Israel Studies: An Anthology - The History of Zionism
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The History of Zionism
By Moshe Maor
(May 2009)
Introduction
One of the most important aspects of modern Jewish life in Europe since the mid-nineteenth
century was the development of a variety of Jewish national movements such as Zionists,
Bundists and Autonomists that offered competing ideologies and solutions to the issues of
Jewish nationhood and individual nationality as well as to problems posed by modernity.
Among these problems was the breakdown of the parochial molds of Jewish life and the
fragmentation of the traditional Jewish community. This article focuses on Zionism, the most
radical of all modern Jewish national movements.
Zionism’s revolutionary character stemmed from its emphasis on the need to construct a
Jewish national life in response to modernity and to do so only in Eretz Israel — the Land of
Israel. Additionally, Zionists were the first to believe that policies on the major issues
confronting Jewry should be subject to free and open debate. Furthermore, due to the
catastrophic condition of East European Jewry, they were the first to assert that the solution
to the “Jewish Problem” hinged on migration to a homeland (Vital, 1998, p. 208-9).
Zionism provides a classic example of the role of nationalism in the reconstruction of
nations. According to Smith (2004), nationalism relies on an historical, primordial identity
connected with religion, history and territory. As will be demonstrated here, the meaning
behind Jewish history, language, tradition and folklore is of central concern to Zionism and
the construction of a Jewish identity. Zionism can also be seen in Anderson’s (1983)
argument that nationalism refers to a dynamic process of remembering and forgetting
fundamental concepts of collective identities. A classic example in the case of Zionist
thought is the development of concepts such as the negation of exile (shlilat hagalut), which
are based on the denial of a collective memory.
The article begins by delineating the trigger and the cause for the emergence of Zionism in
the nineteen-century, and then goes on to describe the ideology and solution proposed by
each Zionist stream until the establishment of the State of Israel.
The Trigger and the Cause
The most common explanation for the emergence of Zionism is the spread of anti-Semitism.
Interestingly, no Zionist movement emerged as a result of anti-Semitic events during the
eighteenth century or at any earlier period. The rise of the Zionist Movement following the
escalation of anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century implies, therefore, that antiSemitic
events could have been a trigger to the emergence of Zionism but not a cause. Any
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analysis that makes a cause and effect argument regarding Zionism should look for a factor
that operates continually on a given effect for a considerable period of time. In the case of
Zionism, this factor was the breakdown of traditional Jewish life and the attempts by Jews to
reconstruct their life within European nation states (Eisenstadt, 1992).
During the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century the number of
Jews in the world numbered approximately two and a half million; with almost 90% of them
living in Europe (Laqueur, 1972). Underlying the Jewish value system and selfconsciousness
as a group throughout history was the bond between the Jewish people and the
Land of Israel. This was manifested in the dream of the “End of Days” in which a Jewish
leader will emerge to gather Jews from all over the world, bring them to Jerusalem and
rebuild the Temple. Traditional Jews prayed three times a day for the deliverance that would
transform the world and transport them to Jerusalem. Meanwhile, there remained only a small
Jewish community in the Land of Israel and a trickling stream of Jews coming to be buried
in the Holy Land (Avineri, 1981). However powerful this bond between Jews and the land
may have been for eighteen centuries, it did not lead to any real collective action by Jews,
despite the discrimination they faced at the hands of Christians and Muslims.
The Jewish population was routinely persecuted, massacred, expelled, forcibly converted,
excluded from public service positions and threatened with physical, spiritual and cultural
annihilation. The reasons for these persecutions were diverse and changed throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the past, they had been characterized and motivated
by sheer hatred and religious zeal. Following the Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, the
French Revolution and the Emancipation that granted full citizenship to Jews in Europe, the
reasons for Jewish persecution began to revolve around complaints concerning the Jews’
incomplete assimilation and the inability of modern societies to fully incorporate them.
Whatever the reasons for Jewish hatred, most Jews remained in exile, some in more moderate
countries, such as the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa and South American
countries while others remained in Europe. Until the nineteenth century, Jews who continued
to live in Europe existed at the margins of the society and earned their living as small traders
or middlemen between the cities and the villages.
