Zionism

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to establish a national home for the Jewish people, pursued through the colonization of Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, with central importance in Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.
Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the Mandate for Palestine governed by Britain explicitly privileged Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. In 1948, the State of Israel was established and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. During the war, Israel expanded its territory to control over 78% of Mandatory Palestine. As a result of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, an estimated 160,000 of 870,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming a Palestinian minority in Israel.
The Zionist mainstream has historically included liberal, labor, revisionist, and cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement. Mainstream Zionist groups for the most part differ more in style than substance, having in some cases adopted similar strategies to achieve their goals, such as violence or compulsory transfer to deal with the Palestinians. Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that brings together secular nationalism and religious conservatism. Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (that were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors. Criticism of Zionism includes its characterization as a supremacist, colonialist, racist, or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.
The first time the term "Zion" was associated with a mass movement was as the Hovevei Zion (lit 'Lovers of Zion') also known as the Hibbat Zion (lit. 'Love of Zion'), that came together at the 1884 Katowice Conference, inspired by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The first use of the term as an -ism is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, in an 1890 article in his periodical Selbst-Emancipation, itself named after Pinsker's pamphlet. This form was subsequently popularized by Herzl in convening the 1897 First Zionist Congress and the Zionist Organization founded there.
Zion or Mount Zion is a hill in Jerusalem and a term used in the Hebrew Bible. It has been used poetically as a synecdoche to refer to the Land of Israel since the period of the Babylonian Exile with particular importance in Jewish messianic belief.
Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation, and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine. This belief developed out of the experiences of European Jewry, which the early Zionists believed demonstrated the danger inherent to their status as a minority. In contrast to the Zionist notion of nationhood, the Judaic sense of being a nation was rooted in religious beliefs of unique chosenness and divine providence, rather than in ethnicity. Specifically, prayers emphasized distinctiveness from other nations where a connection to Eretz Israel and the anticipation of restoration were based on messianic beliefs and religious practices, not modern nationalist conceptions.
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land that outweighed the rights of the Arabs. The establishment of a Jewish demographic majority was an essential aspect of Zionism. Israeli historian Yosef Gorny argues that this demographic change required annulling the majority status of the Arabs. Gorny argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation "there was no such thing as Palestinians" is a cornerstone of Zionist policy. This perspective was also shared by those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom. British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs.
Unlike other forms of nationalism, the Zionist claim to Palestine was aspirational and required a mechanism by which the claim could be realized. The territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine and the subsequent goal of establishing a Jewish majority there was the main mechanism by which Zionist groups sought to realize this claim. By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, the political differences between the various Zionist groups had shrunk further, with almost all Zionist groups seeking a Jewish state in Palestine. While not every Zionist group openly called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, every group in the Zionist mainstream was wedded to the idea of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.
In pursuing a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement encountered the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Arab population, which was predominantly non-Jewish. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or what would now be called ethnic cleansing, of the Palestinian population. According to Morris, the idea of transfer was to play a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement and was seen as the main method of maintaining the "Jewishness" of the Zionist's state. He explains that "transfer" was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" and that a land that was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population. Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population's fear of displacement. He explains that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population.
The concept of "transfer" had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, with moral considerations rarely entering into the discussions of what was viewed as a logical solution—opposition to transferring the Arab population outside Palestine was typically expressed on practical, rather than moral grounds. The concept of removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions, from early in the movement's development. "Transfer" was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership.
From the perspective of some early Zionist thinkers, Jews living amongst non-Jews suffer from impediments that can be addressed only by rejecting the Jewish identity that developed while living amongst non-Jews. Accordingly, the early Zionists sought to develop a nationalist Jewish political life in a territory where Jews constitute a demographic majority. The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with demographic minority status) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The Zionist solution to the perceived deficiencies of diasporic life (or the "Jewish Question") was dependent on the territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine, with the longer-term goal of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.
In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, the founders of Zionism (Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, among others) sought to reformulate conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and the "race science" of the time. They believed that this concept would allow them to build a new framework for collective Jewish identity, and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel. Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories, to argue that only a home for the Jewish people could enable the physical regeneration of the Jewish people and a renaissance of pride in their ancient cultural traditions.
The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the orthodox and liberal establishments often rejected this idea. Subsequently, Zionist and non-Zionist Jews vigorously debated aspects of this proposition in terms of the merits or otherwise of diaspora life. While Zionism embarked on its project of social engineering in Mandatory Palestine, ethnonationalist politics on the European continent strengthened and, by the 1930s, some German Jews, acting defensively, asserted Jewish collective rights by redefining Jews as a race after Nazism rose to power. The Holocaust's policies of genocidal ethnic cleansing utterly discredited race as the lethal product of pseudoscience.
With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the "ingathering of the exiles", and the Law of Return, the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief. Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.
Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in Jewish history and culture. Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an essentialist approach to biology in a similar manner to criticism of the interpretation of archaeology in the region. According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and anti-Zionism. Falk wrote that every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity.
In the early 20th century a more ideologically motivated wave of Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine. With them, the Zionist movement began to emphasize the so-called "conquest of labor", the belief that the employment of exclusively Jewish labor was the pre-condition for the development of an independent Jewish society in Palestine. The goal was to build a "pure Jewish settlement" in Palestine on the basis of "100 per cent Jewish labor" and the claim to an exclusively Jewish, highly productive economy. The Zionist leadership aimed to establish a fully autonomous and independent Jewish economic sector to create a new type of Jewish society. This new society was intended to reverse the traditional economic structure seen in the Jewish Diaspora, characterized by a high number of middlemen and a scarcity of productive workers. By developing fundamental sectors such as industry, agriculture, and mining, the goal was to "normalize" Jewish life that had grown "abnormal" as a result of living amongst non-Jews. Most of the Zionist leadership saw it as imperative to employ strictly Jewish workers in order to ensure the Jewish character of the colonies. Another factor, according to Benny Morris, was the worry that that "employment of Arabs would lead to 'Arab values' being passed on to Zionist youth and nourish the colonists' tendency to exploit and abuse their workers", as well as security concerns.
The employment of exclusively Jewish labor was also intended to avoid the development of a national conflict in conjunction with a class-based conflict. The Zionist leadership believed that by excluding Arab workers they would stimulate class conflict only within Arab society and prevent the Jewish-Arab national conflict from attaining a class dimension. While the Zionist settlers of the First Aliyah had ventured to create a "pure Jewish settlement," they did grow to rely on Arab labor due to the lack of availability of Jewish laborers during this period. With the arrival of the more ideologically driven settlers of the second aliyah, the idea of "avoda ivrit" would become more central. The future leaders of the Zionist movement saw an existential threat in the employment of Arab labor, motivating the movement to work towards a society based on purely Jewish labor.
Zionism rejected traditional Judaic definitions of what it means to be Jewish, but struggled to offer a new interpretation of Jewish identity independent of rabbinical tradition. Jewish religion is viewed as an essentially negative factor, even in religious Zionist ideology, and as responsible for the diminishing status of Jews living as a minority. Responding to the challenges of modernity, Zionism sought to replace religious and community institutions with secular-nationalistic ones. Indeed, Zionism maintained primarily the outward symbols of Jewish tradition, redefining them in a nationalistic context. Zionism saw itself as bringing Jews into the modern world by redefining what it means to be Jewish in terms of identification with a sovereign state, rather than Judaic faith and tradition.
