Zionism

10 Key excerpts on "Zionism"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine

  • Tamar Amar-Dahl, Olga Thierbach-McLean(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  23

  Whether their Zionism took on a political or a spiritual-cultural form, both Zionist thinkers based their definition of the Jewish people on a secular conception of the nation. The Jewish people were perceived to be secular-national subjects in the context of a secular undertaking. Jewish religion as a confession played only a subordinate role in these Zionist utopias and notions as they appeared in the heterogeneous currents of the Zionist movement (revisionist, democratic, liberal, Marxist or socialist). In fact, the Jewish national movement originated in an anti-religious tradition that was carried by the spirit of the socialist and progressive influences of the nineteenth century. In certain phases it even took a decidedly hostile stance towards religion. The Zionist ideology, based on the negation of the diaspora, rejected the traditional-religious way of life of the Torah schools.

  In turn, the religious orthodoxy subsequently opposed Zionist-activist aspiration to a Jewish state in the strongest terms from the very beginning; it adhered to the axiom that redemption is to be granted by God, not to be brought about by men. But in how far can Zionism be understood as a secular national movement? What is meant by the “Hebrew national culture” in the context of Judaism? Which role does the Jewish religion ultimately play in the Zionist national idea?

  According to the Israeli-Marxist historian Moshe Zuckermann (1949–), a religious momentum was inherent in the Zionist nation-state movement from the outset. In contrast to the Western formation of national states, “Zionism […] in its very origins unfolded not in practice, but basically as an idea of a national state constituted within the context of a superstructure. The idea of a Jewish state existed before there was a territory for this Jewish state. The idea of a Jewish state existed before the population who was supposed to inhabit that territory objectively existed as such.”24

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Israeli Nationalism

  • Uri Ram(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For generations of graduates of these schools, and by extension to Jews all over the world, especially in the USA, it seems obvious that there is, that there always had been, a “Jewish nation,” and that this nation had been on the move back to the Land of Israel ever since it was expelled from it. The Zionist movement invented a tradition and constructed a nation, one which did not exist, and would not have existed, if not for the Zionist initiative.

  It is only retrospectively—and anachronistically—that Zionism, that is modern Jewish nationalism, is regarded as anything like the mainstay of Jewish modern history, that all Jewish history is considered from its peculiar point of view, and that the state of Israel is regarded as the teleological culmination of Jewish history. When Zionism emerged, and for a long time afterwards, it was considered only one alternative among others for Jewish individual or collective, present or future, concepts of identity (and also this mainly by central and east European Jews, since for Western and Eastern Jews it was hardly relevant even much later). Several other alternative conceptions of Jewish identity in the modern world were present on the agenda prior to the emergence of nationalism, and they included autonomy, assimilation, reform, and orthodoxy, as well as variations and combinations of the said perspectives. While some of these alternatives were overtly non-nationalist or even anti-nationalist, some were indeed nationalist. Yet pre-Zionist Jewishness was a matter of communal and cultural identification, without overt political imperatives. The novelty of the Zionist conception of Jewish identity was the transformation of the Jews into a nation in the modern sense of the term, that is a historical-territorial political subject. This involved a particular spatio-temporal rendering of Jewishness. In spatial terms Jewishness was said to be inherently connected to Zion, and in temporal terms to be a perennial continuous entity.

  All in all, contemporary Jews were identified as the successors of the ancient Hebrew nation whose origins were in the Land of Israel. These two ingredients—spatial concentration and temporal continuity—were presented as the backbone of Jewishness. At the same time the adverse ingredients of Jewish reality—spatial dispersity and temporal discontinuity—were presented as aberrations. All aspects of Jewish life which did not fit this scheme were tarnished, ignored or modified to accord with the Zionist grand narrative. Thus the reality of Jewish life was claimed to be transitory, while its imaginary past was claimed to be essential. Today, after 100 years of Zionism, it requires a feat of imagination to perceive that Zionism in fact denied the reality of Jewish life and proposed an imaginary alternative to it.16

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Sharing the Land of Canaan

  Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle

  • Mazin B. Qumsiyeh(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  Pinsker became a leader of the movement and, with funds from the wealthy British philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild, developed the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine: Rishon LeZiyyon south of Tel Aviv, and Zikhron Yaaqov, south of Haifa. By 1891, about 10,000 Jews had relocated to these settlements (then in the Ottoman Empire). Yet, in the period of Jewish emigration from Europe, 1882–1903, it was only a tiny fraction that left for Palestine; most went to North or South America.

