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Zionism is a violent and racist political movement among Jews (although supported by some non-Jews, mostly American Christians) which maintains that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland and that they are "God's Chosen People". Formally founded in 1897, Zionism embraced a variety of opinions in its early years on where that homeland might be established. From 1917 it focused on the establishment of a Jewish national homeland or state in Palestine, the location of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Since 1948, Zionism has been a movement to support the development and defence of the State of Israel, and to encourage Jews to settle there.

Since the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the objectives and methods of the Zionist movement and of Israel have come under criticism. The Arab world opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine from the outset, but during the course of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since 1967, the legitimacy of Israel, and thus of Zionism, has been questioned in the wider world. Since the breakdown of the Oslo Accords in 2001, attacks on Zionism in media, intellectual and political circles, particularly in Europe, have reached new levels of intensity.

This article is intended to be a survey of the history and objectives of the Zionist movement, not a history of Israel or of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The history of the various forms of opposition to Zionism is discussed at the article Anti-Zionism.

The Jews and Zion

The word "Zionist" is derived from the word "Zion" (Hebrew: ציון, Tziyyon), being one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible. It was coined by an Austrian Jewish publicist Nathan Birnbaum in his journal Self Emancipation in 1890.

Zionism has always had both religious and secular aspects, reflecting the dual nature of Jewish identity, as both a religion (Judaism) and as a national or ethnic identity (Jewishness). Many religious Jews opposed Zionism, while some of the founders of the State of Israel were atheists.

Religious Jews believe that since the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) was given to the ancient Israelites by God, the right of the Jews to that land is permanent and inalienable. To generations of diaspora Jews, Zion has been a symbol of the Holy Land and of their return to it, as promised by God in Biblical prophecies. (See also Jerusalem, Jews and Judaism)

Despite this, many religious Jews were not enthusiastic about Zionism before the 1930s, and many religious organisations opposed it on the grounds that an attempt to re-establish Jewish rule in Israel by human agency is blasphemous, since only the Messiah can accomplish this. The secular, socialist language used by many pioneer Zionists was contrary to the outlook of most religious Jewish communities. There was, however, a small but vocal group of religious Jews, led by the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, that supported Zionism and cooperation with the secular majority in Palestine. Only the desperate circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s converted most (though not all) of these communities to Zionism.

Secular Jewish opinion was also ambivalent in its attitudes to Zionism. Many argued that Jews should join with other progressive forces in bringing about changes which would eradicate anti-Semitism and make it possible for Jews to live in safety in the various countries where they lived. Before the 1930s, many Jews believed that socialism offered a better strategy for improving the lot of European Jews. In the United States, most Jews embraced the liberalism of their adopted country. By some estimates, before World War II only 20–25 percent of Jews worldwide supported Zionism, with most others either opposed or lukewarm to it.

The chain of events between 1881 and 1945, however, beginning with waves of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and the Russian controlled areas of Poland, and culminating in the so-called Holocaust, converted the great majority of surviving Jews to the belief that a Jewish homeland was an urgent necessity, particularly given the large population of disenfranchised Jewish refugees after World War II. Most also became convinced that Palestine was the only location that was both acceptable to all strands of Jewish thought and within the realms of practical possibility. This led to the great majority of Jews supporting the struggle between 1945 and 1948 to establish the State of Israel, though many did not condone violent tactics used by some Zionist groups.

Since 1948 most Jews have continued to identify as Zionists, in the sense that they support the State of Israel even if they do not choose to live there. This worldwide support has been of vital importance to Israel, both politically and financially. This has been particularly true since 1967, as the rise of Palestinian nationalism and the resulting political and military struggles have eroded sympathy for Israel among non-Jews, at least outside the United States. In recent years, many Jews have criticised the morality and expediency of Israel's continued control of the territories captured in 1967.

