Zionism

Zionism is any political movement which advocates Jewish settlement and the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in historical Palestine, or the areas formerly occupied by the kingdoms of Judea and Israel.

The publication of Theodor Herzl's book Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (The Jewish State: Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question) in in Liepzig and Vienna in 1896 is generally held to mark the beginning of the political movement, although there were precusorsors (most prominently Rabbi Judah Alkalai and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalisher) and contemporaneous independent formulators of the ideology (Moses Hess, German Jew and socialist comrade of Karl Marx, called for the establishment of a Jewish Socialist commonwealth in Palestine in his book Rome and Jerusalem published in 1862). The term itself was first used by Nathan Birnbaum in his journal Selbstemanzipation (Self-Emancipation) on April 1, 1890. Birnbaum himself explained the term (in a letter of November 6, 1891) as the "establishment of an organization of the national-political Zionist party in juxtaposition to the practically oriented party that existed until now." The the May 18, 1893, issue of Birnbaum's publication adopted the motto "Organ der Zionisten" (Organ of the Zionists). Herzl, unlike Birnbaum, first used the term to mean philanthropic (see Cultural Zionism below) rather than politcal enterprises in Eretz Israel.

Etymology

The root of the term "Zionism" is the word Zion, which became a synonym for Jerusalem. Mount Zion is either the disputed Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a small hill outside the city walls of Jerusalem to the south of the city's Armenian Quarter or a small hill just west of the Mount of Olives.

Deuteronomy 4:48 calls Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains between Syria and Lebanon and touching upon the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights "Mount Sion." Deuteronomy 3:8 describes the same mountain as the northern limit of God's Promised Land given to the descendants of Moses. "Sion" is perhaps a gloss of another name for the same mountain, "Mount Syrion."

The term acquires a special meaning after the destruction of Solomon's First Temple in expressing the yearning of the Jewish people in exile in Babylon for their homeland. "Zion" is found in the Psalms, “By the rivers of Babylon,/There we sat down, yea, we wept,/ When we remembered Zion” (Psalms 137:1); in the prayer, “And let our eyes behold Thy return in mercy to Zion”; in the poem, “Zion! Wilt thou not ask if peace be with thy captives/That seek thy peace – that are the remnant of thy flocks” (Judah Halevi); and elsewhere in religious and secular literature. "Zion" is not used in the first five books of the Bible, or the Torah (the Pentateuch). The centralisation of worship in Jerusalem by Solomon eventually led to the civil war between Solomon's son Rehaboam and Jeruboam, leading to schism and the indepedent kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with Assyria, Babylon and Egypt pursuing their own interests in the area.

If "Zion" symbolized the yearning of the Jews in the Babylon Captivity, it wasn't always shared by the Jews left behind in Palestine. Besides Jeruboam's challenge to Solomon's religious monopoly through the establishment or refurbishment of sites of worship at Bethel and Dan, the Samaritans rejected Mount Zion or the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as the proper site of the Temple, and to this day claim Mount Gerizim, which is mentioned in the Torah along with Mount Ebal (both are adjacent to one another and to the north of Jerusalem), is the correct site for the Temple. They also claim the Jews who returned from Babylonian exile in 583 BC practiced a revised form of Judaism while they maintained authentic traditions.

Thus, "Zionism" reflects a continuity with the development of what is considered mainstream, normative Judaism, following the liberation from Babylon and through the development of rabbinical Judaism in the centuries following the Jewish defeat in the wars with Rome. In other words, there is no such thing as "Gerizimism," and "Zionism" implies a return to Hebrew roots, in all senses, as well as to the Land of Israel. The experience of exile, in Babylon and later in Europe, imparted connotations to "Zion," which comes to mean Jerusalem, Israel the land, Israel the people and even the ultimate source of all in certain Kabbalistic speculations. In Eastern Europe Zionism caught on among the Jewish populations as both an answer to the national aspirations of the Jewish people during the period when nationalist revivals were sweeping Europe (and anti-Semitic expressions and acts along with them), and as an answer to the problems posed by the Age of Reason and assimilationist tendencies to the faith of Judaism.

Forms of Zionism

The simplest scheme for classifying the various schools of thought in Zionism posits roughly four trends: political, cultural, labour and revisionist Zionism.

