   #copyright

Zionism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People;
Religious movements, traditions and organizations

   State of Israel
                      Geography

   Land of Israel · Districts · Cities
   Transportation · Mediterranean
   Dead Sea · Red Sea · Sea of Galilee
   Jerusalem · Tel Aviv · Haifa
                       History

   Jewish history · Timeline · Zionism · Aliyah
   Herzl · Balfour · Mandate · 1947 UN Plan
   Independence · Flag · Austerity · Refugees
          Arab-Israeli conflict · Proposals

   1948 War · 1949 Armistice · Suez War
   Six-Day War · Attrition War
   Yom Kippur War · Lebanon War
   Israel-Lebanon conflict
   Peace treaties with: Egypt, Jordan
            Israeli-Palestinian conflict

   Timeline · Peace process · Peace camp
   1st Intifada · Oslo · 2nd Intifada
   Terrorism · Barrier · Disengagement
                       Economy

   Science & technology · Companies
   Tourism · Wine · Diamonds
   Military industry
               Demographics · Culture

   Religion · Israeli Arabs · Kibbutz
   Music · Archaeology · Universities
   Hebrew · Literature · Sport · Israelis
                   Laws · Politics

   Law of Return · Jerusalem Law
   Parties · Elections · PM · President
   Knesset · Supreme Court · Courts
                   Foreign affairs

   Intl. Law · UN · US · Arab League
                   Security Forces

   Israel Defense Forces
   Intelligence Community · Security Council
   Police · Border Police · Prison Service

   Portal:Israel

   Zionism is a political movement that supports a homeland for the Jewish
   people in the Land of Israel, where Jewish nationhood is thought to
   have evolved somewhere between 1200 BCE and late Second Temple times,
   and where Jewish kingdoms existed up to the 2nd century CE.

   Zionism is defined as "an international movement originally for the
   establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine
   and later for the support of modern Israel." It has been described as a
   diaspora nationalism. Its proponents regard it as a national liberation
   movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people.

   While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the
   Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was mainly
   secular, beginning largely as a response to rampant antisemitism in
   Europe during the 19th century. At first one of several Jewish
   political movements offering alternative responses to the position of
   Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support. The Holocaust
   accelerated Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and ultimate
   creation of the State of Israel. On May 14, 1948, the Declaration of
   the Establishment of the State of Israel stated: "In the year 5657
   (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State,
   Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the
   right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country."

Terminology

   The word "Zionism" itself derived from the word " Zion" (Hebrew: ציון,
   Tziyyon), one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible.

   It was coined as a term for Jewish nationalism by Austrian Jewish
   publisher Nathan Birnbaum in his journal Self Emancipation in 1890.

   Since the founding of the State of Israel, the term "Zionism" is
   generally considered to mean support for Israel as a Jewish nation
   state. However, a variety of different, and sometimes competing,
   ideologies that support Israel fit under the general category of
   Zionism, such as Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and Labor
   Zionism. Thus, the term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to
   the programs of these ideologies, such as efforts to encourage Jewish
   emigration to Israel. The term Zionism is also sometimes used
   retroactively to describe the millennia-old Biblical connection between
   the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, which existed long before the
   birth of the modern Zionist movement.

   Certain individuals and groups have used the term "Zionism" as a
   pejorative to justify attacks on Israel. In some cases, the label
   "Zionist" is also used as a euphemism for Jews in general by apologists
   for anti-Semitism. A historian of Zionism Walter Laqueur wrote in 2006:

     "... behind the cover of "anti-Zionism" lurks a variety of motives
     that ought to be called by their true name. When, in the 1950s under
     Stalin, the Jews of the Soviet Union came under severe attack and
     scores were executed, it was under the banner of anti-Zionism rather
     than anti-Semitism, which had been given a bad name by Adolf Hitler.
     When in later years the policy of Israeli governments was attacked
     as racist or colonialist in various parts of the world, the basis of
     the criticism was quite often the belief that Israel had no right to
     exist in the first place, not opposition to specific policies of the
     Israeli government. Traditional anti-Semitism has gone out of
     fashion in the West except on the extreme right. But something we
     might call post-anti-Semitism has taken its place. It is less
     violent in its aims, but still very real. By and large it has not
     been too difficult to differentiate between genuine and bogus
     anti-Zionism. The test is twofold. It is almost always clear whether
     the attacks are directed against a specific policy carried out by an
     Israeli government (for instance, as an occupying power) or against
     the existence of Israel. Secondly, there is the test of selectivity.
     If from all the evils besetting the world, the misdeeds, real or
     imaginary, of Zionism are singled out and given constant and
     relentless publicity, it can be taken for granted that the true
     motive is not anti-Zionism but something different and more
     sweeping."

   Zionism should be distinguished from Territorialism which was a Jewish
   nationalist movement calling for a Jewish homeland, but not necessarily
   in Palestine. During the early history of Zionism, a number of
   proposals were made for settling Jews outside of Europe but these all
   ultimately were rejected or failed. The debate over these proposals
   helped define the nature and focus of the Zionist movement.

Historical background

   The desire of Jews to return to their ancestral homeland has remained a
   universal Jewish theme since the defeat of the Great Jewish Revolt, and
   the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in the year 70, the
   later defeat of Bar Kokhba's revolt in 135, and the dispersal of the
   Jews to other parts of the Empire that followed. (During the
   Hellenistic Age many Jews had decided to leave Palestine to live in
   other parts of the Mediterranean basin by their own free will; famous
   figures associated with these migrations include, for example, Philo of
   Alexandria). Due to the disastrous results of the revolt, what had been
   a human-driven movement to regain national sovereignty based on
   religious inspiration, became, after centuries of broken hopes
   associated with one "false messiah" after another, a movement in which
   much of the human element of messianic deliverance had been replaced by
   a trust in Divine providence. Although Jewish nationalism in ancient
   times had always had religious connotations—from the Maccabean Revolt
   to the various Jewish revolts during Roman rule, and even during the
   Medieval period when intermittently national hopes were incarnated in
   the " false messianism" of Shabbatai Zvi,—it was not until the rise of
   ideological and political Zionism and its renewed belief in human-based
   action toward Jewish national aspirations that the notion of returning
   to the homeland once again became widespread among the Jewish people.

