Eurasia Press & News
Zionism
The term Zionism is derived from the word Zion that in the Hebrew language and cultural-historical tradition of the Jews refers to the citadel (acropolis) of the city of Jerusalem as well as to the Kingdom of Heaven. From the matter of politics, Zionism refers to the political-national movement of the European Jews in the very late 19th century for the very purpose to re-create a Jewish homeland in the form of a nation-state in the Middle East – Israel.[1]
This Zionist movement was to a great extent expressed as a consequence of the European (mostly West European) anti-Semitic (better to say anti-Judaic) sentiments and politics that the (West) European Jews were experiencing for centuries.[2] Zionism as a political-national movement was formally initiated by Theodor Herzl (1860−1904) at the World’s Zionist Conference in Basle (Switzerland) or the First World’s Zionist Congress held from August 29 to 31st, 1897 attended by 208 delegates and 26 representatives of the press.[3]
Th. Herzl was born in Budapest. He was an assimilated Jew who became a journalist in Vienna and was the Paris correspondent of the newspaper Neu Freie Presse in 1891−1895. The Dreyfus Affair which started in December 1894 found his interest in anti-Semitism and how to solve the Jewish Question. He published the book in German Der Judenstaat in 1896 in which he claimed that the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine can be the only effective response to centuries of European anti-Semitism. He devoted the rest of his life to the propagation and realization of this idea and for that purpose, he established the World’s Zionist Organization (the WZO), which was convened at the First World’s Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897.
From the end of the 19th century onward, (basically after 1897) there have been organized attempts to persuade the European Jews to emigrate to the Land of Israel or known as Palestine. However, it was not at first unquestioned that the Jewish nation-state had to be in Palestine exactly. For example, Chaim Weizmann (1874−1952) who became the first Israeli President, was quite influential in the process of creating this political task. He became very much encouraged by the declaration of the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour (the Balfour Declaration) in the form of the letter sent on November 2nd, 1917 to Lord Rothschild as the UK favored the establishment of a Jewish nation-state exactly in Palestine/Israel. After WWI, the European Jews continued to emigrate to Palestine in rather small numbers and, therefore, the Jewish state of Israel might have been for a very long time away to be established if not happened the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945, which, in fact, morally gave the legitimization to the idea of Israel to Jews and non-Jews (the Palestinians) alike as the only solution where the Jews might feel safe from the persecutions and exterminations.[4]
The 1917 Balfour Declaration
The 1917 Balfour Declaration is the name given to the UK’s pledge to support the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine. It was contained in a letter of November 2nd, 1917 from Arthur James, 1st Earl Balfour and Viscount Traprain (1848−1930) to the chief British Zionist, Lord Rothschild. The declaration is considered to be one of the most significant and influential Zionist documents ever written. In fact, the letter-declaration urged that the Jewish nation-state had to be established in Palestine without any prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish people, i.e. the Muslim Arabs or the Palestinians as known today. Nevertheless, this statement from the letter represented a crucial contradiction in the UK’s policy for the very reason at the same time London had pledged to recognize the leaders of the Arab uprising as the rulers of Palestine which at that time was part of the Ottoman Sultanate.
The Balfour Declaration was, however, confirmed by the Allies, and became the foundation of the British Mandate for Palestine that was given by the League of Nations in 1920. The roots of the future political problems of the UK in the Middle East were subsequent attempts by London to reconcile the Balfour Declaration with promises to the Arab Palestinians. Lord Balfour was at the time of issuing declaration the UK’s Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet. Later, he was a prominent British representative at the Paris Peace Conference after WWI and a participant in the 1921−1922 Washington Conference. As Lord President of the Council from 1925 to 1929, he was a very strong supporter of the concept of dominion status, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 owed much to him.
Establishment of the Zionist Israel
The very idea of returning the Jews to Palestine, wherefrom they became dispersed throughout Europe and Asia since 70 A.D., had been alive in some form for many centuries of their almost 2.000 years of the diaspora (from 70 to 1948). The idea became seriously revived at the very end of the 19th century as modern Zionism, in response to a revived wave of pogroms in East Europe followed by anti-Semitism in West Europe, especially in France after the Dreyfus Affair[5] but in Germany and Austria-Hungary too. The founder of modern Zionism, Th. Herzl claimed that peaceful and harmonious coexistence between the Jews and non-Jews already was proven impossible and therefore, the Jews could only be free from discrimination, persecution, and pogroms in their national state – Israel in Palestine.