Political Zionism

Political Zionism was emancipated West European Jewry's response to the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and to the failure of the enlightenment to alter the status of the Jew. Its objective was the establishment of a Jewish homeland in any available territory--not necessarily in Palestine--through cooperation with the Great Powers. Political Zionists viewed the "Jewish problem" through the eyes of enlightenment rationalism and believed that European powers would support a Jewish national existence outside Europe because it would rid them of the Jewish problem. These Zionists believed that Jews would come en masse to the new entity, which would be a secular nation modeled after the post-emancipation European state.

The first Jew to articulate a political Zionist platform was not a West European but a Russian physician residing in Odessa. A year after the 1881 pogroms, Leo Pinsker, reflecting the disappointment of other Jewish maskalim, wrote in a pamphlet entitled Auto-Emancipation that anti-Semitism was a modern phenomenon, beyond the reach of any future triumphs of "humanity and enlightenment." Therefore Jews must organize themselves to find their own national home wherever possible, not necessarily in their ancestral home in the Holy Land. Pinsker's work attracted the attention of Hibbat Tziyyon (Lovers of Zion), an organization devoted to Hebrew education and national revival. Ignoring Pinsker's indifference toward the Holy Land, members of Hibbat Tziyyon took up his call for a territorial solution to the Jewish problem. Pinsker, who became leader of the movement, obtained funds from the wealthy Jewish philanthropist, Baron Edmond de Rothschild--who was not a Zionist--to support Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine at Rishon LeZiyyon, south of what is now Tel Aviv, and Zikhron Yaaqov, south of Haifa. Although the numbers were meager--only 10,000 settlers by 1891--especially when compared to the large number of Jews who emigrated to the United States, the First Aliyah (1882-1903), or immigration, was important because it established a Jewish bridgehead in Palestine espousing political objectives.

The impetus to the founding of a Zionist organization with specific goals was provided by Theodor Herzl. Born in Budapest on May 2, 1860, Herzl grew up in an environment of assimilation. He was educated in Vienna as a lawyer but instead became a journalist and playwright. By the early 1890s, he had achieved some recognition in Vienna and other major European cities. Until that time, he had only been identified peripherally with Jewish culture and politics. He was unfamiliar with earlier Zionist writings, and he noted in his diary that he would not have written his book had he known the contents of Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation.

While working as Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, Herzl became aware of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in French society. He saw that emancipation rather than dissipating anti-Semitism had exacerbated popular animosity toward the Jews. The tearing down of the ghetto walls placed Jews in competition with non-Jews. Moreover, the newly liberated Jew was blamed by much of non-Jewish French society for the socioeconomic upheaval caused by both emancipation and accelerated industrialization.

The turning point in Herzl's thinking on the Jewish question occurred during the 1894 Paris trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, on charges of treason (the sale of military secrets to Germany). Dreyfus was convicted, and although he was eventually cleared, his career was ruined. The trial and later exoneration sharply divided French society and unleashed widespread anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots throughout France. To Herzl's shock and dismay, many members of the French intellectual, social, and political elites--precisely those elements of society into which the upwardly mobile emancipated Jews wished to be assimilated--were the most vitriolic in their anti-Semitic stance.

The Dreyfus affair proved for Herzl, as the 1881 pogroms had for Pinsker, that Jews would always be an alien element in the societies in which they resided as long as they remained stateless. He believed that even if Jewish separateness in religion and social custom were to disappear, the Jews would continue to be treated as outsiders.

Herzl put forth his solution to the Jewish problem in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) published in 1896. He called for the establishment of a Jewish state in any available territory to which the majority of European Jewry would immigrate. The new state would be modeled after the post-emancipation European state. Thus, it would be secular in nature, granting no special place to the Hebrew language, Judaism, or to the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Another important element contained in Herzl's concept of a Jewish state was the enlightenment faith that all men--including anti-Semites--are basically rational and will work for goals that they perceive to be in their best interest. He was convinced, therefore, that the enlightened nations of Europe would support the Zionist cause to rid their domains of the troublesome Jews. Herzl actively sought international recognition and the cooperation of the Great Powers in creating a Jewish state.