In contrast, the nineteenth century was “the best century Jews have ever experienced,
collectively and individually, since the destruction of the Temple” (Avineri, 1981, p. 5).
Following the French Revolution, a new approach toward the Jews began to prevail with the
spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Ghettos were opened, equal individual rights were
granted and the occupational range was gradually widened with Jews acquiring a strong
position in the professions of wholesale and retail trade (Halpern and Reinharz, 1998). Jewish
life began shifting from the periphery to the main metropolises of Europe and a visible
Jewish presence was recorded in universities as well as in science and culture. This new and
more humane approach toward the Jews led to a process of social and cultural assimilation in
European countries.
The assimilation process went beyond the Jews’ speaking and writing in the language of the
country in which they resided or the attempt to blend in with their neighbors. It touched at
the heart of the prevailing traditional ways of life that had developed in the Middle Ages.
Secularization became a cornerstone in the drive of Jews to be part of a society based on
equality before the law, separation of church and state and the national loyalty of citizens.
Many Jews drifted away from Judaism, some even accepting Christianity in its stead. The
decline in religious beliefs had weakened the ties between the European Jewish communities
and as more Jews became increasingly patriotic toward what they thought to be secure
homelands, close links between individual Jewish communities became nearly impossible
(Eisenstadt, 1992).
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The derived tension between the personal life of a Jew and the public life amongst secular
society was the main challenge facing European Jewry. Zionism was a reaction to the
attempts of Jews to bridge this gap. The aforementioned tension was exacerbated by the rise
of anti-Semitism as a strong political force following the major financial crisis of the late
nineteenth century. Anti-Semitism was felt by those living in Europe who had to cope with
pogroms in Russia (1881-82), riots in Kishinev (1903), the murder of Jews throughout
western and southern Russia (1905), accusations of betrayal (the Dreyfus Affair in France),
the emergence of racist approaches in France and Germany and official anti-Semitic policies
in Russia and other Eastern European countries. As a result of the long-term process through
which Jews attempted to resolve the tension between their personal and public lives in a
secular society wrought with anti-Semitism, the Zionist Movement emerged on the world
scene.
The Emergence of Zionist Ideology
The main premise of Zionist ideology was that the solution for a viable Jewish communal
existence in modern times could be implemented only in Eretz Israel. Eretz Israel, the land in
which the identity of the Jewish people had originally formed, constituted a continuous
component within the Jewish collective consciousness. It was the only place in which a
Jewish collective entity and environment could be reconstructed, and the only place in which
the Jews could reenter history and become a productive, normal and unified community,
responsible for its own destiny.
Rabbi Yehudah Shlomo Alkalay (1798-1878) and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874)
appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and were among the first proponents of Zionism to
argue that Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel was a preparatory stage for the coming of the
Messiah. A more modern utopian version of Zionism — based on a socialist perspective and
framed in terms of moral necessity —was developed by Moses Hess (1812-1875). In his
Rome and Jerusalem (1862), Hess argued that Jews were not a religious group but rather a
separate nation characterized by a unique religion whose universal significance should be
recognized. The attempts of religious reformers to mold Jewish ceremonies into a version of
Christianity left only the skeleton of a once magnificent phenomenon in world history. The
response, according to Hess, should be a political organization of Jews as well as the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine that would act as a spiritual center and a base for
political action, embodying socialist principles within its institutions. 
The Coalescence of the Jewish National Movement
The Jewish national movement appeared on the stage of history in the 1870s with the
emergence of associations for the promotion of immigration of Jews to Palestine –Hovevei
Zion(Lovers of Zion) – in a number of Russian cities and later spreading to Poland. The
movement adopted three central goals that it saw necessary for a healthy nation and society:
Auto-emancipation (i.e., self-action by an organized national body); productivity (i.e., the
restructuring of the historical professions of Jews and the utilization of new sources of
livelihood such as agriculture) and some measure of home-rule (Ettinger and Bartal, 1996).