   Jews lived continuously in the Land of Israel even after the Bar
   Kokhba's revolt, and indeed there is much historical evidence of
   vibrant communities there continually throughout the past two
   millennia. For example, the Jerusalem Talmud was created in the
   centuries following that revolt. The inventor of Hebrew vowel-signs in
   the 5th century lived in a Jewish community in Palestine; and so forth.
   The slow and gradual decline of the Palestinian Jews occurred across a
   period of several centuries, and can be attributed to Hadrian's
   crushing of Bar Kokhba's revolt, the Arab conquest of Palestine in the
   600s, the Crusader wars in the 11th century and beyond, and the
   inefficiencies of the Ottoman Empire from the 15th century on, by which
   time the land had greatly decreased in fertility and its economy was
   virtually nil.

   Despite this decline, several proto-Zionist movements over the
   centuries saw the revival of particular Jewish communities, such as the
   medieval community of Safed, the population of which was bolstered by
   Jews fleeing Christian persecution following the Reconquista of
   Al-Andalus (the Muslim name of the Iberian peninsula). In Portugal
   during this period, Jews were expelled by Manuel I or forced to convert
   to Christianity, — a policy that created the Marrano Jews, from which
   Spinoza came. According to chronicler Jerónimo Osório, this followed
   the enslavement and partial expulsion of Jewish refugees from Spain
   during the reign of John II. The persecution of those with Jewish
   blood, no matter what faith, continued in Portugal untill well into the
   eighteenth century. In 1536, John III established the Portuguese
   Inquisition, mirroring the more famous Spanish Inquisition, which
   imposed the limpieza de sangre doctrine, breaking away with the Caliph
   of Córdoba's tolerance.

Aliyah and the ingathering of the exiles

   Return to the Land of Israel had remained a recurring theme among
   generations of diaspora Jews, particularly in Passover and Yom Kippur
   prayers which traditionally concluded with, "Next year in Jerusalem",
   and in the thrice-daily Amidah (Standing prayer).

   Aliyah (immigration to Israel) has always been considered to be a
   praiseworthy act for Jews according to Jewish law, and is included as a
   commandment in most versions of the 613 commandments. Although not
   found in the version of Maimonides, his other writings indicate that he
   considered return to the Land of Israel a matter of extreme importance
   for Jews. From the Middle Ages and onwards, a number of famous Jews
   (and often their followers) immigrated to the Land of Israel. These
   included Nahmanides, Yechiel of Paris with several hundred of his
   students, Yosef Karo, Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and 300 of his
   followers, and over 500 disciples (and their families) of the Vilna
   Gaon known as Perushim, among others.

Establishment of the Zionist movement

Proto-Zionism

   The Haskala of Jews in European countries in the 18th and 19th
   centuries following the French Revolution, and the spread of western
   liberal ideas among a section of newly emancipated Jews, created for
   the first time a class of secular Jews who absorbed the prevailing
   ideas of rationalism, romanticism and, most importantly, nationalism.
   Jews who had abandoned Judaism, at least in its traditional forms,
   began to develop a new Jewish identity, as a "nation" in the European
   sense. They were inspired by various national struggles, such as those
   for German and Italian unification, and for Polish and Hungarian
   independence. If Italians and Poles were entitled to a homeland, they
   asked, why were Jews not so entitled?
   1844 Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews by Mordecai Noah, page
   one. The second page shows the map of the Land of Israel
   Enlarge
   1844 Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews by Mordecai Noah, page
   one. The second page shows the map of the Land of Israel

   A precursor to the Zionist movement of the later 1800s occurred with
   the 1820 attempt by journalist, playwright and American-born diplomat
   Mordecai Manuel Noah to establish a Jewish homeland on Grand Island,
   New York, (north of Buffalo, New York, USA). In 1840s, Noah advocated
   the "Restoration of the Jews" in the Land of Israel.

Rise of modern political Zionism

   Before the 1890s there had already been attempts to settle Jews in
   Palestine, which was in the 19th century a part of the Ottoman Empire,
   inhabited (in 1890) by about 520,000 people, mostly Muslims and
   Christian Arabs—but including 20-25,000 Jews. Pogroms in the Russian
   Empire led Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and the
   Rothschilds to sponsor agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in
   Palestine in the late 1870s, culminating in a small group of immigrants
   from Russia arriving in the country in 1882. This has become known in
   Zionist history as the First Aliyah. Aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning
   "ascent," referring to the act of spiritually "ascending" to the Holy
   Land.

   While Zionism is based heavily upon Jewish religious tradition linking
   the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was mainly
   secular, beginning largely as a response to rampant anti-Semitism in
   late 19th century Europe.

   Moses Hess's 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question
   argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the
   national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews
   would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil"
   that would transform the Jewish community into a true nation in that
   Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an
   intermediary non-productive merchant class, which is how he perceived
   European Jews. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and
   Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of Socialist Zionism and Labour
   Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement.

   In the same year 1862, German Orthodox Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer
   published his tractate Derishat Zion, positing that the salvation of
   the Jews, promised by the Prophets, can come about only by self-help.
   His ideas contributed to the Religious Zionism movement.
   Auto-Emancipation by J.L. Pinsker, 1882
   Enlarge
   Auto-Emancipation by J.L. Pinsker, 1882

   Early Zionist groups such as Hibbat Zion were active in the 1880s in
   the Eastern Europe where emancipation had not occurred to the extent it
   did in Western Europe (or at all). The massive anti-Jewish pogroms
   following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II made emancipation seem
   more elusive than ever, and influenced Judah Leib Pinsker to publish
   the pamphlet Auto-Emancipation in 1882. In 1890, the "Society for the
   Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Eretz Israel"
   (better known as the Odessa Committee) was officially registered as a
   charitable organization in the Russian Empire and by 1897 it counted
   over 4,000 members.

   American Protestant Christian Zionists such as William Eugene
   Blackstone also pursued the Zionist ideal during late 19th century,
   especially in the American Blackstone Memorial (1891).