Herzl's ideas were not original, his belief that the Great Powers would cooperate in the Zionist enterprise was naive and his indifference to the final location of the Jewish state was far removed from the desires of the bulk of the Jewish people residing in the Pale of Settlement. What he accomplished was to cultivate the first seeds of the Zionist movement and to bestow upon the movement a mantle of legitimacy. His stature as a respected Western journalist and his meetings with the pope, the princes of Europe, the German kaiser, and other world figures, although not successful, pushed the movement into the international arena. Herzl sparked the hopes and aspirations of the mass of East European Jewry living under Russian oppression. It was the oppressed Jewish masses of the Pale, however--with whom Herzl, the assimilated bourgeois of the West, had so little in common--who embraced his ideas most passionately.

In 1897 Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The first congress adopted the goal: "To create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by Public Law." The World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded to work toward this goal, and arrangements were made for future congresses. The WZO established a general council, a central executive, and a congress which was held every year or two. It developed member societies worldwide, continued to encourage settlement in Palestine, registered a bank in London and established the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet) to buy land in Palestine. The First Zionist Congress was vital to the future development of Zionism, not only because it established an institutional framework for Zionism, but also because it came to symbolize for many Jews a new national identity, the first such identity since the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70.

Cultural Zionism

The counterpoint to Herzl's political Zionism was provided by Asher Ginsberg, better known by his pen name Ahad HaAm (One of the People). Ahad HaAm, who was the son of a Hassidic rabbi, was typical of the Russian maskalim. In 1886 at the age of thirty he moved to Odessa with the vague hope of modernizing Judaism. His views on Zionism were rooted in the changing nature of Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe. Ahad HaAm realized that a new meaning to Jewish life would have to be found for the younger generation of East European Jews who were revolting against traditional Jewish practice. Whereas Jews in the West could participate in and benefit from a secular culture, Jews in the East were oppressed. While Herzl focused on the plight of Jews alone, Ahad HaAm was also interested in the plight of Judaism, which could no longer be contained within the limits of traditional religion.

Ahad HaAm's solution was cultural Zionism: the establishment in Palestine of small settlements aimed at reviving the Jewish spirit and culture in the modern world. In the cultural Zionist vision, a small number of Jewish cadres, well versed in Jewish culture and speaking Hebrew, would settle in Palestine. Ahad HaAm believed that by settling in there, religious Jews would replace their metaphysical attachment to the Holy Land with a new Hebrew cultural renaissance. Palestine and the Hebrew language were important not because of their religious significance but because they had been an integral part of the Jewish people's history and cultural heritage.

Inherent in the cultural Zionism espoused by Ahad HaAm was a deep mistrust of the gentile world. Ahad HaAm rejected Herzl's notion that the nations of the world would encourage Jews to move and establish a Jewish state. He believed that only through Jewish self-reliance and careful preparation would the Zionist enterprise succeed. Although Ahad HaAm's concept of a vanguard cultural elite establishing a foothold in Palestine was quixotic, his idea of piecemeal settlement in Palestine and the establishment of a Zionist infrastructure became an integral part of the Zionist movement.

The ascendancy of Ahad HaAm's cultural Zionism and its emphasis on practical settlement in Eretz Yisrael climaxed at the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903. After an initial discussion of settlement in the Sinai Peninsula, opposed by Egypt, Herzl came to the congress apparently willing to consider a British proposal for an autonomous Jewish entity in East Africa as a temporary haven. The Uganda Plan, as it was called, was vehemently rejected by Eastern European Zionists who as before insisted on the ancient political identity with Palestine. Exhausted, Herzl died of pneumonia in 1904, and from that time on the mantle of Zionism was carried by the cultural Zionists led by Ahad HaAm and his close colleague, Chaim Weizmann. They took over the WZO, increased support for Hibbat Tziyyon and called for Jewish settlement in Palestine as a prerequisite to international support for a Jewish state.

Labour Zionism

The defeat of Herzl's Uganda Plan ensured that the fate of the Zionist project would ultimately be determined in Palestine. In Palestine the Zionist movement had to devise a practical settlement plan that would ensure its economic viability in the face of extremely harsh conditions. Neither Herzl's political Zionism nor Ahad HaAm's cultural Zionism articulated a practical plan for settlement in Palestine. Another major challenge facing the new movement was how to appeal to the increasing number of young Jews who were joining the growing Socialist and Communist movements in Russia. To meet these challenges, Labour Zionism emerged as the dominant force in the Zionist movement.

