Zionism:An alternative view

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See also Zionism and A critical view of Zionism

Zionism is a political movement among Jews, formally founded in 1897, which holds that the Jews are a nation, and as such are entitled to a national homeland. In its early years Zionism embraced a variety of opinions on where that homeland might be established, but from 1917 its focus was on the establishment of a Jewish homeland or state in Palestine, the location of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Since 1948 Zionism has been a movement for the defence of the State of Israel, and to encourage Jews to settle there.

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The Jews and Zion

The word "Zionist" derives from Mt Zion (Hebrew, Siyon), a hill near Jerusalem, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. 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). Some 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 was given to the ancient Israelites by God, the right of the Jews to that land is permanent and inalienable. Despite this, the majority of religious Jews were not enthusiastic about Zionism before the 1930s, and many religious organisatios opposed it outright. A small minority of religious Jews still argue that the attempt to re-establish Jewish rule in Israel by human agency is blasphemous, since only the Messiah can accomplish this.

Secular Jews have been more ambivalent in their attitudes to the focus of Zionism on a return to Palestine. In the early years of the movement some were willing to consider alternative sites for a Jewish homeland. Many more were hostile to the whole idea of Zionism and 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 and were lukewarm towards Zionism.

The chain of events between the 1890s and 1945, however, beginning with anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and culminating in the Holocaust, in which perhaps a third of all Jews were killed, converted the great majority of surviving Jews to the belief that a Jewish homeland was an urgent necessity. 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 the violent tactics used by some Zionist groups.

Since 1948 the majority of 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 some Jews have criticised the morality and expediency of Israel’s continued occupation of the territories captured in 1967, but they remain a minority.

Establishment of the Zionist Movement

The desire of Jews to return to their ancestral homeland became a universal Jewish theme after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 AD and the dispersal of the Jews to other parts of the Empire that followed. Until the rise of political Zionism, however, most Jews believed that the Jewish people would only return to Israel with the coming of the Messiah, that is, after divine intervention.

The Emancipation [an article someone should write] of Jews in European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, 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 form, 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 resettle Jews in Palestine, which was in the 19th century a thinly populated backwater of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by perhaps 200,000 people, mostly Muslim Arabs – although there had never been a time when there were no Jews in Palestine. Pogroms in Russia and Russian Poland led Jewish philanthropists such as the Rothschilds to sponsor agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in Palestine as early as 1882. This has become known in Zionist history as the First Aliyah (aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning "ascent.")

The key event in triggering the modern Zionist political movement was the Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in France in 1894. Jews were profoundly shocked to see this outbreak of virulent 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. In 1897 Herzl organised a congress in Basel, Switzerland, which founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and elected Herzl as its 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 Argentina or Palestine, both being equally acceptable. In 1903, Herzl introduced a controversial proposal to the 6th Zionist Congress to investigate an offer brought to him for Jewish settlement in Uganda. Although the proposal proved very divisive, a majority voted to establish a committee for the investagation of the possibility. The possiblity was dismissed at 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 territoralists attempted to establish a Jewish homeland wherever possible, but went into decline after 1917 and were dissolved in 1925. Few Jews took seriously the establishment by the Soviet Union of a Jewish Autonomous Republic in the Russian Far East.

One of the major motivations for Zionism was the belief that the Jews needed a country of their own, not just as a refuge from anti-Semitism, but in order to become a "normal people." Some Zionists, mainly socialist Zionists, believed that the Jews' centuries of marginalised existence in anti-Semitic societies, locked up in ghettoes and restricted to occupations such as money-lending, had distorted the Jewish character, reducing Jews to a parasitic existence which further fostered anti-Semitism. They argued that Jews should redeem themselves from their history by becoming farmers, workers and soldiers in a country of their own. This was the motivation behind the kibbutz movement, which settled European Jews on socialist agricultural communes (kibbutzim) in Palestine and taught them manual and industrial skills.

Another aspect of this stategy was the revival and fostering of the Hebrew language. Most European Jews in the 19th century spoke Yiddish, a dialect of German, which many Zionists regarded as a "ghetto language." Beginning in 1880, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his supporters promoted the use and teaching of a modernised form of Biblical Hebrew, which had not been a living language for nearly 2,000 years. The use of Hebrew was adopted as official policy by Zionist organisations in Palestine, and served as an important unifying force among the Jewish settlers, who were also encouraged to take new, Hebrew names. The development of the kibbutzim and other Jewish economic institutions, plus the use of Hebrew, began by the 1920s the lay the foundations of a new nationality, which would come into formal existence in 1948.