                               T. Herzl and his 1896 book The Jewish State

   A key event said to trigger the modern Zionist movement was the Dreyfus
   Affair, which erupted in France in 1894. Jews were profoundly shocked
   to see this outbreak of anti-Semitism in a country which they thought
   of as the home of enlightenment and liberty. Among those who witnessed
   the Affair was an Austro-Hungarian (born in Budapest, lived in Vienna)
   Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, who published his pamphlet Der
   Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896 and described the Affair as a
   turning point—prior to the Affair, Herzl had been anti-Zionist,
   afterwards he became ardently pro-Zionist. In 1897 Herzl organised the
   First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which founded the World
   Zionist Organisation (WZO) and elected Herzl as its first President.

Agricultural settlements

   The first aliyah: Biluim used to wear the traditional Arab headdress,
   the kaffiyeh
   Enlarge
   The first aliyah: Biluim used to wear the traditional Arab headdress,
   the kaffiyeh

   Founded in 1878, Petah Tikva was the first Zionist settlement. It was
   inhabited by former residents of Jerusalem hoping to escape the cramped
   quarters of Jerusalem's Old City walls.

   Rishon LeZion was founded on 31 July 1882 by a group of ten members of
   the Zionist group Hovevei Zion from Kharkov (today's Ukraine). Led by
   Zalman David Levontin, they purchased 835 acres (3.4 km²) of land for
   this purpose near an Arab village named Uyun Qara. The land was owned
   by Tzvi Leventine and was purchased by the "Pioneers of Jewish
   Settlement Committee" that was formed in Jaffa, the port of arrival for
   many of the immigrants to the area.

Early Zionist initiatives

   In 1883, Nathan Birnbaum, nineteen years old, founded Kadimah, the
   first Jewish Students Association in Vienna. In 1884 the first issue of
   Selbstemanzipation or Self Emancipation appeared, completely made by
   Nathan Birnbaum himself.
   Theodor Herzl addresses the Second Zionist Congress in 1898.
   Enlarge
   Theodor Herzl addresses the Second Zionist Congress in 1898.

   Together with Nathan Birnbaum, Herzl planned the first Zionist Congress
   in Basel. During the congress, the following agreement was reached:

     Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in
     Eretz-Israel secured under public law. The Congress contemplates the
     following means to the attainment of this end:
     * The promotion by appropriate means of the settlement in
       Eretz-Israel of Jewish farmers, artisans, and manufacturers.
     * The organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of
       appropriate institutions, both local and international, in
       accordance with the laws of each country.
     * The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and
       national consciousness.
     * Preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments,
       where necessary, in order to reach the goals of Zionism.

   After the First Zionist Congress, the World Zionist Organization met
   every year first four years, later they gathered every second year till
   the Second World War. After the war the Congress met every four years
   until present time.

   The WZO's initial strategy was to obtain permission of the Ottoman
   Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II to allow systematic Jewish settlement in
   Palestine. The good offices of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, were
   sought, but nothing came of this. Instead, the WZO pursued a strategy
   of building a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration, and
   the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund in 1901 and the
   Anglo-Palestine Bank in 1903.

Alternative proposals

   Before 1917 some Zionist leaders took seriously proposals for Jewish
   homelands in places other than Palestine. Herzl's Der Judenstaat argued
   for a Jewish state in either Palestine, "our ever-memorable historic
   home", or Argentina, "one of the most fertile countries in the world".
   In 1903 British cabinet ministers suggested the British Uganda Program,
   land for a Jewish state in "Uganda" (in today's Kenya). Herzl initially
   rejected the idea, preferring Palestine, but after the April 1903
   Kishinev pogrom Herzl introduced a controversial proposal to the Sixth
   Zionist Congress to investigate the offer as a temporary measure for
   Russian Jews in danger. Notwithstanding its emergency and temporary
   nature, the proposal still proved very divisive, and widespread
   opposition to the plan was fueled by a walkout led by the Russian
   Jewish delegation to the Congress. Nevertheless, a majority voted to
   establish a committee for the investigation of the possibility, and it
   was not dismissed until the 7th Zionist Congress in 1905.

   In response to this, the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) led
   by Israel Zangwill split off from the main Zionist movement. The
   territorialists attempted to establish a Jewish homeland wherever
   possible, but went into decline after 1917 and the ITO was dissolved in
   1925. From that time Palestine was the sole focus of Zionist
   aspirations. In 1928, the Soviet Union established a Jewish Autonomous
   Oblast in the Russian Far East but the effort failed to meet
   expectations and as of 2002 Jews constitute only about 1.2% of its
   population.

New Jewish mentality

   One of the major motivations for Zionism was the belief that the Jews
   needed to return to their historic homeland, not just as a refuge from
   anti-Semitism, but also to govern themselves as an independent nation.
   Some Zionists, mainly socialist Zionists, believed that the Jews'
   centuries of being oppressed in anti-Semitic societies had reduced Jews
   to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence which invited further
   anti-Semitism. They argued that Jews should redeem themselves from
   their history by becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country
   of their own. These socialist Zionists generally rejected religion as
   perpetuating a " Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people.

   One such Zionist ideologue, Ber Borochov, continuing from the work of
   Moses Hess, proposed the creation of a socialist society that would
   correct the "inverted pyramid" of Jewish society. Borochov believed
   that Jews were forced out of normal occupations by Gentile hostility
   and competition, using this dynamic to explain the relative
   predominance of Jewish professionals, rather than workers. Jewish
   society, he argued, would not be healthy until the inverted pyramid was
   righted, and the majority of Jews became workers and peasants again.
   This, he held, could only be accomplished by Jews in their own country.
   Another Zionist thinker, A. D. Gordon, was influenced by the völkisch
   ideas of European romantic nationalism, and proposed establishing a
   society of Jewish peasants. Gordon made a religion of work. These two
   figures, and others like them, motivated the establishment of the first
   Jewish collective settlement, or kibbutz, Degania, on the southern
   shore of the Sea of Galilee, in 1909 (the same year that the city of
   Tel Aviv was established). Deganiah, and many other kibbutzim that were
   soon to follow, attempted to realise these thinkers' vision by creating
   a communal villages, where newly arrived European Jews would be taught
   agriculture and other manual skills.
   Tel Aviv, its name taken from a work by Theodor Herzl, was founded by
   Zionists on empty dunes north of Jaffa. This photograph is of the
   auction of the first lots in 1909.
   Enlarge
   Tel Aviv, its name taken from a work by Theodor Herzl, was founded by
   Zionists on empty dunes north of Jaffa. This photograph is of the
   auction of the first lots in 1909.