  Nathan Birnbaum (also known as Mathias Ascher) coined the term ‘Zionism’, based on the ideas of Hess and Pinsker, to describe a political movement for Jewish ‘self-emancipation’ and nationalism. In 1893, he published a brochure entitled ‘Die Nationale Wiedergeburtder Juedischen Volkes in seinem Lande als Mittel zur Loesung der Judenfrage’ (‘The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Homeland as a Means of Solving the Jewish Problem’). Later, Theodore Herzl’s work formed the ideological underpinnings for the movement. Similar to his intellectual fathers, he recognized that anti-Semitism would be harnessed to his own – Zionist – purposes.10 Thus, proponents of Zionism, non-Jews and Jews alike, built their popular base on Jewish fears of anti-Jewish sentiments and actions. Zionism, they were told, is the best solution to the ‘Jewish problem’.

  Zionism AFTER 1948

  While Zionism as a political program was supposed to ‘emancipate the Jewish people’ by giving them their own state, once that state was established and native people largely removed, new roles and arguments were to be presented to sustain and reinvent Zionism. The ‘protection’ of the ‘Jewish people’ from the ‘outside’ remained the essential philosophical argument underpinning Zionism. But more was needed. The Jerusalem Program for Zionism adopted in 1951 and revised by the World Zionist Congress in 1968 took this as a definition of the goals of Zionism:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Understanding Israel

  Political, Societal and Security Challenges

  • Joel Peters, Rob Geist Pinfold, Joel Peters, Rob Geist Pinfold(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  If such understandings of Zionism began to develop as early as the 1950s, and were given renewed emphasis during the 1990s when the discourse of “post-Zionism” was at its height, it seems hardly possible to shy away from similar questions in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps historical Zionism—whether it is assessed negatively or positively—has run its course and we are today in a “post-Zionist” age? Can there be any possible meaning to the word today, other than as an indication of some form of Israeli patriotism or, as some would have it, unquestioning loyalty to (usually right-wing) government policies? Of course, disagreements over the reality or desirability of the continued existence of Zionism after 1948 is really a debate over what Zionism in actual fact was (or is), and what it can or cannot be, should or should not be, in historical circumstances in which one of its key desiderata has been fulfilled.

  Modern Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century, in an age of ideologies and “isms.” It was conceived in response to what was known during that century (and into the first half of the twentieth) as “the Jewish question,” or the “Jewish problem.” In addition to casting itself as a response—in its more ambitious forms, a solution—to the Jewish problem itself, it was also as a response to previous responses, which Zionists deemed to have been partial or complete failures.4 Zionism, in short, was in its very essence a child of the nineteenth century, and an attempt to provide solutions to the predicaments and distress confronting Jews and Jewish life in the nineteenth century. Its aims—though various and at times conflicting—can collectively be deemed revolutionary: It sought a total and complete transformation of Jewish life, culture, social structures; everything from Jewish geography—where Jews lived—to the language they spoke, to so intimate and fundamental a matter such as the Jew’s body itself—were all to be transformed.

  Despite constituting a child of the nineteenth century, the bulk of Zionism’s achievements would come about over the course of the twentieth century, most notably during its first fifty years, before the ruptures of World War II, and then in its immediate aftermath. By the second half of the twentieth century, it was already a very different world—the changes in Jewish life were particularly dramatic with the transfer of the centers of Jewish life from Eastern Europe to North America and Israel, the establishment of the Jewish state, and the extermination of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The dramatic events that shaped the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have come at an ever-accelerating pace. All of this raises a critical question regarding Zionism: As a set of proposed solutions to a list of nineteenth- (and perhaps twentieth-) century problems, in what sense can we talk about Zionism in the twenty-first century? Some seven decades after the establishment of the State of Israel, any attempt to assess Zionism in the twenty-first century is equally bound to begin with an attempt to understand just what Zionism has meant and what it might mean today and in the future.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  SUNY series in Comparative Politics

  The Religion-State Relationship and Democratic Performance in Turkey and Israel

  • Aviad Rubin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Zionism and Religion before Independence

  The interaction between religion and the state in Israel evolved in a very different way from the strictly imposed secularism that characterized Turkish politics. The Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, deviated from the secularist prescription that was offered to and often imposed on postcolonial societies by Western powers. Instead, Israel chose to formally recognize the Jewish religion in the polity. This was done in multiple domains, including incorporating explicitly religious actors in the political system, officially recognizing symbolic religious content by the state, establishing state-backed religious institutions, and allocating significant resources to maintaining religious causes. As suggested in chapter 2 , the roots of this course of action should be sought in the interaction between the Jewish religion and Zionism during the prestate period, first in the Diaspora and later in the Jewish community in Palestine.