Zionism sought to reconfigure Jewish identity and culture in nationalist and secular terms. This new identity would be based on a rejection of the life of exile. Zionism portrayed the Diaspora Jew as mentally unstable, physically frail, and prone to engaging in transient businesses. They were seen as detached from nature, purely materialistic, and focused solely on their personal gains. In contrast, the vision for the new Jew was radically different: an individual of strong moral and aesthetic values, not shackled by religion, driven by ideals and willing to challenge degrading circumstances; a liberated, dignified person eager to defend both personal and national pride.
The Zionist goal of reframing of Jewish identity in secular-nationalist terms meant primarily the decline of the status of religion in the Jewish community. Prominent Zionist thinkers frame this development as nationalism serving the same role as religion, functionally replacing it. Zionism sought to make Jewish ethnic-nationalism the distinctive trait of Jews rather than their commitment to Judaism. Zionism instead adopted a racial understanding of Jewish identity. Framed this way, Jewish identity is only secondarily a matter of tradition or culture. Zionist nationalism embraced pan-Germanic ideologies, which stressed the concept of das völk: people of shared ancestry should pursue separation and establish a unified state. Zionist thinkers view the movement as a "revolt against a tradition of many centuries" of living parasitically at the margins of Western society. Indeed, Zionism was uncomfortable with the term "Jewish," associating it with passivity, spirituality and the stain of "galut". Instead, Zionist thinkers preferred the term "Hebrew" to describe their identity. In Zionist thought, the new Jew would be productive and work the land, in contrast to the diaspora Jew. Zionism linked the term "Jewish" with negative characteristics prevalent in European anti-Semitic stereotypes, which Zionists believed could be remedied only through sovereignty.
The revival of the Hebrew language in Eastern Europe as a secular literary medium marked a significant cultural shift among Jews, who per Judaic tradition used Hebrew only for religious purposes. The primary motivator for establishing modern Hebrew as a national language was the sense of legitimacy it gave the movement, by suggesting a connection between the Jews of ancient Israel and the Jews of the Zionist movement. These developments are seen in Zionist historiography as a revolt against tradition, with the development of Modern Hebrew providing the basis on which a Jewish cultural renaissance might develop.
The revival of the Hebrew language and the establishment of Modern Hebrew is most closely associated with the linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Committee of the Hebrew Language (later replaced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language).
The transformation of a religious and primarily passive connection between Jews and Palestine into an active, secular, nationalist movement arose in the context of ideological developments within modern European nations in the 19th century. The concept of the "return" remained a powerful symbol within religious Jewish belief, emphasizing that their return should be determined by Divine Providence rather than human action. The religious Judaic notion of being a nation was distinct from the modern European notion of nationalism. Ultra-Orthodox and Reform Some Jewish groups and authorities opposed collective Jewish settlement in Palestine. Ultra-orthodox Jews viewed it as a violation of the three oaths sworn to God: not to force their way into the homeland, not to hasten the end times, and not to rebel against other nations. They believed that any attempt to achieve redemption through human actions, rather than divine intervention and the coming of the Messiah, constituted a rebellion against divine will and a dangerous heresy.
The cultural memory of Jews in the diaspora revered the Land of Israel. Religious tradition held that a future messianic age would usher in their return as a people, a 'return to Zion' commemorated particularly at Passover and in Yom Kippur prayers. The biblical prophecy of Kibbutz Galuyot, the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel as foretold by the Prophets, became a central idea in Zionism.
The forerunners of Zionism, rather than being causally connected to the later development of Zionism, are thinkers and activists who expressed some notion of Jewish national consciousness or advocated for the migration of Jews to Palestine. These attempts were not continuous as national movements typically are. The most notable Proto-Zionists were thinkers such as Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (who were both rabbinical figures). Their idea of Jews as a collective was strongly tied to religious notions distinct from the secular movement referred to as Zionism that developed at the end of the century.
In contrast, Moses Hess, who is regarded as the first modern Jewish nationalist, advocated for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in pursuit of the economic and social normalization of the Jewish people. Hess believed that emancipation alone was not a sufficient solution to the problems faced by European Jewry.
Christian restorationist ideas promoting the migration of Jews to Palestine contributed to the ideological and historical context that gave a sense of credibility to these pre-Zionist initiatives. Restorationist ideas were a prerequisite for the success of Zionism, since although it was created by Jews, Zionism was dependent on support from Christians, although it is unclear how much Christian ideas influenced the early Zionists. Zionism was also dependent on the thinkers of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, such as Peretz Smolenskin in 1872, although it often depicted it as its opponent.
Ideas of Jewish cultural unity developed a specifically political expression in the 1860s as Jewish intellectuals began promoting the idea of Jewish nationalism. This emerged amid the late 19th century European trend of national revivals.
Zionism emerged towards the end of the "best century" for Jews who for the first time were allowed as equals into European society and gained access to schools, universities, and professions that were previously closed to them. By the 1870s, Jews had achieved almost complete civic emancipation in all the states of western and central Europe. By 1914, Jews had moved from the margins to the forefront of European society. In the urban centers of Europe and America, Jews played an influential role in professional and intellectual life. During this period as Jewish assimilation was still progressing most promisingly, some Jewish intellectuals and religious traditionalists framed assimilation as a humiliating negation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. The development of Zionism and other Jewish nationalist movements grew out of these sentiments. In this sense, Zionism can be read as a response to the Haskala and the challenges of modernity and liberalism, rather than purely a response to antisemitism.
Emancipation in Eastern Europe progressed more slowly, to the point that Deickoff writes "social conditions were such that they made the idea of individual assimilation pointless". Antisemitism, pogroms and official policies in Tsarist Russia led to the emigration of three million Jews in the years between 1882 and 1914, only 1% of which went to Palestine. Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by ideas of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than just in response to pogroms or economic insecurity. Zionism's emergence in the late 19th century was among assimilated Central European Jews who, despite their formal emancipation, still felt excluded from high society. Many of these Jews had moved away from traditional religious observances and were largely secular, mirroring a broader trend of secularization in Europe. Despite their efforts to integrate, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were frustrated by continued lack of acceptance by the local national movements that tended toward intolerance and exclusivity. For the early Zionists, if nationalism posed a challenge to European Jewry, it also proposed a solution.
In the wake of the 1881 Russian pogroms, Leo Pinsker, who was previously an assimilationist, came to the conclusion that the root of the Jewish problem was that Jews formed a distinctive element that could not be assimilated. For Pinsker, emancipation could not resolve the problems of the Jewish people. In Pinsker's analysis, Judeophobia was the cause of antisemitism and was primiarily driven by Jews' lack of a homeland. The solution Pinsker proposed in his pamphlet Autoemancipation was for Jews to become a "normal" nation and acquire a homeland over which Jews would have sovereignty. Pinsker primarily viewed Jewish emigration a solution for dealing with the "surplus of Jews, the inassimilable residue" from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Germany in response to the pogroms.
The pogroms motivated a small number of Jews to establish various groups in the Pale of Settlement and Poland aimed at supporting Jewish emigration to Palestine. The publication of Autoemancipation provided these groups with an ideological charter around which they would be confederated into Hibbat Zion ("Lovers of Zion") in 1887 where Pinsker would take a leading role. The settlements established by Hibbat Zion lacked sufficient funds and were ultimately not very successful but are seen as the first of several aliyahs, or waves of settlement, that led to the eventual establishment of the state of Israel. The conditions in Eastern Europe would eventually provide Zionism with a base of Jews seeking to overcome the challenges of external ostracism, from the Tsarist regime, and internal changes within the Jewish communities there. The groups that formed Hibbat Zion included the Bilu group, which began its settlements in 1882. Anita Shapira describes the Bilu as serving the role of a prototype for the settlement groups that followed. At the end of the 19th century, Jews remained a small minority in Palestine.