   Another aspect of this strategy was the revival and fostering of an
   "indigenous" Jewish culture and the Hebrew language. One early Zionist
   thinker, Asher Ginsberg, better known by his penname Ahad Ha'am ("One
   of the People") rejected what he regarded as the over-emphasis of
   political Zionism on statehood, at the expense of the revival of Hebrew
   culture. Ahad Ha'am recognised that the effort to achieve independence
   in Palestine would bring Jews into conflict with the native Palestinian
   Arab population, as well as with the Ottomans and European colonial
   powers then eying the country. Instead, he proposed that the emphasis
   of the Zionist movement shift to efforts to revive the Hebrew language
   and create a new culture, free from Diaspora influences, that would
   unite Jews and serve as a common denominator between diverse Jewish
   communities once independence was achieved.

   The most prominent follower of this idea was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a
   linguist intent on reviving Hebrew as a spoken language among Jews (see
   History of the Hebrew language). Most European Jews in the 19th century
   spoke Yiddish, a language based on mediaeval German, but as of the
   1880s, Ben Yehuda and his supporters began promoting the use and
   teaching of a modernised form of biblical Hebrew, which had not been a
   living language for nearly 2,000 years. Despite Herzl's efforts to have
   German proclaimed the official language of the Zionist movement, the
   use of Hebrew was adopted as official policy by Zionist organisations
   in Palestine, and served as an important unifying force among the
   Jewish settlers, many of whom also took new Hebrew names.

   The development of the first modern Hebrew-speaking city (Tel Aviv),
   the kibbutz movement, and other Jewish economic institutions, plus the
   use of Hebrew, began by the 1920s to lay the foundations of a new
   nationality, which would come into formal existence in 1948. Meanwhile,
   other cultural Zionists attempted to create new Jewish artforms,
   including graphic arts. ( Boris Schatz, a Bulgarian artist, founded the
   Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1906.) Others, such
   as dancer and artist Baruch Agadati, fostered popular festivals such as
   the Adloyada carnival on Purim.

British influence

   Ideas of the restoration of the Jews in the Land of Israel entered the
   British public discourse in the 19th century. Not all such attitudes
   were favorable towards the Jews; they were shaped in part by a variety
   of Protestant beliefs, or by a streak of philo-Semitism among the
   classically educated British elite, or by hopes to extend the Empire.
   (See The Great Game)

   At the urging of Lord Shaftesbury, Britain established a consulate in
   Jerusalem in 1838, the first diplomatic appointment in the Land of
   Israel. In 1839, the Church of Scotland sent Andrew Bonar and Robert
   Murray M'Cheyne to report on the condition of the Jews in their land.
   Their report was widely published and was followed by a "Memorandum to
   Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to
   Palestine." In August 1840, The Times reported that the British
   government was considering Jewish restoration.

   Lord Lindsay wrote in 1847: "The soil of Palestine still enjoys her
   sabbaths, and only waits for the return of her banished children, and
   the application of industry, commensurate with her agricultural
   capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all
   that she ever was in the days of Solomon." The Treaty of Paris (1856)
   granted Jews and Christians the right to settle in Palestine and opened
   the doors for Jewish immigration. In her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda,
   George Eliot advocated "the restoration of a Jewish state planted in
   the old ground as a centre of a national feeling, a source of
   dignifying protection, a special channel for special energies and an
   added voice in the councils of the world."

   Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his article entitled "The Jewish Question is
   the Oriental Quest" (1877) that within fifty years a nation of one
   million Jews would reside in Palestine under the guidance of the
   British. Moses Montefiore visited the Land of Israel seven times and
   fostered its development.

   Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire allowed the British place missions
   in the region and to institute charitable projects such as hospitals,
   settlement colonies and exploratory surveys and by the end of the 19th
   century, British interest in the Middle East increased because it was
   considered essential to guard the route to India.

   The Zionist leaders always saw Britain as a key potential ally in the
   struggle for a Jewish homeland. Not only was Britain the world's
   greatest imperial power; it was also a country where Jews had lived for
   centuries in relative peace and security — among them influential
   political and cultural leaders such as Disraeli, Montefiore and Lord
   Rothschild.

   Chaim Weizmann's invention of cordite was critical for the Allies of
   World War I. In his meetings with the British Prime Minister Lloyd
   George and the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Weizmann,
   the leader of the Zionist movement since 1904, was able to advance the
   Zionist cause for which the war had created new prospects.

   This hope was realised in 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary,
   Arthur Balfour, made his famous Declaration in favour of "the
   establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people".
   The Declaration used the word "home" rather than "state," and specified
   that its establishment must not "prejudice the civil and religious
   rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Jewish attitudes to Zionism before the founding of Israel

   Poster from the Zionist Tarbut schools of Poland in the 1930s. Zionist
   parties were very active in Polish politics. In the 1922 Polish
   elections, Zionists held 24 seats of a total of 35 Jewish parliament
   members.
   Enlarge
   Poster from the Zionist Tarbut schools of Poland in the 1930s. Zionist
   parties were very active in Polish politics. In the 1922 Polish
   elections, Zionists held 24 seats of a total of 35 Jewish parliament
   members.

   The chain of events between 1881 and 1945, beginning with waves of
   anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and the Russian-controlled areas of
   Poland, and culminating in the Holocaust, converted the great majority
   of surviving Jews to the belief that a Jewish homeland was an urgent
   necessity, particularly given the large population of disenfranchised
   Jewish refugees after World War II. Most also became convinced that the
   Land of Israel was the only location that was both acceptable to all
   strands of Jewish thought and within the realms of practical
   possibility. This led to the great majority of Jews supporting the
   struggle between 1945 and 1948 to establish the State of Israel, though
   many did not condone violent tactics used by some Zionist groups.