The Zionist leaders always saw Britain as a key potential ally in the struggle for a Jewish homeland. Not only was Britain the world’s greatest imperial power, it was also a country where Jews lived in peace and security, among them influential political and cultural leaders, such as Benjamin Disraeli and Walter, Lord Rothschild [another article someone should write]. There was also a peculiar streak of philo-Semitism among the classically educated British elite to which the Zionist leaders hoped to appeal, just as the Greek independence movement had appealed to British philhellenism during the Greek War of Independence. Chaim Weizmann, who became the leader of the Zionist movement after Herzl's death in 1904, was a professor at a British university, and used his extensive contacts to lobby the British government for a statement in support of Zionist aspirations.

This hope was realised in 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, made his famous Balfour Declaration in favour of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Balfour was motived partly by philo-Semitic sentiment, partly by a desire to weaken the Ottoman Empire (an ally of Germany during the First World War), and partly by a desire to strengthen support for the Allied cause in the United States, home to the world's most influental Jewish community. In the Declaration, however, Balfour was careful to use the word "homeland" rather than "state," and also to specify that the establishment of a Jewish homeland must not "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Zionism and the Arabs

In the light of subsequent events, it is remarkable how little thought many of the founders of Zionism appear to have given to the fact that Palestine was not an uninhabited country, but was the home of Muslim Arabs who had constituted the majority of the population there for over a thousand years. There were several reasons for this. The Arab population was small, poor and thin on the ground. There was almost no Arab educated class to speak on their behalf. Many Zionists assumed that there was plenty of land for everyone and that the Arabs would not object to new settlers. Others, sharing common 19th century European views, held that the Arabs were a backward people whose opinions did not matter, and that in any case European rule would be good for them. When it was hoped that the Ottoman Sultan would support Jewish settlement, some Zionists assumed that the Sultan would resettle the Arabs elsewhere in the Arab world.

Two groups Zionists did give serious thought to the issue of the Arabs. They took diametrically opposite views on what to do about this issue. On the one hand, some of the secular socialists who provided much of the early leadership of the Zionist movement (the ancestors of today's Labour Party), believed that Jews and Arabs could live together in socialist harmony in a secular Palestine. And indeed relations between the Arabs and the early Jewish settlers in Palestine were generally harmonious. Jewish settlement and investment in Palestine stimulated Arab immigration from other Arab countries, and the Jewish and Arab populations grew in tandem to their mutual benefit. At this time, it seems, there was no sense of Palestinian national identity, and apparently no opposition to Jewish settlement.

On the other hand, the movement within Zionism known as Revisionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, argued that the objective of Zionism should be establishment of a Jewish state (as opposed merely to a homeland), that this objective would inevitably provoke Arab resistance, and that the Jews needed to arm themselves to protect the settlements in Palestine and to fight the Arabs for control of the country. Jabotinsky seems to have been the first to grasp the fact that a Jewish state must be preceded by a Jewish majority in Palestine, if necessary entailing the expulsion of the Arab population. His ideas struck most Zionists at this time as extreme, but they were the genesis of the political party which later, under the leadership of Jabotinsky's disciple Menachem Begin, became Likud: now the dominant political force in Israel.

The struggle for Palestine

With the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine with the approval of the League of Nations in 1922, the Zionist movement entered a new phase of activity. Its priorities were the escalation of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the building of the institutional foundations of a Jewish state, raising funds for these purposes, and persuading - or forcing - the British authorities not to take any steps which would lead to Palestine moving towards independence as an Arab-majority state. The 1920s did see a rapid growth in the Jewish population and the construction of state-like Jewish institutions, but also saw the emergence of Palestinian Arab nationalism and growing resistance to Jewish immigration.

International Jewish opinion remained divided on the merits of the Zionist project. Many prominent Jews in Europe and the United States opposed Zionism, arguing that a Jewish homeland was not needed because Jews were able to live in the democratic countries of the West as equal citizens. Albert Einstein, one of the best-known Jews in the world, said: "I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain, especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks." The many Jews who embraced socialism opposed Zionism as a form of reactionary nationalism. The General Jewish Labor Union, or Bund, which represented socialist Jews in eastern Euopope, was strongly anti-Zionist. The Communist Parties, which attracted substantial Jewish support during the 1920s and '30s, were even more violently anti-Zionism. At the other extreme, some American Jews went so far as to say that the United States was Zion, and the successful absorption of 2 million Jewish immigrants in the 30 years before the First World War lent force to this argument.

But the rise of to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 produced a poweful new impetus for Zionism. Not only did it create a flood of Jewish refugees – at a time when the United States had closed its doors against further immigration – but it undermined the faith of Jews that they could live in security as minorities in non-Jewish societies. Jewish opinion began to shift in favour of Zionism, and pressure for more Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. But the more Jews settled in Palestine, the more aroused Palestinian Arab opinion became, and the more difficult the situation in Palestine became. In 1936 serious Arab rioting broke out, and in response the British severely restricted Jewish immigration.

