Zionism

Zionism has played an important role in global politics since the beginning of the 20th century. The term Zionism refers both to an ideology that aimed to establish an independent sovereign Jewish political entity in Palestine (the ancient homeland of the Jewish people) and to a Jewish national liberation movement, which emerged at the end of the 19th century for the purpose of realizing Zionist ideology and was recognized by the League of Nations and Britain as the sole representative of the Jewish people in all matters relating to Palestine. The term Zionism derives from the word Zion, a synonym for Jerusalem and for Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel (the Hebrew term for what later became known as Palestine).

As Zionism sought a national solution for a people scattered throughout the globe, the Zionist enterprise first needed to gather Jews in a country that was then under foreign rule (initially, part of the Ottoman Empire and then a British mandate under the League of Nations) and sparsely populated by others—Arabs. Due to the complex circumstances under which Zionism emerged and evolved, there arose a proliferation of attitudes, trends, and factions which differed in various aspects but shared a common denominator: the right of the Jews to an independent state. The unique character of Zionist ideology and practice drew much criticism, some based on misconceptions, to the extent of casting doubts on its legitimacy.

Zionism, with its aim of returning the Jewish people to an active role in history rather than having them act as passive subordinates, differed from the traditional religious attachment to Zion and the belief in the messianic salvation of the Jewish people by advocating active human endeavor toward national revival. Three fundamental factors were essential to the rise of Zionism: intensified anti-Semitism in Europe, the emergence of nationalism and national movements in central and eastern Europe, and the centuries-long Jewish yearning for Zion.

When the term Zionism was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, Jewish societies for the settlement of Palestine, bearing the name Hibat Zion (Love of Zion), were already active in Russia, following the 1882 pogroms against the Jews. They drew their ideology from Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Autoemancipation, which claimed that anti-Semitism, “Judophobia” in his term, was a permanent social and psychopathological phenomenon which would exist as long as Jews were everywhere a minority and nowhere a normal national majority. The solution to the Jewish problem was to remove the Jews from where they lived, in an abnormal situation and surrounded by hatred, to a territory of their own where they would become a normal nation. Similar views were expressed in 1896 by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews). Herzl's basic notion was “We are a people—one people,” meaning that Jews all over the [Page 1836]world were a national group that constituted an anomaly, that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national, and that the only possible solution to the tension between the Jews and majority society was a Jewish state. Herzl's vision of the Jewish state also had social aspects, exemplified in his proposed seven-starred flag, symbolizing a 7-hour workday.

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