Zionism

David Engel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317865483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Zionism is an international political movement that was originally dedicated to the resettlement of Jewish people in the Promised Land, and is now synonymous with support for the modern state of Israel. This addition to the Short Histories of Big Ideas series looks at the controversial and topical notion of Zionism from a balanced viewpoint, concentrating on where it came from, how it accomplished its goals, and why it affected so many people.

Chapter 1

The idea of a ‘Jewish state’

LET’S START WITH THE BASICS.

The word ‘Zionism’ comes from ‘Zion’, one of the Hebrew Bible’s names for Jerusalem. During the 1890s ‘Zionism’ began to be used as a designation for certain activities aimed at encouraging Jews from different parts of the world to settle close to Jerusalem, in a region many called Palestine. In August 1897, some two hundred Jews who took interest in those activities established a body called the Zionist Organization (ZO), which defined Zionism as a movement seeking ‘to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law’. Half a century later, on 14 May 1948, representatives of the Zionist movement publicly proclaimed ‘the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, to be called the State of Israel’. Since then the ZO has redefined its mission three times, in 1951, 1968 and 2004. In the latest redefinition it dedicated itself to ‘strengthening Israel as a Jewish, Zionist, and democratic state’.

Palestine

The name ‘Palestine’ is probably connected with the people called Philistines in the Hebrew Bible. They lived along the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea from the twelfth through to the seventh century BCE, in an area that the Hebrew Bible called Peleshet and the Greek historian Herodotus Palaistinêi. The Romans gave the name currency during the second century CE, when they designated an administrative division they had formerly called Iudaea (the English ‘Judea’) as Syria Palaestina.

For over 1,500 years after the end of Roman rule, ‘Palestine’ sometimes designated an administrative unit with definite boundaries, sometimes (especially under the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the eastern Mediterranean between 1517 and 1917) a less specific geographical region. Jews traditionally called the same region Erets Yisra’el (the Land of Israel) but used Palestine when speaking European languages. Christians often referred to it as ‘the Holy Land’ (a designation also used in the Qur’an).

Palestine again became a clearly-defined political unit in the early 1920s, when Great Britain assumed a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the territory. From 1920 to 1922 its borders included not only the territory of the current State of Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza Strip) but that of Jordan as well. Since Hebrew and Arabic served as official languages in British mandatory Palestine alongside English, the country was also known formally as Erets Yisra’el and Falastīn. In English translations of official Hebrew documents from the period, ‘Palestine’ was the accepted rendering of Erets Yisra’el, and Jewish citizens of the country were said to be of ‘Palestinian’ nationality.

Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, ‘Palestine’ increasingly became used in connection with Arab assertions of sovereignty over part or all of the former British mandatory territory west of the Jordan River.

If you think those facts tell a simple story, think again! Actually, they raise questions whose answers are not simple at all.

First, what exactly is ‘the Jewish people’ for whom the ZO sought a home? In the English-speaking world most people understand ‘Jewish’ to designate a religious group. It’s fairly clear what English speakers mean when they talk about individual ‘Jewish people’: people who are identified with the Jewish religion to one degree or another. But to many it must sound strange to talk about ‘the Jewish people’ as a whole, just as it sounds strange to talk about ‘the Catholic people’, ‘the Lutheran people’ or ‘the Muslim people’ as discreet social groups. Talking about ‘a home for the Lutheran people’ somewhere in the world probably wouldn’t make sense to most residents of English-speaking countries in the way that ‘a home for the Polish people’ or ‘the Thai people’ would. So what do those words suggest when applied to ‘the Jewish people’?

Similarly, it isn’t obvious at all what the phrase ‘a Jewish state’ signifies. Substituting ‘Catholic’ or ‘Muslim’ for ‘Jewish’ and talking about a ‘Catholic state’ or a ‘Muslim state’ won’t make the concept easier to grasp. After all, what would a ‘Catholic state’ look like in practice? Would every citizen of the state have to be a Catholic? Would officials of the Catholic Church make the state’s laws? Would Catholics be the only ones who determined what children studied in school, who voted in elections or who held public office? Would all residents have to pay taxes to support Catholic worship, even if they weren’t Catholics themselves? If instead of ‘Catholic’ we used the word ‘Jewish’ in these questions and asked them about the State of Israel, the answer to each of them would be negative. In the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish state’ not all citizens are Jews; Jewish religious leaders do not make the country’s laws; Jews are not the only ones who vote, occupy public office and determine school curricula; and Jewish religious institutions are not the only ones supported by public funds. If so, then what exactly makes Israel a ‘Jewish state’?

There is also a historical problem. Does the fact that the word ‘Zionism’ first came to be widely used at a relatively recent moment in historical time (the 1890s) mean that the basic idea the word came to signify – that Jews from different parts of the world ought to settle in Palestine and seek a ‘home’ there ‘secured by public law’ – is itself only a bit more than a century old? The fact that the word is derived from an ancient name in the foundational text of Judaism might well suggest that the idea is much older, rooted in traditional Jewish religious ideals. Indeed, when Zionist representatives composed the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, they contended that their movement actually dated back thousands of years:

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world. Exiled from the Land of Israel, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom. Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood.

