Zionism

Zionism is commonly defined as the ideology and movement for the return of the Jewish people to the biblical land of Israel. The Jewish state of Israel was established in historic Palestine in 1948. While the idea of return has represented a principal feature of Jewish religious thought, prior to the emergence of modern Zionism, Jews had believed that only divine intervention could trigger return.

The origins of Zionism as a modern political idea are commonly identified with Theodore Herzl, the man who founded the movement in the late 19th century. For Herzl, anti-Semitism stemmed from the minority status of Jews in Europe. Although the emancipation of Europe's minority groups was progressing, the failure of the trend to end anti-Jewish violence led many Jewish intellectuals like Herzl to question whether the dissemination of rights would include Jews. Herzl argued that the antidote to anti-Jewish oppression lay in Jewish nationalism, which would create a “new Jew” capable of self-defense.

Zionism has historically encompassed a vast array of ideological positions—from socialist to fascist, secular to religious, territorially minimalist to expansionist. Zionism has also changed over time; before the creation of the modern state of Israel, for example, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, an important early Zionist thinker, advocated a binational state of Jews and Palestinians—a position that today remains outside what is generally considered Zionism. That being said, the goal of the movement's key actors and institutions was the creation of an ethnically Jewish state; those who advocated binationalism never held much power.

Zionist political organizing formally began in 1897 with the First Zionist Congress. The movement [Page 1517]organized Jewish communities around the world, lobbied governments for support, and settled on land in Palestine. Support for the movement grew steadily within European and American Jewish communities, coinciding with the increase of anti-Semitism, which peaked with the Nazi Holocaust. After the state's creation in 1948, major waves of Jewish immigration came also from the Middle East and Africa.

The Zionist movement assured the indigenous Palestinian population that Jewish immigration would bring economic prosperity. It quickly became clear to the Palestinians, however, that a Jewish state involved, at best, the obstruction of their own national goals and, at worst, their outright dispossession and transfer. Indeed, Jewish settlers came not to a “land without a people,” as early Zionist propaganda claimed, but to an already populated region. The actual creation of Israel involved the flight and expulsion of roughly 700,000 Palestinians, as well as the destruction of more than 400 Palestinian villages.

Many Palestinian refugees currently live in camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Today, conflict over the future of the Occupied Territories represents the most prominent fissure within Zionism.