Opposition or ambivalence

   Initially, support for political Zionism was not a mainstream position
   in the Jewish communities scattered around the world. The secular,
   socialist language used by many pioneer Zionists was contrary to the
   outlook of most religious Jewish communities, and many religious
   organisations opposed it, both on the grounds that it was a secular
   movement, and on the grounds that any attempt to re-establish Jewish
   rule in Israel by human agency was blasphemous, since (in their view)
   only the Messiah could accomplish this.

   While traditional Jewish belief held that the Land of Israel was given
   to the ancient Israelites by God, and that therefore the right of the
   Jews to that land was permanent and inalienable, most Orthodox groups
   held that the Messiah must appear before Israel could return to Jewish
   control. Prior to the Holocaust, Reform Judaism explicitly rejected
   Zionism.

   When the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, Edwin Montagu, the
   only Jew in the British Cabinet, "was passionately opposed to the
   declaration on the grounds that (a) it was a capitulation to
   anti-Semitic bigotry, with its suggestion that Palestine was the
   natural destination of the Jews, and that (b) it would be a grave cause
   of alarm to the Muslim world."

   Haredi Jewish opinion was overwhelmingly negative, with several Hasidic
   groups calling Zionists the personification of Satan, blaming Zionism
   for the Holocaust, accusing them of being the source of all evil in the
   world and defiling the entire world with their impurity.

Support

   The 1911 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia evidenced the movement's
   growing popularity: "there is hardly a nook or corner of the Jewish
   world in which Zionistic societies are not to be found."

   In the 1920s and 1930s, a small but vocal group of religious Jews began
   to develop the concept of Religious Zionism under such leaders as Rabbi
   Abraham Isaac Kook (the Chief Rabbi of Palestine) and his son Zevi
   Judah, and gained substantial following during the latter half of the
   20th century. Only the desperate circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s
   converted most (though not all) of these communities to Zionism. By
   1940, there were 171,000 members of Zionist organizations, and by 1942,
   80% of American Jews surveyed agreed that a homeland in Palestine was
   required.

Zionism and the Arabs

   The Jews who already lived in the region of Palestine had a long and
   complex history of interaction with their Muslim neighbours and rulers,
   which was complicated by the relationship between Islam and Judaism.

   Outside of Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, Arabs and/or Muslims
   constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. The early
   Zionists were well aware of this, but claimed that the inhabitants
   could only benefit from Jewish immigration. They also were inclined to
   settle in uninhabited areas, such as the coastal plain and the Jezreel
   Valley, thus avoiding conflict with the Arabs. Within Zionist
   literature, the Arab presence was largely ignored, as in the famous
   slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land." This
   slogan is often attributed to Israel Zangwill, but its original form,
   "A country without a nation for a nation without a country," was penned
   by Lord Shaftesbury. Generally such statements were propaganda invented
   by leaders who did not foresee the subsequent conflict with the Arabs
   and thought of them as allies against the big empires whom they viewed
   as the main obstacle. Agreements with the Ottoman authorities, or with
   Arab rulers outside Palestine were their main concern and concerns of
   the local Arabs were overlooked.

   One of the earlier Zionists to warn against these ideas was Ahad Ha'am,
   who warned in his 1891 essay "Truth from Eretz Israel" that in
   Palestine "it is hard to find tillable land that is not already
   tilled", and moreover,

     From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all
     desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what
     goes on around them. But this is a big mistake... The Arabs, and
     especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires
     in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand,
     since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their
     future... However, if the time comes when the life of our people in
     Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native
     population, they will not easily yield their place.

   Though there had already been Arab protests to the Ottoman authorities
   in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious
   opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist
   enterprise became known. This opposition did not arise out of
   Palestinian nationalism, which was in its infancy at the time, but out
   of a sense of threat to the livelihood of the Arabs. This sense was
   heightened in the early years of the 20th century by the Zionist
   attempts to develop an economy in which Arabs were largely redundant,
   such as the "Hebrew labor" movement that campaigned against the
   employment of Arabs. The severing of Palestine from the rest of the
   Arab world in 1918 and the Balfour Declaration were seen by the Arabs
   as proof that their fears were coming to fruition.

   A wide range of opinion could be found among Zionist leaders after
   1920. However, the division between these camps did not match the main
   threads in Zionist politics so cleanly as is often portrayed. To take
   an example, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Vladimir
   Jabotinsky, is often presented as having had an extreme pro-expulsion
   view but the proofs offered for this are rather thin. According to
   Jabotinsky's Iron Wall (1923), an agreement with the Arabs was
   impossible, since they

     look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor
     that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his
     prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the
     realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic
     benefits we can bestow on them is infantile.

   The solution, according to Jabotinsky, was not expulsion (which he was
   "prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never
   [do]") but to impose the Jewish presence on the Arabs by force of arms
   until eventually they came to accept it. Only late in his life did
   Jabotinsky speak of the desirability of Arab emigration though still
   without unequivocally advocating an expulsion policy. After the World
   Zionist Organization rejected Jabotinsky's proposals, he resigned from
   the organization and founded the New Zionist Organization in 1933 to
   promote his views and work independently for immigration and the
   establishment of a state. The NZO rejoined the WZO in 1951.

   The situation with socialist Zionists such as David Ben-Gurion was also
   ambiguous. In public Ben-Gurion upheld the official position of his
   party that denied the necessity of force in achieving Zionist goals.
   The argument was based on the denial of a unique Palestinian identity
   coupled with the belief that eventually the Arabs would realise that
   Zionism was to their advantage. The British plan was soon shelved, but
   the idea of a Jewish state with a minimal population of Arabs remained
   an important thread in Labour Zionist thought throughout the remaining
   period until the creation of Israel.

