Zionism
Zionism is a nationalist 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 spread of the Zionist project and growth of the petit-bourgeois World Zionist Organization (WZO) resulted in the aliyot (Hebrew for "ascents"; singular aliyah), concentrated efforts to move Jews out of oppressive states, particularly Tsarist Russia, to settlements in Ottoman Palestine beginning in 1882. During the First World War, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, a statement of support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, which aimed to gain support for the British war effort against the Ottomans and the Central Powers.
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.
Historical leaders of the Zionist movement, including Theodor Herzl and Some notorious supporters of Zionism include Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill,
In addition, 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.