The attempt to achieve the first two objectives was only partially successful. The goals were
undertaken by the most active of the aforementioned associations, Bilu (Beit Yaakov Lechu
ve Nelcha – “Go Forth the House of Jacob”), whose members had immigrated to Palestine
and started the first wave of immigration known as the First Aliyah. As very few Jews were
willing to translate their nationalistic consciousness into the concrete collective action of
emigration, the movement soon receded to the margin of Jewish society in Eastern Europe.
The settlement activity in Palestine, however, which was undertaken with the help of Baron
Edmond de Rothschild, had created an economic and national infrastructure upon which
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further immigration waves could build. The third goal, to achieve home-rule, was achieved
following the appearance of Theodor Herzl and the convening of the First Zionist Congress
in Basel in 1897, at which the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was established. This
organization replaced Baron de Rothschild as the main funder of settlement activities in
Palestine (Ettinger and Bartal, 1996).
Streams of Zionism
Within the new emerging Zionist movement there were many different streams competing for
the attention of the Jewish public. Each stream contributed its own ideology regarding the
future of the Zionist movement, how it should be built, appropriate goals it should set and the
order it should attempt to accomplish these goals. A breakdown of these different ideological
views and the main historical figures that played active roles in promoting them is described
below.
Practical Zionism
The idea that Palestine was essential to Zionism was not shared by all Jews. At the time of
the First Aliyah, only a few agricultural settlements had been established in Argentina by
Baron de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association. One of the founders of the Lovers
of Zion, Leon Pinsker (1821-1891), articulated the view of practical Zionists in his book
Auto-Emancipation (1882). Pinsker argued that the Jewish national goal need not be Eretz
Israel but rather a land large enough to include Jews who are deprived of their political,
economic and social rights. Only later did Practical Zionists shift their stance and begin
stressing settlement in Palestine. They refused, however, to embark upon major political
offensives aimed at gaining a political commitment from the leading world powers in support
of the Jewish national home. In the end, the core idea of Practical Zionism was the creation
of a gradual process through which Jews, via immigration and settlement, would gain a large
enough foothold in Palestine that world powers would have no choice but to grant them
approval to establish a Jewish national home (Berlin, 1996).
Political Zionism
The Zionist movement developed into a politically dynamic force with the meteoric
emergence of Theodor Herzl and the convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel,
Switzerland, in 1897. In the beginning of his career, Herzl held the conventional view of the
Europeanized Jewish intellectuals of the late nineteenth century that the process of
assimilation would lead to the full integration of Jews within their home societies. This view,
however, was soon revised once he encountered anti-Semitism following the publication of
Eugen Dühring’s book on the “Jewish Problem” and the Dreyfus trial in 1894, in which a
Jewish captain within the French General Staff was falsely accused of spying for Germany
and sentenced to life in prison. Dreyfus was exonerated 12 years after he was first charged,
but it was the anti-Semitic environment surrounding his original trial that provoked Herzl,
who was covering the event as a journalist, to realize that assimilation had failed and that it
was futile to combat anti-Semitism in Europe. At that moment, the “Jewish Question” was
transformed from a social and religious problem to a national one (Friedman, 2004). Herzl
subsequently became the founder and leader of the Political Zionists.
Herzl’s ideology, which he explicated in plays, such as The New Ghetto (1897), pamphlets
and books (e.g., The Jewish State, 1896; Altneuland, 1902), was based on the revolutionary
premise that Jews are a nation like all other nations which is why a sovereign state was a
solution to their problem (Avineri, 1981). Herzl believed the “Jewish Question” should be
solved politically, by European nations granting sovereignty over a portion of land for the
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Jews. This solution, he argued, satisfied the interests of Zionists and anti-Semites alike for
the Jews to live separately. A Jewish state was therefore perceived by Herzl as a worldwide
necessity and responsibility. The great powers, he maintained, should act together to find a
“corner” for Jewish masses to emigrate to and live in peace. 
Herzl was a man of action and a great diplomat, shifting his focus from one capital to another
in response to political opportunities. He first turned to several prominent Jewish figures,
including Baron de Hirsch (the founder of Jewish settlements in Argentina), the Chief Rabbi
of Vienna and the Rothschild family, in the hope that they would be receptive to his ideas.