  The social, structural, cultural, and demographic attributes of the Jewish nation during the emergence of the Zionist movement stimulated the integration of religion into the ideology and institutions of the movement, then into the political framework of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), and eventually into the legal and institutional configuration of the new country. Three factors were of particular importance. First, the Jewish religion lacked political authority, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, and thus did not threaten the authority of the emerging secular Zionist leadership. Second, despite its secular convictions, the Zionist elite acknowledged the inseparable fusion between the religious component of Jewish identity and its other ingredients (national, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic). Third, the Jewish faith served as a common source of identity and the most effective recruitment tool for Jews from different states of origin, languages, and value systems who otherwise had little in common.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Sovereign Jews

  Israel, Zionism, and Judaism

  • Yaacov Yadgar(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  60

  Zionism makes the sovereign state all the more important due to its focus on immigration and land (as opposed, for example, to culture61 ): “At the foundation of the Zionist outlook stood the aspiration to establish a state. And absolute sovereignty is needed for Zionism more than for any other nation, because Zionism demanded the right of unrestricted immigration and unrestricted colonization, which can be brought about only by complete sovereignty.”62 This move (in simple terms, the Zionist struggle against the non-Jewish Palestinian inhabitants of the land) would be impossible were it not for sovereignty. This renders Zionism’s definition dependent on the negation of the Palestinians’ political arguments: “A Zionist is a person who accepts the principle that the State of Israel does not belong only to its citizens, but to the Jewish people in its entirety.”63 And a state means absolute sovereignty: “Half sovereignty is impossible, and the only choice is between full sovereignty and no sovereignty.”64

  Exile Within Sovereignty

  And yet, even the spokesperson of this theology confesses the weakness of his belief. The relation to non-Jews betrays it: “Let’s be honest with ourselves. […] Every authentically secular position, which demands the legitimacy of the secular Jew, must acknowledge the fact that a Jew can also be Christian or Muslim.” However, “I, too, confess, with all my dedication and loyalty to the secular-Jewish principle, with all my strong belief that at Mount Sinai only a welding, and no melting, between religion and nation had taken place, that I still cannot accept the permission of the Jew to convert his religion to Christianity or Islam, and remain Jewish, a member of the Jewish nation.”65

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Politics and Society in Israel

  • Ernest Krausz(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The question then arose as to how it was possible to maintain commitment to a national collectivity whose territorial boundaries were not clearly defined. The serious implications of this question are clear when we recall that from its inception one of the points of departure for Zionist ideology was the existence of a bond between a nation and its territory. The Zionist movement was constantly engaged in disputes with movements advocating Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora over the possibility of maintaining the autonomous institutional existence of a minority group in societies which have become secularized in the wake of the industrial and national revolutions. 36 Another controversy occurred with the territorialist movement, which advocated a Jewish territorial concentration but not necessarily in the Land of Israel. Zionism responded with fundamental arguments concerning the bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and operational arguments to the effect that it would not be possible to attract Jews to a land other than Israel. 37 The efforts to create a territorial concentration and a sovereign Jewish society in the Land of Israel did not solve the ideological problem of defining the territorial boundaries of the national collectivity while this process was going on. Moreover, the concept of the unity of the Jewish people itself implied a nonterritorial definition of the boundaries of the collectivity. This contradiction between the efforts to create an identity between nationality and territory and the recognition of the existence of a nation without a territory led to the emergence of several ideological trends that claimed that a new “Hebrew” nation was coming into being in the Land of Israel that was not identical with the Jewish nation in the Diaspora