   The attitude of the Zionist leaders towards the Arab population of
   Palestine in the lead-up to the 1948 conflict is one of the most hotly
   debated issues in Zionist history. This article does not cover it; see
   1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Israel-Palestinian conflict, and
   the Palestinian exodus for more information on this.

The struggle for Palestine

Before the Holocaust

   With the defeat and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the
   establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine by the League of
   Nations in 1922, the Zionist movement entered a new phase of activity.
   Its priorities were the escalation of Jewish settlement in Palestine,
   the building of the institutional foundations of a Jewish state,
   raising funds for these purposes, and persuading — or forcing — the
   British authorities not to take any steps which would lead to Palestine
   moving towards independence as an Arab-majority state. The 1920s did
   see a steady growth in the Jewish population and the construction of
   state-like Jewish institutions, but also saw the emergence of
   Palestinian Arab nationalism and growing resistance to Jewish
   immigration.

   International Jewish opinion remained divided on the merits of the
   Zionist project. While many Jews in Europe and the United States argued
   that a Jewish homeland was not needed because Jews were able to live in
   the democratic countries of the West as equal citizens, others
   supported Zionism.

   Albert Einstein was one of the prominent supporters of Zionism, and was
   active in the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
   which published in 1930 a volume titled About Zionism: Speeches and
   Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein, and to which Einstein bequeathed
   his papers. However, he opposed nationalism and expressed skepticism
   about whether a Jewish nation-state was the best solution. He said: "I
   am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain, especially from the
   development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks."

   Many Jews who embraced socialism and proletarian internationalism
   opposed Zionism as a form of bourgeois nationalism. The General Jewish
   Labor Union (Bund), which represented socialist Jews in eastern Europe,
   was anti-Zionist. Some Jewish factions tried to blend Jewish Autonomism
   with Zionism, favoring Jewish self-rule in the diaspora until diaspora
   Jews make aliyah.

   The Communist parties, which attracted substantial Jewish support
   during the 1920s and 1930s, were even more vigorously internationalist
   and therefore anti-Zionist, if one defines Zionism as the advocacy of a
   Jewish homeland in Palestine. During this time the Soviet OZET/ Komzet
   actively promoted an alternative Jewish homeland — the Jewish
   Autonomous Oblast with its capital in Birobidzhan set up in the Russian
   Far East.

   At the other extreme, some American Jews went so far as to say that the
   United States was Zion, and the successful absorption of two million
   Jewish immigrants in the 30 years before World War I lent force to this
   argument. Some American Jewish socialists supported the Birobidzhan
   experiment, and a few even migrated there during the Great Depression.

Rise of the Nazis in Germany

   The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 produced a
   powerful new impetus for Zionism. Not only did it create a flood of
   Jewish refugees but it undermined the faith of Jews that they could
   live in security as minorities in non-Jewish societies. Jewish opinion
   began to shift in favour of Zionism, and pressure for more Jewish
   immigration to Palestine increased. But the more Jews settled in
   Palestine, the more aroused local Arab opinion became, and the more
   difficult the situation became in Palestine. In 1936 serious Arab
   rioting broke out, and in response the British authorities held the
   unsuccessful St. James Conference and issued the MacDonald White Paper
   of 1939, severely restricting further Jewish immigration.

   The Jewish community in Palestine responded by organising armed forces,
   based on smaller units developed to defend remote agricultural
   settlements. Two military movements were founded, the Labor-dominated
   Haganah and the Revisionist Irgun. The latter group did not hesitate to
   retaliate in military action against the Arab population. With the
   advent of World War II, both groups decided that defeating Hitler took
   priority over the fight against the British. However, attacks against
   British targets were recommenced in 1940 by a splinter group of the
   Irgun, later known as Lehi, and in 1944 by the Irgun itself.

After the Holocaust

   The revelation of the fate of six million European Jews murdered during
   the Holocaust had several consequences. Firstly, it left hundreds of
   thousands of Jewish refugees (or displaced persons) in camps in Europe,
   unable or unwilling to return to homes in countries which they felt had
   betrayed them to the Nazis. Not all of these refugees wanted to go to
   Palestine, and in fact many of them eventually went to other countries,
   but large numbers of them did, and they resorted to increasingly
   desperate measures to get there; over 250,000 were smuggled out of
   Europe by an organization called Berihah.

   Secondly, it evoked a world-wide feeling of sympathy with the Jewish
   people, mingled with guilt that more had not been done to deter
   Hitler's aggressions before the war, or to help Jews escape from Europe
   during its course. This was particularly the case in the United States,
   whose federal government had halted Jewish immigration during the war.
   Among those who became strong supporters of the Zionist ideal was
   President Harry S. Truman, who overrode considerable opposition in his
   State Department and used the great power of his position to mobilise
   support at the United Nations for the establishment of a Jewish state
   in Palestine. Since Britain was desperate to withdraw from Palestine,
   Truman's efforts were the crucial factor in the creation of Israel.
   This also corresponded with the Soviet effort to establish their
   influence in the Middle East. During the 1947 UN Partition Plan debate
   on May 14, 1947, the Soviet ambassador Gromyko announced:

     "As we know, the aspirations of a considerable part of the Jewish
     people are linked with the problem of Palestine and of its future
     administration. This fact scarcely requires proof... During the last
     war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering...
     The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with
     indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high
     principles proclaimed in its Charter... The fact that no Western
     European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary
     rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence
     of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to
     establish their own State. It would be unjust not to take this into
     consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize
     this aspiration."

   Thirdly, it swung world Jewish opinion almost unanimously behind the
   project of a Jewish state in Palestine, and within Palestine it led to
   a greater resolution to use force to achieve that objective. American
   Reform Judaism was among the elements of Jewish thought which changed
   their opinions about Zionism after the Holocaust. The proposition that
   Jews could live in peace and security in non-Jewish societies was
   certainly a difficult one to defend in 1945, although it is one of the
   ironies of Zionist history that in the decades since World War II
   anti-Semitism has greatly declined as a serious political force in most
   western countries, though it increased greatly in Middle Eastern
   countries.