Following these failed attempts, he later founded Die Welt, the Zionist Movement's weekly
newspaper, the financial arm of the movement known as the Jewish Colonial Trust, and, in
August 1897, the Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. In the diplomatic arena, Herzl
negotiated with Kaiser Wilhelm, the Sultan of Turkey, the King of Italy, Pope Pius X, the
Russian Minister of the Interior and many other gentile leaders. It was the first time in history
that a Jewish national program was placed on the international political agenda (Avineri,
2007). In these meetings, Herzl presented the fundamental ideas of Zionism and the necessity
to apply a Realpolitic view to constructively solve the “Jewish Problem.”
Perhaps Herzl’s most controversial move was his support of the British proposal in 1903 for
a Jewish settlement in Uganda under the British flag. Herzl justified his move on the grounds
of political pragmatism by claiming it politically unwise to reject an offer made by a great
power that recognized the Zionist movement. Furthermore, the acceptance of the British offer
would bring about the realization of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine nearer as
the great powers began to comprehend the futility of this idea.
Following the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, Herzl foresaw further persecutions. In fact, he
predicted that a Jewish catastrophe was imminent — a prediction that was tragically realized
during the Second World War. Herzl sought, therefore, a “temporary haven” in Uganda as an
emergency measure and not as a rejection of a territorial base in Eretz Israel. His wish,
however, never came to fruition. Although he won support at the sixth Zionist Congress to
dispatch an investigation commission to East Africa, Russian Zionists, led by Chaim
Weizmann (1874-1952), lined up against him. The blow to Herzl’s prestige, as well as the
attempted murder of Max Nordau (co-founder of the WZO along with Herzl), left Herzl
profoundly depressed. A year later, the British government withdrew its offer. Herzl’s health
deteriorated considerably during 1903, and he died the following year.
After Herzl’s death, there was no hope for a breakthrough for the Zionist movement until the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which at that time included Palestine. The leadership of the
Zionist movement, therefore, moved from the hands of those who sought a political solution
to those who supported a more practical orientation in the form of the steady immigration of
Jews to Palestine and the development of the infrastructure for a Jewish homeland.
Spiritual and Cultural Zionism
The history of Zionism before the First World War is reflected in the multitude of themes
that ran across the Zionist Movement, such as the secular, political and social emphases on
national reconstruction and renaissance, and the capacity of Jews to transform themselves
into autonomous agents of history, as well as Jewish solidarity. These themes were
interwoven into the principle of shlilat ha'galut and were intended to be molded, once a
Jewish nation in Eretz Israel was established, into a new Jewish collective identity
(Eisenstadt, 1992). This utopia is found in the literary masterpieces of Ahad Ha’Am, who
was Herzl’s ideological opponent.
Ahad Ha’Am was a prolific Zionist writer and a political actor. He contributed more than any
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writer to the creation of modern Hebrew prose and, at the same time, supported the Lovers of
Zion, attended the first Zionist congress and was elected as a member of the Odessa central
committee which was the center of the Lovers of Zion organization. Later, Ahad Ha’Am
became Chaim Weizmann’s confidant during the negotiations over the Balfour Declaration.
He attempted to influence the course of Zionism by emphasizing that Zionism should be a
cultural movement, not just a political force. It should attempt to solidify the spiritual content
of Jewish existence and reconstitute Jewish national culture so that, upon the acquisition of a
state, Jews would continue to be guided by their historic quest for spiritual greatness.
Ahad Ha’Am presciently realized the establishment of a Jewish state would cause only a
small portion of the Jewish people to immigrate to Israel. This implied that the Diaspora
would continue to house the majority of the Jewish population. Since a newly established
Jewish state would not solve the economic problems of Jews who continued to reside abroad,
its responsibility toward their vitality would exist through spiritual and cultural spheres.