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

  • Tomis Kapitan(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Zionist imperative to have a state for the Jewish people is itself a rejection of liberalism. So conformity with the liberal idea of the state as equal handed as between members of different ethnic groups is upheld, by Ben-Gurion, only by subterfuge. This solves neither the moral problem of discrimination nor the political problem of discrimination. For, the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency is, though not de jure, at least de facto, an integral part of the Jewish state, being effectively controlled by the government (Mallison 1968, 556–629). It will be useful to list other instances in which this tension is evident. They serve to make clear that the Zionist nature of the state of Israel is, in the circumstance of ethnic diversity, an impediment to equality. But first a clarification of the Zionist nature of the Israeli state. In saying that the state of Israel is Zionist in nature, I mean that it is a state designed to provide the Jews with the basic conditions for promoting what the state itself sees as the interests of the Jews as an ethnic group. Under different circumstances the basic conditions for realizing this ultimate end would be quite different. They would be different where there are no ethnic competitors for the land from what they would be where there is ethnic diversity. In the period immediately after the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, the actual circumstances were that the Jews were not the only people on the land they thought they had a right to. In fact, they were a minority on that land. A process of state formation on the basis of the Jewish community in Palestine—the Yishuv—was already under way. The Jews traced their rule over the land to the time of the Jewish kingdom of David and Solomon, some 3,000 years earlier

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Invention of the Land of Israel

  From Holy Land to Homeland

  • Shlomo Sand, Geremy Forman, Geremy Forman(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  Contrary to the consensus that has taken form and deepened within Israeli society, particularly after the conquests of 1967, these scholars have all maintained that the Jews have connections to “the Land” in its entirety and have national rights in “the Land,” but do not possess rights to all “the Land.” This distinction may be important, as it stems from a moral sense of discomfort vis-à-vis ongoing control over a population that enjoys no rights, and yet it has never proved capable of translating itself into meaningful and effective politics. The primary reason for this was that most intellectuals of the later Zionist leftfailed to understand that, although religious connections did not necessarily have to be translated into rights, ties of ownership in patriotic garb did, as such rights are always included within the paradigms of ownership over homeland territories, and these paradigms are deeply embedded in all national pedagogies. That is to say, in the case of Israeli political culture, the area considered to constitute the Land of Israel is ultimately regarded as the property of the Jewish people, and abandoning parts of this imagined land is considered the equivalent of an owner of private property willingly giving up some of his assets. While such a scenario is of course possible, most people would agree that it is nonetheless rare and problematic.

  Despite the rationalizing discourse that has accompanied it since its inception, Zionist colonization never spent much time on ethical nuances that had the potential to limit or even to entirely prevent its hold on the land. As with all other colonizations, the only boundaries that have restrained the Zionist enterprise have been those dictated by the limits of its own power, not those resulting from concessions or from the quest for pacific compromise with the local inhabitants.

  We still know very little about the meaning of the “concession” of property in Zionist thought, which now brings us to two additional questions: (1) According to the Zionist imagination, what tracts of land have, without question, always belonged to the Jewish people? 2) What land did the nationalist vision deem sacred, and did this land ever have concrete borders?

  ZIONIST GEOPOLITICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF THE LAND

  Settlement Zionism, which borrowed the term “Land of Israel” from the Talmud, was not overly pleased with the borders it had been assigned by Jewish law. As already noted, the lines that cordoned off sacred land were short, extending only from Acre to Ashkelon. Furthermore, the land contained by these boundaries was not sufficiently contiguous to serve as a national homeland. For the Olei Bavel

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The History of Arab - Jewish Conflict

  1881-1948

  • Dr. P J Vincent(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd

    (Publisher)

  138

  To provide the political Zionist movement with a mass base and to gain the support of the leading Jews of the West, Herzl summoned a World Zionist Congress on August 29, 1897 in the Swiss city of Basel.139 Some 197 delegates had arrived from all corners of the world. Russian Jewry’s response to Herzl’s call was overwhelming and of the participants 66 were from Russia.140 Herzl was unanimously elected President of the Congress. He presented an intelligible program for the re-establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, openly recongised and legally secured. The delegates, belonging to all schools of thought in Judaism, sensed the political realism of Herzl’s programme and voted overwhelmingly in favour of it. The word ‘home land’ was substituted for ‘state’ and ‘public law’ for ‘international law” in order to avoid ottoman objections.141 The programme adopted at the first Zionist congress is known as ‘the Basel program’, which declared that the aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a homeland (‘Heimstatte’ – homestead) in Palestine secured by public law. It was decided to take the following means for attainment of this end:

  (a) The promotion on suitable lines of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.

  (b) The organization and binding together of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international, in accordance with the laws of each country.

  (c) The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness.

  (d) Preparatory steps towards obtaining government consent necessary to the attainment of the aim of Zionism.142

  The Basel Conference established the World Zionist Organization with Herzl as its president. A Jewish flag and a national anthem, ‘Hatikvah’, were adopted. The organization was pyramidal in structure. ‘Power tended towards the center and it could indeed be characterized as an ‘elective aristocracy’, or as a form of democratic elitism.’143

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book