zionist settlement, the Palestinians viewed Zionism as an expansionist endeavor. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Zionism was inherently expansionist and always had the goal of turning the entirety of Palestine into a Jewish state. In addition, Morris describes the Zionists as intent on politically and physically dispossessing the Arabs. Early warnings from local leaders in the 1880s about the destabilizing effects of Jewish immigration went largely unheeded until these later developments. By the early 20th century, there were fourteen Zionist settlements in Palestine, established through land purchases from both local and external landowners. These were the Zionists of the First Aliyah.

From the outset, the Zionist leadership saw land acquisition as essential to achieving their goal of establishing a Jewish state. This acquisition was strategic, aiming to create a continuous area of Jewish land. The World Zionist Organization established the Jewish National Fund in 1901, with the stated goal "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people." The notion of land "redemption" entailed that the land could not be sold and could not be leased to a non-Jew nor should the land be worked by Arabs. The land purchased was primarily from absentee landlords, and upon purchase of the land, the tenant farmers who traditionally had rights of usufruct were often expelled. Herzl publicly opposed this dispossession, but wrote privately in his diary: "We must expropriate gently... We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Support for expulsion of the Arab population in Palestine was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement's inception. The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession would be the main driver of Arab antagonism to Zionism for the next several decades.

In 1903, 'the Eretz Israel assembly' was held and chaired by Menachem Ussishkin, a committed Zionist and Russian Jew in his early forties, this assembly marked the beginning of a more formalized Zionist colonization effort. Under his leadership, both professional and political organizations were established, paving the way for a sustained Zionist presence in the region. Ussishkin delineated three methods for the Zionist movement to acquire land: by force and conquest, by expropriation via governmental authority, and by purchase. The only option available to the movement at the moment in his perspective was the last one, "until at some point we become rulers."

The Second Aliyah

The second wave of Zionist settlement came with the second aliyah starting in 1904. The settlers of the Second Aliyah laid the foundational elements for the Jewish society in Palestine envisioned by the Zionist movement. They established the first two political parties, the socialist Po'alei Zion and the non-socialist Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir and initiated the first collective agricultural settlements known as kibbutzim, which were fundamental in the formation of the Israeli state. They also formed the first underground military group, Ha-Shomer, which later evolved into the Haganah and eventually became the core of the Israeli army. Many leaders of the Zionist national movement, including David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Yosef Sprinzak, Yitzhak Tabenkin, and Aharon David Gordon, were products of the Second Aliyah. The Zionists of the second aliyah were also more ideologically motivated than those of the first aliyah. In particular, they sought the "conquest of labor" which entailed the exclusion of Arabs from the labor market.

The Balfour Declaration and World War I

At the start of the war, the Zionist leadership initiated attempts to persuade the British government of the benefits of sponsoring a Jewish colony in Palestine. Their main initial success was in establishing a lobbying group centered around the Rothschild family, largely driven by Chaim Weizmann, with official negotiations beginning in 1916. The ensuing Balfour declaration came shortly afterwards in November 1917. In it, Britain formally declared its commitment to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration was largely motivated by war-time considerations and antisemitic preconceptions about the putative influence Jews had on the Tsarist government and in the shaping of American policy. Though his decision was also motivated by religious convictions, Balfour himself had passed the Aliens Act 1905 which aimed to keep Eastern European Jews out of Britain. More decisive were Britain's colonial and imperial geopolitical goals in the region, specifically in retaining control over the Suez Canal by establishing a pro-British state in the region. Weizmann's role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration led to his election as the Zionist movement's leader. He remained in that role until 1948, and then was elected as the first President of Israel after the nation gained independence.

The British Mandate and development of the Zionist quasi-state

After the war, the plan for a greater Arab kingdom under the Hashemite family was abandoned when King Feisal was expelled from Damascus by the French in 1920. In parallel, the Zionist demand for a clear British acknowledgment of the entirety of Palestine as the Jewish national home was rejected. Instead, Britain committed only to establishing a Jewish national home "in Palestine" and promised to facilitate this without prejudicing the rights of existing "non-Jewish communities". These qualifying statements aroused the concern of Zionist leaders at the time.

The British mandate over Palestine, established in 1922, was based on the Balfour declaration, explicitly privileging the Jewish minority over the Arab majority. In addition to declaring British support for the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, the mandate included provisions facilitating Jewish immigration, and granting the Zionist movement the status of representing Jewish national interests. In particular, the Jewish Agency, the embodiment of the Zionist movement in Palestine, was made a partner of the mandatory government, acquiring international diplomatic status and representing Zionist interests before the League of Nations and other international venues.

The British mandate effectively established a Jewish quasi-state in Palestine, lacking only full sovereignty, which was held by the British High Commissioner. This lack of sovereignty was crucial for Zionism at this early stage, as the Jewish population was too small to defend itself against the Arabs of Palestine. The British presence provided a necessary safeguard for Jewish nationalism. To achieve political independence, Jews needed Britain's support, particularly in land purchase and immigration.

British policies and the development of Zionist institutions

British policies supporting these efforts were pursued at the expense of the socioeconomic development of the Arab sector. For example, the taxation system imposed by the mandatory government extracted greater relative costs (as well as in absolute numbers) from the Arab population. At the same time, the main British mandatory expenditures from 1933 to 1937 were for economic development and security expenses, in support of the Jewish population. In this sense, the growth of the Jewish economic sector came at the expense of the Arab population. British policies encouraged the proletarianization of the Arab peasantry and reinforced the wage gap between Jewish and Arab laborers. The mandate also included an article describing self-governing institutions intended only for the Jewish population of Palestine. No similar support or recognition was provided to the Palestinian majority at any point during the time of the mandate.

In contrast to the Jewish population, the Arabs did not benefit from any government protections such as social security, employment benefits, trade union protection, job security and training opportunities. Arab wages were one third of their Jewish counterparts (including when paid by the same employer). By enabling the Zionist institutions to serve as a parallel government to the Mandate, the British facilitated the separation of the economy and legitimized their quasi-state status. Accordingly, these institutions, which purported to act in the interests of Jews everywhere, were able to funnel resources into the Jewish sector in Palestine, heavily subsidizing the dominate Jewish economy; for example, over 80% of the JNF's income came from contributions.

Following the Balfour declaration, Jewish immigration to Palestine would grow from 9,149 immigrants in 1921 to 33,801 in 1925—by the end of the mandate period, the Jewish population in Palestine would have nearly tripled, eventually reaching one third of the country's population.

The nucleus of the Jewish quasi-state was the Histadrut, established in 1920 as an independent social, political and economic institution. The Histadrut also developed a military arm, the Haganah, which evolved into a permanent underground reserve army with a command structure integrated into the Jewish community's political institutions. Although the British authorities disapproved of the Haganah, particularly its method of stealing arms from British bases, they did not disband it. The Histadrut operated as a completely independent entity, without interference from the British mandate authorities. Ben-Gurion saw the Histadrut's detachment from socialist ideology to be one of its key strengths; indeed it was the General Organization of Workers in Israel. In particular, the Histadrut worked towards national unity and aimed to dominate the capitalist system en route to gaining political power, not to create a socialist utopia.

As secretary general of the Histadrut and leader of the Zionist labor movement, Ben-Gurion adopted similar strategies and objectives as Weizmann during this period, disagreeing primarily on issues of specific tactical moves up until 1939. The middle class grew dramatically in size with the arrival of the fourth aliyah in 1924, motivating a political shift within the labor movement. It was during this period that the political strategy of the labor movement would solidify. The founding of the Mapai party unified the labor movement, making it the dominant force. The labor party saw economic control as essential to facilitating Zionist settlement and achieving political power: "the economic question is not one of class; it is a national question." Indeed, the Mapai prioritized nationalism over socialism to the extent that the "only qualification required for membership in Mapai was not ideological commitment but possession of a Histadrut membership card." For Ben-Gurion, the transformation from "working class to nation" was intertwined with his rejection of diaspora life, as he would declare: the "weak, unproductive, parasitical Jewish masses" must be converted "to productive labor" in service of the nation.

Zionist policies and the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt

For the Zionist movement, economic development and policies were a mechanism by which political aims could be achieved. A new economic sector exclusively for Jews, controlled by the Labor Zionist movement, was established with support from the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the agricultural workers' Histadrut. The JNF and Histadrut aimed to remove land and labor from the market, effectively excluding Palestinian Arabs. Despite the universalist ideals of Zionist pioneering, this new Jewish economic sector was fundamentally based on exclusionary practices. Throughout the duration of the British Mandate, the labor movement was largely driven by the goal of achieving "100 percent of Hebrew labour." This was primary driver of the territorial, economic and social separation between Jews and Arabs.

The Zionist economic platform was partially based on the assumption (eventually demonstrated incorrect) that economic benefits to the Arabs of Palestine would pacify opposition to the movement. For the Zionist leadership, the economic status and development of the Arabs of Palestine should be compared with Arabs of other countries, rather than with the Jews of Palestine. Accordingly, disproportionate gains in Jewish development were be acceptable as long as the status of the Arab sector did not worsen. While British support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine established the parameters within which the Arab economy could develop, Zionist policies reinforced these limitations. Most notable are the exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish enterprise and the expulsion of Arab peasants from Jewish owned land. Both of these had limited impact in scope but reinforced the structural limitations put in place by British policies.

With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, the Jewish community was increasingly persecuted and driven out. The discriminatory immigration laws of the US, UK and other countries preferable to German Jews, led to, for example, in 1935 alone more than 60,000 Jews arriving in Palestine (more than the total number of Jews in Palestine as of the establishment of the Balfour declaration in 1917). Ben-Gurion would subsequently declare that immigration at this rate would allow for the maximalist Zionist goal of a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The Arab community openly pressured the mandatory government to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases.

Sporadic attacks in the country-side (described by Zionists and the British as "banditry") reflected widespread anger over the Zionist land purchases that displaced local peasants. Meanwhile, in urban areas, protests against British rule and the increasing influence of the Zionist movement intensified and became more militant. The British appointed a commission of inquiry in 1937 in response to the revolt which recommended the partition of the land: annexation of most of Palestine to Transjordan and the designation of a small portion of land for a future Jewish state.

The Peel Commission transfer proposal

At this point, Jews owned 5.6% of the land in Palestine; the land allocated to the Jewish state would contain 40 percent of the country's fertile land. The commission also recommended the expulsion (or the euphemistic "compulsory transfer") of the Palestinian population from the land designated for the Jewish state. For Ben-Gurion, the transfer proposal was the most appealing recommendation put forward by the commission; he would write in his diary:

The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples.… We are being given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this is national consolidation in a free homeland.

Much of the Zionist leadership spoke in strong support of the transfer plan, including Ussishkin, Ruppin and Katznelson. In giving their support for compulsory transfer, they asserted their stance that there is nothing immoral about it. Within the Zionist movement, two perspectives developed with respect to the partition proposal; the first was a complete rejection of partition, the second was acceptance of the idea of partition on the basis that it would eventually allow for expansion to all territories within "the boundaries of Zionist aspirations.". The revolt was inflamed by the partition proposal and continued until 1939 when it was forcefully suppressed by the British.

By the time of the 1936 Arab revolt, almost all groups within the Zionist movement wanted a Jewish state in Palestine, "whether they declared their intent or preferred to camouflage it, whether or not they perceived it as a political instrument, whether they saw sovereign independence as the prime aim, or accorded priority to the task of social construction." The main debates within the movement at this time were concerning partition of Palestine and the nature of the relationship with the British. The dominant feeling within the movement was that Jewish considerations took precedance over those of the Arabs and the Zionist movement was in a struggle for survival. From this perspective, the leadership believed that the movement could not afford to compromise.

According to Zionist historian Yosef Gorny, these considerations would drive the Zionist belief in the necessity of the use of force against the Arabs whose motives "were of no moral or historical significance." The intensity of the revolt, Britain's ambiguous support for the movement and the increasing threat against European Jewry during this period motivated the Zionist leadership to prioritize immediate considerations. The movement ultimately favored the notion of partition, primarily out of practical considerations and partially out of a belief that establishing a Jewish state over all of Palestine would remain an option. At the 1937 Zionist congress, the Zionist leadership adopted the stance that the land allocated to the Jewish state by the partition plan was inadequate—effectively rejecting the partition plan which faded away in the face of both Arab and Zionist opposition.

Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust

In 1939, a British White Paper would recommend limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase with the objective of maintaining the status quo while the threat of war loomed in Europe. This planned to allow no more than 75,000 additional Jewish migrants over a five-year period. With Nazi expansionism in Europe, the limits on immigration prompted further militarization, land takeover and illegal immigration efforts by the Zionist movement. The second world war broke out as the Zionists were developing their campaign against the White Paper—unable to accept the White Paper or to side against the British, the Zionist movement would ultimately support the British war effort while working to upend the White Paper. From the start of the second world war, the Zionists pressured the British to organize and train a Jewish "army," culminating in the establishment of a Jewish Brigade and accompanying blue and white flag. The development of this force would further train and enable the already substantial Zionist military capacity. The Haganah was allowed by the British to openly acquire weapons and worked with the British to prepare for a possible Axis invasion.

Despite the White Paper, Zionist immigration and settlement efforts continued during the war period. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of the holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned. The Zionist war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv, with little Zionist resources being deployed in support of European Jews. Ben-Gurion in particular was primarily concerned with the impact the holocaust had on the Yishuv rather than on European Jewry. Many of those fleeing Nazi terror in Europe preferred to leave for the United States, however, strict American immigration policies and Zionist efforts led to 10% of the 3 million Jews leaving Europe to settle in Palestine.

In the Biltmore Program of 1942, the Zionist movement would openly declare for the first time its goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. At this point, the United States, with its growing economy and unprecedented military force, became a focal point of Zionist political activity which engaged with the American electorate and politicians. US President Truman supported the Biltmore program for the duration of his time in office, largely motivated by humanitarian concerns and the growing influence of the Zionist lobby.

