Zionism

Zionism is the movement, born in the last years of the nineteenth century, to re-establish a Jewish national home in the land Jews call Eretz Israel and Arabs call Palestine. Its premise was simple and, to its founders, hard-won by bitter experience: that Jews were a nation, not merely a religion, and that a people so persistently persecuted in Europe would be safe only with a state of their own. Everything the movement became, and every argument it still provokes, grows from that starting point.

Persecution and a pamphlet

The immediate spur was violence and humiliation in Europe. Waves of pogroms swept the Russian Empire after 1881, driving millions of Jews into flight. In France in 1894, a Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason amid open antisemitic mobs, an episode watched closely by a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl. Concluding that assimilation had failed, Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896 and the next year convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Some 200 delegates founded the World Zionist Organization and adopted the Basel Program, which set the goal of "a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law." Herzl privately predicted that a Jewish state would exist within fifty years. He was off by less than a year.

Many Zionisms

The movement was never a single thing. Political Zionists, following Herzl, chased a charter from the great powers. Cultural Zionists, led by the essayist Ahad Ha'am, cared less about a state than about reviving Hebrew and Jewish civilization. Labor Zionists, socialists who would dominate the future state under figures like David Ben-Gurion, built collective farms called kibbutzim and prized settlement by Jewish hands. Religious Zionists read the whole project through scripture. Zion itself was close to non-negotiable: when the British floated a Jewish territory in East Africa in 1903, the movement nearly tore apart before rejecting it. What united them was aliyah, Jewish immigration to Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire and, after 1917, a territory under British rule. That year the Balfour Declaration committed Britain to "a national home for the Jewish people" there, and the fringe idea of the 1890s became the policy of an empire.

A word two peoples cannot share

Zionism achieved its central aim in 1948, when the State of Israel was declared and, in Herzl's phrase, the Jewish state existed. It remains one of the most contested words on earth precisely because that success carries two histories. To its adherents Zionism is a movement of national liberation and refuge, the reason a people nearly annihilated in the Holocaust has a country. To Palestinians the same events are the Nakba, the "catastrophe," in which some 700,000 Arabs were displaced from their homes in the war surrounding Israel's founding. Both are describing the same land and, often, the same year. That is why a single word can mean deliverance to one person and dispossession to another, and why it has resisted a neutral definition for more than a century.