At this point, Zionism remained a scattered movement. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl (the father of political Zionism) infused Zionism with a practical urgency and worked to unify the various strands of the movement. The title of Herzl's 1896 manifesto providing the ideological basis for Zionism, Der Judenstaat, is typically translated as The Jewish State. Herzl sought to establish a state where Jews would be the majority and as a result, politically dominant. Ahad Ha'am, the founder of cultural Zionism, criticized the lack of Jewish cultural activity and creativity in Herzl's envisioned state, which Ahad Ha'am referred to as "the state of the Jews." Specifically, he points to the envisioned European and German culture of the state where Jews were simply the transmitters of imperialist culture rather than producers or creators of culture. Like Pinsker, Herzl saw antisemitism as a reality that could only be addressed by the territorial concentration of Jews in a Jewish state.
Herzl's project was purely secular; the selection of Palestine, after considering other locations, was motivated by the credibility the name would give to the movement. From early on, Herzl recognized that Zionism could not succeed without the support of a Great Power. His view was that this Judenstaat would serve the interests of the Great Powers, and would "form part of a defensive wall for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism."
Herzl's efforts would lead to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the Zionist Organization (ZO), renamed in 1960 as World Zionist Organization (WZO), and adopted the Basel Program, which served as the formal platform of the movement until the 1950s, including the official objective of establishing a legally recognized home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The Zionist Organization was to be the main administrative body of the movement and would go on to establish the Jewish Colonial Trust, whose objectives were to encourage European Jewish emigration to Palestine and to assist with the economic development of the colonies.
Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, considered a Jewish state in places outside Palestine, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula. Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan; however, he later affirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jews with that area. A major concern and driving reason for considering other territories was the Russian pogroms, in particular the Kishinev massacre, and the resulting need for quick resettlement in a safer place.
In the early twentieth century, Zionism advanced by establishing towns, colonies, and an independent monetary system to channel Jewish capital into Palestine. Due to the unstable local economy and fluctuating currency values under Ottoman rule, Zionists created their own financial institutions. Despite their small numbers, the Zionists instilled a fear of territorial displacement in the local Palestinian population. This fear would be the main driver of antagonism from the Arabs, leading to physical resistance and the eventual use of military force by settlers. Initially, the impact on rural Palestinians was minimal, with only a few villages encountering Jewish colonies. However, after World War I and as Zionist land purchases increased, the rural population began to experience dramatic changes. From almost the beginning of Zionist settlement, the Palestinians viewed Zionism as an expansionist endeavor. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Zionism was inherently expansionist and always had the goal of turning the entirety of Palestine into a Jewish state. In addition, Morris describes the Zionists as intent on politically and physically dispossessing the Arabs. Early warnings from local leaders in the 1880s about the destabilizing effects of Jewish immigration went largely unheeded until these later developments. By the early 20th century, there were fourteen Zionist settlements in Palestine, established through land purchases from both local and external landowners.
From the outset, the Zionist leadership saw land acquisition as essential to achieving their goal of establishing a Jewish state. This acquisition was strategic, aiming to create a continuous area of Jewish land. The World Zionist Organization established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901, with the stated goal "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people." The notion of land "redemption" entailed that the land could not be sold and could not be leased to a non-Jew nor should the land be worked by Arabs. The land purchased was primarily from absentee landlords, and upon purchase of the land, the tenant farmers who traditionally had rights of usufruct were often expelled. Herzl publicly opposed this dispossession, but wrote privately in his diary: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Support for expulsion of the Arab population in Palestine was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement's inception.
The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine in the late 19th century is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.
In 1903, 'the Eretz Israel assembly' was held by Menachem Ussishkin. This assembly marked the beginning of a more formalized Zionist colonization effort. Under his leadership, both professional and political organizations were established, paving the way for a sustained Zionist presence in the region. Ussishkin delineated three methods for the Zionist movement to acquire land: by force and conquest, by expropriation via governmental authority, and by purchase. The only option available to the movement at the moment in his perspective was the last one, "until at some point we become rulers".
The second wave of Zionist settlement came with the Second Aliyah starting in 1904. The settlers of this period laid the foundational elements for the Jewish society in Palestine envisioned by the Zionist movement. They established the first two political parties, the socialist Po'alei Zion and the non-socialist Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir and initiated the first collective agricultural settlements known as kibbutzim, which were fundamental in the formation of the Israeli state. They also formed the first underground military group, Ha-Shomer, which later evolved into the Haganah and eventually became the core of the Israeli army. Many leaders of the Zionist national movement were products of the Second Aliyah. The Zionists of the second aliyah were also more ideologically motivated than those of the first aliyah. In particular, they sought the "conquest of labor", which entailed the exclusion of Arabs from the labor market.
At the start of World War I, the Zionist leadership attempted to persuade the British government of the benefits of sponsoring a Jewish colony in Palestine. Their main initial success was in establishing a lobbying group centered around the Rothschild family, largely driven by Chaim Weizmann. In the 1917 Balfour declaration, Britain declared its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". The declaration was largely motivated by war-time considerations and antisemitic preconceptions about the putative influence Jews had on the Tsarist government and in the shaping of American policy. Though his decision was also motivated by religious convictions, Balfour himself had passed the Aliens Act 1905, which aimed to keep Eastern European Jews out of Britain. More decisive were Britain's colonial and imperial geopolitical goals in the region, specifically in retaining control over the Suez Canal by establishing a pro-British state in the region. Weizmann's role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration led to his election as the Zionist movement's leader. He remained in that role until 1948, and then was elected as the first President of Israel after the nation gained independence.
Weizmann's ultimate goal was the establishment of a Jewish state, even beyond the borders of "Greater Israel." For Weizmann, Palestine was a Jewish and not an Arab country. The state he sought would contain the east bank of the Jordan River and extend from the Litani River (in present-day Lebanon). Weizmann's strategy involved incrementally approaching this goal over a long period, in the form of settlement and land acquisition. Weizmann was open to the idea of Arabs and Jews jointly running Palestine through an elected council with equal representation, but he did not view the Arabs as equal partners in negotiations about the country's future. In particular, he was steadfast in his view of the "moral superiority" of the Jewish claim to Palestine over the Arab claim and believed these negotiations should be conducted solely between Britain and the Jews. According to Zionist Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the essential assumptions of Weizmann's strategy were later adopted by David Ben-Gurion and subsequent Zionist leaders.
In 1919, the US-based King–Crane Commission started with a strongly sympathetic disposition towards Zionism but concluded that the maximum Zionist demands implied subjection of Palestinians to Jewish rule and that this was a violation of the principle of self-determination, given the anti-Zionist sentiment of the non-Jewish population. The report stated that "The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered." Consequently, it recommended a considerably "modified" or "reduced" version of the Zionist programme, with Palestine as a Jewish national home but not a Jewish state.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party in 1925, which took on a more militant ethos and openly maximalist agenda than Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky rejected Weizmann's strategy of incremental state building, instead preferring to immediately declare sovereignty over the entire region, which extended to both the East and West bank of the Jordan river. Like Weizmann and Herzl, Jabotinsky also believed that the support of a great power was essential to the success of Zionism. From early on, Jabotinksy openly rejected the possibility of a "voluntary agreement" with the Arabs of Palestine. He instead believed in building an "iron wall" of Jewish military force to break Arab resistance to Zionism, at which point an agreement could be established. Jabotinsky's "iron wall" strategy would have a lasting effect on the Zionist perspective towards the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Palestinian population. Both the left and right factions of Zionism would rely on this strategy of leveraging military strength in pursuit of political aspirations.