During World War II, as the horrors of the Holocaust became known, the Zionist leadership formulated the One Million Plan, a reduction from Ben-Gurion's previous target of two million immigrants. Following the end of the war, many stateless refugees, mainly Holocaust survivors, began migrating to Palestine in small boats in defiance of British rules. The Holocaust united much of the rest of world Jewry behind the Zionist project. The British either imprisoned these Jews in Cyprus or sent them to the British-controlled Allied Occupation Zones in Germany. The British, having faced Arab revolts, were now facing opposition by Zionist groups in Palestine for subsequent restrictions on Jewish immigration. In January 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a joint British and American committee, was tasked to examine political, economic and social conditions in Mandatory Palestine and the well-being of the peoples now living there; to consult representatives of Arabs and Jews, and to make other recommendations 'as necessary' for an interim handling of these problems as well as for their eventual solution. Following the failure of the 1946–47 London Conference on Palestine, at which the United States refused to support the British leading to both the Morrison–Grady Plan and the Bevin Plan being rejected by all parties, the British decided to refer the question to the UN on February 14, 1947.

End of the Mandate and expulsion of the Palestinians

Towards the end of the war, the Zionist leadership was motivated more than ever to establish a Jewish state. Since the British were no longer sponsoring its development, many Zionists considered it would be necessary to establish the state by force by upending the British position in Palestine. In this the IRA's tactics against Britain in the Irish War of Independence served as a both a model and source of inspiration. The Irgun, the military arm of the revisionist Zionists, led by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, which at one point sought an alliance with the Nazis, would lead a series of terrorist attacks against the British starting in 1944. This included the King David Hotel bombing, British immigration and tax offices and police stations. It was only by the war's end that the Haganah joined in the sabotage against the British. The combined impact of US opinion and the attacks on British presence eventually led the British to refer the situation to the United Nations in 1947.

The UNSCOP found that Jews were a minority in Palestine, owning 6% of the total land. The urgency of the condition of the Jewish refugees in Europe motivated the committee to unanimously vote in favor of terminating the British mandate in Palestine. The disagreement came with regards to whether Palestine should be partitioned or if it should constitute a federal state. American lobbying efforts, pressuring UN delegates with the threat of withdrawal of US aid, eventually secured the General Assembly votes in favor of the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states which was passed 29 November 1947.

Outbursts of violence slowly grew into a wider civil war between the Arabs and Zionist militias. By mid-December, the Haganah had shifted to a more "aggressive defense", abandoning notions of restraint it had espoused from 1936 to 1939. The Haganah reprisal raids were often disproportionate to the initial Arab offenses, which led to the spread of violence to previously unaffected areas. The Zionist militias, employed terror attacks against Arab civilian and militia centers. In response, Arabs planted bombs in Jewish civilian areas, particularly in Jerusalem.

The first expulsion of Palestinians began 12 days after the adoption of the UN resolution, and the first Palestinian village was eliminated a month later. In March 1948, Zionist forces began implementing Plan D, which warranted the expulsion of civilians and the destruction of Arab towns and villages in pursuit of eliminating potentially hostile Arab elements. According to Benny Morris Zionist forces committed 24 massacres of Palestinians in the ensuing war, in part as a form of psychological warfare, the most notorious of which is the Deir Yassin massacre. Between 1948 and 1949, 750,000 Palestinians would be driven out of their homes, primarily as a result of these expulsions and massacres.

The British left Palestine (having done little to maintain order) on May 14 as planned. The British did not facilitate a formal transfer of power; a fully functioning Jewish quasi-state had already been operating under the British for the past several decades. The same day, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The Declaration of Independence of Israel described a democracy with equality of social and political rights for all citizens, and extended a peace offering to neighboring states and their Arab citizens. Masalha notes that the declaration states equality on the basis of citizenship but not nationality.

The establishment of the State of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine, instead of the 55% outlined in the UN partition plan, resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and the Arab landscape. This war, led by the Zionist Yishuv was framed by its leaders in biblical and messianic terms as a 'miraculous clearing of the land,' akin to the biblical War of Joshua. Masalha writes that it is not clear who the Yishuv was declaring independence from, as it was neither from the British colonial rule, which facilitated Jewish settlement against Palestinian wishes, nor from the land's indigenous inhabitants, who had long cultivated and owned it.

Hebraization of names

As part of the effort to consolidate its new ownership over the land it had taken over in the 1948 war, the Israeli state worked towards "erasing all traces of its former owners." The project of "Hebraization" of the map, for which the JNF Naming Committee was established, aimed to replace what remained of the Arab towns and villages with newly named Israeli settlements. These names were often based on the Arab names but with a "Hebrew pronunciation" or based on old Hebrew biblical names. This effort also sought to demonstrate continuous Jewish ownership over the land to ancient times. Moshe Dayan would later speak to the appropriation of Arab place names:

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Hunefis; and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that didn’t have a former Arab population.

Prior to 1948, the Zionist movement had limited authority over the use of place names in Palestine. After 1948, the Zionist movement systematically eliminated mention of "Palestine" from the names of its organizations; for example, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which played a critical role in the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 was renamed to the "Jewish Agency for Israel".

Post-World War II

With the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Stalin reversed his long-standing opposition to Zionism, and tried to mobilize worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort. A Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in Moscow. Many thousands of Jewish refugees fled the Nazis and entered the Soviet Union during the war, where they reinvigorated Jewish religious activities and opened new synagogues. In May 1947 Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko told the United Nations that the USSR supported the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The USSR formally voted that way in the UN in November 1947. However once Israel was established, Stalin reversed positions, favoured the Arabs, arrested the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and launched attacks on Jews in the USSR.

In 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended that western Palestine should be partitioned 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 UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote led to celebrations in Jewish communities and protests in Arab communities throughout Palestine. Violence throughout the country, previously an Arab and Jewish insurgency against the British, Jewish-Arab communal violence, spiralled into the 1947–1949 Palestine war. According to various assessments of the UN, the conflict led to an exodus of 711,000 to 957,000 Palestinian Arabs, outside of Israel's territories. More than a quarter had already fled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. After the 1949 Armistice Agreements, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented displaced Palestinians from claiming private property or returning on the state's territories. They and many of their descendants remain refugees supported by UNRWA.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, the World Zionist Organization has functioned mainly as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel. It has provided political support for Israel in other countries but plays little role in internal Israeli politics. The movement's major success since 1948 was in providing logistical support for Jewish migrants and refugees and, most importantly, in assisting Soviet Jews in their struggle with the authorities over the right to leave the USSR and to practice their religion in freedom, and the exodus of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world, mostly to Israel. In 1944–45, Ben-Gurion described the One Million Plan to foreign officials as being the "primary goal and top priority of the Zionist movement." The immigration restrictions of the British White Paper of 1939 meant that such a plan could not be put into large scale effect until the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948. The new country's immigration policy had some opposition within the new Israeli government, such as those who argued that there was "no justification for organizing large-scale emigration among Jews whose lives were not in danger, particularly when the desire and motivation were not their own" as well as those who argued that the absorption process caused "undue hardship". However, the force of Ben-Gurion's influence and insistence ensured that his immigration policy was carried out.

Religious Zionism and the Six-Day War

The 1967 Six-Day War was followed by the emergence of "religious Zionism." The Israeli conquest of the West Bank, referred to by Zionists as Judea and Samaria, indicated to religious Zionists that they were living in a messianic era. For them, the war was a demonstration of the work of the Divine Hand and the "beginning of redemption." The rabbis following in this line of thought immediately began to venerate the land as sacred, making its sanctity a core principle of religious Zionism. Consequently, anyone willing to cede parts of this land was seen as a traitor to the Jewish people. This belief contributed to the religiously motivated assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which was carried out with the approval of some Orthodox rabbis. Rabbi Kook, a main religious Zionist leader and thinker, would declare in 1967 following the Six Day War in the presence of Israeli leadership including the president, ministers, members of the Knesset, judges, chief rabbis and senior civil servants:

I tell you explicitly... that there is a prohibition in the Torah against giving up even an inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign land; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our forefathers. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God—the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for it and for all of us.

For the religious Zionists, secular Zionism and secular state policies were holy: "The spirit of Israel... is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter how secularist his intention may be, is, despite himself, imbued with the divine spirit even against his own will." Religious Zionists view the settlement of the West Bank as a commandment of God, necessary for the redemption of the Jewish people.

Role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. In response to Ben-Gurion's 1938 quote that "politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves", Israeli historian Benny Morris says, "Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement", and that "Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist." Morris describes the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as necessarily displacing and dispossessing the Arab population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish and Arab region was a fundamental issue for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing, of the Arab Palestinian population. According to Benny Morris, "the idea of transferring the Arabs out... was seen as the chief means of assuring the stability of the 'Jewishness' of the proposed Jewish State".

In fact, the concept of forcibly removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions, from early on in the movement's development. The concept of transfer was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership. The notion of forcible transfer was so appealing to this leadership that it was considered the most attractive provision in the Peel Commission. Indeed, this sentiment was deeply ingrained to the extent that Ben Gurion's acceptance of partition was contingent upon the removal of the Palestinian population. He would go as far as to say that transfer was such an ideal solution that it "must happen some day". It was the right wing of the Zionist movement that put forward the main arguments against transfer, their objections being primarily on practical rather than moral grounds.

According to Morris, the idea of ethnically cleansing the land of Palestine was to play a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement. He explains that "transfer" was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" and that a land which was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population. Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population's fear of displacement. He explains that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population.

Types

From the turn of the century until the Arab revolt of 1936, there was room for political flexibility within the Zionist movement. Even so, the ideological framework within which the movement operated constrained the political moves made by groups within the movement. A key tenant of this framework involved seeking the support of a Great Power through which to achieve the acquiescence of the Palestinians.

Labor Zionism

In Labor Zionist thought, a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Labor Zionists established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim" which began as a variation on a "national farm" scheme, a form of cooperative agriculture where the Jewish National Fund hired Jewish workers under trained supervision. The kibbutzim were a symbol of the Second Aliyah in that they put great emphasis on communalism and egalitarianism, representing Utopian socialism to a certain extent. Furthermore, they stressed self-sufficiency, which became an essential aspect of Labor Zionism.

Traditionalist Israeli historian Anita Shapira describes labor Zionism's use of violence against Palestinians for political means as essentially the same as that of radical conservative Zionist groups. For example, Shapira notes that during the 1936 Palestine revolt, the Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in the "uninhibited use of terror", "mass indiscriminate killings of the aged, women and children", "attacks against British without any consideration of possible injuries to innocent bystanders, and the murder of British in cold blood". Shapira argues that there were only marginal differences in military behavior between the Irgun and the labor Zionist Palmah. In following with policies laid out by Ben-Gurion, the prevalent method among field squads was that if an Arab gang had used a village as a hideout, it was considered acceptable to hold the entire village collectively responsible. The lines delineating what was acceptable and unacceptable while dealing with these villagers were "vague and intentionally blurred". As Shapira suggests, these ambiguous limits practically did not differ from those of the openly terrorist group, Irgun.

Labor Zionism became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine and was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election when the Israeli Labor Party was defeated. The Israeli Labor Party continues the tradition, although the most popular party in the kibbutzim is Meretz. Labor Zionism's main institution is the Histadrut (general organisation of labor unions), which began by providing strikebreakers against a Palestinian worker's strike in 1920 and until 1970s was the largest employer in Israel after the Israeli government.

General Zionism and Liberal Zionism

General Zionism was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 until after the First World War. General Zionists identified with the liberal European middle class to which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann aspired. As head of the World Zionist Organization, Weizmann's policies had a sustained impact on the Zionist movement, with Abba Eban describing him as the dominant figure in Jewish life during the interwar period. According to Zionist Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the essential assumptions of Weizmann's strategy were later adopted by Ben-Gurion and subsequent Zionist (and Israeli) leaders. By replacing 'Great Britain' with 'United States' and 'Arab National Movement' with 'Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,' Weizmann's strategic concepts can be seen as reflective of Israel's current foreign policy. A key aspect of this strategy is the consistent non-recognition of the national rights of the Palestinian people as a basic element of Zionist policy towards the Arab issue.

Weizmann's ultimate goal was the establishment of a Jewish state, even beyond the borders of "Greater Israel." For Weizmann, Palestine was a Jewish and not an Arab country. The state he sought would contain the east bank of the Jordan River and extend from the Litani River (in present-day Lebanon). Weizmann's strategy involved incrementally approaching this goal over a long period, establishing "facts on the ground" as "faits accomplis" in the form of settlement expansion and land acquisition. Weizmann was open to the idea of Arabs and Jews jointly running Palestine through an elected council with equal representation, but he did not view the Arabs as equal partners in negotiations about the country's future. In particular, he was steadfast in his view of the "moral superiority" of the Jewish claim to Palestine over the Arab claim and believed these negotiations should be conducted solely between Britain and the Jews.

Liberal Zionism, although not associated with any single party in modern Israel, remains a strong trend in Israeli politics advocating free market principles, democracy and adherence to human rights. Their political arm was one of the ancestors of the modern-day Likud. Kadima, the main centrist party during the 2000s that split from Likud and is now defunct, however, did identify with many of the fundamental policies of Liberal Zionist ideology, advocating among other things the need for Palestinian statehood in order to form a more democratic society in Israel, affirming the free market, and calling for equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel. In 2013, Ari Shavit suggested that the success of the then-new Yesh Atid party (representing secular, middle-class interests) embodied the success of "the new General Zionists."

Philosopher Carlo Strenger describes a modern-day version of Liberal Zionism (supporting his vision of "Knowledge-Nation Israel"), rooted in the original ideology of Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, that stands in contrast to both the romantic nationalism of the right and the Netzah Yisrael of the ultra-Orthodox. It is marked by a concern for democratic values and human rights, freedom to criticize government policies without accusations of disloyalty, and rejection of excessive religious influence in public life. "Liberal Zionism celebrates the most authentic traits of the Jewish tradition: the willingness for incisive debate; the contrarian spirit of davka; the refusal to bow to authoritarianism." Liberal Zionists see that "Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity or gender."