Zionism as the movement and political program achieved finally its fundamental task in May 1948 when Israel as the Jewish nation-state was established which recognized in its Law of Return the right of all Jews to live in Israel. From that time onward, Zionism is understood as a reference for support for the continued existence of the state of Israel.[6]
Undoubtedly, Zionism was an ideological-political form of Jewish nationalism and was recognized as such by the OUN. However, like many different forms and expressions of nationalism across the globe, Zionism historically was tolerating very deep ideological diversity as, for instance, it is possible to be a religious or secular Zionist and to believe either in capitalism or socialism in Zionist Israel.[7]
After the First World’s Zionist Congress in 1897, many Jews began to emigrate to Palestine. At the same time, the WZO was working to convince the world’s opinion and influential politicians of the very necessity of the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. However, Palestine was already occupied when the Jewish emigration and settlement began but populated by Arab people, the Palestinians for centuries. They have been, for the most part, forced into exile by a form of settlement that became, in fact, a military conquest.
In essence, it is a very problematic question of the Zionist-Jewish legitimacy of a national claim to the land which dates back to a dispersion of the Jews in 70 A.D. under the Roman Empire. However, there are historians who have even claimed that the European Jews are not, or at least for the most part of them, descended from the Jews of Palestine, who btw have not been the original inhabitants of the land. They claim that most European Jews were originating from Caucasus tribes who converted to Judaism under the Late Roman Empire.[8]
In 1917 the WZO urged the Government of the UK to set up a Jewish Legion which helped rid Palestine of the Ottoman administration. The Jewish Legion was, in fact, a number of military units formed in 1917 to assist the British to expel the Ottoman authorities from the “Promised Land”. One battalion was recruited in the UK, another in the USA, and others in Egypt and Palestine, joining Allenby in his advance into the Ottoman Sultanate.[9] After WWI, many of the members of the Jewish Legion, like Ben-Gurion and Eshkol, proceeded to form the Haganah (Defense) – A Jewish defense force in Palestine established in 1920 as a secret organization for the very purpose to defend Jewish settlements from the Arabs. Nevertheless, the Haganah was very soon accepted and used by the British authorities in Palestine as an auxiliary police force which was under the control of the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut). During the Arab-Jewish clashes in 1936−1939, it acquired a General Staff and developed close cooperation with the Jewish Agency.[10] In WWII, the Haganah contributed to the British 8th Army, but, however, was as well as involved in organizing illegal Jewish immigration from Europe. The organization condemned the terrorist activities against the Brits and Arabs by Stern Gang and Irgun, and when the Brits have been preparing to leave Palestine in 1947, the Haganah took on the defense of Jewish Palestine against the Arab troops committing at the same time and war crimes but, in essence, it formed the foundations of the army of the new state of Israel.[11]
When the Balfour Declaration to establish an independent Jewish state of Israel failed after WWI, the Zionist WZO was working further on the Jewish emigration into Palestine and succeeded to win from the local British authorities extremely important concessions related to the self-administration via the Jewish Agency. In the beginning, the newly arrived Jewish settlers lived peacefully with the genuine Arab population but soon, as the Jewish influx continued, the Arabs started with sporadic attacks against the Jewish immigrants. Tensions between the Arabs, the Jewish immigrants, and the British administration in Palestine arose in the 1940s when around 100.000 new Jewish settlers illegally arrived in Palestine.
Finally, in 1947 it was clear that the UK cannot solve the Palestinian problem in the form of its promise to create independent states for both Jews and Arabs and, therefore, returned its mandate to the OUN, which recommended the partition of Palestine between the Jews and genuine Arabs. Formally, on the foundation of such UN’s plan, a Zionist Ben-Gurion[12] issued a declaration of Israel’s independence on May 14th, 1948 (the Nakba Day for the Arabs) on the day of British withdrawal. The greater portion of Palestine became the Jewish state of Zionist Israel, most of the rest was amalgamated with Transjordan to become Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt. During and after the fighting in 1948, around 70% of the Arab Palestinians left their homes and became refugees in Jordan, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.[13] Nevertheless, today, the overwhelming number of Israeli Jews are descendants of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 differently to all Arab-Palestinians who are native of Palestine.[14]
