What was zionism

In the early 21st century, literature on the Yishuv has increasingly integrated Zionist and Palestinian history through what Zachary Lockman has called a relational paradigm. Having said that, one of the principles guiding the construction of this article is to keep it manageable rather than comprehensive.

It therefore maintains the focus on books that pertain more or less directly to Zionism as an ideology, and as a political and social movement, rather than straying too far into the history of Palestine more generally. Zionist historiography was first written by activists and ideologues who were directly involved in the Zionist Organization, a global body that changed its name in to the World Zionist Organization, and its constituent national chapters. Their work was heavily ideological and tendentious, but Adolf Boehm, president of the Austrian Zionist Federation Boehm — , adopted a more limited and professional approach in his comprehensive history.

The transformation from ideological to reflective historiography began in the s. Laqueur breaks Zionist historiography fully away from ideology and hagiography in what is in many ways still the finest overview of the Zionist movement to Lucas offers a deeply critical approach to Israeli nation building and Zionist—Arab relations, so much so that the book was largely overlooked, although from the perspective of later generations its analysis appears prescient.

Sachar is mainly about the post period but provides a useful narrative of pre events. Shapira is less comprehensive but more engaging. Lisak — is a multivolume Hebrew work that brings together dozens of essays on all aspects of the history of the Yishuv. Stein provides the most detailed narrative in a one-volume English work on the history of the Yishuv, whereas Engel and Stanislawski , respectively, compress the history of international Zionism, Zionist diplomacy, and Jewish state building into slim and elegant accounts.

Boehm, Adolf. Die Zionistische Bewegung. Originally published — Engel, David. Short Histories of Big Ideas. The best starting point for a newcomer to the subject. Engel, a specialist in East European Jewish history, covers the history of both international Zionism and Jewish state building in Palestine, with trenchant analysis and an up-to-date bibliography.

Halpern, Ben. The Zionist movement started in the late 19th century, amidst growing European anti-Semitism. The movement secured support among Western European governments, particularly after Zionists agreed to create their Jewish state in historic Palestine. Most Jews in Central and Western Europe continued at that time to believe that integration was possible and the best solution to rising anti-Semitism. But some secular Jews, initially committed to the principles of liberalism and integrated, came to feel that Jews could not be accepted as members of a host nation, but instead should cultivate their own identity as a nation of their own.

Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jewish journalist from Budapest, who, watching rising anti-Semitism culminating in with the accusation of Alfred Dreyfus in France of treason , concluded that anti-Semitism would not end and that the solution was Jewish statehood. This is the political mix that spawned Zionism: disenchantment with liberalism in Western Europe, combined with political upheaval and violence in Eastern Europe, a setting more generally conducive to thinking about identity in ethno-nationalist terms.

Though Zionism has a particular logic that emerged from the events surrounding it, not all Jews subscribed to that logic and in fact a majority of Jews initially did not. Their opposition stemmed from a number of directions. Jewish liberals, committed to the idea of Jewish integration, thought that Zionism, by conceding to the permanence of anti-Semitism, would in turn lead to more anti-Semitism. They believed that taking action to return to Palestine en masse was nothing short of heresy. This religious opposition would change as religious streams of Zionism emerged, but it is important to recall that Orthodoxy was initially deeply opposed to Zionism.

Another Jewish group, Autonomists, believed in the national and cultural specificity of Jews, but believed that the solution to Jewish problems would be found within the places they lived, by demanding cultural autonomy. Many of them promoted Yiddish not Hebrew as the Jewish national language.

Meanwhile, some Jews thought that the division by nationality was highly inappropriate and joined socialist movements not organized in national terms. To understand how this initially small movement evolved into a major political force, we need to look at it in stages, always understanding the tension between the national purpose Zionism would serve in Europe and the settlement project itself.

The earliest Zionist settlers, known as the first Aliyah wave of immigration , emerge in Eastern Europe following the events of But they were very disorganized. Still, though, they believed that the actual target population was those facing pogroms in Eastern Europe, most of them assumed they would not personally move.

If Central European Jews had provided the organizational impetus, and Eastern European Jews had provided the willing immigrants, the early Zionist settlements, places like Rehovot, Rishon LeZion, and Zikhron Yaakov, succeeded after initial failures only because of the investment of wealthy Western European Jews—most famously Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the noted banking family, who pumped capital into struggling wheat and grape plantations, which employed mainly native Arab labor.

With Central and Western European Jews providing much of the organizational backbone of the still tiny Jewish settlement movement, the ongoing tensions and violence in the Russian Empire—most notably the Kishinev Pogrom in —drove further waves of Jews to Palestine. In the 10 years before World War I, this group, known as the second wave of Zionist immigration Second Aliyah arrived to find the plantation colonies of their predecessors.

However, strongly influenced by the socialist trends and emphasis on labor of early 20th century Russia, they expressed concern at the tendency of Jewish colonists so they called themselves at the time to be uninvolved with physical labor, and to hire native Arab labor at a low cost.

They were convinced that this path was bad for Jews who were not properly connected to the soil and to Palestine in general because plantation owners would be seen as exploitative. They pushed for the separation of Jewish and Arab agricultural economies, and founded all-Jewish farming cooperatives called Kibbutzim.

There are two different ways to look at this development, both of which have truth in them. On the one hand, the members of the Second Aliyah who, because of their socialist focus would be called Labor Zionists, were convinced that their path was enlightened, non-exploitative, and sensitive to the needs of local Palestinian Arab peasants, who they assumed were at a lower stage of development. They believed that their new economic structure would work better for Jews, for Palestinian Arabs, and for the land as a whole.

On the other hand, the model of a separate economy eliminated Palestinian Arabs from the picture. With Arabs no longer essential as workers, the Zionist movement began to imagine a more fully Jewish project, which would build an all-Jewish model society from scratch.

This thinking, though rooted in progressive values, introduced new challenges and conflicts. The Second and Third Aliyot, Zionists from the Russian empire, were strongly influenced by the idea that national identity was rooted in Hebrew. Palestine is a small region of land that has played a prominent role in the ancient and modern history of the Middle East. The history of Palestine has been marked by frequent political conflict and violent land seizures because of its importance to several major world On October 6, , hoping to win back territory lost to Israel during the third Arab-Israeli war, in , Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Taking the Israeli Defense Forces by The long-term effects of the Balfour Declaration, and the British The Oslo Accords were a landmark moment in the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. Actually a set of two separate agreements signed by the government of Israel and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO —the militant organization established in to Over time, the PLO has embraced a broader role, claiming to Following years of diplomatic friction and skirmishes between Israel and its neighbors, Israel Defense Forces launched preemptive air strikes that Syria is home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with a rich artistic and cultural heritage.

From its ancient roots to its recent political instability and the Syrian Civil War, the country has a complex and, at times, tumultuous history. Ancient Syria Live TV. This Day In History.