Revisionist Zionism

Ze'ev Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party in 1925 which took on a more militant ethos and openly maximalist agenda. Jabotinsky rejected Weizmann's strategy of incremental state building, instead preferring to immediately declare sovereignty over the entire region, which extended to both the East and West bank of the Jordan river. Like Weizmann and Herzl, Jabotinsky also believed that the support of a great power was essential to the success of Zionism. From early on, Jabotinksy openly rejected the possibility of a "voluntary agreement" with the Arabs of Palestine. He instead believed in building an "iron wall" of Jewish military force to break Arab resistance to Zionism, at which point an agreement could be established. The labor Zionists promoted immigration and settlement, establishing "facts", as the main path towards statebuilding. Later, Ben-Gurion would recognize the national character of Arab rejection of Zionism and concluded that only war, not an agreement, would resolve the conflict.

Revisionist Zionists, led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, believed that a Jewish state must expand to both sides of the Jordan River, i.e. taking Transjordan in addition to all of Palestine. The movement developed what became known as Nationalist Zionism, whose guiding principles were outlined in the 1923 essay Iron Wall, a term denoting the force needed to prevent Palestinian resistance against colonization. Jabotinsky wrote that

Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot—or else I am through with playing at colonization.

— Zeev Jabotinsky

Historian Avi Shlaim describes Jabotinsky's perspective

Although the Jews originated in the East, they belonged to the West culturally, morally, and spiritually. Zionism was conceived by Jabotinsky not as the return of the Jews to their spiritual homeland but as an offshoot or implant of Western civilization in the East. This worldview translated into a geostrategic conception in which Zionism was to be permanently allied with European colonialism against all the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean.

In 1935 the Revisionists left the WZO because it refused to state that the creation of a Jewish state was an objective of Zionism. According to Israeli historian Yosef Gorny, the Revisionists remained within the ideological mainstream of the Zionist movement even after this split. The Revisionists advocated the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine to force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration.

Supporters of Revisionist Zionism developed the Likud Party in Israel, which has dominated most governments since 1977. It advocates Israel's maintaining control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and takes a hard-line approach in the Arab–Israeli conflict. In 2005, the Likud split over the issue of creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Party members advocating peace talks helped form the Kadima Party.

Religious Zionism

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Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that combines religious conservatism and secular nationalism into a theology with patriotism as its basis. In this vein, Religious Zionism reinvents the meaning of Jewish traditions in service of the nation. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Religious Zionists were mainly observant Jews who supported Zionist efforts to build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. One of the core ideas in Religious Zionism is the belief that the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel and the establishment of Israel is Atchalta De'Geulah ("the beginning of the redemption"), the initial stage of the geula.

After the Six-Day War and the capture of the West Bank, a territory referred to in Jewish terms as Judea and Samaria, right-wing components of the Religious Zionist movement integrated nationalist revindication and evolved into what is sometimes known as Neo-Zionism. Their ideology revolves around three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel.

Other currents

Brit-Shalom was established in 1925, an ultimately marginal group which promoted Arab-Jewish cooperation.

Non-Jewish support

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, top figures of the Nationalist government, including Sun Yat-sen, expressed their sympathy with the aspirations of the Jewish people for a National Home.

Christian support

Christian Zionism is primarily driven by the belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land will either lead to their conversion to Christianity or their destruction. This belief is criticized by Gershom Gorenberg in his book "The End of Days," where he highlights the troubling aspect of this messianic scenario—the disappearance of Jews. Evangelical figures like Jerry Falwell believe the establishment of Israel is a pivotal event signaling the Second Coming of Christ and the eventual End of the World. As a result, Christian Zionists have significantly contributed politically and financially to Israeli nationalist forces, with the understanding that Israel's role is to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ and the elimination of Judaism.

Some Christians actively supported the return of Jews to Palestine even prior to the rise of Zionism, as well as subsequently. Anita Shapira, a history professor emerita at Tel Aviv University, suggests that evangelical Christian restorationists of the 1840s "passed this notion on to Jewish circles". Evangelical Christian anticipation of and political lobbying within the UK for Restorationism was widespread in the 1820s and common beforehand. It was common among the Puritans to anticipate and frequently to pray for a Jewish return to their homeland.

One of the principal Protestant teachers who promoted the biblical doctrine that the Jews would return to their national homeland was John Nelson Darby. His doctrine of dispensationalism is credited with promoting Zionism, following his 11 lectures on the hopes of the church, the Jew and the gentile given in Geneva in 1840. However, others like C H Spurgeon, both Horatius and Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray M'Chyene, and J C Ryle were among a number of prominent proponents of both the importance and significance of a Jewish return, who were not dispensationalist. Pro-Zionist views were embraced by many evangelicals and also affected international foreign policy.

The Russian Orthodox ideologue Hippolytus Lutostansky, also known as the author of multiple antisemitic tracts, insisted in 1911 that Russian Jews should be "helped" to move to Palestine "as their rightful place is in their former kingdom of Palestine".

Notable early supporters of Zionism include British Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, American President Woodrow Wilson and British Major-General Orde Wingate, whose activities in support of Zionism led the British Army to ban him from ever serving in Palestine. According to Charles Merkley of Carleton University, Christian Zionism strengthened significantly after the Six-Day War of 1967, and many dispensationalist and non-dispensationalist evangelical Christians, especially Christians in the United States, now strongly support Zionism.

In the last years of his life, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, Joseph Smith, declared, "the time for Jews to return to the land of Israel is now." In 1842, Smith sent Orson Hyde, an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to Jerusalem to dedicate the land for the return of the Jews.

Some Arab Christians publicly supporting Israel include US author Nonie Darwish, and former Muslim Magdi Allam, author of Viva Israele, both born in Egypt. Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-born Christian US journalist and founder of the American Congress for Truth, urges Americans to "fearlessly speak out in defense of America, Israel and Western civilization".

The largest Zionist organisation is Christians United for Israel, which has 10 million members and is led by John Hagee.

Muslim support

Muslims who have publicly defended Zionism include Tawfik Hamid, Islamic thinker and reformer and former member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist militant group that is designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and United Kingdom, Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community and Tashbih Sayyed, a Pakistani-American scholar, journalist, and author.

During the Palestine Mandate era, As'ad Shukeiri, a Muslim scholar ('alim) of the Acre area, and the father of PLO founder Ahmad Shukeiri, rejected the values of the Palestinian Arab national movement and was opposed to the anti-Zionist movement. He met routinely with Zionist officials and had a part in every pro-Zionist Arab organization from the beginning of the British Mandate, publicly rejecting Mohammad Amin al-Husayni's use of Islam to attack Zionism.

Druze support

While most Israeli Druze identify as ethnically Arab, today, tens of thousands of Israeli Druze belong to "Druze Zionist" movements.

Hindu support

After Israel's creation in 1948, the Indian National Congress government opposed Zionism. Some writers have claimed that this was done in order to get more Muslim votes in India (where Muslims numbered over 30 million at the time). Zionism, seen as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of the Jewish people to their homeland then under British colonial rule, appealed to many Hindu nationalists, who viewed their struggle for independence from British rule and the Partition of India as national liberation for long-oppressed Hindus.

An international opinion survey has shown that India is the most pro-Israel country in the world. In more current times, conservative Indian parties and organizations tend to support Zionism. This has invited attacks on the Hindutva movement by parts of the Indian left opposed to Zionism, and allegations that Hindus are conspiring with the "Jewish Lobby."

Anti-Zionism

Zionism has been opposed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals. In 1919, the US-based King–Crane Commission found that the subjection of Palestinians to Zionist rule was a violation of the principle of self-determination. The report stated that "The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered."

Today, opponents include Palestinian nationalists, several states of the Arab League and in the Muslim world, some secular, Satmar and Neturei Karta Jews. Reasons for opposing Zionism have been varied, and they include: fundamental disagreement that foreign born Jews have rights of resettlement, the perception that land confiscations are unfair; expulsions of Palestinians; violence against Palestinians; and alleged racism. Arab states in particular have historically strongly opposed Zionism. The preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been ratified by 53 African countries as of 2014, includes an undertaking to eliminate Zionism together with other practices including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, "aggressive foreign military bases" and all forms of discrimination.

In 1945 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud pointed out that it was Germany who had committed crimes against the Jews and so Germany should be punished. Palestinian Arabs had done no harm to European Jews and did not deserve to be punished by losing their land. Roosevelt on return to the US concluded that Israel "could only be established and maintained by force."

Catholic Church and Zionism

Shortly after the First Zionist Congress, the semi-official Vatican periodical (edited by the Jesuits) Civiltà Cattolica gave its biblical-theological judgement on political Zionism: "1827 years have passed since the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilled ... that the Jews would be led away to be slaves among all the nations and that they would remain in the dispersion until the end of the world." The Jews should not be permitted to return to Palestine with sovereignty: "According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and vagabondo among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures ... but by their very existence".

Nonetheless, Theodor Herzl travelled to Rome in late January 1904, after the sixth Zionist Congress (August 1903) and six months before his death, looking for support. On January 22, Herzl first met the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. According to Herzl's private diary notes, the Cardinal's interpretation of the history of Israel was the same as that of the Catholic Church, but he also asked for the conversion of the Jews to Catholicism. Three days later, Herzl met Pope Pius X, who replied to his request of support for a Jewish return to Israel in the same terms, saying that "we are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it ... The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people." In 1922, the same periodical published a piece by its Viennese correspondent, "anti-Semitism is nothing but the absolutely necessary and natural reaction to the Jews' arrogance... Catholic anti-Semitism—while never going beyond the moral law—adopts all necessary means to emancipate the Christian people from the abuse they suffer from their sworn enemy". This initial attitude changed over the next 50 years, until 1997, when at the Vatican symposium of that year, Pope John Paul II rejected the Christian roots of antisemitism, stating that "... the wrong and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relating to the Jewish people and their supposed guilt circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility toward this people."

Characterization as colonialist and racist

Zionism is often considered to be an example of a colonial or racist movement. According to historian Avi Shlaim, throughout its history up to present day, Zionism "is replete with manifestations of deep hostility and contempt towards the indigenous population." Shlaim balances this by pointing out that there have always been individuals within the Zionist movement that have criticized such attitudes. He cites the example of Ahad Ha'am, who after visiting Palestine in 1891, published a series of articles criticizing the aggressive behaviour and political ethnocentrism of Zionist settlers. Ha'am reportedly wrote that the Yishuv "behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it, and nobody stands to check this contemptible and dangerous tendency" and that they believed that "the only language that the Arabs understand is that of force." Some criticisms of Zionism claim that Judaism's notion of the "chosen people" is the source of racism in Zionism, despite, according to Gustavo Perednik, that being a religious concept unrelated to Zionism. This characterization of Zionism as a colonialism has been made by, among others, Gershon Shafir, Michael Prior, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling. Noam Chomsky, John P. Quigly, Nur Masalha, and Cheryl Rubenberg have criticized Zionism, saying that it unfairly confiscates land and expels Palestinians. Isaac Deutscher has called Israelis the 'Prussians of the Middle East', who have achieved a 'totsieg', a 'victorious rush into the grave' as a result of dispossessing 1.5 million Palestinians. Israel had become the 'last remaining colonial power' of the twentieth century. Saleh Abdel Jawad, Nur Masalha, Michael Prior, Ian Lustick, and John Rose have criticized Zionism for having been responsible for violence against Palestinians, such as the Deir Yassin massacre, Sabra and Shatila massacre, and Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.

Edward Said and Michael Prior claim that the notion of expelling the Palestinians was an early component of Zionism, citing Herzl's diary from 1895 which states "we shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed—the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Derek Penslar says that Herzl may have been considering either South America or Palestine when he wrote the diary entry about expropriation. According to Walter Laqueur, although many Zionists proposed transfer, it was never official Zionist policy and in 1918 Ben-Gurion "emphatically rejected" it.

The exodus of the Arab Palestinians during the 1947–1949 war has been controversially described as having involved ethnic cleansing. According to a growing consensus between 'new historians' in Israel and Palestinian historians, expulsion and destruction of villages played a major role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. While some traditionalist scholars such as Efraim Karsh state that most of the Arabs who fled left of their own accord or were pressured to leave by their fellow Arabs (and that Israel attempted to convince them to stay), the scholarly consensus now dismisses this claim, and as such, Benny Morris concurs that Arab instigation was not the major cause of the refugees' flight, and state that the major cause of Palestinian flight was instead military actions by the Israeli Defence Force and fear of them and that Arab instigation can only explain a small part of the exodus and not a large part of it. Ilan Pappe said that Zionism resulted in ethnic cleansing. This view diverges from other New Historians, such as Benny Morris, who place the Palestinian exodus in the context of war, not ethnic cleansing. When Benny Morris was asked about the Expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle, he responded "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."

In 1938, Mahatma Gandhi said in the letter "The Jews", that the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine must be performed by non-violence against the Arabs, comparing it to the Partition of India into Hindu and Muslim countries. He proposed to the Jews to "offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them". He expressed his "sympathy" for the Jewish aspirations, but said: "The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?" and warned them against violence: "It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs ... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home ... They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart". Gandhi later told American journalist Louis Fischer in 1946 that "Jews have a good case in Palestine. If the Arabs have a claim to Palestine, the Jews have a prior claim". He expressed himself again in 1946, nuancing his views: "Hitherto I have refrained practically from saying anything in public regarding the Jew-Arab controversy. I have done so for good reasons. That does not mean any want of interest in the question, but it does mean that I do not consider myself sufficiently equipped with knowledge for the purpose". He concluded: "If they were to adopt the matchless weapon of non-violence ... their case would be the world's and I have no doubt that among the many things that the Jews have given to the world, this would be the best and the brightest".

