ZIONISM.

Zionism is a Jewish nationalist political and cultural movement that developed in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Although it emerged among the Jewish masses of eastern Europe in the 1870s, it achieved recognition on the international stage when central European Jews became its leaders. Zionism was a response to two features of the contemporary Jewish situation: the surprising strength of anti-Semitism, even in countries that had conferred citizenship on their Jewish residents; and the erosion of a specific Jewish culture as a concomitant of the secularization of Jews and their assimilation to the norms of the larger society.

ORIGINS

Although it drew on traditional Jewish longing for Zion, Zionism was a secular movement that shared the nationalist zeal of the European fin de siècle. Zionists claimed that Jews, like other ethnic minorities, constituted a nationality. Lacking a territorial base in Europe, they would reconstitute themselves in their ancient homeland, Palestine. By working their own land and taking responsibility for their own affairs, Jews (and males especially) who settled in Palestine would remake themselves as physically strong and psychologically confident persons. They would overcome the deleterious impact of almost two thousand years of living in Diaspora and would also escape anti-Semitic persecution. Zionism was particularly aimed at the economically impoverished Jews of Russia, who suffered from pogroms and rampant governmental discrimination. Early Russian Zionists, such as the Lovers of Zion, fostered efforts to establish agricultural settlements in Palestine, with no explicit political goal and with little success.

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), an assimilated Viennese journalist and essayist with a Europe-wide reputation, established Zionism as an international political movement with a distinct political goal. Deeply affected by the anti-Semitism he witnessed throughout Europe, in 1896 he published Der Judenstaat, which outlined his understanding of Jewish nationalism and called for the establishment of a Jewish national home. Herzl proved to be a charismatic leader whose force of personality inspired commitment. In the face of widespread opposition from rabbis, who asserted that Jews should rely on God for their ultimate redemption, he convened the first international Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, attracting almost two hundred delegates and much publicity. The congress issued the Basel Program, proclaiming that the movement sought "for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured home in Palestine" (Laqueur, p. 106) through the encouragement of the settlement of Jewish agricultural workers and other laborers there and through obtaining the consent of governments throughout the world. The World Zionist Organization (WZO), formed at the Zionist congress, coordinated a network of local branches and national federations.

Herzl succeeded in the several years remaining before his early death in 1904 in placing Zionism on the international public agenda, establishing the framework of Zionist congresses, a Jewish nationalist fund for the purchase of land in Palestine, and a Zionist paper called Die Welt. However, his diplomatic efforts to secure the cooperation of the Turkish authorities, the German kaiser, Russian governmental figures, and prominent Jewish philanthropists were unsuccessful, and he could not fully bridge the differences between those who emphasized diplomatic activity to achieve legitimacy for Zionism (political Zionists) and those who focused on settlement efforts and/or addressed the issue of the creation of Jewish culture (practical Zionists). After his death, different factions, which ultimately became parties, contended within the movement.

THE GROWTH AND LIMITATION OF THE YISHUV

The Zionist movement was established on a firm footing by the conclusion of World War I through a combination of "practical" and "political" Zionism. About forty thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine between 1905 and 1914, the years called the Second Aliyah, comprising almost half of the total Jewish population of eighty-five thousand in 1914. Although many left by the end of the war—in large part because of Ottoman expulsion policies—and only a small minority were idealistic agricultural settlers of socialist convictions, it was these idealistic Zionist "pioneers" who set the tone of the new Yishuv (Jewish settlement). From their ranks emerged the leaders who built the institutions of the state-in-the-making and dominated the political elite of the State of Israel in its early years. It was during this period of the Second Aliyah that the pioneers experimented with various forms of collective and cooperative living and agricultural work for which the Zionist Yishuv became well known, including the kibbutz. They also organized a group called Hashomer (The Watchman), to defend their settlements, laying the ground for future military organization. In 1909 Zionist settlers established the city of Tel Aviv as a demonstration of a modern, technologically sophisticated Zionist city.