The Jewish community in Palestine responded by organising armed forces. Three military movements were founded, the Labor-dominated Haganah and the Revisionist Irgun and Lehi. The latter groups did not hesitate to take military action against the Arab population. Serious violence was forestalled only by the outbreak of World War II. The Zionist leadership decided that defeating Hitler must take priority and agreed to co-operate with the British while the war lasted.

The revelation of the fate of 6 million European Jews killed during the Holocaust had several consequences. Firstly, it left hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees (or displaced persons) in camps in Europe, unable or unwilling to return to homes in countries which they felt had betrayed them to the Nazis. Not all of these refugees wanted to go to Palestine, and in fact many of them eventually went to other countries, but large numbers of them did, and they resorted to increasingly desperate measures to get there.

Secondly, it evoked a world-wide feeling of sympathy with the Jewish people, mingled with guilt that more had not been done before the war to deter Hitler's aggressions or help Jews escape from Europe. This was particularly the case in the United States. Among those who became strong supporters of the Zionist ideal were President Harry Truman, who used the great power of his position to mobilise support at the United Nations for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Since Britain was desperate to withdraw from Palestine, this was the crucial factor in the creation of Israel.

Thirdly, it swung world Jewish opinion almost unanimously behind the project of a Jewish state in Palestine, and within Palestine it led to a greater resolution to use force to achieve that objective. American Reform Judaism was among the elements of Jewish thought which changed their opinions about Zionism after the Holocaust. The proposition that Jews could live in peace and security in non-Jewish societies was certainly a difficult one to defend in 1945, although it one of the ironies of Zionist history that in the decades since World War II anti-Semitism has almost disappeared as a serious political force in most western countries, and Jewish communities continue to live and prosper outside Israel.

Zionism and Israel

On May 14 1948 the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine made a declaration of independence, and the state of Israel was established. This marked a major turning point in the Zionist movement, as its principal goal had now been accomplished. Many Zionist institutions were reshaped: the three military movements combined to form the Israel Defence Forces. The majority of the Arab population having either fled or been expelled during the War of Indendence, Jews were now a majority of the population within the 1948 ceasefire lines, which became Israel’s de facto borders until 1967. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return which granted all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel, together with the inflow of Jewish refugees from Euope, and the later flood of Jews expelled from the Arab countries, had the effect of creating a permanent Jewish majority in Israel.

Since 1948 the international Zionist movement has undertaken a variety of roles in support of Israel. These have included the encouragement of immigration, assisting the absorption and integration of immigrants, fundraising on behalf of settlement and development projects in Israel, the encouragement of private capital investment in Israel, and mobilisation of world public opinion in support of Israel

The 1968 conference of the WZO adopted the following principles:

  • The unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life
  • The ingathering of the Jewish people in the historic homeland, Eretz Israel, through aliyah from all countries
  • The strengthening of the State of Israel, based on the "prophetic vision of justice and peace"
  • The preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the fostering of Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values
  • The protection of Jewish rights everywhere.

Some liberal or socialist Jews outside Israel still oppose Zionism. Well-known Jewish scholars and statesmen who have opposed Zionism include Bruno Kreisky, Hans Fromm and Michael Selzer. In the United States Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein have continued to oppose Zionism, although few argue that the Jewish settlement of Palestine should actually be reversed. Most argue for the establishment of a secular binational state in which Palestinians and Jews live togther. Criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories have become sharper since Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel, but the majority of Jews in all countries continue to publicly support Israel in all circumstances, whatever misgivings they may have about current Israeli policies.

Some elements of Orthodox Judaism remain anti-Zionist, although important Orthodox groups such as the the Lubavitchers have changed their positions since 1948 and now actively support Israel. Today, the overwhelming majority of Jewish organisations and denominations are strongly pro-Zionist.

Recently, some Israelis have discussed a position known as Post-Zionism. Some Post-Zionists argue that while the original ideals of a Jewish homeland may not have been desirable, Israelis now constitute a new nationality. Post-Zionists tend to be secular, and believe that Israel as a nation should be separated from Judaism. Others argue that while the creation of Israel was a necessity at the time, Israelis should now acknowledge the injustice that was done to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and should abandon Israel's peculiar status as a Jewish state and agree to a binational state. Arguments of this kind, both within Israeli and among Jews outside Israel, have largely been silenced since the onset of the crisis associated with the Second Intifada and the wave of suicide bombings which began in 2001.

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