In December 1973, the UN passed a series of resolutions condemning South Africa and included a reference to an "unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, Apartheid and Zionism." At the time there was little cooperation between Israel and South Africa, although the two countries would develop a close relationship during the 1970s. Parallels have also been drawn between aspects of South Africa's apartheid regime and certain Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, which are seen as manifestations of racism in Zionist thinking.

In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which said "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". According to the resolution, "any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous." The resolution named the occupied territory of Palestine, Zimbabwe, and South Africa as examples of racist regimes. Resolution 3379 was pioneered by the Soviet Union and passed with numerical support from Arab and African states amidst accusations that Israel was supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1991 the resolution was repealed with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86, after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked.

Arab countries sought to associate Zionism with racism in connection with a 2001 UN conference on racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa, which caused the United States and Israel to walk away from the conference as a response. The final text of the conference did not connect Zionism with racism. A human rights forum arranged in connection with the conference, on the other hand, did equate Zionism with racism and censured Israel for what it called "racist crimes, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing".

Haredi Judaism and Zionism

Haredi Jews number some 2,100,000 world-wide, constituting 14% of the total Jewish population in the world. Most accept the secular Israeli state. A small number of Orthodox organizations among these Haredi reject Zionism as they view it as a secular movement and reject nationalism as a doctrine. in Jerusalem, certain Hasidic groups, most famously the Satmar Hasidim, as well as the larger movement they are part of, the Edah HaChareidis, are opposed to its ideology for religious reasons. Despite having his life saved by a leader of the Zionist movement in 1944, one of the best known Hasidic opponents of political Zionism was Hungarian rebbe and Talmudic scholar Joel Teitelbaum. Although this group of ultra-observant Jews do not support or identify with Zionism as a movement or ideology, in a poll taken in February 2024, 83% said they have a "very strong emotional connection" to Israel, only a small percentage less than the 87% of Modern Orthodox Jews who reported having those same feelings.

The Neturei Karta, a tiny Orthodox Haredi sect, is considered "the most radical of the Extreme Orthodox groups", which overall have a membership in Israel of 10,000 to 12,000 individuals. Some of its members have said that Israel is a "racist regime", compared Zionists to Nazis, claimed that Zionism is contrary to the teachings of the Torah, or accused it of promoting antisemitism. According to the Jewish Chronicle, their approximately 5,000 members worldwide make up about 0.03 percent of the world's Jewish population.

Anti-Zionism or antisemitism

Critics of anti-Zionism have argued that opposition to Zionism can be hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and that criticism of Israel may be used as an excuse to express viewpoints that might otherwise be considered antisemitic. In discussion of the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, "one theory holds that anti-Zionism is no more than veiled anti-Semitism". This is contrasted with the theory "that criticism of Israeli politics has been discredited as anti-Zionism, and thus linked with anti-Semitism, in order to prevent such criticism".

According to Thomas Mitchell, the terms Jewish and Zionist are at times used interchangeably by some Arab leadership, a perspective that has been influenced by the introduction of European antisemitism into the Arab world in the 1930s and 1940s by the Axis powers. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has always positioned itself as being anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, although its leadership have in a few instances used the terms interchangeably.

Anti-Zionist writers such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Marder, and Tariq Ali have argued that the characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitic obscures legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions, and that it is used as a political ploy in order to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

• Jewish American linguist Noam Chomsky argues: "There have long been efforts to identify anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in an effort to exploit anti-racist sentiment for political ends; 'one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all,' Israeli diplomat Abba Eban argued, in a typical expression of this intellectually and morally disreputable position (Eban, Congress Bi-Weekly, March 30, 1973). But that no longer suffices. It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism—or in the case of Jews, as 'self-hatred,' so that all possible cases are covered." – Chomsky, 1989 "Necessary Illusions
• Philosopher Michael Marder argues: "To deconstruct Zionism is ... to demand justice for its victims—not only for the Palestinians, who are suffering from it, but also for the anti-Zionist Jews, 'erased' from the officially consecrated account of Zionist history. By deconstructing its ideology, we shed light on the context it strives to repress and on the violence it legitimises with a mix of theological or metaphysical reasoning and affective appeals to historical guilt for the undeniably horrific persecution of Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere."
• Jewish American political scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that anti-Zionism and often just criticism of Israeli policies have been conflated with antisemitism, sometimes called new antisemitism for political gain: "Whenever Israel faces a public relations débâcle such as the Intifada or international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Jewish organizations orchestrate this extravaganza called the 'new anti-Semitism.' The purpose is several-fold. First, it is to discredit any charges by claiming the person is an anti-Semite. It's to turn Jews into the victims, so that the victims are not the Palestinians any longer. As people like Abraham Foxman of the ADL put it, the Jews are being threatened by a new holocaust. It's a role reversal—the Jews are now the victims, not the Palestinians. So it serves the function of discrediting the people leveling the charge. It's no longer Israel that needs to leave the Occupied Territories; it's the Arabs who need to free themselves of the anti-Semitism."

Zionism and colonialism

Founders and early leaders of Zionism described it as colonization, including Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

According to Arab politics professor Joseph Massad, Zionism was connected with European colonial thought from early on in its development. Massad describes antisemitism and a shared interest in the colonial project as the basis of the collaboration between Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists during the beginning of the movement's development. He argues that the collaboration between the Zionist movement and European imperialism was essential to the movement's development. In his prominent pro-Zionist book Auto-Emancipation (1882), Jewish thinker Leon Pinsker wrote that the "auto-emancipation of the Jewish people as a nation the foundation of a colonial community belonging to the Jews". In Rome and Jerusalem (1862), early Jewish Zionist Moses Hess asked those who were unconvinced of the merits of the Zionist movement if "you still doubt that France will help the Jews to found colonies which may extend from Suez to Jerusalem and from the banks of the Jordan to the coast of the Mediterranean?" Massad wrote that, for political and ideological reasons, starting in the 1930s, some Zionist thinkers, such as Zionist Executive chairman F.H. Kisch, proposed that the Zionist movement should avoid using terms related to colonialism.

Gershon Shafir describes the use of violence by a colonial metropole as essential to settler colonization. Shafir defines settler-colonialism as the creation of a permanent home in which settlers benefit from privileges withheld from the indigenous population. He describes colonization, the establishment of settlements against the wishes of the indigenous people, as the distinctive characteristic of settler colonialism.

Shafir distinguishes between the pre-1948 era and the post-1967 era in the sense that after 1967, the Israeli state became the sponsor of the Zionist movement's colonial efforts, a role which had previously been played by the British. For Shafir, Jerome Slater and Shlomo Ben-Ami, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Zionist movement more closely resembled other colonial movements. Similarly, Avi Shlaim describes 1967 as a milestone in the development of the "Zionist colonial project" rather than as a qualitative shift in its nature. Ze'ev Sternhell agrees that Zionism was a movement of "conquest" from the outset, but disagrees that Jews arriving in Palestine had a colonial mindset. The conquest of 1967 was, for Sternhell, the first time the Zionist movement created a "colonial situation." Israeli historian Yitzhak Sternberg cites Sivan, Halamish and Efrat as similarly describing 1967 as a turning point in which Zionism became involved in colonial efforts.

Shafir and Morris both further distinguish between Zionist colonialism during the First Aliyah and following the arrival of the Second Aliyah. Shafir describes the First Aliyah as following the ethnic plantation colony model, exploiting low wage Palestinian workers. Morris describes this relationship:

These Jews were not colonists in the usual sense of sons or agents of an imperial mother country, projecting its power beyond the seas and exploiting Third World natural resources. But the settlements of the First Aliyah were still colonial, with white Europeans living amid and employing a mass of relatively impoverished natives.

The "pure settlement colonies" of the Second Aliyah and its exclusion of Palestinian labor, Shafir says "did not originate from opposition to colonialism," but instead out of a desire to secure employment for Jewish settlers. Similarly, Morris and traditionalist historian Anita Shapira describe the labor Zionist rejection of the ethnic plantation model as motivated by practical as well as moral justifications, stemming from their socialist outlook. For Shapira, studying Zionism as a colonial movement is "both legitimate and desirable," comparable to colonialism in North America and Australia. She argues that the settler-colonial framing may help "clarify the relations between the settling nation and the native one."

Sternberg argues that it is important to clearly distinguish between colonization and colonialism as concepts. For Shafir and Peled, "colonization, namely territorial dispossession and the settlement of immigrant populations," cannot happen without colonialism and "the means of violence of a colonial metropole." In contrast, Sternberg considers classical definitions of colonization as broad enough to include cases which did not require the dispossession of the native population.

Tuvia Friling depicts the Zionist movement as operating differently from colonial movements in terms of land acquisition. Specifically, the Zionist movement acquired land in the early years by purchasing it. Sternberg in contrast explains that it was not unique for colonial movements to purchase land as part of land acquisition, pointing to similarities in North American colonialism. Friling argues that in contrast to European colonial projects, the early Zionist leadership was dominated by the labor movement with a socialist ethos. Shafir points to ideological drives in American and Rhodesian settler colonies which developed in service of the colonial project. Similarly, Shafir says, the Zionist labor movement used socialist ideals largely in service of the national movement.

Sternhell rejects the depiction of the Zionist settlers arriving in Palestine as colonialists. In response to the argument that Zionism could not be a colonial project, but should instead be described as a project of immigration, Shafir quotes Lorenzo Veracini's statement that "behind the persecuted, the migrant, even the refugee... behind his labor and hardship." Shafir goes on to characterize Zionism as not unique, in the sense that "he ruthless ethnic cleanser is commonly hidden behind the peaceful settler who arrived in an 'empty land' to start a new life."

Alan Dowty describes the debate over the relationship between Zionism and colonialism as essentially a discussion of "semantics." He defines colonialism as the imposition of control by a "mother country" on another people, for economic gain or for the spreading of culture or religion. Dowty argues that Zionism does not fit this definition on the basis that "there was... no mother country" and that Zionism did not consider the local population in its plans. Efraim Karsh adopts a similar definition and similarly concludes that Zionism is not colonialism. Dowty elaborates that Zionism did not control the local population since it ultimately failed to remove the native people from Palestine. In his assessment of whether Zionism is colonialism, Penslar works with a broader definition of colonialism than Dowty, which allows for the country sponsoring the colonial enterprise to be different from the country of origin of the settlers.

Zionism has also been framed as national liberation movement. Masalha cites the Zionist relationship with the British in arguing that Zionism could not be understood in terms of national liberation. Specifically, he says that despite the tensions between the Zionists and the British, "the State of Israel owes its very existence to the British colonial power in Palestine." Shapira and Ben-Ami emphasize the importance of the Zionist ethos, describing Zionism as a national liberation movement that was "destined" or "forced" to use colonial methods.

In his work on Zionism, Edward Said described the movement as following the European colonial model. According to Said, Zionism's alliances with the Great Powers and its patronizing attitude toward the native Palestinian population, whom it regarded as backward, were consistent with other colonial projects. For Said, Zionists dismissed native resistance as either driven by primitive emotions or manipulated by elite figures, inherently refusing to recognize Palestinians as a people with their own desires and rights. In a similar vein, Penslar, who considers Zionism within the settler-colonial frame, writes that the clearest connection between Zionism and colonialism is in the perception of the Palestinians and the Zionist movement's practices towards them. He also describes the Zionists as perceiving Palestinians as backward and primitive, seeing themselves as forming a "rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism."

Zionism as settler colonialism

Beyond characterizing it as a colonial movement, Zionism has been more recently described as a form of settler colonialism, with scholarly proponents of this paradigm including Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour [ar], Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal [ar], and Rosemary Sayigh.

The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths. It built on the work of Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies who has defined settler colonialism as an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population rather than exploiting it.

Sociologist Rachel Busbridge says the framework's subsequent popularity is inseparable from frustration at the stagnation of that process and resulting Western left-wing sympathy for Palestinian nationalism. Busbridge writes that while a settler colonial analysis "offers a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than...has conventionally been painted", Wolfe's zero-sum approach is limited in practical application because almost all Israeli Jews naturally reject it, as a form of antisemitism that denies their long-standing history in the land of Israel and aspirations for self-determination.

Violence and criticism

See also

• American Council for Judaism
• Gathering of Israel
• Golus nationalism
• Jewish Agency for Israel
• Jewish Autonomism
• List of Zionists
• Muscular Judaism
• Palestinianism
• Palestinian nationalism
• Romanistan
• Yehud Medinata
• Zio (pejorative)
• Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory

Notes

1. The reasons for this decision were explained by His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in a speech to the House of Commons on February 18, 1947, in which he said:
   "His Majesty's Government have been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. The discussions of the last month have quite clearly shown that there is no prospect of resolving this conflict by any settlement negotiated between the parties. But if the conflict has to be resolved by an arbitrary decision, that is not a decision which His Majesty's Government are empowered, as Mandatory, to take. His Majesty's Government have of themselves no power, under the terms of the Mandate, to award the country either to the Arabs or to the Jews, or even to partition it between them."
2. (Masalha 2012, p. 28): "In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionist leadership found it expedient to euphemise, using the term 'transfer' or ha'avarah—the Hebrew euphemism for ethnic cleansing—one of the most enduring themes of Zionist colonisation of Palestine."
3. On this topic, Ben-Ami writes: "This is how a Brit-Shalom Ihud, non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency, Werner Senator, put it: 'If I weigh the catastrophe of five million Jews against the transfer of one million Arabs, then with a clean and easy conscience I can state that even more drastic acts are permissible.'"

