Where did Zionism originate?
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Zionism ( "Tsiyyonut" after "Zion") is the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine). Modern Zionism emerged in the late 19th century in Central and Eastern Europe as a national revival movement, both in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and as an imitative response to other nationalist movements. Soon after this, most leaders of the movement associated the main goal with creating the desired state in Palestine, then an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
Zionism
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Labor Zionism originated in Eastern Europe. Socialist Zionists believed that centuries of oppression in antisemitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence that invited further antisemitism, a view originally stipulated by Theodor Herzl. They argued that a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Most socialist Zionists rejected the observance of traditional religious Judaism as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people, and established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim". The kibbutz began as a variation on a "national farm" scheme, a form of cooperative agriculture where 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 to a certain extent Utopian socialism. Furthermore, they stressed self-sufficiency, which became an important aspect of Labor Zionism. Though socialist Zionism draws its inspiration and is philosophically founded on the fundamental values and spirituality of Judaism, its progressive expression of that Judaism has often fostered an antagonistic relationship with Orthodox Judaism.
Zionism
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and that
Although the Jews originated in the East, they belonged to the West culturally, morally, and spiritually. Zionism was conceived by Jabotinsky not as the return of the Jews to their spiritual homeland but as an offshoot or implant of Western civilization in the East. This worldview translated into a geostrategic conception in which Zionism was to be permanently allied with European colonialism against all the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean. The revisionists advocated the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine to force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration.
Zionism
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In Eastern Europe the General Jewish Labour Bund called for Jewish autonomy within Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish national language. Like Zionism, the Bund was founded in 1897 and it was one of the largest socialist movements in Europe, however it did not grow as fast as Zionism. The Bund campaigned for Jewish autonomy and recognition of Jewish (non-territorial) national rights within a post-socialist Russia. Initially the Bund included Zionist Socialist parties but over time the leadership came to oppose Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. The socialist movement recognized various national groups, but the Jews were not one of them. The socialist movement was generally unwilling to combat worker anti-Semitism and often failed to publicly condemn pogroms.
History of Zionism
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The aim of Zionism was to set up a secular state in the vicinity of the Biblical Land of Israel. Zionism, or the idea of a restored national homeland and common identity for the Jews, had already started to take shape by the mid-19th century, with Jewish thinkers such as Moses Hess whose 1862 work "Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question" argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" which would transform the Jewish community into a "true" nation, in that Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class, which is how he perceived Jews in Europe. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of "Socialist Zionism" and Labour Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement. Others like Rabbi Zvi Kalischer viewed a return to the Jewish homeland as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy through natural means.
As the 19th century wore on, the persecution of the Jews in Eastern Europe where emancipation had not occurred to the extent it did in Western Europe (or at all) increased. Starting with the state-sponsored massive anti-Jewish pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, through the bloody pogroms of 1903 to 1906 who left thousands of Jews dead and many more wounded, continuing with the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894, Jews were profoundly shocked to see the continuing extent of anti-Semitism from Russia to France, a country which they thought of as the home of enlightenment and liberty.
Jewish political movements
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The Labor Movement wing of Religious Zionism, founded in 1921 under the Zionist slogan "Torah va'Avodah" (Torah and Labor), was called Hapoel Hamizrachi. It represented religiously traditional Labour Zionists, both in Europe and in the Land of Israel, where it represented religious Jews in the Histadrut. In 1956, Mizrachi, Hapoel HaMizrachi, and other religious Zionists formed the National Religious Party to advance the rights of religious Zionist Jews in Israel. Other parties and groups affiliated with religious Zionism are Gush Emunim, Tkuma, and Meimad. A radical branch of religious Zionism, Kahanism was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party, Kach, was eventually banned for racism. Today, Otzma Yehudit is the leading wing of this school of thought.
Religious Zionism
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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). However, conservative Hindu nationalists, led by the Sangh Parivar, openly supported Zionism, as did Hindu Nationalist intellectuals like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Sita Ram Goel. Zionism, seen as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of the Jewish people to their homeland then under British colonial rule, appealed to many Hindu Nationalists, who viewed their struggle for independence from British rule and the Partition of India as national liberation for long-oppressed Hindus.
Zionism
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Support for Zionism was not a purely European and Ashkenazi phenomenon. In the Arab world, the first Zionist branches opened in Morocco only a few years after the Basel conference, and the movement became popular among Jews living within the Arab and Muslim world where Jews generally faced religious discrimination, prejudice and occasional violence. A number of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv were early Moroccan Jewish immigrants and Ottoman Salonika had a vigorous Zionist movement by 1908.
History of Zionism
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"The Arab-Zionist conflict did not begin in 1948 but rather long before it," Abunimah maintained in a 2009 lecture. It began, he said, "when the Zionists came to Palestine in the beginning of the last century, and was exacerbated with the appearance of the refugee problem." He made the following argument: "If for example the Jews returned to their original countries, those countries would be shocked, and those are their countries who exported them to Palestine. So how can these countries, most of which sing the praises of democracy and human rights, be silent about the right of return of the Palestinian people, the people and owners of the land, to their villages and cities?" He also claimed that "Zionism is strong, but it has not been renewed or rooted in the land of Palestine, and the Palestinians hold their land and identities dearly and are on their way to a majority."
Ali Abunimah
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Creating an alliance with Great Britain and securing support for some years for Jewish emigration to Palestine, Zionists also recruited European Jews to immigrate there, especially Jews who lived in areas of the Russian Empire where anti-semitism was raging. The alliance with Britain was strained as the latter realized the implications of the Jewish movement for Arabs in Palestine, but the Zionists persisted. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel on May 14, 1948 (5 Iyyar 5708 in the Hebrew calendar), as the homeland for the Jewish people. The proportion of the world's Jews living in Israel has steadily grown since the movement emerged. By the early 21st century, more than 40% of the world's Jews lived in Israel, more than in any other country. These two outcomes represent the historical success of Zionism, and are unmatched by any other Jewish political movement in the past 2,000 years. In some academic studies, Zionism has been analyzed both within the larger context of diaspora politics and as an example of modern national liberation movements.
Zionism