Spiritual and Cultural Zionism was meant to offer spiritual Jewish values to both the
individual Jew in Western Europe who was unable to integrate into the liberal culture of his
home country and the East European Jew unable to identify with the nationalist culture of his
home country. Not surprisingly, after the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland, Ahad Ha’Am
published a scathing critique of Herzl’s vision of the Jewish state because it ignored the
spiritual dimension. In addition, Ahad Ha’Am was among the first writers to emphasize the
necessity of confronting the Arab problem in Palestine, first and foremost, by changingthe
attitudes of the first settlers toward the Arab population. He also warned of the potential
emergence of an Arab Palestinian national movement that would eventually confront the
Zionist movement.
Religious Zionism
The roots of Religious Zionism can be traced back to the establishment of the Lovers of
Zion. Prominent rabbis recognized the need to take part in the national reawakening process
and influence the reconstruction of a new Jewish identity. Most important, however, was
their decision to remain members of the Lovers of Zion, side by side with secular leaders – a
move that resulted in a crucial turn in the history of Religious Zionism. Later, differences of
opinions between Shmuel Mohilever (1824-1898), who established the Warsaw section of
Lovers of Zion, and the largely secular main office of the movement, led to the establishment
of the religious Zionist party known as the Mizrahi (an abbreviation of merkas ruhani
meaning “spiritual center”) between 1902 and 1905.
The establishment of the Mizrahi party early in the history of the Zionist Movement signified
the entry of the religious and rabbinic world into the realm of institutionalized politics. In
contrast to the Lovers of Zion, wherein secular and religious members worked side by side,
the establishment of Mizrahi signaled the emergence of a religious-political body within a
secular movement. The founder of Mizrahi, Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915), defined
boundaries between the domains of legitimate Zionist activity performed by flesh and blood
in the present and that of the messianic hope, which was ideal and distant. This separation
enabled him to envisage complete Jewish national redemption as coming only after the
reforming of humanity as a whole, and especially the elimination of human corruption
(Ravitzky 1993, p. 33). Until redemption, the proper path to follow was Herzlian Zionism.
This decision left two options for the Mizrahi movement to choose from: (1) To act as a
watchdog within the larger Zionist movement or (2) to engage in activities related to the
physical and cultural infrastructure in Eretz Israel; namely Jewish settlement and the religious
education of Zionist society (Laqueur, 1972, p. 482). Once the advocates of the latter option
won, there was a need to formulate the ideological justification for this constructive attitude.
This was done by translating national content and spirit into traditional religious terms.
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The resulting ideology of these Religious Zionists was based on the claim that a Jewish
nation without adherence to religion is a body without a soul; that religion and nation
constitute an indissoluble unity. The Jewish religion is national in character and the national
reawakening of the Jews is a fulfillment of God’s will. Furthermore, there exists a shared
interest by both secular and religious Jews in defending their national and religious existence
(Schwartz, 2003). This joint interest was instrumental to Zionism and the Jewish state. A
classic example is the decision that Hebrew would be the language of both spiritual and daily
life. In this decision, the basic aim of Mizrahi was apparent: The assurance that the Zionist
movement and institutions would have religion at their core. Despite valiant attempts, this
goal never materialized. The religious Zionists were always a minority within the Zionist
Movement, even when combined with the radical religious Zionists, the disciples of Rabbi
Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who regarded the history of Zionism as a messianic
process and claimed that the success of Zionism was guaranteed in advance despite
temporary setbacks.         
Labor Zionism
Although there was no mention of socialism during the first Zionist Congress, socialist
Zionist parties had become an integral part of the movement within a few years of the first
meeting. Three decades later, this ideological stream emerged as the strongest political force
within the Zionist movement and the main engine in the construction of the State of Israel.
One year after the first Zionist Congress, Nahman Sirkin (1867-1924) established the Bund,
the largest Jewish socialist organization. Contrary to Pinsker’s view of anti-Semitism as
being derived from an abstract fear of Jews, Sirkin’s explanation was based on the emergence
of populist socio-economic anti-Semitism.
The starting point of Sirkin’s explanation was the importance of the religious dimension as
the main dividing line between Jews and non-Jews. Christians despised the non-conformist
character of the Jewish minority and its rejection of any integration within the native culture.
Subsequently, their relationships with Jews mutated from passive to physical hatred by
means of persecution and coercion. The French revolution and its subsequent religious
emancipation led to the integration of Jews into social, economic and political life.