1. /ˈzaɪ.ənɪzəm/ ZY-ə-niz-əm; Hebrew: צִיּוֹנוּת, romanized: Ṣīyyonūt, IPA: [tsijoˈnut]
2. 'Zionism belongs to the category of ethnocultural nationalism, according to which groups sharing a common history and culture have fundamental and morally significant interests in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. Cultural nationalism holds that such interests warrant political recognition and support, primarily by the means of granting the groups in question the right to national self-determination or self-rule.'
3. (Masalha 2012, p. 2): "... for decades Zionists themselves used terms such as 'colonisation' (hityashvut) to describe their project in Palestine."
4. "The basic assumption regarding the right of Jews to Palestine—a right that required no proof—was a fundamental component of all Zionist programs. In contrast with other prospective areas for Jewish settlement, such as Argentina or East Africa, it was generally believed that no one could deny the right of the Jews to their ancestral land. Even Ahad Ha-Am, the eternal skeptic, commented that this was 'a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs.' Others, such as Lilienblum, did not even think it necessary to dwell on this matter."
5. "When faced with the apocalyptic dimensions of the Jewish catastrophe, the Holocaust, even Brit-Shalom Ihud moved to endorse first the necessity of demographic parity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and then, as 'a necessary evil', the idea of a Jewish independent state, that is the partition of Palestine. It was no longer the time for moral scruples or guilt feelings towards the dispossessed Arab population. This is how a Brit-Shalom Ihud, non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency, Werner Senator, put it: 'If I weigh the catastrophe of five million Jews against the transfer of one million Arabs, then with a clean and easy conscience I can state that even more drastic acts are permissible.'"
6. Lord Balfour would write, "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
7. While Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill spoke to the Peel Commission: "I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
8. "Unsatisfactory and simplistic as Pinsker's quasi-medical diagnosis may be, it does try to address itself to the exceptional conditions of Jewish existence. If Jews are a nation and they continue to exist as a nation despite the lack of the effective attributes of national life, this is an obvious anomaly, and an explanation has to be found. Krochmal and Graetz tried to explain this deviation from the norms of universal historical development by rearranging the conventional norms of universal history itself. Pinsker lacks this philosophical dimension of history, and he therefore limits himself to stating what he conceives as an anomaly and attempting to suggest a clinical diagnosis for it. Pinsker's diagnosis may appear irrelevant, but his cure is radical. If the nations of the world see the Jew as a soul without a body, a shadowless Ahasver, an eternal Wandering Jew, lacking real, corporeal existence, the cure surely has to be radical. If the Jews are hated because they have no homeland, normalization will become possible only if they acquire one. Were this to happen, then the nations of the world would view the Jews as normal human beings and would consequently lose their inordinate fear of them. No concrete, real attribute of the Jews causes Judeophobia; it is the abnormality of the Jews being somewhere between a national existence and a lack of a real foundation for that existence. For the Jews to appear like any other people they need a homeland, Pinsker argues: then everybody will relate to them as normal people and Judeophobia will wither away." Avineri 2017, Chapter 7
9. '"A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-facial type are Jewish." (Jabotinsky 1961, pp. 37–49)
10. "The Talmud does take up the right of individuals to settle in Israel, but there is a consensus against collective settlement.", "Several rabbinical sources through the centuries have interpreted these oaths to assert that even if all the nations were to encourage the Jews to settle in the Land of Israel, it would still be necessary to abstain from doing so, for fear of committing yet other sins and of being punished by an exile even cruder still." " Traditional Jewish culture discourages political and military activism of any variety, particularly in the Land of Israel... In the traditional view, settlement in the Land of Israel will be brought, about by the universal effect of good deeds rather than by military force or diplomacy... The Talmud (BT Ketubot, 111a) relates the three oaths sworn on the eve of the dispersal of what remained of the people of Israel to the four corners of the earth: not to return en masse and in an organized fashion to the Land of Israel; not to rebel against the nations; and that the nations do not subjugate Israel exceedingly... The idea of return to the Land of Israel achieved by political means is alien to the idea of salvation in Jewish tradition."Rabkin 2006
11. "To ultra-Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, the idea of Jews returning to their homeland flew in the face of the fate decreed for them. To them such an act ran counter to the three oaths the Jewish people swore to the Almighty: not to storm the wall, not to rush the End, and not to rebel against the nations of the world, while the Almighty adjured the nations of the world not to destroy the Jewish people.4 They saw an attempt to bring about redemption by natural, man-made means as rebelling against divine decrees, as Jews taking their fate into their own hands and not waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Consequently ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently opposed this perilous heresy" Shapira 2014, p. 5
12. Pinsker wrote: "The fact that, as it seems, we can mix with the nations only in the smallest proportions, presents a further obstacle to the establishment of amicable relations. Therefore, we must see to it that the surplus of Jews, the inassimilable residue, is removed and provided for elsewhere. This duty can be incumbent upon no one but ourselves," Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation," in Hertzberg, 1959, p. 193. And Nordau wrote, in a otherwise sympathetic presentation of the Ostjuden, that: "'the contempt created by the impudent, crawling beggar in dirty caftan... falls back on all of us,'" quoted in Aschheim, 1982, p. 88.
13. "The irony here is in the now well-documented understanding that Lord Balfour was himself deeply religious and that his thinking on the projected post-World War 1 fate of Palestine was influenced by his expectations of the fulfullment of biblical prophecy. What disappointed Balfour, Hechler and Kook was that the secular Jewish settlers of British Mandate Palestine did not see divine Providence at work in international affairs."
14. Brian Klug states that "Keeping Jews out of Britain and packing them off to Palestine were just two sides of the same antisemitic coin"
15. "The Histadrut is not a trade union, not a political party, not acooperative society, nor is it a mutual aid association, although it doesengage in trade union activity, in politics, cooperative organizationand mutual aid. But it is much more than that. The Histadrut is a covenant of builders of a homeland, founders of a state, renewers of anation, builders of an economy, creators of culture, reformers of a society."
16. Various leaders spoke strongly in favor of transfer. Ussishkin said, "We cannot start the Jewish state with … half the population being Arab … Such a state cannot survive even half an hour." There was nothing immoral about transferring sixty thousand Arab families: "It is most moral.… I am ready to come and defend … it before the Almighty." Ruppin said: "I do not believe in the transfer of individuals. I believe in the transfer of entire villages." Berl Katznelson, coleader with Ben-Gurion of Mapai, said the transfer would have to be by agreement with Britain and the Arab states: "But the principle should be that there must be a large agreed transfer." Ben-Gurion summed up: "With compulsory transfer we have a vast area …. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it."
17. David Ben Gurion famously would say: we shall "fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler and fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper."
18. "Ben-Gurion remarked in December 1938 (a month after the Nazis' pogrom against Germany's Jews, known as Kristallnacht, but two years before the start of the Holocaust): "If I knew it was possible to save all the children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter—because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People."3 Ben-Gurion viewed the Holocaust primarily through the prism of its effect on the Yishuv. “The catastrophe of European Jewry is not, in a direct manner, my business," he said in December 1942.4And, "The destruction of European Jewry is the death-knell of Zionism." In the words of Yitzhak Gruenbaum a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, "Zionism is above everything."
19. "that a small, determined group of revolutionaries representing a minority view within the wider population could achieve some success against the British Empire helped to convince Zionist radicals that they could be successful. Members of Jewish underground groups . .studied Irish rebels' victory over the superior might of Britain. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, leader of the Irgun, had travelled to ireland, meeting Irish Volunteer and IRA gunrunner Robert Briscoe, to discuss drilling, training and strategy in fighting the British and to 'learn all he could in order to form a physical force movement in Palestine on the same lines as the IRA'."
20. "In Israel, '"nationality" (Hebrew: "le'um") and "citizenship" (Hebrew: "ezrahut") are two separate, distinct statuses, conveying different rights and responsibilities’. Palestinians in Israel, as non-Jews, can be citizens, but never nationals, and are thus denied 'rights and privileges' enjoyed by those 'who would qualify for Israeli citizenship under the 1950 Law of Return'."White 2012, Spot the Difference
21. Massad depicts the transition in the choice of terminology within the Zionist movement in the mid-20th century, as "colonialism" began to more broadly develop a negative association. Khalidi writes: "In fact, Zionism—for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism—rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement"
22. "Berl Katznelson, the labour-movement ideologist, never thought there could be any doubt about it: 'The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest', he said in 1929. And in the same breath: 'It is not by chance that I use military terms when speaking of settlement.' In 1922 Ben-Gurion had already said the same: 'We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it.'... ut to claim that the arrivals were white settlers driven by a colonialist mind-set does not correspond to historical reality."
23. Morris: "Though it inflamed Arab antagonism to Zionism, the socialists saw the fight over jobs as a struggle for survival, the social struggle meshing with the national one. But, in reality, rather than "meshing," the nationalist ethos had simply overpowered and driven out the socialist ethos." (Morris 1999)
24. "The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm's reformulation.Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, first section