But if that is the case, why was it only in the 1890s that an organization was founded to make that striving a reality? And why was it only during the twentieth century that the ancient hope was fulfilled?

Without answers to these questions it won’t be possible to understand what Zionism is about. Fortunately, the brief capsule history in Israel’s Declaration of Independence suggests where to look for them. Let’s examine it more closely.

Names and histories

What does it mean to say that ‘the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people’?

In Hebrew (the language in which the Declaration of Independence was written and the dominant language in contemporary Israel), the phrase translated as ‘the Jewish people’ is ‘ha-Am ha-Yehudi’. ‘Yehudi’ is an adjective meaning ‘Jewish’, but it is also a noun meaning ‘Jew’. It is derived from the personal name Yehudah ( Judah), who is mentioned in the biblical book of Genesis as the fourth son of the patriarch Jacob. Already in biblical times, however, Yehudah was also the name of a political entity. That entity, usually called Judah or Judea in English, existed from perhaps as early as 1000 BCE until the second century CE. Located in a hilly region, it was bounded in the east by the Jordan River and in the south by the Negev desert. In the west it extended to where the hills met the Mediterranean coastal plain, and in the north to a line slightly above Jerusalem and Jericho.

Sometimes Judah was an independent kingdom; at others it was a province of a larger empire. In both cases, the country’s inhabitants were usually called collectively by a name derived from the place: Yehudi in Hebrew, Ioudaios in Greek, Iudeus in Latin. These are the names ordinarily rendered in English as ‘Jew’. In other words, the label ‘Jew’ was originally not a religious but a political designation. It signified a person who was thought to belong to the political entity called Judah or Judea – what we might call today a ‘citizen’ of Judah, who lived in the country by right and could bequeath that right to later generations.

Interestingly, though, in ancient times Jews themselves didn’t use the name much when speaking about themselves. More often they called themselves ‘Yisra’el’, which is the name ‘Israel’ in English. Like Judah, Israel was a biblical name for both a person ( Judah’s father, also called Jacob) and a political entity. The Bible tells of a Kingdom of Israel that reached from Judah’s northern boundary all the way to the mountains of southern Lebanon. In the tenth century BCE Israel and Judah are said to have been united under a succession of kings (Saul, David and Solomon). However, after Solomon’s death (around 930 BCE) Israel broke away; in 721 BCE it was absorbed into the Assyrian Empire and disappeared from the political map. However, while it had been associated with Judah, the inhabitants of the latter country had begun to call themselves ‘Bnei Yisra’el’ – ‘Children of Israel’ or ‘Israelites’ – along with their northern neighbours. The name stuck even after the Kingdom of Israel vanished.

Why did Judeans prefer the name ‘Israel’ to one derived from their own country? We can’t know for certain. It appears likely, though, that by doing so they reinforced their connection with an ancient Israelite tradition, according to which the patriarch Israel ( Jacob) had inherited from his grandfather Abraham a promise from God to ‘give [his] offspring the land from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the River Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:18). The territory encompassed by that promise had long been called ‘Erets Yisra’el’ – the Land of Israel, or the land that Israel’s descendants claimed to inhabit by divine command. By including themselves among Israel’s children, the Judeans thus highlighted their claim to live where they did by right.

That claim was generally accepted by the successive empires – Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman – that controlled Judea for most of the interval from the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE until around 135 CE, when the Romans renamed the province and surrounding areas Syria Palaestina and denied Jews any special status in it. Thus when, as a result of the Babylonian conquest, Judeans began migrating in large numbers beyond their country’s borders (forming what came to be termed a ‘diaspora’, from the Greek word for ‘scattering’), others continued to call them Jews. That practice continued even after 135, extending to the areas throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and beyond in which Jews formed communities in subsequent centuries. From then on, however, the name could no longer be used in its original sense, because a political entity called Judea, to which Jews rightfully belonged, had ceased to exist. Instead it came to be used as an ethnic designation, referring to descendants of ancient Judeans anywhere in the world.

In most places throughout the centuries, that ethnic usage closely reflected observable reality. For the bulk of their history Jews were easily identifiable as a distinct social group: they often differed from the non-Jews in whose midst they lived not only in religion but in language, dress, eating habits, neighbourhoods of residence, educational and social welfare systems, and occupation. Moreover, Jews who lived in one place often shared certain cultural attributes with Jews who lived in another part of the world altogether. Jews described this situation with the help of a biblical phrase: Am Yisra’el – ‘the People of Israel’. Like ‘Children of Israel’, the phrase initially referred to the descendants of Jacob to whom God was supposed to have promised a certain territory. Later it came to signify a Jewish ethnic and cultural unit that transcended political boundaries. The expression ‘the Jewish people’ (ha-Am ha-Yehudi) is simply a more modern way of designating the same entity.

This is the history that Israel’s Declaration of Independence evoked when it claimed that ‘the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people’.