Perhaps the most significant success of practical Zionism before World War I was the building of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine based on Hebrew. Drawing on the achievements of a handful of Zionist settlers from the 1880s, the pioneers revived Hebrew as a spoken language and as the language of public life. The WZO subsidized the establishment of Hebrew-language schools, and in 1913 Zionist activists in Palestine made it clear that the newly founded Technion in Haifa must adopt Hebrew as its language of instruction. Jerusalem boasted two Hebrew dailies, and a Hebrew high school had been founded in Jaffa. Plans for a Hebrew university, first articulated in 1903, were put in motion, though the university did not open in Jerusalem until 1925. A 1916 census indicated that 40 percent of the Jewish population, the non-Zionist Orthodox aside, declared Hebrew to be their first language.

The political Zionists of the WZO actively fostered the efforts of settlement as they continued their diplomatic activity. In 1907 the movement established the Palestine Office, which became involved in land purchase, agricultural training, and assistance to poor settlers. Most important, the WZO succeeded in realizing Herzl's dream of acquiring international recognition. With the situation in the Middle East in flux during the war, both sides considered the Zionists as potential allies. The British, with whose politicians Zionist leaders, particularly Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), were in close touch, were the first to issue a statement of support for Zionist goals in Palestine. The British authorities acted in order to strengthen their position in the postwar Middle East and thereby protect access to their colony in India. On 2 November 1917 the foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) issued a declaration that stated "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The 1920 San Remo Conference determined that Great Britain would be given the mandate over Palestine and the Balfour Declaration would be included. Although the British were ambivalent about the commitments they had made to the Zionist movement in the Balfour Declaration and concerned about mitigating its negative impact on relations with Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, the recognition of the Balfour Declaration by the League of Nations in 1922 legitimated the Zionist settlement in Palestine in the international political realm.

In the face of active Arab opposition to the Zionist enterprise and increasing British restriction over Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Zionist movement labored to construct a Jewish society in Palestine. The Jewish Agency was initially considered in 1923 so that mandatory authorities would have an organization separate from the WZO to deal with as regards the growth of the Yishuv. It took years of political negotiation to shape the type of agency that Chaim Weizmann, president of the WZO, envisioned alongside the Zionist movement. Along with American Jewish leaders, he sought to involve representatives of world Jewry in the building of the Yishuv's economy and educational institutions. In 1929 the Jewish Agency was formally expanded to include non-Zionists, and especially representatives of American Jewry, on its board. Prominent European Jews, such as the French socialist leader Léon Blum, the scientist Albert Einstein, and the British first high commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, became members.

Although the Jewish Agency was important in assisting the new immigrants as well as Zionist economic activity in general, it was the labor Zionist Histadrut—the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Palestine, established in 1920—that became the most powerful institution in the Yishuv. Labor Zionists recognized that class-conscious politics had to take a back seat to nation building. Thus, the Histadrut not only defended the rights of workers but also was instrumental in entrepreneurial activity in a wide variety of industries that employed the workers. The Histadrut marketed all the products of the agricultural collectives, ran companies in the building and transport sectors, founded a large insurance company, and set up cooperative retail stores. It was also deeply involved in cultural activity: it had its own network of schools and kindergartens, teachers' seminaries, libraries, and cultural clubs. It published a daily Hebrew newspaper and set up successful publishing houses. Finally, it established Kupat Holim, a sick fund, which became the basis of the State of Israel's national health service.

Despite the political ascendancy of labor Zionism in the Yishuv, Zionism was rife with factions and parties. Each of these factions and parties sponsored its own youth movement, which fostered the continuation of ideological and political division. Virtually from the beginning of the movement, the socialist Left itself was divided. Only in 1930 did the two major labor factions merge to become the Mapai Party, which came to play a central role in Yishuv and later Israeli politics. In the WZO and its congresses, however, the non-socialist, middle-class centrist General Zionists wielded control. They, too, however, were plagued by dissension. In addition, religious Zionists were organized under the title Mizrahi as early as 1903, but they were divided as to whether their primary loyalty was to Zionism or Orthodoxy, and their 1931 decision to fight the non-Orthodox majority within the WZO limited their influence. The largest fault line in Zionism, however, was between the WZO and the Revisionists, who considered all other Zionist parties to be insufficiently militant in the face of a dire situation facing European Jews.