References

1. Gans 2008, p. 3.
2. Beinin, Joel; Stein, Rebecca L. (2006). The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford University Press. p. 157. ISBN 978-0-8047-5365-4.
3. Kagarlitsky, Boris (June 27, 2014). From Empires to Imperialism: The State and the Rise of Bourgeois Civilisation. Routledge. p. 294. ISBN 978-1-317-66871-8.
4. • Collins 2011, pp. 169–185: "and as subsequent work (Finkelstein 1995; Massad 2005; Pappe 2006; Said 1992; Shafir 1989) has definitively established, the architects of Zionism were conscious and often unapologetic about their status as colonizers"
   • Bloom 2011, pp. 2, 13, 49, 132: "Dr. Arthur Ruppin was sent to Palestine for the first time in 1907 by the heads of the German 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 such a representation was pivotal to the entire project of becoming 'white men'." Colonization was seen as a sign of belonging to western and modern culture;"
   • Robinson 2013, p. 18: "Never before", wrote Berl Katznelson, founding editor of the Histadrut daily, Davar, "has the white man undertaken colonization with that sense of justice and social progress which fills the Jew who comes to Palestine." Berl Katznelson
   • Alroey 2011, p. 5: "Herzl further sharpened the issue when he tried to make diplomacy precede settlement, precluding any possibility of preemptive and unplanned settlement in the Land of Israel: "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."
   • Jabotinsky 1923: "Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.. .Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population". Ze'ev Jabotinsky quoted in Alan Balfour, The Walls of Jerusalem: Preserving the Past, Controlling the Future, Wiley 2019 ISBN 978-1-119-18229-0 p.59.
5. • Safrai 2018, p. 76: "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 2004, pp. 58–63: "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..."
   • Motyl 2001, p. 604
   • Herzl, Theodor (1988) . "Biography, by Alex Bein". Der Judenstaat [The Jewish state]. Translated by Sylvie d'Avigdor (republication ed.). New York: Courier Dover. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-486-25849-2. Archived from the original on January 1, 2014. Retrieved September 28, 2010.
6. ^ {{multiref |Manna 2022, pp. 2 ("the principal objective of the Zionist leadership to keep as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish state"), 4 ("in the 1948 war, when it became clear that the objective that enjoyed the unanimous support of Zionists of all inclinations was to establish a Jewish state with the smallest possible number of Palestinians"), and 33 ("The Zionists had two cherished objectives: fewer Arabs in the country and more land in the hands of the settlers."); |Khalidi 2020, p. 76: "The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land."; |Slater 2020, pp. 49 ("There were three arguments for the moral acceptability of some form of transfer. The main one—certainly for the Zionists but not only for them—was the alleged necessity of establishing a secure and stable Jewish state in as much of Palestine as was feasible, which was understood to require a large Jewish majority."), 81 ("From the outset of the Zionist movement all the major leaders wanted as few Arabs as possible in a Jewish state"), 87 ("The Zionist movement in general and David Ben-Gurion in particular had long sought to establish a Jewish state in all of “Palestine,” which in their view included the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria."), and 92 ("As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand wrote: 'During every round of the national conflict over Palestine, which is the longest running conflict of its kind in the modern era, Zionism has tried to appropriate additional territory.'"); |Segev 2019, p. 418, "the Zionist dream from the start—maximum territory, minimum Arabs"; |Cohen 2017, p. 78, "As was suggested by Masalha (1992), Morris (1987), and other scholars, many preferred a state without Arabs or with as small a minority as possible, and plans for population transfers were considered by Zionist leaders and activists for years."; |Lustick & Berkman 2017, pp. 47–48, "As Ben-Gurion told one Palestinian leader in the early 1930s, 'Our final goal is the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River, not as a minority, but as a community numbering millions" (Teveth 1985:130). Ipso facto, this meant Zionism's success would produce an Arab minority in Palestine, no matter what its geographical dimensions."; |Stanislawski 2017, p. 65, "The upper classes of Palestinian society quickly fled the fight to places of safety within the Arab world and outside of it; the lower classes were caught between the Israeli desire to have as few Arabs as possible remaining in their new state and the Palestinians’ desire to remain on the lands they regarded as their ancient national patrimony." |Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2014, p. 6, "It was obvious to most approaches within the Zionist movement—certainly to the mainstream as represented by Labor Zionism and its leadership headed by Ben Gurion, that a Jewish state would entail getting rid of as many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land as possible ... Following Wolfe, we argue that the logic of demographic elimination is an inherent component of the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project, although it has taken different manifestations since the founding of the Zionist movement."; |Engel 2013, pp. 96 ("From the outset Zionism had been the activity of a loose coalition of individuals and groups united by a common desire to increase the Jewish population of Palestine ..."), 121 ("... the ZO sought ways to expand the territory a partitioned Jewish state might eventually receive ... Haganah undertook to ensconce small groups of Jews in parts of Palestine formerly beyond their sights ... their leaders had hoped for more expansive borders ..."), and 138 ("The prospect that Israel would have only the barest Jewish majority thus loomed large in the imagination of the state’s leaders. To be sure, until the late 1930s most Zionists would have been delighted with any majority, no matter how slim; the thought that Jews in Palestine would ever be more numerous than Arabs appeared a distant vision. But in 1937 the Peel Commission had suggested ... to leave both the Jewish state and Arab Palestine with the smallest possible minorities. That suggestion had fired Zionist imaginations; now it was possible to think of a future state as ‘Jewish’ not only by international recognition of the right of Jews to dominate its government but by the inclinations of virtually all of its inhabitants. Such was how the bulk of the Zionist leadership understood the optimal ‘Jewish state’ in 1948: non-Jews (especially Arabs) might live in it and enjoy all rights of citizenship, but their numbers should be small enough compared to the Jewish population that their impact on public life would be minimal. Israel’s leaders were thus not sad at all to see so many Arabs leave its borders during the fighting in 1947–48 ... the 150,000 who remained on Israeli territory seemed to many to constitute an unacceptably high proportion relative to the 650,000 Jews in the country when the state came into being. This perception not only dictated Israel’s adamant opposition to the return of Arab refugees, it reinforced the imperative to bring as many new Jewish immigrants into the country as possible, as quickly as possible, no matter how great or small their prospects for becoming the sort of ‘new Jews’ the state esteemed most.") |Masalha 2012, p. 38, "From the late nineteenth century and throughout the Mandatory period the demographic and land policies of the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine continued to evolve. But its demographic and land battles with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were always a battle for 'maximum land and minimum Arabs' (Masalha 1992, 1997, 2000)."; |Lentin 2010, p. 7, "'the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space ... Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state' (Pappe 2008: 94)."; |Shlaim 2009, p. 56, "That most Zionist leaders wanted the largest possible Jewish state in Palestine with as few Arabs inside it as possible is hardly open to question."; |Pappé 2006, p. 250, "In other words, hitkansut is the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible."; |Morris 2004, p. 588, "But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority." |Ben-Ami 2007, p. 50, "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." |Finkelstein 2016"Zionism’s claim to the whole of Palestine not only precluded a modus vivendi based on partition with the indigenous Arab population, it called into question any Arab presence in Palestine."
7. • Gorny 1987, p. 
   • Ben-Ami 2007: "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."
   • Conforti 2024, p. 
   • Beauchamp 2018
   • Encyclopedia Britannica 2024
8. • Conforti 2024, p. 485: "The crisis in the Enlightenment movement in the late nineteenth century gave way to the rise of alternative ideologies, such as Jewish nationalism and socialism. Early Zionist thinkers, such as Peretz Smolenskin (1842–1885), sharply criticized the Enlightenment scholars and their universalist approach."
   • Shillony 2012, p. 88:" arose in response to and in imitation of the current national movements of Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe"
   • LeVine & Mossberg 2014, p. 211: "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 2014, p. 93: "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""
9. • Cohen, Robin (1995). The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge University Press. p. 504. ISBN 978-0-521-44405-7. Zionism Colonize palestine.
   • Gelvin, James (2007). The Israel–Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0-521-88835-6. Archived from the original on February 20, 2017. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
   • Pappé 2006, pp. 10–11
10. Gorny 1987, p. .
11. • Sternhell 1999: "The difference between religious and secular Zionism, be- tween the Zionism of the Left and the Zionism of the Right, was merely a difference of form and not an essential difference."
    • Penslar 2023, p. 60
    • Ben-Ami 2007, p. 3
    • Shapira 1992, Conclusion
    • Shlaim 2001, Prologue
    • Ben-Ami, Shlomo (2022). Prophets Without Honor. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-006047-3. Archived from the original on June 24, 2024. Retrieved June 23, 2024.
    • Gorny 1987, p. 165: "As a member of the Zionist Executive in 1921-3, he soon discovered that what divided him from his colleagues in the Zionist leadership was not political differences, but mainly his style of political action"
    • Chomsky 1999, Rejectionism and Accommodation: "In essence, then, the two programs are not very different. Their difference lies primarily in style. Labor is, basically, the party of the educated Europe-oriented elite—managers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, etc. Its historical practice has been to "build facts" while maintaining a low-keyed rhetoric with conciliatory tones, at least in public. In private, the position has been that "it does not matter what the Gentiles say, what matters is what the Jews do" (Ben-Gurion) and that "the borders are where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map" (Golda Meir).21 This has been an effective method for obtaining the ends sought without alienating Western opinion—indeed, while mobilizing Western (particularly American) support."
12. Troen, S. Ilan (2007). "De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine". Israel Affairs. 13 (4: Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict): 872–884. doi:10.1080/13537120701445372.
13. Aaronson, Ran (1996). "Settlement in Eretz Israel – A Colonialist Enterprise? "Critical" Scholarship and Historical Geography". Israel Studies. 1 (2). Indiana University Press: 214–229. Archived from the original on December 21, 2013. Retrieved July 30, 2013.
14. Cohen, Michael J. (2011). "Zionism and British imperialism II: Imperial financing in Palestine". Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture. 30 (2): 115–139. doi:10.1080/13531042.2011.610119.
15. ^
    • Shafir, Gershon, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 37–38
    • Bareli, Avi, "Forgetting Europe: Perspectives on the Debate about Zionism and Colonialism", in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, Psychology Press, 2003, pp. 99–116
    • Pappé Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 72–121
    • Prior, Michael, The Bible and colonialism: a moral critique, Continuum International Publishing Group, 1997, pp. 106–215
    • Shafir, Gershon, "Zionism and Colonialism", in The Israel / Palestinian Question, by Ilan Pappé, Psychology Press, 1999, pp. 72–85
    • Lustick, Ian, For the Land and the Lord ...
    • Zuriek, Elia, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, Routledge & K. Paul, 1979
    • Penslar, Derek J., "Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism", in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, Psychology Press, 2003, pp. 85–98
    • Pappé 2006
    • Masalha 2007, p. 16
    • Thomas, Baylis (2011), The Dark Side of Zionism: Israel's Quest for Security Through Dominance, Lexington Books, p. 4
    • Prior, Michael (1999), Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry, Psychology Press, p. 240
16. ^
    • Zionism, imperialism, and race, Abdul Wahhab Kayyali, ʻAbd al-Wahhāb Kayyālī (Eds), Croom Helm, 1979
    • Gerson, Allan, "The United Nations and Racism: the Case of Zionism and Racism", in Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1987, Volume 17; Volume 1987, Yoram Dinstein, Mala Tabory (Eds), Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988, p. 68
    • Hadawi, Sami, Bitter harvest: a modern history of Palestine, Interlink Books, 1991, p. 183
    • Beker, Avi, Chosen: the history of an idea, the anatomy of an obsession, Macmillan, 2008, pp. 131, 139, 151
    • Dinstein, Yoram, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1987, Volume 17; Volume 1987, pp. 31, 136
    • Harkabi, Yehoshafat, Arab attitudes to Israel, pp. 247–248
17. See for example: M. Shahid Alam (2010), Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism Paperback, or Gould-Wartofsky, Michael (June 3, 2010). "Through the Looking Glass: The Myth of Israeli Exceptionalism". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on September 21, 2017.
18. • Masalha 2007, p. 314
    • Curthoys, Ned; Ganguly, Debjani (2007). Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual. Academic Monographs. p. 315. ISBN 978-0-522-85357-5. Archived from the original on January 12, 2017. Retrieved May 12, 2013.
    • Kīfūrkiyān, Nādira Shalhūb (2009). Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-521-88222-4. Archived from the original on May 2, 2014. Retrieved May 12, 2013.
    • Scham, Paul; Salem, Walid; Pogrund, Benjamin (2005). Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue. Left Coast Press. pp. 87–. ISBN 978-1-59874-013-4. Archived from the original on January 7, 2014. Retrieved May 12, 2013.
19. "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state.' Avraham Burg cited Tony Judt, Israel:The Alternative New York Review of Books 23 October 2003
20. • Morris 2008, p. 3: "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 1923, pp. 6–7: "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."
21. Finkelstein 2003, p. 109: "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'."
22. This is Jerusalem, Menashe Harel, Canaan Publishing, Jerusalem, 1977, pp. 194–195
23. Pixner, Bargil (2010). Paths of the Messiah. Ignatius Pres. pp. 320–322.
24. Neusner, Jacob (1991). An Introduction to Judaism – A Textbook Reader. Westminister Press. p. 469.
25. Barnett, Michael (2020). "The Jewish Problem in International Society". In Phillips, Andrew; Reus-Smit, Christian (eds.). Culture and Order in World Politics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 232–249. doi:10.1017/9781108754613.011. ISBN 978-1-108-48497-8. S2CID 214484283. Archived from the original on April 15, 2021. Retrieved April 15, 2021.
26. Kühntopf-Gentz, Michael (1990). Nathan Birnbaum: Biographie [Nathan Birnbaum: Biography] (in German). Eberhard-Karls-Universität zu Tübingen. p. 39. Archived from the original on July 7, 2023. Retrieved July 7, 2023. Nathan Birnbaum wird immer wieder als derjenige erwähnt, der die Begriffe "Zionismus" und "zionistisch" eingeführt habe, auch sieht er es selbst so, obwohl er es später bereut und Bedauern darüber äußert, wie die von ihm geprägten Begriffe verwendet werden. Das Wort "zionistisch" erscheint bei Birnbaum zuerst in einem Artikel der "Selbst-Emancipation" vom 1 April 1890: "Es ist zu hoffen, dass die Erkenntnis der Richtigkeit und Durchführbarkeit der zionistischen Idee stets weitere Kreise ziehen und in der Assimilationsepoche anerzogene Vorurteile beseitigen wird" [Nathan Birnbaum is repeatedly mentioned as the person who introduced the terms "Zionism" and "Zionist", and he himself sees it that way, although he later regrets it and expresses regret about how the terms he coined are used. The word "Zionist" first appears in Birnbaum's article in "Selbst-Emancipation" on April 1, 1890: "It is to be hoped that the recognition of the correctness and feasibility of the Zionist idea will continue to spread and eliminate prejudices acquired during the assimilation era."]
27. Selbst-Emancipation: Zeitschrift für die nationalen, socialen und politischen Interessen des jüdischen Stammes; Organ der Zionisten: (1.4.1890). 1890 Heft 1 (1.4.1890). Wien [Self-Emancipation: Journal for the national, social and political interests of the Jewish tribe; Organ of the Zionists: (1.4.1890). 1890 Issue 1 (1.4.1890). Vienna] (in German). August 13, 1890. Archived from the original on July 8, 2023. Retrieved July 7, 2023 – via Digitale Sammlungen.
28. Shapira 1992, p. 41.
29. ^ Rabkin 2006, A New Identity.
30. • Gorny 1987, p. 210: "This set of assumptions was intended to stress the equal status of the Jews vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and to provide the basis for their superior right to Palestine."
    • Shapira 1992, p. 41