Jewish messianic traditions

But what of the Declaration’s next assertion: ‘Exiled from the Land of Israel, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom’?

The key to unpacking this claim lies in a historical-theological puzzle. On the one hand, Jewish tradition asserted that God had promised the Land of Israel to the People of Israel in perpetuity. However, beginning in the sixth century BCE a succession of foreign conquerors had overrun the country, until the Romans eventually disavowed any unique Jewish claims upon it. Jewish religious thinkers thus faced a conundrum. Did foreign conquest mean that God had similarly disavowed the ancient promise? If so, why? If not, why hadn’t God – whom Jews depicted as the all-powerful creator of heaven and earth – intervened to prevent defeat?

In order to resolve this dilemma, Jewish thinkers, beginning in Roman times, developed an explanation that generations of Jews found compelling. Several biblical passages suggested that God’s promise of the land had actually been conditional: God was bound to uphold it only as long as the people obeyed the special laws and commandments dictated to Moses during the Exodus from Egypt. Hence, the notion ran, the Jews’ loss pointed to God’s dissatisfaction with how they had kept their end of the bargain: as punishment for their failure to obey God’s law, God had taken the Jews’ homeland from them, effectively sending them into exile. In such a situation, Jews could only hope that one day the divine punishment would be lifted and that God would restore their mastery over the Promised Land. Indeed, prayers for restoration became part of the Jewish liturgy: even the traditional Jewish grace after meals implores a merciful God to ‘break the yoke around our neck and lead us to our country with head held high’.

No doubt the authors of Israel’s Declaration of Independence had prayers like this in mind when they located Zionism’s roots many centuries before the ZO was founded. But if Jews had prayed consistently since Roman times to regain mastery over the territory they believed God had promised them, why was it only towards the end of the nineteenth century that they formed the organization that helped them achieve that goal? Actually, the Declaration asserted not only that Jews prayed for restoration but actively ‘strove throughout the centuries to go back … and regain their statehood’. Was the ZO actually a late embodiment not only of a hope but of a tangible movement that had begun long before?

It turns out that when it spoke about continuous hands-on efforts by Jews to resettle and reclaim Palestine, the Declaration of Independence glossed over parts of the historical record – as political documents often do. It is true that throughout Jewish history some individual Jews left relatively more comfortable lives outside Palestine in order to satisfy a deep longing to settle in what they saw as their true homeland. However, the number of such Jews appears to have been quite small. In fact, for more than a thousand years after Muslim armies first took control of the country in 632 CE, Palestine’s Jewish population declined sharply, from around 200,000 in the mid-seventh century to no more than 3,000 in 1700. Moreover, certain Jewish religious ideas actually appear to have discouraged Jews from trying to reclaim sovereignty there. Since restoration was possible only after God lifted the punishment of exile, Jews traditionally watched for signs that God was about to relent. They anticipated that, when the time came, God would choose a champion who would gather the Jewish people from all the lands of their dispersion, organize them to take control of the Promised Land, and lead them there in triumph. They called that anticipated champion mashi’ah – literally, ‘the anointed one’, or, as it is usually rendered in English, ‘Messiah’. Once the Messiah appeared, Jews believed, the return to Palestine would be at hand. But they also believed that the timing of the Messiah’s appearance was up to God alone. In fact, throughout most of their history the majority of Jewish religious leaders insisted that, except for praying and observing God’s commandments, Jews neither could nor should do anything to persuade God to send the Messiah quickly. Some even warned that if Jews tried to resettle Palestine en masse before the Messiah came, God was liable to interpret their efforts as an act of rebellion and extend the punishment, making the exile last longer.

A minority understood the concepts of exile and Messiah differently, however. According to that understanding, God would send the Messiah only after Jews showed that they were prepared not merely to pray for a return to Palestine but actually to live there. Broad developments in Jewish history helped this minority view gain influence from the sixteenth century onwards; by the beginning of the eighteenth century some Jewish leaders even organized groups to settle the country. To be sure, their efforts attracted only a small following among Jews throughout the world, but they nevertheless appear to have reversed the millennium-long decline in Palestine’s Jewish population. From its low point in 1700, the number of Jews in Palestine doubled over the next hundred years. The pace of growth increased even more during the nineteenth century, doubling again by 1840 and yet again by 1880, when the country’s Jewish population reached some 24,000. Still, that number represented barely half a per cent of the estimated 4.75 million Jews throughout the world at the time. And although the Jews’ proportion of the overall population of Palestine was increasing, it still barely exceeded 5 per cent of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• To the reader
• Timeline
• Chapter 1. The idea of a ‘Jewish state’
• Chapter 2. Crystallization of a movement, 1881–1897
• Chapter 3. Diplomacy and settlement, 1897–1914
• Chapter 4. Britain as ambivalent patron, 1914–1929
• Chapter 5. From mandate to statehood, 1929–1948
• Chapter 6. Movement and state, 1948–1967
• Chapter 7. Normalizers and messianists, 1967–2008
• References
• Index