After the war, the plan for a greater Arab kingdom under the Hashemite family was abandoned when King Feisal was expelled from Damascus by the French in 1920. In parallel, the Zionist demand for a clear British acknowledgment of the entirety of Palestine as the Jewish national home was rejected. Instead, Britain committed only to establishing a Jewish national home "in Palestine" and promised to facilitate this without prejudicing the rights of existing "non-Jewish communities"—these qualifying statements aroused the concern of Zionist leaders at the time.
The British mandate over Palestine, established in 1922, was based on the Balfour declaration, explicitly privileging the Jewish minority over the Arab majority. In addition to declaring British support for the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, the mandate included provisions facilitating Jewish immigration, and granting the Zionist movement the status of representing Jewish national interests. In particular, the Jewish Agency, the embodiment of the Zionist movement in Palestine, was made a partner of the mandatory government, acquiring international diplomatic status and representing Zionist interests before the League of Nations and other international venues.
The British mandate effectively established a Jewish quasi-state in Palestine, lacking only full sovereignty. This lack of sovereignty was crucial for Zionism at this early stage, as the Jewish population was too small to defend itself against the Arabs of Palestine. The British presence provided a necessary safeguard for Jewish nationalism. To achieve political independence, Jews needed Britain's support, particularly in land purchase and immigration. Following the Balfour declaration, Jewish immigration to Palestine grew from 9,149 immigrants in 1921 to 33,801 in 1925—by the end of the mandate period, the Jewish population in Palestine would have nearly tripled, eventually reaching one third of the country's population.
The mandatory administration implemented policies that favored the development of the capitalist sector, predominantly associated with the Jewish community, while disadvantaging the Arab non-capitalist sector. Between 1933 and 1937, government spending was concentrated in two main areas — development and economic services, and defense — with the former focusing on infrastructural improvements (such as railways, roads, bridges, and other public works) that were particularly beneficial for capitalist production. In contrast to the Jewish population, the Arabs did not benefit from any government protections such as social security, employment benefits, trade union protection, job security and training opportunities. Arab wages were one third of their Jewish counterparts (including when paid by the same employer). The mandate also included an article describing self-governing institutions intended only for the Jewish population of Palestine. No similar support or recognition was provided to the Palestinian majority during the time of the mandate. By enabling the Zionist institutions to serve as a parallel government to the Mandate, the British facilitated the separation of the economy and legitimized their quasi-state status. Accordingly, these institutions, which purported to act in the interests of Jews everywhere, were able to funnel resources into the Jewish sector in Palestine, heavily subsidizing the dominate Jewish economy. The nucleus of the Jewish quasi-state was the Histadrut, established in 1920 as an independent social, political and economic institution. The Histadrut also exercised significant control over the Haganah, a Jewish defense force formed in 1920 in reaction to Arab riots. Originally created to defend the community, Haganah evolved into a permanent underground reserve army fully integrated into the Jewish political structure. Although the British authorities disapproved of the Haganah, particularly its method of stealing arms from British bases, they did not disband it. The Histadrut operated as a completely independent entity, without interference from the British mandate authorities. Ben-Gurion saw the Histadrut's detachment from socialist ideology to be one of its key strengths; indeed it was the General Organization of Workers in Israel. In particular, the Histadrut worked towards national unity and aimed to dominate the capitalist system en route to gaining political power, not to create a socialist utopia.
As secretary general of the Histadrut and leader of the Zionist labor movement, Ben-Gurion adopted similar strategies and objectives as Weizmann during this period, disagreeing primarily on issues of specific tactical moves up until 1939. The middle class grew dramatically in size with the arrival of the fourth aliyah in 1924, motivating a political shift within the labor movement. It was during this period that the political strategy of the labor movement would solidify. The founding of the Mapai party unified the labor movement, making it the dominant force. The party saw economic control as essential to facilitating Zionist settlement and achieving political power: "the economic question is not one of class; it is a national question". For Ben-Gurion, the transformation from "working class to nation" was intertwined with his rejection of diaspora life, as he would declare: the "weak, unproductive, parasitical Jewish masses" must be converted "to productive labor" in service of the nation.
For the Zionist movement, economic development and policies were a mechanism by which political aims could be achieved. A new economic sector exclusively for Jews, controlled by the Labor Zionist movement, was established with support from the Jewish National Fund and the agricultural workers' Histadrut. Despite the universalist ideals of Zionist pioneering, this new Jewish economic sector was fundamentally based on exclusionary practices. The goal of achieving "100 percent of Hebrew labour" was the primary driver of the territorial, economic and social separation between Jews and Arabs.
The Zionist economic platform was partially based on the assumption (eventually demonstrated incorrect) that economic benefits to the Arabs of Palestine would pacify opposition to the movement. For the Zionist leadership, the economic status and development of the Arabs of Palestine should be compared with Arabs of other countries, rather than with the Jews of Palestine. Accordingly, disproportionate gains in Jewish development were be acceptable as long as the status of the Arab sector did not worsen. While British support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine established the parameters within which the Arab economy could develop, Zionist policies reinforced these limitations. Most notable are the exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish enterprise and the expulsion of Arab peasants from Jewish-owned land. Both of these had limited impact in scope but reinforced the structural limitations put in place by British policies.
With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, the Jewish community was increasingly persecuted and driven out. The discriminatory immigration laws of the US, UK and other countries preferable to German Jews, led to in 1935 alone more than 60,000 Jews arriving in Palestine (more than the total number of Jews in Palestine as of the establishment of the Balfour declaration in 1917). Ben-Gurion would subsequently declare that immigration at this rate would allow for the maximalist Zionist goal of a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The Arab community openly pressured the mandatory government to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases.
Sporadic attacks in the countryside (described by Zionists and the British as "banditry") reflected widespread anger over the Zionist land purchases that displaced local peasants. Meanwhile, in urban areas, protests against British rule and the increasing influence of the Zionist movement intensified and became more militant in the early 1930s.
The outbreak of violence in the course of the 1936 Arab Revolt was a turning point in Jewish-Arab relations, unifying previously divided factions within the Zionist movement and leading them to view the use of force as a necessary means of defense and deterrence. Moreover, some, like Beilinson, viewed the Jewish struggle for Palestine as a matter of survival, whereas they argued that for the Arabs it was not an existential issue. Consequently, they believed that Jews could not afford to make significant concessions and that Arab motives — whether noble or base — were not historically or morally significant.
During the revolt, the Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in the use of terror attacks against the Arabs of Palestine. Similarly, for the labor Zionist Palmah, the lines delineating what was acceptable and unacceptable while dealing with Arab villagers were "vague and intentionally blurred". These ambiguous limits practically did not differ from those of the self-described "terrorist" group, Irgun. According to Anita Shapira, beginning in this period, Labor Zionism's use of violence against Palestinians for political means was essentially the same as that of radical conservative Zionist groups.
In response to the revolt the British appointed in 1937 a commission of inquiry that eventually recommended the partition of the land. The proposal included creating a small Jewish state occupying 17 percent of Mandatory Palestine's territory, while Jerusalem and a corridor to the sea would remain under British control, and the remaining 75 percent of the territory would form a Palestinian state connected to Transjordan under King Abdullah's rule. At this point, Jews owned 5.6% of the land in Palestine; the land allocated to the Jewish state would contain 40 percent of the country's fertile land. The commission also proposed a population transfer of the Palestinian Arabs from the areas designated for the Jewish state, based on the precedent of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. For Ben-Gurion, the transfer proposal was the most appealing recommendation put forward by the commission. Indeed, this sentiment was deeply ingrained to the extent that Ben Gurion's acceptance of partition was contingent upon the removal of the Palestinian population.