    • Slater 2020: "According to the standard Zionist and then the Israeli narrative, for a number of reasons the land of Palestine rightfully belongs to the Jewish people—and no others, including today's Palestinians."
    • Khalidi 2006: "he Zionist claim to Palestine, which since even before the establishment of the state of Israel had depended in some measure on arguing that there was no legitimacy to the competing Arab claim"
    • Alam 2009: "Zionism was a messianic movement to restore Palestine to its divinely appointed Jewish owners... Conversely, the Palestinian, whether his ancestors were the ancient Canaanites or Hebrews, would forfeit all rights to his lands; he had become a usurper."
    • Sternhell 1999: "Like all Zionists, Gordon did not recognize the principle of majority rule, and he refused to acknowledge the right of the majority to 'take from us what we have acquired through our work and creativity.' Moreover, he had confidence in the spiritual vitality of the Yishuv, its energy and motivation, and believed it was supported by the entire Jewish people. In 1921, he spoke in much stronger terms than he had between 1909 and 1918: 'For Eretz Israel, we have a charter that has been valid until now and that will always be valid, and that is the Bible, and not only the Bible.'... And now came the decisive argument: 'And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country? Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative, especially since the people that came after us did not create such works in this country, or did not create anything at all.' The founders accepted this point of view. This was the ultimate Zionist argument."
31. ^ Gorny 1987, p. 251.
32. Flapan 1979, p. 12.
33. Jacobs 2017, p. 274: "In fact Buber also shared the common European Orientalist perspective, by which the local Arabs did not really have a national concern and may be appeased by the cultural and economic benefits that will accrue from Jewish immigration to Palestine."
34. ^ Ben-Ami 2007.
35. Khalidi 2006, p. 252.
36. White 2012, Introduction.
37. White 2012, Introduction; Jacobs 2017, Does the Left have a Zionist Problem?; Khalidi 2006, pp. 145–150
38. Penslar 2023, pp. 1–2, "Zionism, in turn, is the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine ... Unlike other nationalisms, however, pre-1948 Zionism's claim on territory was aspirational, based in ancient memories and future hopes. Until well into the twentieth century, a negligible number of Jews lived in the Land of Israel ... It is a belief that Jews have a moral right and historic need for self-determination within historic Palestine."
39. Morris 1999, p. 682: "Zionism had always looked to the day when a Jewish majority would enable the movement to gain control over the country: The Zionist leadership had never posited Jewish statehood with a minority of Jews ruling over a majority of Arabs, apartheid style."
40. Gorny 1987, pp. Introduction, Chapter 8.
41. Ben-Ami 2007, pp. 22–23: "Zionism is both a struggle for land and a demographic race; in essence, the aspiration for a territory with a Jewish majority...Zionist democratic diversity did not mean that there was no commonground between the major segments of the movement. Initially, Ben-Gurion preferred an 'iron wall of workers', namely settlements and Jewish infrastructure, on Jabotinsky's call for an iron wall of military might and deterrence... he even lashed out against what he defined as Jabotinsky's 'perverted national fanaticism', and against the Revisionists 'worthless prattle of sham heroes, whose lips becloud the moral purity of our national movement. . .' Eventually, however, under the growing chal-lenge of Arab nationalism and especially with the growth in the Yishuv of a collective mood of sacred Jewish nationalism following the Holocaust, the Labour Zionists, chief among them David Ben-Gurion, accepted forall practical purposes Jabotinsky's iron-wall strategy. The Jewish State could only emerge, and force the Arabs to accept it, if it erected around it an impregnable wall of Jewish might and deterrence."
42. Finkelstein 2003, Chapter 1: "Within the Zionist ideological consensus there coexisted three relatively distinct tendencies—political Zionism, labor Zionism and cultural Zionism. Each was wedded to the demand for a Jewish majority, but not for entirely the same reasons."
43. Gorny 1987, p. 2: "Thus, the desire for a Jewish majority was the key issue in the implementation of Zionism, implying a basic change in the international standing of the Jewish people and marking a turning-point in their history. The significance of this demand, and of the untiring endeavour to realize it in various ways, lay in the annulling of the majority standing of the Arabs of Palestine."
44. ^ Finkelstein 2016, Chapter 1.
45. Masalha 2014: "In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionist leadership found it expedient to euphemize, using the term "transfer" or "ha‘avara" – the Hebrew euphemism for ethnic cleansing – one of most enduring themes of Zionist settler-colonization (see below). Other themes included demographic transformation of the land and physical separation between the immigrant-settlers and the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. All these colonizing themes were central to Zionist muscular nationalism, with its rejection of both liberal forms of universalism and Marxism, along with individual rights and class struggle. Instead, Zionism gave precedence to the realization of its ethnocratic völkisch project: the establishment of a biblically ordained state."
46. Gorny 1987: "In any event, the idea of a mass transfer did not strike them as morally deplorable at any time, and their hesitations related only to its political effectiveness."
47. Morris, Benny (June 2012). "The Idea of 'Transfer' in Zionist Thinking Before 1948". The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge Middle East Studies (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 42–43. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511816659.006. ISBN 978-0-521-81120-0.
48. Finkelstein, Norman (September 2002). "An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict". Archived from the original on March 1, 2008. It bears critical notice for what comes later that, from the interwar through early postwar years, Western public opinion was not altogether averse to population transfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) for resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe's Jewish press supported in the mid-1930s the transfer of Jews to Madagascar to solve Poland's "Jewish problem." The main forced transfer before World War II was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and approved and supervised by the League of Nations, this brutal displacement of more than 1.5 million people eventually came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent. The British cited it in the late 1930s as a model for resolving the conflict in Palestine.
49. ^ Finkelstein 2016.
50. Morris 1999, p. 139: "The transfer idea did not originate with the Peel Commission. It goes back to the fathers of modern Zionism and, while rarely given a public airing before 1937, was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement’s inception. It was always clear to the Zionists that a Jewish state would be impossible without a Jewish majority; this could theoretically be achieved through massive immigration, but even then the Arabs would still be a large, threatening minority."
51. Ben-Ami 2007, p. 25-26.
52. ^ Masalha 2012, Chapter 1.
53. Masalha 2014, Chapter 2: "The archival and documentary evidence shows that in the pre-1948 period, "transfer"/ethnic cleansing was embraced by the highest levels of Zionist leadership, representing almost the entire political spectrum. Nearly all the founding fathers of the Israeli state advocated transfer in one form or another, including Theodor Herzl, Leon Motzkin, Nahman Syrkin, Menahem Ussishkin, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Avraham Granovsky, Israel Zangwill, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, Pinhas Rutenberg, Aaron Aaronson, Vladmir Jabotinsky and Berl Katznelson (Masalha, 1992). Supporters of "voluntary" removal included Arthur Ruppin, a co-founder of Brit Shalom, a movement advocating bi-nationalism and equal rights for Arabs and Jews; moderate leaders of Mapai (later the Labour party) such as Moshe Shertok and Eli’ezer Kaplan, Israel’s first finance minister; and leaders of the Histadrut (Hebrew Labour Federation) such as Golda Meyerson (later Meir) and David Remez (Masalha, 1992)."
54. Ben-Ami 2007, pp. 25–26.
55. Ben-Ami 2007, p. 25.
56. "Ben-Gurion declared unequivocally that sovereignty of the Jewish state, especially in matters of immigration and transfer of Arabs, were the two conditions sine qua non for his agreement to partition." Flapan 1979, p. 261
57. Masalha 1992, The Emerging Consensus.
58. Morris, Benny (September 10, 2009), Bessel, Richard; Haake, Claudia B. (eds.), "Explaining Transfer: Zionist Thinking and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", Removing Peoples, Studies of the German Historical Institute London, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 349–360, ISBN 978-0-19-956195-7, retrieved November 29, 2024
59. Morris 2001, p. 140: "But Palestine’s Arabs did not wish to evacuate the land of their ancestors, and they made this very clear... The matter raised ethical questions that troubled the Yishuv from within..."
60. Engel, David (2021). "Zionism and the Negation of the Diaspora". In Diner, H. R. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora. Oxford handbooks. Oxford University Press. pp. 151–165. ISBN 978-0-19-024094-3.
61. ^ Rabkin 2006.
62. ^ Yadgar 2017.
63. ^ Shimoni 1995, Chapter 1.
64. Yadgar 2017, p. 245.
65. ^ Gorny 1987, Introduction.
66. Hirsch 2009, pp. 592–609: "The work of Jewish race scientists has been the subject of several recent studies (Efron 1994; R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000; Kiefer 1991; Lipphardt 2007; Y. Weiss 2002; see also Doron 1980). As these studies suggest, among Jewish physicians, anthropologists, and other 'men of science' in Central Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent (Doron 1980: 404; Y. Weiss 2002: 155). At the same time, many of these proponents agreed that the Jews were suffering a process of 'degeneration, and so their writings advanced the national project as a means of 'regeneration' and 'racial improvement' (R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000: 17)... In the Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization. 'Race' was an integral concept in certain versions of nationalist thinking, and in Western identity (Bonnett 2003), albeit in different ways. In the discourse of Zionist men of science, 'race' served different purposes, according to the context in question. In some contexts 'race' was mainly used to establish Jewish unity, while in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jews. The latter use was more common in texts which appeared in Palestine. It resulted from the encounter of European Zionists with Eastern Jews, and from the tension between the projects of nation-building and of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in the East."
67. ^ Falk, R. (2014). "Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent". Frontiers in Genetics. 5 (462): 462. doi:10.3389/fgene.2014.00462. PMC 4301023. PMID 25653666.
68. McGonigle 2021, p. 35 (c.f. p.52-53 of PhD): "Here, the ethnic composition of Israel is crucial. Despite the ambiguity in respect of the legal, biological, and social 'nature' of 'Jewish genes' and their intermittent role in the reproduction of Jewish identity, Israel is an ethnically diverse country. Many Jewish immigrants have arrived from Eastern Europe, North Africa, France, India, Latin America, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, the US, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the ex-Soviet Union, not to mention Israel's indigenous Arab minority of close to 2 million people. And while Jewishness has often been imagined as a biological race—most notably, and to horrific ends, by the Nazis, but also later by Zionists and early Israelis for state-building purposes—the initial origins of the Ashkenazi Jews who began the Zionist movement in turn-of-the-century Europe remain highly debated and enigmatic."
69. Abu El-Haj 2012, p. 98: "There is a "problem" regarding the origins of the Ashkenazim, which needs resolution: Ashkenazi Jews, who seem European—phenotypically, that is—are the normative center of world Jewry. No less, they are the political and cultural elite of the newly founded Jewish state. Given their central symbolic and political capital in the Jewish state and given simultaneously the scientific and social persistence of racial logics as ways of categorizing and understanding human groups, it was essential to find other evidence that Israel's European Jews were not in truth Europeans. The normative Jew had to have his/her origins in ancient Palestine or else the fundamental tenet of Zionism, the entire edifice of Jewish history and nationalist ideology, would come tumbling down. In short, the Ashkenazi Jew is the Jew—the Jew in relation to whose values and cultural practices the oriental Jew in Israel must assimilate. Simultaneously, however, the Ashkenazi Jew is the most dubious Jew, the Jew whose historical and genealogical roots in ancient Palestine are most difficult to see and perhaps thus to believe—in practice, although clearly not by definition."
70. ^ Baker 2017, p. 100-102.
71. Morris-Reich, Amos (2006). "Arthur Ruppin's Concept of Race". Israel Studies. 11 (3). Indiana University Press: 1–30. doi:10.2979/ISR.2006.11.3.1. ISSN 1084-9513. JSTOR 30245648. S2CID 144898510. Archived from the original on July 11, 2023. Retrieved July 11, 2023.
72. Olson 2007, pp. 252, 255.
73. Falk 2017, p. 62.
74. Haddad, Hassan S. (1974). "The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism". Journal of Palestine Studies. 3 (4). University of California Press, Institute for Palestine Studies: 98–99. doi:10.2307/2535451. ISSN 0377-919X. JSTOR 2535451. The Zionist moveinent remains firmly anchored on the basic principle of the exclusive right of the Jews to Palestine that is found in the Torah and in other Jewish religious literature. Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations... We can summarize these beliefs, based on the Bible, as follows. 1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews. The purity of the Jewishness of the land is derived from a divine command and is thus a sacred mission. Accordingly, settling in Palestine, in addition to its economic and political motivations, acquires a romantic and mythical character. That the Bible is at the root of Zionism is recognized by religious, secular, non-observant, and agnostic Zionists... The Bible, which has been generally considered as a holy book whose basic tenets and whose historical contents are not commonly challenged by Christians and Jews, is usually referred to as the Jewish national record. As a "sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine," it has caused a fossilization of history in Zionist thinking... Modern Jews, accordingly, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites, hence the only possible citizens of the Land of Palestine.
75. ^ McGonigle 2021, p. 36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD): "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic 'return.' If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as 'settler colonialism' pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of 'Jewish genetics' is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population 'returning' to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."
76. Rich, Dave (January 2, 2017). "Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 11 (1): 101–104. doi:10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682. ISSN 2373-9770. S2CID 152132582. Archived from the original on July 8, 2023. Retrieved July 11, 2023.
77. McGonigle 2021, p. (c.f. p.218-219 of PhD): "The biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."
78. Abu El-Haj 2012, p. 18: "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to "see," especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive... Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."
79. Flapan 1979, Jewish and Arab Labour.
80. Shafir 1996, Conclusion.
81. Flapan 1979, The Policy of Economic and Social Separation.
82. Morris 1999, p. 51
    'Continued employment of Arabs would lead to “Arab values” being passed on to Zionist youth and nourish the colonists’ tendency to exploit and abuse their workers. Moreover, Arabs living in or on the periphery of colonies were suspected of pilfering and of passing information to hostile villagers and officials.'
83. Almog 1983, p. 5.
84. Flapan 1979, p. 201.
85. ^ Shafir 1996.
86. Shapira 1992, p. 60.
87. Shapira 2014, p. 45-50.
88. Morris 1999, Chapter 2.
89. Yadgar 2017, Zionism, Jewish "Religion," and Secularism.
90. Avineri, cited in Yadgar 2017, p. 72
91. Penslar 2023, pp. 18–23.
92. ^ Avineri 2017, Introduction.
93. ^ Shimoni 1995.
94. ^ Avineri 2017.
95. Yadgar 2020.
96. ^ Masalha 2012.
97. Don-Yehiya, Eliezer (1992). "The Negation of Galut in Religious Zionism". Modern Judaism. 12 (2): 129–155. doi:10.1093/mj/12.2.129. ISSN 0276-1114. JSTOR 1396185.
98. Mandel, George (2005). "Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer (1858–1922)". Encyclopedia of modern Jewish culture. Glenda Abramson (New ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-29813-1. OCLC 57470923.
99. Rabkin 2006, Chapter 2.
100. Dieckhoff 2003, pp. 104.
101. אברהם בן יוסף ,מבוא לתולדות הלשון העברית (Avraham ben-Yosef, Introduction to the History of the Hebrew Language), p. 38, אור-עם, Tel-Aviv, 1981.
102. Fellman, Jack (2011). The Revival of Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-087910-0. OCLC 1089437441.
103. Taylor 1971, pp. 10, 11.
104. "Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise the banner to gather our exiles and gather us together from the four corners of the earth (Isaiah 11:12) Blessed are you, O Lord, Who gathers in the dispersed of His people Israel."