Zionism and Israel

   In 1947 Britain announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine, and
   on 29 November the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition
   Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state (with Jerusalem
   becoming an international enclave). The Jewish Agency accepted the
   plan, while the Arabs of Palestine and the neighboring countries
   rejected it and commenced to use force to abort the establishment on a
   Jewish state in the area allotted to it by the UN. Civil conflict
   between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine ensued immediately. On 14 May
   1948 the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine made a
   declaration of independence, and the state of Israel was established.
   This marked a major turning point in the Zionist movement, as its
   principal goal had now been accomplished. Many Zionist institutions
   were reshaped, and the three military movements combined to form the
   Israel Defence Forces.

   The majority of the Arab population having either fled or been expelled
   during the War of Independence, Jews were now a majority of the
   population within the 1948 ceasefire lines, which became Israel's de
   facto borders until 1967. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return
   which granted all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel. This, together
   with the influx of Jewish refugees from Europe and the later flood of
   expelled Jews from Arab countries, had the effect of creating a large
   and apparently permanent Jewish majority in Israel.

   Since 1948 the international Zionist movement has undertaken a variety
   of roles in support of Israel. These have included the encouragement of
   immigration, assisting the absorption and integration of immigrants,
   fundraising on behalf of settlement and development projects in Israel,
   the encouragement of private capital investment in Israel, and
   mobilisation of world public opinion in support of Israel.

   The 1967 war between Israel and the Arab states (the " Six-Day War")
   marked a major turning point in the history of Israel and of Zionism.
   Israeli forces captured the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the
   holiest of Jewish religious sites, the Western Wall of the ancient
   Temple. They also took over the remaining territories of pre-1948
   Palestine, the West Bank (from Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (from Egypt).
   Religious Jews regarded the West Bank (ancient Judaea and Samaria) as
   an integral part of Eretz Israel, and within Israel voices of the
   political Right soon began to argue that these territories should be
   permanently retained. Zionist groups began to build Jewish settlements
   in the territories as a means of establishing "facts on the ground"
   that would make an Israeli withdrawal impossible.

   The 28th Zionist Congress (Jerusalem, 1968) adopted the following five
   principles, known as the "Jerusalem Program", as the aims of
   contemporary Zionism:
     * The unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in
       Jewish life
     * The ingathering of the Jewish people in the historic homeland,
       Eretz Israel, through aliyah from all countries
     * The strengthening of the State of Israel, based on the "prophetic
       vision of justice and peace"
     * The preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the
       fostering of Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education and of Jewish
       spiritual and cultural values
     * The protection of Jewish rights everywhere.

   Control of the West Bank and Gaza placed Israel in the position of
   control over a large population of Palestinian Arabs. Whether or not
   there had been a distinct Palestinian national identity in the 1920s
   may be debated, but there is no doubt that by the 1960s such an
   identity was firmly established — the founders of Zionism had thus,
   ironically, created two new nationalities, Israeli and Palestinian,
   instead of one.

   The faith of the Palestinians in the willingness and ability of the
   Arab states to defeat Israel and return Palestine to Arab rule was
   destroyed by the war, and the death of the most militant and popular
   Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in 1970 reinforced the belief
   of Palestinians that they had been abandoned. The PLO, created in 1964
   after a proposal by Nasser at the first Arab Summit, took on new life
   as an autonomous movement led by Yasser Arafat, and soon turned to
   terrorism as its principal means of struggle.

   From this point the history of Israel and the Palestinians can be
   followed in the article Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

   In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 was passed.
   It stated that "zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination"
   The resolution 3379 was rescinded in 1991 by the Resolution 4686. This
   issue is discussed in length in the article on anti-Zionism.

   Since 1948 most Jews have continued to identify as Zionists, in the
   sense that they support the State of Israel even if they do not choose
   to live there. This worldwide support has been of vital importance to
   Israel, both politically and financially. This has been particularly
   true since 1967, as the rise of Palestinian nationalism and the
   resulting political and military struggles have eroded sympathy for
   Israel among non-Jews, at least outside the United States. In recent
   years, many Jews have criticised the morality and expediency of
   Israel's continued control of the territories captured in 1967.

Anti-Zionism and post-Zionism

   More than 50 years after the founding of the State of Israel, and after
   more than 80 years of Arab-Jewish conflict over Israel, the West Bank
   and the Gaza Strip, some groups have misgivings about current Israeli
   policies. The overwhelming majority of Jewish organizations and
   denominations are strongly pro-Zionist. Some liberal or socialist Jews,
   as well as some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities (the most vocal and
   visible being Satmar Hasidim and the Neturei Karta group), oppose
   Zionism as a matter of religious belief. Well-known Jewish scholars and
   statesmen who have opposed Zionism include Bruno Kreisky, Hans Fromm,
   and Michael Selzer. In the United States, a small number of Jewish
   intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein oppose modern
   Zionism. Chomsky says he supports a Jewish homeland, but not a Jewish
   state, and claims that this view is consistent with the original
   meaning of Zionism.

   In the modern period, certain elements within Orthodox Judaism remain
   anti-Zionist, some vehemently so. Yakov M. Rabin, a professor of
   history at the University of Montreal, argues in his book ‘’A Threat
   Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism,’’ that Haredi Jews
   who publicly criticize Zionism do so for two religiously-based reasons:

          “The first of these is to prevent desecration of the name of
          God. And since the State of Israel often claims to be acting on
          behalf of all the world's Jews, and even in the name of Judaism,
          these Jews feel they must explain to the public, and primarily
          to non-Jews, the falsehood of this pretension. The second
          commandment is to preserve human life. By exposing the Judaic
          rejection of Zionism, they hope to protect Jews from the outrage
          they believe the State of Israel has generated among the nations
          of the world.”

   Many mainstream Orthodox groups, such as the Agudat Israel, have
   changed their positions since 1948 and have reached a modus vivendi
   with the State of Israel. Others have often assumed right-wing stances
   regarding important political questions such as the peace process.