Nevertheless, this integration did not derive from the power of Jews, but rather from the
victory of the principles of liberty and self-determination (Avineri, 1981, p. 128). The
problem was that this victory contradicted the inner conviction of large segments of society.
As Jews rapidly acquired a dominant position in the modern economic and commercial life
of bourgeois society, a connection between capitalism and Judaism was created. The
emergence of economic and financial crises – an integral part of the capitalist system –
contributed to a new kind of populist anti-Semitism that blamed the Jews for the society’s
economic and financial malaise. Furthermore, social classes whose power appeared to be
declining (i.e., the lower middle and peasant classes) demonstrated a more intense brand of
anti-Semitism than the working class. Sirkin’s conclusion was stark: As long as power was
not equally dispersed among segments of society, and as long as Jews were perceived weak,
anti-Semitism would continue to exist.
An additional premise of Sirkin’s approach was related to the justification of the fusion of
socialism with Zionism. According to Sirkin, capitalism evolved through a historical process
during which no one was asked whether he wishes to live in a socially and economically
unequal society. In contrast, the Jewish national movement provided the opportunity to reach
a consensus over a socialist vision before the establishment of a Jewish state. An agreedupon
attempt to implement a socialist vision, combined with the necessity for social planning
of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, as well as the establishment of an economic regime to
cater to the masses of the Jewish proletariat expected to immigrate to Palestine, required the
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fusion of socialism with Zionism.
This challenge faced by socialist Zionism was also justified on the basis of Marxist methods
of reasoning, formulated by Ber Borochov (1881-1917), and was very popular among young
Russian Jewish intellectuals. Borochov’s argument revolved around the fact that many
socially oppressed segments of society were also oppressed because of their nationality. Class
and national emancipation were, therefore, mutually linked to each other rather than standalone
processes. The fusion of Jewish nationalism with orthodox Marxist doctrine
emphasized the futility of assimilation attempts by the Jewish proletariat, the central social
class of Zionism in the Diaspora, and the necessity, therefore, of settling Palestine. On these
grounds, Sirkin and Borochov founded, in 1906, the first Labor Zionist Party called Poalei
Zion (the Workers of Zion). Among its members was David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), the
first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. 
Around this period, Zionist leaders in Palestine came to realize that mere ideas were not a
substitute for political power. Aharon David Gordon (1856-1922) emphasized the need for an
effective political organization to defeat the capitalist ethos of the First Aliyah to Palestine.
This organization would establish collectives, promote workers’ self-management, and
support the formalization of Hebrew education (Avishai, 2002).
In 1919, Achdut Ha’Avoda (the Unity of Labor) was established as a merger of Poalei Zion,
then led by Ben-Gurion, and non-political workers, led by Berl Katzenelson (1887-1944).
Achdut Ha’Avoda eventually became the core of the Mapai political party. Mapai absorbed
the religious Zionists and became the dominant political force in the Zionist Movement and
then became the most influential part in the State of Israel from 1948 until 1977.
In 1920, Labor Zionists, which included all Jewish workers parties in the pre-state Jewish
community of Israel (Yishuv), established the Histadrut (the General Federation of Hebrew
Workers). The Histadrut called strikes, provided services, negotiated workers’ contracts and
working conditions, settled land along collective lines, established vocational training
programs, supported Hebrew education and provided for security through participation in the
Haganah, the unified defense organization (Avishai, 2002).
Zionist Revisionism
The main opposition to Labor Zionism came from Zionist Revisionism. A key player in this
movement was Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, whose status and image as a hero during his
lifetime were unparalleled in any other Zionist organization (Shavit, 1988). Jabotinsky
became an active Zionist in 1903 when he helped to organize a Jewish self-defense corps in
Odessa, Russia. Unlike many currents of Labor Zionism, Jabotinsky never had faith in the
vision of the “New World” brought about by the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. He
regarded the Revolution as the biggest threat to the Jewish minority because of the powerful
degree of anti-Semitism inherent in East European nationalism. As new nation states in
Eastern Europe emerged, two organizations – Betar (Berit Trumpeldor youth organization,
established 1924-1927) and Berit Ha-Zohar (the Union of Zionist Revisionists political
party, founded in Paris in 1925) – gained momentum. During the late 1920s and early 1930s,
Berit Ha-Zohar grew into a mass movement with an ideology that revolved around the claim
that Zionism must consist only of a bold, Herzlian political and military struggle for a state.