Establishment of the Zionist Movement

The desire of Jews to return to their ancestral homeland became a universal Jewish theme after the defeat of the Great Jewish Revolt and destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in the year 70, the defeat of Bar Kochba's revolt in 135, and the dispersal of the Jews to other parts of the Empire that followed. Due to the disasterous results of the revolt, what was once a human driven movement towards national sovereignty based on religious inspiratation, over centuries tradition and broken hopes of one "false messiah" after another took much of the human element out of messianic deliverance and put it all in the hands of God. Although Jewish nationalism in ancient times have always taken on religious connatations, from the Maccabean Revolt to the various Jewish revolts during Roman rule, and even Medieval Times when intermittently national hopes were incarnated in the "false messianism" of Shabbatai Zvi, among others less know messianists, it was not until the rise of ideological and political Zionism and its renewed belief in human based action toward Jewish national aspiration, did the notion of settling the homeland become widespread among the Jewish conscious.

The emancipation of Jews in European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries following the French Revolution, and the spread of western liberal ideas among a section of newly emancipated Jews, created for the first time a class of secular Jews, who absorbed the prevailing ideas of rationalism, romanticism and, most importantly, nationalism. Jews who had abandoned Judaism, at least in its traditional forms, began to develop a new Jewish identity, as a "nation" in the European sense. They were inspired by various national struggles, such as those for German and Italian unification, and for Polish and Hungarian independence. If Italians and Poles were entitled to a homeland, they asked, why were Jews not so entitled?

Before the 1890s there had already been attempts to settle Jews in Palestine, which was in the 19th century a part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by about 450,000 people, mostly Muslim and Christian Arabs (although there had never been a time when there were no Jews in Palestine). Pogroms in Russia led Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and the Rothschilds to sponsor agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in Palestine in the late 1870s, culminating in a small group of immigrants from Russia arriving in the country in 1882. This has become known in Zionist history as the First Aliyah (aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning "ascent.").

Proto-Zionist groups such as Hibbat Zion were active in the 1880s in Eastern Europe where emancipation had not occurred to the extent it did in Western Europe (or at all.)The massive anti-Jewish pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II made emancipation seem farther than ever and influenced Judah Leib Pinsker to publish the pamphlet Auto-Emancipation in January 1, 1882. The pamphlet became influential for the Political Zionism movement.

There had also been several Jewish thinkers such as Moses Hess whose 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" which would transform the Jewish community into a true nation in that Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class which is how he perceived European Jews. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of Socialist Zionism and Labour Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement.

A key event triggering the modern Zionist movement was the Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in France in 1894. Jews were profoundly shocked to see this outbreak of anti-Semitism in a country which they thought of as the home of enlightenment and liberty. Among those who witnessed the Affair was an Austrian-Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, who published his pamphlet Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896. Prior to the Affair, Herzl had been anti-Zionist, afterwards he became ardently pro-Zionist. In 1897 Herzl organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and elected Herzl as its first President.

Zionist strategies

The WZO's initial strategy was to obtain the permission of the Ottoman Sultan to allow systematic Jewish settlement in Palestine. The good offices of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, were sought, but nothing came of this. Instead the WZO pursued a strategy of building a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration, and the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund in 1901 and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in 1903.

Before 1917 some Zionist leaders took seriously proposals for Jewish homelands in places other than Palestine. Herzl's Der Judenstaat argued for a Jewish state in either Palestine, "our ever-memorable historic home", or Argentina, "one of the most fertile countries in the world". In 1903 British cabinet ministers suggested the British Uganda Program, land for a Jewish state in "Uganda" (actually in modern Kenya). Herzl initially rejected the idea, preferring Palestine, but after the April 1903 Kishinev pogroms Herzl introduced a controversial proposal to the 6th Zionist Congress to investigate the offer as a temporary measure for Russian Jews in danger. Notwithstanding its emergency and temporary nature, the proposal still proved very divisive, and sparked a walkout led by the Russian Jewish delegation to the Congress. Nevertheless, a majority voted to establish a committee for the investigation of the possibility, and it was not dismissed until the 7th Zionist Congress in 1905.

In response to this, the Jewish Territorialist Organization led by Israel Zangwill split off from the main Zionist movement. The territorialists attempted to establish a Jewish homeland wherever possible, but went into decline after 1917 and were dissolved in 1925. From that time Palestine was the sole focus of Zionist aspirations. Few Jews took seriously the establish