Revisionism was a Zionism of the Right, led by a charismatic figure, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940), a cultured Russian litterateur. Jabotinsky had worked within the WZO, achieving fame in his strong advocacy for the establishment of a Jewish brigade in the British Army during World War I. Resigning from the WZO executive in 1923, he established a Zionist party called Revisionism, with its own youth movement, Betar, that argued for a Jewish nationalism averse to compromise. Revisionism advocated the right of Jews to settle in all of Palestine, including Transjordan, which the British had separated from the Palestine mandate, and by 1934 called for non-cooperation with the British authorities. Influenced by Italian fascism, it promoted militarism and physical strength and became increasingly antisocialist. In 1935 Jabotinsky and his followers established a rival to the WZO, the New Zionist Organization.

Aside from its political, cultural, and economic achievements in Palestine, Zionism exerted an influence on European Jewry in the interwar years. In western and central Europe, Zionist youth movements stimulated interest in Hebrew and in Jewish culture broadly defined. Ethnic elements, which had been suppressed among Jews as part of their accommodation to emancipation, reappeared in Jewish public pronouncements. The Zionist Yishuv, not to mention the political situation of Palestinian Jewry, was accorded significant attention in the Jewish press. Activists in Zionist youth groups later played a large role in Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

Zionism—and non-Zionist support for the Yishuv—grew in the period between the wars even as the political plight of the Yishuv seemed to worsen. The Arabs of Palestine and of the Middle East in general had been opposed to Zionism from its inception. While Zionists did not see their movement as antagonistic to the Arab population, or as colonialist, they were unable to accept the Arabs as equal rivals for the land of Palestine. After World War I brought the Arabs no success in their desires for independence, Palestinian Arabs chose violence as a way of displaying to Zionists and British alike that the Jewish presence in Palestine would be costly. Beginning with lethal attacks in Jaffa in 1921 that spread throughout Palestine and continuing with a massive attack on the Jews of Hebron in 1929 that ignited rioting throughout the country and cost 133 Jewish lives and the Arab revolt of 1936–1939, the Arabs disrupted the stability that the British desired and brought the threat of death and injury to the members of the Yishuv.

By 1930 British took ever more seriously the qualification in the Balfour Declaration that the Jewish homeland "not prejudice the civil or religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Decisions about Jewish immigration to Palestine were to be based on the economic capacity of the country as the British authorities defined it. The Passfield White Paper of 1930 was pessimistic about Palestine's economic potential and made it clear that Britain had the same obligation to Arabs as to Jews in Palestine. Despite Arab calls for a cessation of all Jewish immigration to Palestine, the general prosperity in Palestine in 1933–1935 had persuaded the British to allow 134,000 (of a much larger total) requests for immigrant visas. The new settlers contributed to an expansion of the entire Palestinian economy. After the outbreak of the Arab riots, however, immigration was sharply curtailed, and in the years 1936–1939, when Nazi persecution of Jews was explicit and grim, the mandatory government permitted only 69,400 Jews to enter Palestine. In 1939 there were 460,000 Jews and 1,070,000 Arabs in Palestine. In that year, recognizing that the Arabs had more to offer should an anticipated world war break out, the British issued a White Paper that capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at fifteen thousand a year for the next five years. After March 1944 no new Jewish resident would be allowed in Palestine and the Jewish proportion of the population of Palestine would be no more than a third.

In addition to controlling Jewish immigration to Palestine, the British also began to devise means to extricate themselves from the political morass of the Arab-Zionist struggle. Beginning in 1937, the idea of partitioning Palestine was bruited. The 1939 White Paper, however, envisioned one future state of Palestine with a permanent Jewish minority. Both Arabs and Jews rejected the 1939 White Paper, the Arabs because it did not grant them immediate independence, the Jews because it restricted immigration. A small group of Zionists, organized as Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) advocated a binational Jewish-Arab state as early as 1925 but they had little support. During World War II the Zionists changed their policy, accepting partition as the only way to attain the sovereignty that they considered essential. They also reacted to British policy by fostering illegal immigration, which attracted favorable publicity when the displaced survivors of Nazi camps were involved after the conclusion of World War II. Two paramilitary groups not under the control of the WZO, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), essentially the military wing of the Revisionist movement, and the even more radical Lechi, also called the Stern Gang, broke with the WZO's policy of self-restraint vis-à-vis the British. The latter in particular engaged in armed insurrection and committed terrorist acts against the British. The hostility of both Arabs and Zionists led the British to hand the Palestine problem over to the United Nations (UN) in 1947.

