Zionism

Background

From its beginning, Zionism advocated secular as well as spiritual aims, reflecting the dual nature of Jewish identity as both a religion (Judaism) and a national or ethnic designation (“Jewishness” or “Jewish peoplehood”). Jews from every ideological position—left and right, secular and religious— joined together to create a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine for the purpose of transforming the victimized European Jews and the second-class Jews of Muslim lands into a redeemed biblical Jew—the agrarian man of the earth, the fierce warrior, the passionate man of God.

The word Zionism was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, an Austrian Jewish publicist. In his essay, the term self emancipation is derived from a biblical source: the word Zion, one of the common names of Jerusalem, the sacred capital of the Kingdom of Israel.

Zionism does not have a uniform ideology because of the many competing ideologies among the founders of the movement. From the first Zionist Conference in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, the often fierce struggle for supremacy between Zionist factions quickly erupted: Political Zionism, Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and Religious Zionism battled to determine the prevailing identity of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, a struggle that continues today in the present state of Israel.

To illustrate the paradoxical nature of the Jewish movement, one can simply point to the many ultra-Orthodox Jews who opposed Zionism as a blasphemous preemption of the Messianic Age (since only the Messiah, with God's support, can bring about Jewish rule in the Holy Land), while some of the key founders of the state of Israel were unbending atheists. It is important, therefore, to explain Zionism by clarifying the historical ideologies that characterized the movement from the outset.

Labor Zionism

Labor Zionism provided the most powerful ideology during the founding years of pre-state Israel and prevailed as the dominant ruling party in government until 1977. The movement had its origins in the first intellectual document of the Zionist movement—Moshe Hess's book Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, published in 1862. Hess perceived European Jewry as a nonproductive, dependent merchant class that desperately needed a process of transformation through “redemption of the soil”—a return to the tilling of the earth, as in the days of the Bible. Such a transformation, however, could take place only in a new and sovereign Jewish homeland. Hess is now considered a key founder of Labor/Socialist Zionism as well as a key intellectual forebear of the Israeli kibbutz movement.

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