UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST:
History, Religion, and the Clash of Cultures
400 pages
Copyright © 2007 by Beechmont Crest Publishing
First edition, 2007
0-9748330-6-1
C H A P T E R 6:
Zionism and the Modern State of Israel
The birth of the Zionist movement
Zionism arose as a reaction to the virulent anti-Semitism of nineteenth century Europe. As is often the case with new political and social movements, Zionism began with a series of written manifestoes. In 1862, Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem called for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Two decades later, Leo Pinsker, a Russian Jew, asserted in Auto-Emancipation (1881) that Europe’s Jews should organize and take bold actions to found their own homeland. Pinsker’s book inspired the formation of Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion): a group dedicated to Hebrew education, and the revival of the now dispersed Jewish nation.
There were only about 25,000 Jews in Palestine at the end of the 1870s. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing through World War II, European Jews began arriving in Palestine in a series of migrations called aliyahs. These migrations multiplied the Jewish population in Palestine, leading to conflict with local Arabs—and eventual Israeli statehood. The First Aliyah (1882-1903) was an influx of more than 35,000 Jews, mostly from Russia. Jewish immigrants of this aliyah established agricultural communities in Palestine: Rishon le-Ziyyon, near Tel Aviv, and Zikhron, near Haifa.
Meanwhile, successive Jewish writers and activists in Europe refined the ideas of Zionism. One of the most influential of these was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904). Herzl was a reporter for the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. He covered the Paris trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer who was falsely accused of treason. Herzl was disturbed not only by the anti-Semitic overtones of the Dreyfus trial, but by the rampant anti-Semitism he saw throughout French society.
In 1896, Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). The book described anti-Semitism as an inevitable fact of life for Jews living in Europe. It reinforced a central idea first proposed by Hess and Pinsker: that a Jewish state was absolutely necessary given the conditions in Europe:
“The nations in whose midst Jews live are all, either overtly or covertly, anti-Semitic….Everything tends to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly articulated in that Berlin phrase, Juden raus! (‘Out with the Jews!’)…Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation. The rest we shall manage for ourselves.”
-Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