ZIONISM AFTER ISRAEL

The United Nations established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to study the Palestine situation. After meeting with Arabs and Jews in Palestine and displaced persons (DPs) in Europe, UNSCOP delivered its report in September, with the majority recommending the partition of Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations voted in favor of the partition resolution. After the British withdrew from Palestine and the Zionist leaders declared the establishment of the State of Israel on 15 May 1948, the hostilities between local Arabs and Jews, which had broken out after the UN vote, became an all-out war between the new state and four invading Arab armies. Israel achieved a resounding victory, ratified in four armistice agreements in 1949, that greatly expanded the territory of the Jewish state. The war also created the Arab refugee problem that has prolonged Arab-Israeli hostilities.

The history of the Zionist movement effectively ended with the creation of the state of Israel. Zionism was subsequently redefined as support for the State of Israel. The issues of immigration, settlement, and nation building that the Jewish Agency had supervised were now controlled by appropriate state agencies. David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), a veteran of the Second Aliyah and Israel's first prime minister, effectively brought independent militias under the aegis of the state, disbanding both the IZL and the Lechi at the cost of some lives.

Zionist ideology, however, underlay state policy. The theme of Zion as a refuge for Jews suffering from persecution motivated the 1950 Law of Return that gave Jews everywhere the right to immigrate and quickly attain citizenship. Even in the most economically difficult years of the late 1940s and 1950s, the new state welcomed European survivors of the Holocaust, immigrants from Yemen, and later newcomers from Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq. By 1956 the Jewish population of Israel had nearly tripled, reaching 1,667,000. Subsequently, Israel opened its door to a small immigration of Ethiopian Jews and after 1989 hundreds of thousands of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews. As of 2005 there were 5.3 million Jews in a total population of 6.9 million. To be sure, the settling of large numbers of Jews strengthened Israel in its demographic struggle with the Arabs, but it also realized the Zionist dream of the ingathering of the exiles. Pragmatism alone does not explain the Law of Return.

Zionism has also seen the Jewish settlement of the land as a form of secular redemption. Indeed, working the land not only redeemed the land: it also transformed those who undertook the task. When Israel's overwhelming victory in the 1967 war left it in control of a vast amount of Arab land, including the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, some Jews viewed the victory in messianic terms. With the encouragement of successive Israeli governments, they transformed settlement into a messianic act. The most ideologically motivated settlers, the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) blended nationalism and religion into a heady brew. They proclaimed themselves the true Israeli Zionists. Most Israeli Jews saw the newly acquired territory as legitimate fruit of victory.

By the year 2000, however, it had become clear to the majority of Israel's Jewish citizens that it would be impossible to maintain Israel as a Jewish and democratic state while holding on to the territory occupied since the 1967 war. A peaceful solution to the "Palestine problem" that met the needs of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews was necessary. Reality on the ground had proven the Zionist goal of redeeming the whole Land of Israel irreconcilable with the values of a modern nation-state rooted in European culture. Whether Israelis and their Palestinian counterparts choose to press for and achieve a negotiated peace will ultimately determine the fate of Zionism in the future.

See alsoJews; Palestine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. New York, 1959; Philadelphia, 1997. A collection of writings of early Zionist thinkers, with a splendid introductory essay.

Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State. Translated by Harry Zohn. Reprint, New York, 1970. Translation of Der Judenstaat (1896).

Secondary Sources

Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York, 1981.

Berkowitz, Michael. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.

Bernstein, Deborah, ed. Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel. Albany, N.Y., 1992.

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York, 1972. The classic one-volume history of Zionism to 1948.

Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001. New York, 2001.

Reinharz, Jehuda, and Anita Shapira, eds. Essential Papers on Zionism. New York, 1996. A collection of important scholarly articles on history, ideology, politics, and culture.

Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948. Translated by William Templer. New York, 1992.

Shavit, Jacob. Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948. London, 1988.

Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover, N.H., 1995.

Vital, David. The Origins of Zionism. Oxford, U.K., 1975.

Paula E. Hyman