Jabotinsky believed that Revisionism would never succeed in implementing an independent
policy as long as it remained subject to the constraints imposed on its members by the Zionist
Organization (Shavit, 1988, p. 58). This divergence led, in 1925, to the establishment of the
Revisionist Zionist Organization within the Zionist Movement and, in 1935, led to its
withdrawal from the Zionist movement and the creation of the New Zionist Organization
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(Ha'Zach). Confronted with the influences of the Arab riots of 1929, the Arab revolt during
the years 1936-1939, the promulgation of the White Paper of 1939 and Great Britain's
policies toward the Yishuv during World War II and the Holocaust, Jabotinsky developed a
political ideology based upon two pillars: An insistence on maintaining the territorial
integrity of Eretz Israel (i.e., establish a state in all of the historic homeland) and the
determination to establish a sovereign state in Eretz Israel by political and military means.
Jabotinsky’s insistence on using force to accomplish the movement’s goals led him to
participate in establishing the First Zion Mule Corps, become active in the formation of a
Jewish Regiment in the British Army, and demand a permanent Jewish armed force under
British guidance. As Arab violence escalated, and the British reacted by placing greater
restrictions on the Zionists, Jabotinsky concluded that the only way to establish a Jewish state
was to create a regular Jewish military force that would force out the British and defeat the
Arabs. Toward that end, the National Military Organization (Irgun Zeva'i Le'umi or IZL) was
established. In the face of Arab terrorism, this organization initiated retaliatory actions,
facilitated illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine during the 1930s and directed actions
against the British until September 1948 when the IZL was dissolved and its members
integrated into the Israel Defense Forces.
The Success of Zionism
The Zionist Movement insisted that the reconstruction of the Jewish collective identity in
response to the challenge of modernity was possible only through the creation of a Jewish
state in Eretz Israel. This vision materialized following the Balfour Declaration, a sweeping
commitment from Great Britain to Chaim Weizmann made on November 2, 1917. The
Declaration endorsed the aim of the first Zionist Congress to secure a “national home” for
Jews in Palestine. This endorsement, given while Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire,
meant that Weizmann had, in fact, secured the political charter for Zionism that Herzl had
failed to obtain. The Balfour Declaration was later incorporated into the Mandate for
Palestine granted to Great Britain by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922.
The Mandate agreement required Britain to prepare the necessary conditions to secure the
establishment of a Jewish national home. Judaism was thus recognized, for the first time by
major world powers, as a nationality and Zionism was seen as its legitimate expression.
At the end of World War II, when the magnitude of the Holocaust became clear, the shock it
created amongst world powers led to the emergence of a dominant view that the Jewish
Problem must finally be solved. In September 1947, representatives to the United Nations
Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) made far-reaching recommendations for the
partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. A similar proposal for dividing
the country between Jews and Arabs was suggested in the 1937 Peel Commission Report. In
both cases, only the Zionist leadership accepted this idea, whereas the Palestinian leadership
historically rejected all proposals for partition.
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly ratified the UNSCOP recommendation
and, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the founding of the State of Israel.
The pioneering faction of Labor Zionism gradually exited the stage of Jewish history while
Mapai, the larger faction of Labor Zionism, became the ruling party in the newly established
state. The creation of the Law of Return (1950) by the Mapai-led government effected the
status and condition of Jews worldwide by allowing them to acquire citizenship in Israel.
Jews could now choose whether to stay in their present countries or immigrate to Israel. The
mass immigration that ensued upon the establishment of the State of Israel emphasized the
success of the Zionist movement. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, Zionism still
remains Israel’s official ideology. The question now is what Zionism means in view of this
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success.
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 Ahad Ha’am was the pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg, 1856-1927. The meaning of the name
is “One of the People.”
Table of Contents
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