What is Zionism?
From biblical times to the present, Jews and Judaism have had an unbroken connection to Zion, a reference to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, derived from the hill at the heart of Jerusalem. Zionism was and remains the Jewish quest to have and sustain a Jewish state in Jews’ ancient land. Zionism is Jewish nationalism.
A relatively small number of Jews who decided to control their own futures by seeking, making and keeping a state wrote the story of modern Israel. Linking people to the land and building an infrastructure for a state are the story of modern Zionism, the story of Israel’s establishment.
The key outline for re-establishing the modern State of Israel is found in Theodor Herzl’s answer to “the Jewish Question” in The Jewish State. The Balfour Declaration and Israel’s Declaration of Independence are the other basic documents that chronicle the half-century effort to re-establish a Jewish territory in the ancestral Jewish homeland.
For the origins of Zionism before the late 19th century, we suggest the 1906 entry on “Zionism” in The Jewish Encyclopedia. For an excellent, brief review of Zionism in the years after the state’s establishment, we recommend “The Zionist Movement,” which includes the history of Palestine, in the Israel Yearbook, 1950-51.
To understand how the Zionists connected Jewish immigration to land purchased in Palestine, we present Forming a Nucleus for the Jewish State (also in Hebrew and Spanish).
For a video overview of the connection among the Jewish people, the Land of Israel and a Jewish state, watch or listen to CIE President Ken Stein’s 33-minute presentation on “Jewish Peoplehood, Zionism and State Building.”
The 19th century plan to build a Jewish state required a population and a place, which was Eretz Yisrael, the Holy Land, called Palestine by the Great Powers after World War I. As for the population, Jewish identity, antisemitism and the failure to find civic equality in Europe catalyzed Jewish immigration to democratic settings and support for the option to build a Jewish state. The Jewish population in Palestine increased from 25,000 in 1882 to 600,000 in 1948, with 400,000 Jews in Palestine by 1940. Jewish land ownership grew from 450,000 dunams (a dunam was a quarter of an acre) to 1.4 million dunams in 1940 and 2 million by January 1948.
The pace of physical and demographic growth over that nearly 70-year period was steady but uneven. Charting the geographic placement of the 315 Jewish settlements built in that period unfolds the footprint for the state and provides an easy visual explanation for the United Nations’ proposed borders for the Jewish and Arab states in its 1947 partition plan.
Documents
Biblical Covenants
Liturgical References to Zion and Jerusalem
1893 Andrew D. White on the wretched Jewish Situation in Russia
1896 Herzl – The Jewish Question and the Plan for the Jewish State
1897 Max Nordau, Addresses the First Zionist Congress, Basel, Switzerland
1906 “Zionism.” In The Jewish Encyclopedia
1917 The Balfour Declaration
1922 League of Nations – International Legitimacy granted for creating a Jewish National Home
1938 Chaim Weizmann Rallying World Jewry to Partition of Palestine – two states
1941 David Ben-Gurion – Outlines a Jewish state at end of current war
1942 David Ben-Gurion, The Biltmore Address – a Jewish state is at hand
1944 British High Commissioner Stanley suggests division of Palestine into two states is a viable solution to communal unrest
1948 Israel Declaration of Independence
1949 Admission of Israel to the United Nations
1950 Israel’s Law of Return