The origins and development of Zionism

In order to understand the competition between Jews and Arabs over Palestine it is necessary to take a closer look at their respective national claims and underlying ideas and ideologies.

Modern Zionism - the belief that the Jews are one people and should have a state of their own - dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Like other European nationalisms, it was inspired by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment’s secular and rationalistic traditions, notions of social contract, and principles of equality and citizenship. More importantly, however, it was a direct response to the continuing prevalence of antiSemitism in Eastern and Western European society. The idea of a Jewish home or state as the solution to the so-called Jewish problem arose both in the Eastern European environment of segregation, persecution and oppression and in the freer Western European environment of legal equality and assimilation. The result was that Zionism as a national movement was the product of a number of thinkers, who drew upon different personal experiences and intellectual traditions.

In 1881, a series of pogroms swept through southern Russia. As the first extensive anti-Jewish disturbances since the slaughter of the Jews in Poland in 1648-49, they had a profound impact on the local Jewish community. They dashed any hopes the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia had nurtured for reform and assimilation, sparking a wave of emigration, mainly to the United States. But they also triggered aspirations for the renewal of Jewish national life in the biblical Land of Israel - Eretz Israel - and thus gave birth to the Zionist movement.

It was in response to these pogroms that Leo Pinsker, a Jewish doctor from Odessa, published his pamphlet Auto-Emancipation in 1882 which saw a territory for Jews as the answer to the burden of life as a Jewish minority among Gentiles and as the means to regain lost dignity and self-respect.

In fact, his focus on honour was more important to him than the actual location of the territory and consequently Pinsker was willing to consider countries other than Palestine for the Jewish home. This willingness, however, was not shared by many of his Zionist contemporaries, most of whom had come from a traditional religious background steeped in the longing for Zion. Drawing upon Pinsker’s ideas, these Zionists formed Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion), an organization which channelled small groups of idealist settlers to Palestine. They were part of what became known as the first Aliyah (immigration wave) which lasted from 1882 to 1903.

This small number of Eastern European idealists founded the first Jewish settlements of Rishon LeZion, Petah Tikva, Rehovot and Rosh Pina. It was not, however, their commitment that fired the imagination of European Jews who knew little about the early Zionist endeavours in Palestine, but the writings of a Western European assimilated Jew by the name of Theodor Herzl. A Viennese playwright and journalist, Herzl made one of the most important contributions to Zionism by providing it with a practical and institutional framework. Following the 1894 trial of the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused and convicted of treason, in 1896 Herzl wrote a book entitled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). In it Herzl called for the creation of a Jewish state as assimilation had not produced the hoped-for end to anti-Semitism. Only a state of their own could provide a rational solution to the Jewish experience of rejection, humiliation and shame. Herzl's notion of the state was firmly based on the principles of the French Revolution in the sense that it was an essentially artificial construct, rather than a mystical rebirth of a primordial entity. Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land), which is generally considered to have been his blueprint for the Jewish state, in fact described it as a thoroughly Western European upper-middle-class paradigm of civility, cleanliness, charm, theatre and opera — an idealized version of Herzl's Vienna, grounded in religious tolerance, mutual respect and brotherhood.

It was devoid of any distinctly Jewish qualities, so much so that Herzl, like Pinsker, was in principle prepared to accept land in Argentina or, as later suggested by the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, in British East Africa rather than Palestine.

In 1897, Herzl convened the first Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland, bringing together Eastern and Western European Zionists for the first time. It led to the establishment of the World Zionist Organization for the ‘creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine to be secured by public law'. This stated aim revealed two important issues: first, that the Eastern European Zionists' preference for Palestine had resolved the territorial question, and, second, that this Jewish state was to be achieved incrementally through the purchase and settlement of land, on the one hand, and through diplomacy and the blessing of the Great Powers on the other.

Herzl's approach soon came under fire from a number of different sources. Intellectually, his rational nationalism, which saw Zionism as the result of the external pressures of anti-Semitism, was challenged by romantic nationalists, such as Ahad Ha Am and Micha Joseph Berdichevsky, who asserted that Jewish nationalism was the product of the innate Jewish instinct for national survival and the eternal spirit of the nation. According to this school of thought, the Land of Israel was crucial to national revival as it represented continuation with the biblical past. Only through a return to the land would the Jewish people be liberated from the weakness and degeneration of exile. Herzl's bourgeois vision was also challenged by the budding socialist movement in Eastern Europe, whose quest for social equality had attracted a number of Jewish intellectuals. These intellectuals, in turn, introduced socialist principles into Zionism. It was not, however, these principles but the pogroms that followed the aborted Russian Revolution in 1905 that provided the stagnating Zionist movement with new momentum.

It gave rise to the second Aliyah from 1904 to 1914 which is conventionally credited with laying the institutional foundations for the Jewish state in Palestine.

By the time Zionism collided head on with Arab nationalism in Palestine it had moved away from Herzl's rational Enlightenment basis. Instead it had become a romantic-exclusivistic brand of nationalism based on a precarious mixture of unifying ethnic-cultural bonds and mytho-historical spirit which organically linked Jewish nationalism to Palestine alongside socialist revolutionary principles of restructuring society. Not only did this transformation of Zionism exclude the indigenous Arab population from the Jewish state-building project, as exemplified by the slogan of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land', the centrality of land as an essential prerequisite for redemption for both the romantic nationalist and agricultural socialist also placed the Zionist settlers in a zero-sum competition with the Arab peasants — the Palestinians.

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Source: Best Antony. International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Routledge,2008. — 638 p.. 2008

The origins and development of Zionism

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