The intellectual founders of Labour Zionism were Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov. They inspired the founding of Poalei Tziyyon (Workers of Zion)--the first Labour Zionist party, which grew quickly from 1906 until the start of World War I. The concepts of Labour Zionism first emerged as criticisms of the Rothschild-supported settlements of the First Aliyah (first modern wave of Jewish settlement). Both Borochov and Syrkin believed that the Rothschild settlements, organized on purely capitalist terms and therefore not adverse to hiring Arab labor, would undermine the Jewish enterprise. Syrkin called for Jewish settlement based on socialist modes of organization: the accumulation of capital managed by a central Jewish organization and employment of Jewish labourers only. He believed that "anti-Semitism was the result of unequal distribution of power in society. As long as society is based on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist." Thus, he reasoned, the Jews needed a material base for their social existence--a state and political power-structure.

Ber Borochov's contribution to Labour Zionism was his synthesis of the concepts of class and nation. In his most famous essay, Nationalism and Class Struggle, Borochov showed how the nation, in this case the Jewish nation, was the best institution through which to conduct the class struggle. According to Borochov, only through the establishment of a Jewish society controlling its own economic infrastructure could Jews be integrated into the revolutionary process. His synthesis of Marxism and Zionism attracted many Russian Jews caught up in the revolutionary fervour of the Bolshevik movement.

Another important Labor Zionist and the first actually to reside in Palestine was Aaron David Gordon. Gordon believed that only through physical labour and returning to the land could the Jewish people achieve national salvation in Palestine. Gordon became a folk-hero to the early Zionists by coming to Palestine in 1905 at a relatively advanced age--forty-seven--and assiduously working the land. He and his political party, HaPoel HaTzair (The Young Worker), were a major force behind the movement to collectivize Jewish settlements in Palestine. The first kibbutz was begun by Gordon and his followers at Deganya in eastern Galilee.

Before Gordon's arrival, the major theorists of Labour Zionism had never set foot in Palestine. Zionism in its theoretical formulations only took practical effect with the coming to Palestine of the Second Aliyah. Between 1904 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in response to the pogroms that followed the attempted Russian revolution of 1905. By the end of the Second Aliyah, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at about 85,000, or 12 percent of the total population. The members of the Second Aliyah, unlike the settlers of the first, were dedicated socialists set on establishing Jewish settlement in Palestine along socialist lines. They undertook a number of measures aimed at establishing an autonomous Jewish presence in Palestine, including employing exclusively Jewish labour, encouraging the wider use of Hebrew and forming the first Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer (The Watchmen).

The future leadership cadre of the state of Israel emerged out of the Second Aliyah. The most important leader of this group and the first prime minister of Israel was David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, who arrived in Palestine in 1906, believed that economic power was a prerequisite of political power. He foresaw that the fate of Zionist settlement in Palestine depended on the creation of a strong Jewish economy. This aim, he believed, could only be accomplished through the creation of a Hebrew-speaking working class and a highly centralized Jewish economic structure. Beginning in the 1920s, he set out to create the immense institutional framework for a Jewish workers' state in Palestine.

Revisionist Zionism

Labour Zionism, although by far the largest organisation in the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community in Palestine), did not go unchallenged. The largest and most vocal opposition came from a Russian-born Jewish intellectual residing in Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was a famous writer and the first military hero of the Zionist revival: he was the commander of the Jewish Legion. While residing in Italy, Jabotinsky became attached to the notions of romantic nationalism espoused by the great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. Like Garibaldi, Jabotinsky viewed nationalism as the highest value to which humans can aspire. He called for massive Jewish immigration to Palestine and the immediate declaration of Jewish statehood in all of biblical Palestine. He viewed the world in Machiavellian terms: military and political power ultimately determine the fate of peoples and nations. Therefore, he called for the establishment of a well-armed Jewish self-defense organization.

Jabotinsky sharply criticized Ben-Gurion's single-minded focus on creating a Jewish working-class movement, which he felt distracted the Zionist movement from the real issue at hand, Jewish statehood. He gained wide popularity in Poland where his criticisms of Socialism and his calls for Jewish self-defense appealed to a Jewish community of small entrepreneurs hounded as a result of anti-Semitism.

External links

• Library of Congress Country Studies: Israel http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iltoc.html