Zionism

Theodor Herzl speaks at the first or second Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897 or '98.

Zionism is a ethnonationalist political philosophy which seeks to establish and maintain a state for all Jews, who according to Zionist thought constitute a nation. Zionism resulted in the establishment of Jewish minority communities in Ottoman Palestine around the turn of the 20th century, followed by the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 and its admission to the United Nations the following year. Since 1948, Zionism has constituted the support for Israel's right to exist, the right of Jews to the land of Palestine, the ideological connection of Jewishness, Judaism and anti-Semitism to Israel's raison d'être, and the defense of Israeli policies generally. A growing number of critics, among them many Jews and Israelis, have come to label Zionism a settler colonialist, supremacist, racist, anti-Semitic or genocidal project.

Directly influenced by 19th-century European nationalism, Jewish intellectuals began discussing a homeland for Jews as early as the 1850s as an alternative to political emancipation within their own countries. However, political Zionism, the support for international and legal recognition for Jewish statehood, was not widespread until it was popularized by the European Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, particularly in his influential 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State. Although many locations were considered — including Argentina, Uganda, British Guiana, and several locations in the United States — Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews until their dispersal in the 2nd century AD, became the most popular proposal. The growth of Herzl's petit-bourgeois World Zionist Organization (WZO) resulted in the aliyot (Hebrew for "ascents"; singular aliyah), concentrated efforts starting in 1882 to move Jews out of oppressive states, particularly Tsarist Russia, to settlements in Ottoman Palestine. During the First World War, in an effort to gain Jewish sympathy for the British war effort against the Ottomans and their allies, the United Kingdom issued the Balfour Declaration, a statement of support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in the land of Palestine. British support for a Jewish state led eventually to the United Nations partition plan in 1947, which collapsed into the 1948 Palestine war, the Arab-Israeli War, and the mass displacement of over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, the start of a continuing process known to Palestinians as the Nakba.

Although many leftists, as well as the Soviet Union, supported Zionism and the policy of the state of Israel at one point in time, today many or even most radical leftists throughout the world oppose Zionism.

Zionism and anti-Semitism

Historical leaders of the Zionist movement, including Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, emphasized the impossibility of coexistence with anti-Semitic forces in Europe as a key part of the rationale for the creation of a Jewish state and, as a consequence, often negotiated with anti-Semites in order to achieve their aims. Some notorious supporters of Zionism include the British anti-Semite Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill, supporter of the anti-communist and anti-Semitic Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory.

The Nazi Party of the 1930s considered deporting European Jews to Madagascar before deciding on the "Final Solution" in the late years of the war.

See also

• Manifest Destiny
• Lebensraum
• Palestinian genocide

External links

• Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism on Wikipedia