The Zionist leadership viewed the mass transfer of the Arabs as morally permissible, but were unsure of its political effectiveness. Much of the Zionist leadership spoke in strong support of the transfer plan, asserting that there is nothing immoral about it. Within the Zionist movement, two perspectives developed with respect to the partition proposal; the first was a complete rejection of partition, the second was acceptance of the idea of partition on the basis that it would eventually allow for expansion to all territories within "the boundaries of Zionist aspirations.". It was the right wing of the Zionist movement that put forward the main arguments against transfer, with Jabotinsky strongly objecting it on moral grounds, and others mainly focusing on its impracticality. However, in his last book "The Jewish War Front" published in 1940, after the outbreak of WWII, Jabotinsky no longer ruled out the possibility of voluntary population transfer, though he still didn't view as a necessary solution. Some leaders, such as Ruppin, Motzkin, and writers such as Israel Zangwill, also referred to transfer as a "voluntary" action that would include some form of compensation. However, "Palestine's Arabs did not wish to evacuate the land of their ancestors... The matter raised ethical questions that troubled the Yishuv". The revolt was inflamed by the partition proposal and continued until 1939 when it was forcefully suppressed by the British.
Later, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader, drew inspiration from the Nazi demographic policies that resulted in the expulsion of 1.5 million Poles and Jews, in whose place Germans resettled. In Jabotinsky's assessment:
By the time of the 1936 Arab revolt, almost all groups within the Zionist movement wanted a Jewish state in Palestine, "whether they declared their intent or preferred to camouflage it, whether or not they perceived it as a political instrument, whether they saw sovereign independence as the prime aim, or accorded priority to the task of social construction". The main debates within the movement at this time were concerning partition of Palestine and the nature of the relationship with the British. The intensity of the revolt, Britain's ambiguous support for the movement and the increasing threat against European Jewry during this period motivated the Zionist leadership to prioritize immediate considerations. The movement ultimately favored the notion of partition, primarily out of practical considerations and partially out of a belief that establishing a Jewish state over all of Palestine would remain an option. At the 1937 Zionist congress, the Zionist leadership adopted the stance that the land allocated to the Jewish state by the partition plan was inadequate—effectively rejecting the partition plan that faded away in the face of both Arab and Zionist opposition.
In response to Ben-Gurion's 1938 quote that "politically we are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves", Israeli historian Benny Morris says, "Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement", and that "Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist." Morris describes the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as necessarily displacing and dispossessing the Arab population.
In 1939, a British White Paper would recommend limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase with the objective of maintaining the status quo while the threat of war loomed in Europe. The immigration was to be limited to no more than 75,000 people over the next five years. With Nazi expansionism in Europe, the limits on immigration prompted further militarization, land takeover and illegal immigration efforts by the Zionist movement. The second world war broke out as the Zionists were developing their campaign against the White Paper—unable to accept the White Paper or to side against the British, the Zionist movement would ultimately support the British war effort while working to upend the White Paper. From the start of the second world war, the Zionists pressured the British to organize and train a Jewish "army", culminating in the establishment of a Jewish Brigade and accompanying blue and white flag. The development of this force would further train and enable the already substantial Zionist military capacity. The Haganah was allowed by the British to openly acquire weapons and worked with the British to prepare for a possible Axis invasion.
Despite the White Paper, Zionist immigration and settlement efforts continued during the war period. While immigration had previously been selective, once the details of the holocaust reached Palestine in 1942, selectivity was abandoned. The official Zionist movement's war effort focused on the survival and development of the Yishuv; Pappe argues that scarce Zionist energy was deployed in support of European Jews. Many of those fleeing Nazi terror in Europe preferred to leave for the United States, however, strict American immigration policies and Zionist efforts led to 10% of the 3 million Jews leaving Europe to settle in Palestine.
In the Biltmore Program of 1942, the Zionist movement would openly declare for the first time its goal of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine. At this point, the United States, with its growing economy and unprecedented military force, became a focal point of Zionist political activity that engaged with the American electorate and politicians. US President Truman supported the Biltmore program for the duration of his time in office, largely motivated by humanitarian concerns and the growing influence of the Zionist lobby.
During World War II, as the horrors of the Holocaust became known, the Zionist leadership formulated the One Million Plan, a reduction from Ben-Gurion's previous target of two million immigrants. Following the end of the war, many stateless refugees, mainly Holocaust survivors, began migrating to Palestine in small boats in defiance of British rules. The Holocaust united much of the rest of world Jewry behind the Zionist project. The British either imprisoned these Jews in Cyprus or sent them to the British-controlled Allied Occupation Zones in Germany. The British, having faced Arab revolts, were now facing opposition by Zionist groups in Palestine for subsequent restrictions on Jewish immigration. In January 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a joint British and American committee, was tasked to examine political, economic and social conditions in Mandatory Palestine and the well-being of the peoples now living there; to consult representatives of Arabs and Jews, and to make other recommendations 'as necessary' for an interim handling of these problems as well as for their eventual solution. Following the failure of the 1946–47 London Conference on Palestine, at which the United States refused to support the British, leading to both the Morrison–Grady Plan and the Bevin Plan being rejected by all parties, the British decided to refer the question to the UN on February 14, 1947.
Towards the end of the war, the Zionist leadership was motivated more than ever to establish a Jewish state. Since the British were no longer sponsoring its development, many Zionists considered it would be necessary to establish the state by force by upending the British position in Palestine. In this the IRA's tactics against Britain in the Irish War of Independence served as a both a model and source of inspiration. The Irgun, the military arm of the revisionist Zionists, and Lehi, who at one point sought an alliance with the Nazis, would lead a series of terrorist attacks against the British starting in 1944. This included the King David Hotel bombing, British immigration and tax offices and police stations. It was only by the war's end that the Haganah joined in the sabotage against the British. The combined impact of US opinion and the attacks on British presence eventually led the British to refer the situation to the United Nations in 1947. In response to a United Kingdom government request that the General Assembly "make recommendations under article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine", the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created on 15 May 1947.
The urgency of the condition of the Jewish refugees in Europe motivated the committee to unanimously vote in favor of terminating the British mandate in Palestine. The disagreement came with regards to whether Palestine should be partitioned or if it should constitute a federal state. American lobbying efforts, pressuring UN delegates with the threat of withdrawal of US aid, eventually secured the General Assembly votes in favor of the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which was passed 29 November 1947.
Outbursts of violence slowly grew into a wider civil war between the Arabs and Zionist militias. By mid-December, the Haganah had shifted to a more "aggressive defense", abandoning notions of restraint it had espoused from 1936 to 1939. The Haganah reprisal raids were often disproportionate to the initial Arab offenses, which led to the spread of violence to previously unaffected areas. The Zionist militias, employed terror attacks against Arab civilian and militia centers and many Palestinians were evicted from their houses. In response, Arabs planted bombs in Jewish civilian areas, particularly in Jerusalem.