105. Halamish, Aviva (2008). "Zionist Immigration Policy Put to the Test: Historical analysis of Israel's immigration policy, 1948–1951". Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 7 (2): 119–134. doi:10.1080/14725880802124164. ISSN 1472-5886. S2CID 143008924. Archived from the original on January 13, 2022. Retrieved May 7, 2022. A number of factors motivated Israel's open immigration policy. First of all, open immigration—the ingathering of the exiles in the historic Jewish homeland—had always been a central component of Zionist ideology and constituted the raison d'etre of the State of Israel. The ingathering of the exiles (kibbutz galuyot) was nurtured by the government and other agents as a national ethos, the consensual and prime focus that united Jewish Israeli society after the War of Independence
106. Shohat, Ella (2003). "Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews". Social Text. 21 (2): 49–74. doi:10.1215/01642472-21-2_75-49. ISSN 1527-1951. S2CID 143908777. Archived from the original on March 4, 2021. Retrieved May 7, 2022. Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the "ingathering of the exiles." Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably "outside of history," Jews could once again "enter history" as subjects, as "normal" actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel
107. Russell, C. T., Gordon, H. L., & America, P. P. F. O. (1917). Zionism in Prophecy. Reprinted in Pastor Russell's Sermons. Brooklyn, NY: International Bible Students Association.
108. Penslar 2023, p. 25.
109. ^ Shimoni 1995, Chapter 2.
110. ^ Dieckhoff 2003, Political Beginnings of Zionism.
111. ^ Edelheit, Hershel (September 19, 2019). History Of Zionism: A Handbook And Dictionary. Routledge. pp. 10–12. ISBN 978-0-429-70103-0.
112. "Shabbethai Ẓebi B. Mordecai". www.jewishencyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on March 26, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023.
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116. Penslar 2023, pp. 27–29.
117. ^ Sela 2002, Zionism.
118. Penslar 2023, p. 27, "The Zionist movement was created by Jews, but from the start it was dependent on support from the Christian world. Restorationism was therefore a prerequisite for the success of Zionism. It is harder to establish, however, whether Christian ideas influenced the nineteenth-century Jews who championed a return to the Land of Israel. It is difficult indeed to trace any such external influences...it may be that direct influence was scant or nonexistent but that the men were all influenced by the dynamic spirit of the age..."
119. Smith, C. D. (2001). Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (4th ed.). Bedford: St. Martin's. pp. 1–12, 33–38. ISBN 978-0-312-20828-8.
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122. "Zionism". www.jewishencyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on March 10, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023.
123. American Jewish Historical Society, Vol. 8, p. 80
124. ^ Dieckhoff 2003.
125. Shimoni 1995: "While assimilation was still progressing most promisingly, and also quite independently of antisemitism when it later arose, not only religious traditionalists but also part of the Jewish intelligentsia decried the humiliating self-negation that assimilation exacted and rose to the defense of Jewish cultural distinctiveness."
126. Shimoni 1995, Ethnicity and Nationalism.
127. Goldberg 2009, p. 20.
128. Rabkin 2006, Orientations.
129. ^ Shlaim 2001, Introduction.
130. Sela 2002.
131. Shafir 1996, p. 243-244.
132. Morris 1999, Palestine on the Eve.
133. Gorny 1987, The Overt Question, 1882–1917.
134. Dieckhoff 2003, p. 50.
135. Shapira 2014, p. 32-33.
136. Morris 2001, p. 47.
137. ^ Masalha 2018.
138. Sethi, Arjun (January 2007). "Zionism & The British In Palestine" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on November 27, 2007. Retrieved May 20, 2007.
139. ^ Masalha 2014, Introduction.
140. Cleveland 2010, Chapter 13: "Notwithstanding the growing participation of East European Jewry in Zionist activities, Herzl recognized that the movement would not succeed until it secured the diplomatic support of a Great Power and the financial assistance of members of the Western Jewish community."
141. Morris 1999, p. 23.
142. Laqueur 2009, pp. 210–211.
143. Davidovitch, N.; Seidelman, R. (2003). "Herzl's Altneuland: Zionist utopia, medical science and public health". Korot. 17: 1–21, ix. ISSN 0023-4109. PMID 17153576.
144. Stefon, Matt, ed. (2012). Judaism: History, Belief, and Practice (1st ed.). New York: Britannica Educational Publishing. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-61530-537-7.
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146. ^ Goldstein, J. (October 1986). "The Attitude of the Jewish and the Russian Intelligentsia to Zionism in the Initial Period (1897–1904)". The Slavonic and East European Review. 64 (4): 546–556. ISSN 0037-6795. JSTOR 4209355.
147. ^ Waxman, Chaim I. (May 1987). "Messianism, Zionism, and the State of Israel". Modern Judaism. 7 (2): 175–192. doi:10.1093/mj/7.2.175. ISSN 0276-1114. JSTOR 1396238.
148. Shapira, Anita (January 25, 2021). "Herzl Was the New Jew". Mosaic. Archived from the original on December 8, 2022. Retrieved November 24, 2023.
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150. Wiemer, Reinhard (April 1987). "The Theories of Nationalism and of Zionism in the First Decade of the State of Israel". Middle Eastern Studies. 23 (2): 172–187. doi:10.1080/00263208708700698. ISSN 0026-3206. JSTOR 4283170.
151. Rovner, Adam (2014). In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York University Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-1-4798-1748-1. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. European Jews swayed and prayed for Zion for nearly two millennia, and by the end of the nineteenth century their descendants had transformed liturgical longing into a political movement to create a Jewish national entity somewhere in the world. Zionism's prophet, Theodor Herzl, considered Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula as potential Jewish homelands. It took nearly a decade for Zionism to exclusively concentrate its spiritual yearning on the spatial coordinates of Ottoman Palestine.
152. Aviv, Caryn S.; Shneer, David (2005). New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-8147-4017-0. Archived from the original on January 11, 2024. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
153. Hazony 2000, p. 150: "Recalling his views when he had written "The Jewish State" eight years earlier, he pointed out that at the time, he had openly been willing to consider building on Baron de Hirsch's beginning and establishing the Jewish state in Argentina. But those days were long gone."
154. Friedman, Motti (2021). Theodor Herzl's Zionist Journey – Exodus and Return. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 239–240.
155. Herzl 1896, p. 29 (31).
156. Hazony 2000, p. 369: "Herzl decided to explore the East Africa proposal in the wake of the pogrom, writing to Nordau: "We must give an answer to Kishinev, and this is the only one...We must, in a word, play the politics of the hour.""
157. Aviv, Caryn S.; Shneer, David (2005). New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-8147-4017-0. Archived from the original on January 11, 2024. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
158. Weissbrod, Lilly (2014). Israeli Identity: In Search of a Successor to the Pioneer, Tsabar and Settler. Routledge. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-135-29386-4. Archived from the original on January 11, 2024. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
159. ^ Pasachoff, Naomi E.; Littman, Robert J. (2005). A Concise History of the Jewish People. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 240–242. ISBN 978-0-7425-4366-9. Archived from the original on February 19, 2017. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
160. Tessler, Mark A. (1994). A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. Indiana University Press. p. 55–56. ISBN 978-0-253-20873-6. Retrieved June 22, 2016. The suggestion that Uganda might be suitable for Jewish colonization was first put forward by Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, who said that he had thought about Herzl during a recent visit to the interior of British East Africa. Herzl, who at that time had been discussing with the British a scheme for Jewish settlement in Sinai, responded positively to Chamberlain's proposal, in part because of a desire to deepen Zionist-British cooperaion and, more generally to show that his diplomatic efforts were capable of bearing fruit.
161. ^ Rovner, Adam (2014). In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York University Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-4798-1748-1. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016. On the afternoon of the fourth day of the Congress a weary Nordau brought three resolutions before the delegates: (1) that the Zionist Organization direct all future settlement efforts solely to Palestine; (2) that the Zionist Organization thank the British government for its other of an autonomous territory in East Africa; and (3) that only those Jews who declare their allegiance to the Basel Program may become members of the Zionist Organization." Zangwill objected... When Nordau insisted on the Congress's right to pass the resolutions regardless, Zangwill was outraged. "You will be charged before the bar of history," he challenged Nordau... From approximately 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1905, a Zionist would henceforth he defined as someone who adhered to the Basel Program and the only "authentic interpretation" of that program restricted settlement activity exclusively to Palestine. Zangwill and his supporters could not accept Nordau's "authentic interpretation" which they believed would lead to an abandonment of the Jewish masses and of Herzl's vision. One territorialist claimed that Ussishkin's voting bloc had in fact "buried political Zionism".
162. Epstein, Lawrence J. (2016). The Dream of Zion: The Story of the First Zionist Congress. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 97. ISBN 978-1-4422-5467-1. Archived from the original on January 11, 2024. Retrieved November 23, 2020.
163. Mendes-Flohr, Paul R.; Reinharz, Jehuda (1995). The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press. p. 552. ISBN 978-0-19-507453-6. Archived from the original on January 11, 2024. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
164. Ėstraĭkh, G. (2005). In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism. Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. p. 30.
165. Hagopian, Elaine C. (2016). "The Primacy of Water in the Zionist Project". Arab Studies Quarterly. 38 (4): 700–708. doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0700. ISSN 0271-3519. JSTOR 10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0700.
166. Pappé 2004, Chapter 2.
167. Morris 1999, p. 37: "The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (and indeed after 1967 as well)."
168. Morris 1999, Conclusions.
169. ^ Pappé 2004, The Arrival of Zionism.
170. Quigley 2005.
171. Khalidi 2010, p. 102.
172. Morris 1999, p. 20-24.
173. Morris 1999, p. 37.
174. Morris 1999, p. 35-40.
175. ^ Gorny 1987.
176. Shafir 1996, "Conquest of Labor".
177. ^ Shlaim 2001.
178. Shapira 2014, The Balfour Declaration.
179. Pappé 2004, Palestine in the First World War.
180. Goldman 2009, p. 133.
181. Masalha 2018, Chapter 10.
182. Shapira 2014, p. 70-71.
183. Roy 2016, p. 33-35.
184. ^ Gorny 1987, Historical Background.
185. ^ Khalidi 2020, Chapter 1.
186. Dieckhoff 2003, pp. 7–8, 42.
187. Roy 2016, pp. 40.
188. ^ Roy 2016, British Government Policies.
189. Roy 2016, Political Background to the British Mandate Period (1917–1948).
190. Sternhell 1999, Introduction.
191. Shimoni 1995, p. 201.
192. Cleveland 2010, The Jewish Community: Leadership and Institutions.
193. Sternhell 1999, Ends and Means: The Labor Ideology and the Histadrut.
194. Flapan 1979, p. 131.
195. Dieckhoff 2003, p. 91.
196. Sternhell 1999, p. 219.
197. ^ Sternhell 1999.
198. Sternhell 1999, p. 264.
199. Dieckhoff 2003, pp. 89–95.
200. Flapan 1979, The Policy of Econonic and Social Separation.
201. Flapan 1979, pp. 19.
202. Roy 2016, The Economic Transformation of Palestine: Key British and Zionst Policies.
203. ^ Pappé 2004.
204. ^ Roy 2016, p. 33.
205. ^ Khalidi 2020.
206. Morris 1999, p. 142.
207. Morris 1999, p. 144.
208. Chomsky 1999, "The Boundaries of Zionist Aspirations".
209. Gorny 1987, p. 243-245.
210. Gorny 1987, p. 250-253.
211. Gorny 1987, p. 323: "In the end, all of them accepted partition, less out of inner conviction than because of international pressure and force of national discipline, and in some cases were comforted by the thought that the path to a greater Palestine was still open."
212. ^ Cleveland 2010, Communal Conflict and the British Response.
213. Morris 1999, p. 162.
214. Pappé 2004: "A British White Paper of 1939 tried to make provision for Palestinian sensibilities. It repeated the promises made in 1930 of withdrawal from the Balfour Declaration and limits to Jewish immigration and land purchase. The objective was to maintain the status quo until the situation in Europe was clear. The limitation on immigration came at a time when Nazi expansion in Europe was making life for Jews there unbearable and impossible. The Yishuv now waged its own kind of rebellion, a clandestine operation of illegal immigration, land takeover, and formation of a paramilitary organization, helped by sympathetic British officers such as the legendary Orde Wingate."
215. ^ Morris 1999, p. 167.
216. Gorny 1987, p. 277.
217. ^ Cleveland 2010, World War II and the Birth of the State of Israel.
218. Morris 1999, p. 162-163.
219. Pappé 2004, Palestine in World War II.
220. Morris 1999, p. 169.
221. ^ Cleveland 2010.
222. Survey of Palestine (1946), Vol I, Chapter VI, p. 141 and Supplement to Survey of Palestine (1947), p. 10.
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227. Morris 1999, p. 174.
228. Pappé 2004, p. 118-119.
229. Morris 1999, p. 148.
230. Morris 1999, p. 196-197.
231. Pappé 2004, pp. 118–119.
232. Pappé 2004, p. 120.
233. Morris 2004: "The prospect and need to prepare for the invasion gave birth to Plan D, prepared in early March. It gave the Haganah brigade and battalion-level commanders carte blanche to completely clear vital areas; it allowed the expulsion of hostile or potentially hostile Arab villages. Many villages were bases for bands of irregulars; most villages had armed militias and could serve as bases for hostile bands. During April and May, the local Haganah units, sometimes with specific instruction from the Haganah General Staff, carried out elements of Plan D, each interpreting and implementing the plan in his area as he saw fit and in relation to the prevailing local circumstances. In general, the commanders saw fit to completely clear the vital roads and border areas of Arab communities -Allon in Eastern Galilee, Carmel around Haifa and Western Galilee, Avidan in the south. Most of the villagers fled before or during the fighting. Those who stayed put were almost invariably expelled."
234. Morris 2008, pp. 404–406.
235. "When the British left Palestine in 1948, there was no need to create the apparatus of a Jewish state ab novo. That apparatus had in fact been functioning under the British aegis for decades. All that remained to make Herzl’s prescient dream a reality was for this existing para-state to flex its military muscle against the weakened Palestinians while obtaining formal sovereignty, which it did in May 1948. The fate of Palestine had thus been decided thirty years earlier, although the denouement did not come until the very end of the Mandate, when its Arab majority was finally dispossessed by force." Khalidi 2020, Chapter 1
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250. Hakohen 2003, p. 246–247: "Both the immigrants' dependence and the circumstances of their arrival shaped the attitude of the host society. The great wave of immigration in 1948 did not occur spontaneously: it was the result of a clear-cut foreign policy decision that taxed the country financially and necessitated a major organizational effort. Many absorption activists, Jewish Agency executives, and government officials opposed unlimited, nonselective immigration; they favored a gradual process geared to the country's absorptive capacity. Throughout this period, two charges resurfaced at every public debate: one, that the absorption process caused undue hardship; two, that Israel's immigration policy was misguided."
251. Hakohen 2003, p. 47: "But as head of the government, entrusted with choosing the cabinet and steering its activities, Ben-Gurion had tremendous power over the country's social development. His prestige soared to new heights after the founding of the state and the impressive victory of the IDF in the War of Independence. As prime minister and minister of defense in Israel's first administration, as well as the uncontested leader of the country's largest political party, his opinions carried enormous weight. Thus, despite resistance from some of his cabinet members, he remained unflagging in his enthusiasm for unrestricted mass immigration and resolved to put this policy into effect."
252. Hakohen 2003, p. 247: "On several occasions, resolutions were passed to limit immigration from European and Arab countries alike. However, these limits were never put into practice, mainly due to the opposition of Ben-Gurion. As a driving force in the emergency of the state, Ben-Gurion—both prime minister and minister of defense—carried enormous weight with his veto. His insistence on the right of every Jew to immigrate proved victorious. He would not allow himself to be swayed by financial or other considerations. It was he who orchestrated the large-scale action that enabled the Jews to leave Eastern Europe and Islamic countries, and it was he who effectively forged Israel's foreign policy. Through a series of clandestine activities carried out overseas by the Foreign Office, the Jewish Agency, the Mossad le-Aliyah, and the Joint Distribution Committee, the road was paved for mass immigration."
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