   Among the important minority threads within Zionism is one that holds
   Israelis to be a new nationality, not merely the representatives of
   world Jewry. The "Canaanite" or "Hebrew Renaissance" movement led by
   poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s was built on this idea. A
   modern movement based partly on the same idea is known as post-Zionism.
   There is no agreement as to how this movement should be defined, nor
   even of who belongs to it, but the most common idea is that Israel
   should leave behind the concept of a "state of the Jewish people" and
   instead strive to be a state of all its citizens according to
   pluralistic democratic values. Many Israeli historians consider "
   Canaanism" or "Pan- Semitism" to be an aberration beyond the bounds of
   Zionism. Self-identified post-Zionists differ on many important
   details, such as the status of the Law of Return. Critics tend to
   associate post-Zionism with anti-Zionism or postmodernism, both of
   which claims are strenuously denied by proponents.

   Another opinion favors a binational state in which Arabs and Jews live
   together while enjoying some type of autonomy. Variants of this idea
   were proposed by Chaim Weizmann in the 1930s and by the Ichud (Unity)
   group in the 1940s, which included such prominent figures as Judah
   Magnes (first dean of The Hebrew University) and Martin Buber. With the
   emergence of Israel as a Jewish state with a small Arab minority,
   however, the movement died down, but it was revived after the 1967 war
   left Israel in control of a large Arab population. The idea is
   nevertheless supported by a few prominent intellectuals such as Noam
   Chomsky, the late Edward Said, Meron Benvenisti (since 2003), and Tony
   Judt. Opponents of a binational state argue that since Arabs, whose
   population growth rates are much higher than among Jews, would form the
   majority of the population in such a state, the Jewish character on
   which the state was founded would be lost and the Jewish population's
   existence threatened, as it was threatened under other Turkish and Arab
   regimes in the past. They also suggest that such a state is unlikely to
   remain a democracy for long, as many Arab countries today have either
   autocratic or theocratic governments.

   Critics of Zionism see the changes in demographic balance which created
   a Jewish state and displaced over 700,000 Arab refugees, and the
   methods employed along the way, as inevitable consequences of Zionism.
   Critics also point to current inequities between Jews and Arabs in
   Israel, similarly viewing them as attributable to Zionist beliefs and
   ideologies. Some consider this ethnic and cultural discrimination to be
   a form of racism.

   Defenders of Zionism disagree with the identification of Zionism with
   racism on a number of grounds. They hold that the basis of the charge
   is too vague, as the views of Zionist groups differ widely from each
   other (see Types of Zionism). They also disagree on the basis that
   Palestinians and Jews are not racially distinct from each other, and
   that Israeli Jews themselves are racially "mixed": nearly half of
   Israel's Jews come from Arab countries, and there are almost 100,000
   black Jews from Ethiopia. Thus even if Zionism discriminates against
   Arabs, such discrimination cannot accurately be termed racist, but
   rather ethnic and/or cultural. Defenders of Zionism also argue that
   discrimination based on culture or ethnicity is a fact in almost all
   countries, and that any discrimination in Israel, including
   discrimination between and among Jewish groups, is similarly based on
   such differences, and is not an inevitable consequence of Zionism. They
   also argue that, in stark contrast to the situation in neighboring Arab
   countries, Arab citizens of Israel can vote in free elections, are
   represented in the Israeli parliament and enjoy a much higher standard
   of living than Arabs in Arab countries, and that most differences in
   income between Israeli Jews and Arabs have more to do with a difference
   in educational background than would be likely to result from
   discrimination, either by the government or by private actors. They
   also point out that while perhaps 700,000 Muslims either fled or were
   forced out of Israel upon the creation of the State, almost a million
   Jews were forced out of Muslim controlled lands and fled to Israel.
   (Muslims are free to vote in Israel, and have their own MK's, while
   Jews are forbidden citizenship in many Muslim countries, including
   Saudi Arabia and Jordan.)

Non-Jewish Zionism

International support for Zionism

   Napoleon suggested the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as
   early as of 1799.

   Throughout the entire 19th century, the return of the Jews to the Holy
   Land was widely supported by eminent figures as Queen Victoria, King
   Edward VII, John Adams, the second President of the United States,
   General Smuts of South Africa, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia,
   British Prime Ministers Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, President
   Woodrow Wilson, Benedetto Croce, Italian philosopher and historian,
   Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and author of the Geneva
   Conventions, Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian scientist and humanitarian. The
   French government through Minister M. Cambon formally committed itself
   to “the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which
   the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago". Even in
   faraway China, Wang, Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared that "the
   Nationalist government is in full sympathy with the Jewish people in
   their desire to establish a country for themselves."

   In 1873, Shah Nasr-ed-Din met with British Jewish leaders, including
   Sir Moses Montefiore, during his journey to Europe. At that time, the
   Persian leader suggested that the Jews buy land and establish a state
   for the Jewish people.

   King Faisal I of Iraq supported the idea of Zionism and signed the
   Faisal-Weizmann Agreement in 1919. He wrote: "We Arabs, especially the
   educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist
   movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the
   proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace
   Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper."

   Both the League of Nations' 1922 Palestine Mandate and the 1947 UN
   Partition Plan endorsed the aim of Zionism. The latter was a rare
   instance of concurrence between the United States and the Soviet Union
   during the Cold War.

   Various political groups and parties in India have also expressed
   support for Zionism. This reflects the opinion of many sections of
   Indian society that are increasingly sympathetic to Israel.

Christian Zionism

   In addition to Jewish Zionism, there was always a small number of
   Christian Zionists that existed from the early days of the Zionist
   movement. According to Charles Merkley of Carleton University,
   Christian Zionism strengthened significantly after the 1967 Six-Day
   War, and many dispensationalist Christians, especially in the United
   States, now strongly support Zionism.

Left wing support for Zionism

   Zionism was also supported by the political left at various times both
   before and after Israel's formation, in part due to sympathy for the
   Jews as an oppressed people and in part due to the strong socialist
   roots of Labor Zionism. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, however, the
   Palestinians have been gathering more sympathy as a dispersed and
   stateless people, and Israel has been moving away from the limited
   socialist policies it had originally adopted. This has led to a loss of
   support for Zionism among the political left, especially in Europe.
   (see The left and "anti-Zionism")
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