The first expulsion of Palestinians began 12 days after the adoption of the UN resolution, and the first Palestinian village was eliminated a month later, in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on convoys and Jewish settlements. In March 1948, Zionist forces began implementing Plan D, an ethnic cleansing operation that involved the expulsion of civilians and the destruction of Arab towns and villages in pursuit of eliminating Palestinians seen as potentially hostile, resulting in the loss of Palestine to much of its indigenous population. According to Benny Morris Zionist forces committed 24 massacres of Palestinians in the ensuing war, in part as a form of psychological warfare, the most notorious of which is the Deir Yassin massacre. The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated that between 1948 and 1949, 710,000 Palestinians were driven out of the country and another 40,000 were internally displaced, primarily as a result of these expulsions and massacres.
The British left Palestine (having done little to maintain order) on May 14 as planned. The British did not facilitate a formal transfer of power; a fully functioning Jewish quasi-state had already been operating under the British for the past several decades. The same day, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The Declaration of Independence of Israel described a democracy with equality of social and political rights for all citizens, and extended a peace offering to neighboring states and their Arab citizens. Masalha notes that the declaration states equality on the basis of citizenship but not nationality.
The ensuing war led to the State of Israel establishing control over 78% of Mandatory Palestine, instead of the 55% outlined in the UN partition plan, and resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and the Arab landscape. This war, led by the Zionist Yishuv was framed by its leaders in biblical and messianic terms as a 'miraculous clearing of the land,' akin to the biblical War of Joshua. Masalha writes that it is not clear who the Yishuv was declaring independence from, as it was neither from the British colonial rule, which facilitated Jewish settlement against Palestinian wishes, nor from the land's indigenous inhabitants, who had long cultivated and owned it. After the 1949 Armistice Agreements, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented displaced Palestinians from claiming private property or returning on the state's territories. They and many of their descendants remain refugees supported by UNRWA.
As part of the effort to consolidate its new ownership over the land it had taken over in the 1948 war, the Israeli state worked towards "erasing all traces of its former owners". The project of "Hebraization" of the map, for which the JNF Naming Committee was established, aimed to replace what remained of the Arab towns and villages with newly named Israeli settlements. These names were often based on the Arab names but with a "Hebrew pronunciation" or based on old Hebrew biblical names. This effort also sought to demonstrate continuous Jewish ownership over the land to ancient times.
Prior to 1948, the Zionist movement had limited authority over the use of place names in Palestine. After 1948, the Zionist movement systematically eliminated mention of "Palestine" from the names of its organizations; for example, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which played a critical role in the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 was renamed to the "Jewish Agency for Israel".
Since the creation of the State of Israel, the World Zionist Organization has functioned mainly as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel. It has provided political support for Israel in other countries but plays little role in internal Israeli politics. The movement's major success since 1948 was in providing logistical support for Jewish migrants and refugees and, most importantly, in assisting Soviet Jews in their struggle with the authorities over the right to leave the USSR and to practice their religion in freedom, and the exodus of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world, mostly to Israel. In 1944–45, Ben-Gurion described the One Million Plan to foreign officials as being the "primary goal and top priority of the Zionist movement." The immigration restrictions of the British White Paper of 1939 meant that such a plan could not be put into large scale effect until the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948. The new country's immigration policy had some opposition within the new Israeli government, such as those who argued that there was "no justification for organizing large-scale emigration among Jews whose lives were not in danger, particularly when the desire and motivation were not their own" as well as those who argued that the absorption process caused "undue hardship". However, the force of Ben-Gurion's influence and insistence ensured that his immigration policy was carried out.
Prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, religious Zionism mostly described support for political Zionism among Orthodox Jews. However, the war and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, invigorated and popularized a religious Zionist ideology associated with the Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, which believes that Zionism is a part of the historical process that will bring about the messianic age. This ideology considered secular Zionism and secular state policies to be holy and part God's divine plan: "The spirit of Israel... is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter how secularist his intention may be, is, despite himself, imbued with the divine spirit even against his own will."
According to followers of the Mercaz HaRav ideology, the Six Day War was a demonstration of the work of the Divine Hand and the "beginning of redemption". Proponents of this ideology venerate the land as sacred, and consider its sanctity a core principle of religious Zionism. Religious Zionists view the settlement of the West Bank as a commandment of God, necessary for the redemption of the Jewish people. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, a major religious Zionist leader and thinker, would declare in 1967 following the Six Day War in the presence of Israeli leadership including the president, ministers, members of the Knesset, judges, chief rabbis and senior civil servants:
In the 1970s, religious Zionists, such as Shlomo Aviner and Hanan Porat, campaigned against Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula. Religious Zionist ideology motivated the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, who ceded some territory to the PLO as a part of the Oslo Accords, and several religious Zionist rabbis reacted to the assassination with approval.
From the turn of the century until the Arab revolt of 1936, there was room for political flexibility within the Zionist movement, many scholars argue that different currents of Zionism have had a shared core framework. Most mainstream histories of the movement delineate a few key strains, many following a taxonomy introduced during the period starting in the late 19th century and continuing into the 1930s: political, practical, socialist, cultural and revisionist. Some scholars emphasise the heterogeneity of these strains of Zionism.
Political Zionism was led by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. This approach was espoused at the Zionist Organization's First Zionist Congress. It focused on a Jewish home as a solution to the "Jewish question" and antisemitism in Europe, centred on gaining Jewish sovereignty (probably within the Ottoman or later British or French empire), and was opposed to mass migration until after sovereignty was granted. It initially considered locations other than Palestine (e.g. in Africa) and did not foresee migration by many Western Jews to the new homeland.
Known in Hebrew as Tzionut Ma'asit, Practical Zionism was led by Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker and molded by the Hovevei Zion organization. It became dominant after Herzl's death, and differed from Political Zionism in not seeing Zionism as justified primarily by the Jewish Question but rather as an end in itself; it "aspired to the establishment of an elite utopian community in Palestine" through Aliyah. It also differed from Political Zionism in "distrust[ing] grand political actions" and preferring "an evolutionary incremental process toward the establishment of the national home".
These initially dominant strains faded after the First World War and Balfour Declaration.
Led by socialists Nachman Syrkin, Haim Arlosoroff, Berl Katznelson, and Marxist Ber Borochov, Labor or Socialist Zionism was a form of Zionism that combined messianic tendencies and socialist or social democratic politics. The labor Zionists promoted immigration and settlement, establishing "facts on the ground" as the main path towards statebuilding.
Labor Zionism became a mass movement with the founding of Poale Zion ("Workers of Zion") groups in Eastern and Western Europe and North America in the 1900s. Poale Zion split between Left and Right after 1917. In 1919, the Right Poale Zion in Palestine disbanded to form the nationalist socialist Ahdut HaAvoda, led by David Ben Gurion; in 1930, it merged with Hapoel Hatzair, founded by A. D. Gordon, to form Mapai. Labor Zionism, represented by Mapai, became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine. It was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election, when the Israeli Labor Party was defeated. During the early twentieth century, the left wing of this tradition was represented by Hashomer Hatzair, followed by Mapam in the late twentieth century, and Meretz until 2022.
In Labor Zionist thought, a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was believed necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Labor Zionists established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim", a form of cooperative agriculture in which the Jewish National Fund hired Jewish workers under trained supervision. The kibbutzim were a symbol of the Second Aliyah in that they put great emphasis on communalism and egalitarianism, representing Utopian socialism to a certain extent. Furthermore, they stressed self-sufficiency, which became an essential aspect of Labor Zionism.
Synthetic Zionism, led by Chaim Weizmann, Leo Motzkin and Nahum Sokolow, was an approach that advocated a combination of practical and political Zionism and distanced themselves from the growing Labour, Religious and Revisionist Zionist groups as the movement became polarised between those. General Zionists identified with the liberal European middle class to which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann aspired. As head of the World Zionist Organization, Weizmann's policies had a sustained impact on the Zionist movement, with Abba Eban describing him as a dominant figure in Jewish life during the interwar period.
Revisionist Zionism, developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, was a right-wing strain of Zionism. It initially believed that a Jewish state must expand to both sides of the Jordan River, i.e. taking Transjordan in addition to all of Palestine. It broke with the WZO in 1935 because of the latter's refusal to declare the establishment of a Jewish state as its immediate aim, and had its own paramilitary organisation, Irgun, from 1931 to 1948.
Followers of Revisionist Zionism developed the Likud Party in Israel, which has dominated most governments since 1977. It advocates Israel's maintaining control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and takes a hard-line approach in the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Initially led by Yitzchak Yaacov Reines and by Abraham Isaac Kook, Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that combines religious conservatism and secular nationalism into a theology with patriotism as its basis. One of the core ideas in Religious Zionism is the belief that the ingathering of exiles in the Land of Israel and the establishment of Israel is the beginning of the redemption, the initial stage of the geula.
After the Six-Day War and the capture of the West Bank, a territory referred to by the movement as Judea and Samaria, the movement turned right as it integrated revanchist and irredentist forms of nationalism; this right-wing form of religious Zionism, powerful within the settlement movement, is represented today by Gush Emunim (founded by students of Abraham Kook's son Zvi Yehuda Kook in 1974), Jewish Home (HaBayit HaYehudi, formed in 2009), Tkuma, and Meimad.
Kahanism, a radical branch of religious Zionism, was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party, Kach, was eventually banned from the Knesset, but has been increasingly influential on Israeli politics.
Today, the liberal Zionist perspective criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory since 1967 while also promoting the idea of a Jewish state as a necessity. In this vein, liberal Zionism sees Zionist and Israeli activity before 1967, such as the military conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, as a necessity.
Liberal Zionism, although not associated with any single party in modern Israel, remains a strong trend in Israeli politics advocating free market principles, democracy and adherence to human rights.
Philosopher Carlo Strenger describes a modern-day version of Liberal Zionism, rooted in the original ideology of Herzl and Ahad Ha'am. It is marked by a concern for democratic values and human rights, freedom to criticize government policies without accusations of disloyalty, and rejection of excessive religious influence in public life. Liberal Zionists see that "Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity or gender."
Cultural Zionism or Spiritual Zionism is a strain of Zionism that focused on creating a center in historic Palestine with its own secular Jewish culture and national history, including language and historical roots, rather than on mass migration or state-building. The founder of Cultural Zionism was Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha'am. Like Hibbat Zion and unlike Herzl, Ha'am saw Palestine as the spiritual centre of Jewish life. Ha'am inaugurated the movement in his 1880 essay "This is not the way", which called for the cultivation of a qualitative Jewish presence in the land over [the] quantitative one" pursued by Hibbat Zion. Ha'am was also a sharp critic of Herzl; spiritual Zionism believed that the realpolitik engaged in by Political Zionism corrupted Jewry, and opposed any political solutions that victimised non-Jewish people in the land.
Brit Shalom, which promoted Arab-Jewish cooperation, was established in 1925 by supporters of Ahad Ha'am's Spiritual Zionism, including Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, "and other important figures of the intellectual elite of the pre-independence yishuv, Gorny describes it as an ultimately marginal group.
From the beginning of the Zionist movement's development, it was dependent on support from the Christian world. The Christian restorationist movement held the belief that the "return" of Jews to Palestine would trigger the second coming of the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and ultimately lead to the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. In this sense, Christian ideas of "restoration" were a prerequisite for Zionism.
Christian Zionism is primarily driven by the belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land will either lead to their conversion to Christianity or their destruction. This belief is criticized by Gershom Gorenberg in his book "The End of Days," where he highlights the troubling aspect of this messianic scenario—the disappearance of Jews. Evangelical figures like Jerry Falwell believe the establishment of Israel is a pivotal event signaling the Second Coming of Christ and the eventual End of the World. As a result, Christian Zionists have significantly contributed politically and financially to Israeli nationalist forces, with the understanding that Israel's role is to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ and the elimination of Judaism.
One of the principal Protestant teachers who promoted the biblical doctrine that the Jews would return to their national homeland was John Nelson Darby. His doctrine of dispensationalism is credited with promoting Zionism, following his 11 lectures on the hopes of the church, the Jew and the gentile given in Geneva in 1840. However, others like C H Spurgeon, both Horatius and Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray M'Chyene, and J C Ryle were among a number of prominent proponents of both the importance and significance of a Jewish return, who were not dispensationalist. Pro-Zionist views were embraced by many evangelicals and also affected international foreign policy.
The largest Zionist organisation is Christians United for Israel, which has 10 million members and is led by John Hagee.
After Israel's creation in 1948, the Indian National Congress government opposed Zionism. Some writers have claimed that this was done in order to get more Muslim votes in India (where Muslims numbered over 30 million at the time).
In more current times, conservative Indian parties and organizations tend to support Zionism. A 2012 international opinion survey found that India was the most pro-Israel country in the world. This has invited attacks on the Hindutva movement by parts of the Indian left opposed to Zionism, and allegations that Hindus are conspiring with the "Jewish Lobby."
Zionism has been opposed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals. Until World War II, anti-Zionism was widespread among Jews for varying reasons. Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on religious grounds, as preempting the Messiah, many secular or assimilationist Jewish anti-Zionists identified more with ideals of the Enlightenment and saw Zionism as a reactionary ideology, while left-wing Jews (including in the Bund) believed that the Jewish question was best solved in the diaspora through building a socialist society.
Opposition to Zionism in the Jewish diaspora was surmounted only from the 1930s onward, as conditions for Jews deteriorated radically in Europe and, with the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust was felt. Thereafter, Jewish anti-Zionist groups generally either disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, though many small groups, and bodies like the American Council for Judaism, conserved an earlier Reform tradition of rejection of Zionism.
There was a shift in the meaning of anti-Zionism after the events of the 1940s. Whereas pre-1948 anti-Zionism was against the hypothetical establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, post-1948 anti-Zionism had to contend with the existence of the State of Israel. This often meant taking a retaliatory position to the new reality of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The overriding impulse of post-1948 anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else.
Opposition to Zionism was overwhelmingly common among the non-Jewish communities of Palestine from the 1880s onwards. Palestinian nationalism, the national movement of the Palestinian people that espouses self-determination and sovereignty over the region of Palestine, cohered in the early 20th century, along with broader Arab nationalism and the ideology of Greater Syria. Palestinian nationalism later internationalized and attached itself to other ideologies, in particular Third World socialism and Islamism, and was embodied in particular by the broadly secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and later also by the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Islamist Hamas.
Although the left was initially mostly supportive of Zionism, Soviet anti-Zionism was influential in spreading anti-Zionism on the global left, and much of the New Left of the 1960s took on anti-Zionism as a key tenet.
Today, opponents include Palestinian nationalists, several states of the Arab League and in the Muslim world, much of the left, and some secular Jews, as well as the Satmar and Neturei Karta Jewish sects.
The fascist far right have also generally espoused anti-Zionism, for antisemitic reasons.
Reasons for opposing Zionism have been varied, and they include: fundamental disagreement that foreign born Jews have rights of resettlement, the perception that land confiscations are unfair; expulsions of Palestinians; violence against Palestinians; and alleged racism. Arab states in particular have historically strongly opposed Zionism. The preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been ratified by 53 African countries as of 2014, includes an undertaking to eliminate Zionism together with other practices including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, "aggressive foreign military bases" and all forms of discrimination.
In December 1973, the UN passed a series of resolutions condemning South Africa and included a reference to an "unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, Apartheid and Zionism." At the time there was little cooperation between Israel and South Africa, although the two countries would develop a close relationship during the 1970s. Parallels have also been drawn between aspects of South Africa's apartheid regime and certain Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, which are seen as manifestations of racism in Zionist thinking.
In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which said "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". According to the resolution, "any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous". The resolution named the occupied territory of Palestine, Zimbabwe, and South Africa as examples of racist regimes. Resolution 3379 was pioneered by the Soviet Union and passed with numerical support from Arab and African states amidst accusations that Israel was supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1991 the resolution was repealed with UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86, after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked.
Arab countries sought to associate Zionism with racism in connection with a 2001 UN conference on racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa, which caused the United States and Israel to walk away from the conference. The final text of the conference did not connect Zionism with racism. A human rights forum arranged in connection with the conference, on the other hand, did equate Zionism with racism and censured Israel for what it called "racist crimes, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing".
Haredi Jews number some 2,100,000 world-wide, constituting 14% of the total Jewish population in the world. Most accept though do not support the secular Israeli state. A small number of Orthodox organizations among these Haredi reject Zionism as they view it as a secular movement and reject nationalism as a doctrine. in Jerusalem, certain Hasidic groups, most famously the Satmar Hasidim, as well as the larger movement they are part of, the Edah HaChareidis, are opposed to its ideology for religious reasons. Despite having his life saved by a leader of the Zionist movement in 1944, one of the best known Hasidic opponents of political Zionism was Hungarian rebbe and Talmudic scholar Joel Teitelbaum. Although this group of ultra-observant Jews do not support or identify with Zionism as a movement or ideology, in a poll taken in February 2024, 83% said they have a "very strong emotional connection" to Israel, only a small percentage less than the 87% of Modern Orthodox Jews who reported having those same feelings.
The Neturei Karta, a tiny Orthodox Haredi sect, is considered "the most radical of the Extreme Orthodox groups", with approximately 5,000 members worldwide that make up about 0.03 percent of the world's Jewish population. Some of its members have said that Israel is a "racist regime", compared Zionists to Nazis, claimed that Zionism is contrary to the teachings of the Torah, or accused it of promoting antisemitism.
Critics of anti-Zionism have argued that opposition to Zionism can be hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and that criticism of Israel may be used as an excuse to express viewpoints that might otherwise be considered antisemitic.
Anti-Zionist writers such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Marder, and Tariq Ali have argued that the characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitic obscures legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions, and that it is used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.
Zionism has been characterized as a form of colonialism or settler colonialism by various scholars. Joseph Massad argues that Zionism was intrinsically linked to European colonial thought from its inception, shaped by antisemitism and European imperial interests. Edward Said similarly described the movement as following the European colonial model, particularly in its patronizing view of the native Palestinian population, which it regarded as backward. Zeev Sternhell describes Zionism disagrees as a movement of "conquest", but disagrees that Jews arriving in Palestine had a colonial mindset. Anita Shapira and Shlomo Ben-Ami also emphisize the importance of the "ethos" of the movement, framing Zionism as a national liberation movement that was "destined" or "forced" to use colonial methods. Conversely, Nur Masalha argues that Zionism cannot be understood as a national liberation movement because it relied on British colonial support, asserting that "the State of Israel owes its very existence to the British colonial power in Palestine".
Various proponents of Zionism have characterized Zionism as colonial or settler-colonial. Joseph Massad wrote that, for political and ideological reasons, starting in the 1930s, some Zionist thinkers proposed that the Zionist movement should avoid using terms related to colonialism. Rashid Khalidi highlights how this move was an attempted rebranding of Zionism as an anticolonial movement.
Gershon Shafir describes the use of violence by a colonial metropole as essential to settler colonization. Shafir defines settler-colonialism as the creation of a permanent home in which settlers benefit from privileges withheld from the indigenous population. He describes colonization, the establishment of settlements against the wishes of the indigenous people, as the distinctive characteristic of settler colonialism.
Shafir distinguishes between the pre-1948 era and the post-1967 era in the sense that after 1967, the Israeli state became the sponsor of the Zionist movement's colonial efforts, a role that had previously been played by the British. For Shafir, Jerome Slater and Shlomo Ben-Ami, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Zionist movement more closely resembled other colonial movements. Similarly, Avi Shlaim describes 1967 as a milestone in the development of the "Zionist colonial project" rather than as a qualitative shift in its nature. Israeli historian Yitzhak Sternberg cites Sivan, Halamish and Efrat as similarly describing 1967 as a turning point in which Zionism became involved in colonial efforts.
Shafir and Morris both further distinguish between Zionist colonialism during the First Aliyah and following the arrival of the Second Aliyah. Shafir describes the First Aliyah as following the ethnic plantation colony model, exploiting low wage Palestinian workers. Morris describes this relationship:
Sternberg argues that it is important to clearly distinguish between colonization and colonialism as concepts. For Shafir and Peled, "colonization, namely territorial dispossession and the settlement of immigrant populations", cannot happen without colonialism and "the means of violence of a colonial metropole". In contrast, Sternberg considers classical definitions of colonization as broad enough to include cases that did not require the dispossession of the native population.
Tuvia Friling depicts the Zionist movement as operating differently from colonial movements in terms of land acquisition. Specifically, the Zionist movement acquired land in the early years by purchasing it. Sternberg in contrast explains that it was not unique for colonial movements to purchase land as part of land acquisition, pointing to similarities in North American colonialism. Friling argues that in contrast to European colonial projects, the early Zionist leadership was dominated by the labor movement with a socialist ethos. Shafir points to ideological drives in American and Rhodesian settler colonies that developed in service of the colonial project. Similarly, Shafir says, the Zionist labor movement used socialist ideals largely in service of the national movement.
In response to the argument that Zionism could not be a colonial project, but should instead be described as a project of immigration, Shafir quotes Lorenzo Veracini's statement that settlers sometimes hide "behind the persecuted, the migrant, even the refugee... behind his labor and hardship." Shafir goes on to characterize Zionism as not unique, in the sense that "[t]he ruthless ethnic cleanser is commonly hidden behind the peaceful settler who arrived in an 'empty land' to start a new life."
Alan Dowty describes the debate over the relationship between Zionism and colonialism as essentially a discussion of "semantics". He defines colonialism as the imposition of control by a "mother country" on another people, for economic gain or for the spreading of culture or religion. Dowty argues that Zionism does not fit this definition on the basis that "there was... no mother country" and that Zionism did not consider the local population in its plans. Efraim Karsh adopts a similar definition and similarly concludes that Zionism is not colonialism. Dowty elaborates that Zionism did not control the local population since it ultimately failed to remove the native people from Palestine. In his assessment of whether Zionism is colonialism, Penslar works with a broader definition of colonialism than Dowty, which allows for the country sponsoring the colonial enterprise to be different from the country of origin of the settlers.
Beyond characterizing it as a colonial movement, Zionism has been more recently described as a form of settler colonialism, with scholarly proponents of this paradigm including Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour [ar], Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal [ar], and Rosemary Sayigh.
The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, who challenged some of Israel's foundational myths. It built on the work of Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies who has defined settler colonialism as an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population rather than exploiting it.