Key Ideas:


Zionism


 

see also: United Nations member states - Israel


see also collection: David Roberts "A Journey in the Holy Land"

see also: Marc Chagall

 

Marc Chagall
Exodus
1964-1968
Tapestry, manufactured at the Manufacture nationale des Gobelins in Paris by master-craftsman M. E. Lelong

CONTENTS:

Zionism. Encyclopaedia Britannica

Zionism. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Labor Zionism
Revisionist Zionism
Religious Zionism

History of Zionism

Timeline of Zionism

Theodor Herzl

Max Nordau

First Zionist Congress

Balfour Declaration of 1917

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Chaim Weizmann

Aliyah

Jews place of wailing, 1860

Zionism

Nationalistic movement

Main
Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisrael, “the Land of Israel”). Though Zionism originated in eastern and central Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, it is in many ways a continuation of the ancient nationalist attachment of the Jews and of the Jewish religion to the historical region of Palestine, where one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion.

In the 16th and 17th centuries a number of “messiahs” came forward trying to persuade Jews to “return” to Palestine. The Haskala (“Enlightenment”) movement of the late 18th century, however, urged Jews to assimilate into Western secular culture. In the early 19th century interest in a return of the Jews to Palestine was kept alive mostly by Christian millenarians. Despite the Haskala, eastern European Jews did not assimilate and in reaction to tsarist pogroms formed the Ḥovevei Ẕiyyon (“Lovers of Zion”) to promote the settlement of Jewish farmers and artisans in Palestine.

A political turn was given to Zionism by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who regarded assimilation as most desirable but, in view of anti-Semitism, impossible to realize. Thus, he argued, if Jews were forced by external pressure to form a nation, they could lead a normal existence only through concentration in one territory. In 1897 Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Switz., which drew up the Basel program of the movement, stating that “Zionism strives to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.”

The centre of the movement was established in Vienna, where Herzl published the official weekly Die Welt (“The World”). Zionist congresses met yearly until 1901 and then every two years. When the Ottoman government refused Herzl’s request for Palestinian autonomy, he found support in Great Britain. In 1903 the British government offered 6,000 square miles (15,500 square km) of uninhabited Uganda for settlement, but the Zionists held out for Palestine.

At the death of Herzl in 1904, the leadership moved from Vienna to Cologne, then to Berlin. Prior to World War I Zionism represented only a minority of Jews, mostly from Russia but led by Austrians and Germans. It developed propaganda through orators and pamphlets, created its own newspapers, and gave an impetus to what was called a “Jewish renaissance” in letters and arts. The development of the Modern Hebrew language largely took place during this period.

The failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the wave of pogroms and repressions that followed caused growing numbers of Russian Jewish youth to emigrate to Palestine as pioneer settlers. By 1914 there were about 90,000 Jews in Palestine; 13,000 settlers lived in 43 Jewish agricultural settlements, many of them supported by the French Jewish philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

Upon the outbreak of World War I political Zionism reasserted itself, and its leadership passed to Russian Jews living in England. Two such Zionists, Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, were instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration from Great Britain (Nov. 2, 1917), which promised British support for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The declaration was included in Britain’s League of Nations mandate over Palestine (1922).

In the following years the Zionists built up the Jewish urban and rural settlements in Palestine, perfecting autonomous organizations and solidifying Jewish cultural life and Hebrew education. In March 1925 the Jewish population in Palestine was officially estimated at 108,000, and it had risen to about 238,000 (20 percent of the population) by 1933. Jewish immigration remained relatively slow, however, until the rise of Hitlerism in Europe. Nevertheless, the Arab population feared Palestine eventually would become a Jewish state and bitterly resisted Zionism and the British policy supporting it. Several Arab revolts, especially in 1929 and 1936–39, caused the British to devise schemes to reconcile the Arab and Zionist demands.

Hitlerism and the large-scale extermination of European Jews led many Jews to seek refuge in Palestine and many others, especially in the United States, to embrace Zionism. As tensions grew among Arabs and Zionists, Britain submitted the Palestine problem first to Anglo-U.S. discussion for solution and later to the United Nations, which on Nov. 29, 1947, proposed partition of the country into separate Arab and Jewish states and the internationalization of Jerusalem. The creation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, brought about the Arab–Israeli war of 1948–49, in the course of which Israel obtained more land than had been provided by the UN resolution, and drove out 800,000 Arabs who became displaced persons known as Palestinians. Thus 50 years after the first Zionist congress and 30 years after the Balfour Declaration, Zionism achieved its aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, but at the same time it became an armed camp surrounded by hostile Arab nations and Palestinian “liberation” organizations engaged in terrorism in and outside of Israel.

During the next two decades Zionist organizations in many countries continued to raise financial support for Israel and to encourage Jews to immigrate there. Most Jews, however, reject the view propagated by many very Orthodox Jews in Israel that the Jews outside Israel were living in “exile” and could live a full life only in Israel.

 

History » Origins of a modern Jewish state » Zionism

Modern Israel springs from both religious and political sources. The biblical promise of a land for the Jews and a return to the Temple in Jerusalem were enshrined in Judaism and sustained Jewish identity through an exile of 19 centuries following the failed revolts in Judaea against the Romans early in the Common Era. By the 1800s, fewer than 25,000 Jews still lived in their ancient homeland, and these were largely concentrated in Jerusalem, then a provincial backwater of the Ottoman Empire.

In the 1880s, however, a rise in European anti-Semitism and revived Jewish national pride combined to inspire a new wave of emigration to Palestine in the form of agricultural colonies financed by the Rothschilds and other wealthy families. Political Zionism came a decade later, when the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl began advocating a Jewish state as the political solution for both anti-Semitism (he had covered the sensational Dreyfus affair in France) and a Jewish secular identity. Herzl’s brief and dramatic bid for international support from the major powers at the First Zionist Congress (August 1897) failed, but, after his death in 1904, the surviving Zionist organization under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann undertook a major effort to increase the Jewish population in Palestine while continuing to search for political assistance.

These efforts could only be on a small scale while the Ottoman Turks ruled what the Europeans called Palestine (from Palaestina, “Land of the Philistines,” the Latin name given Judaea by the Romans). But in 1917, during World War I, the Zionists persuaded the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration, a document that committed Britain to facilitate the establishment of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. Amid considerable controversy over conflicting wartime promises to the Arabs and French, Britain succeeded in gaining the endorsement of the declaration by the new League of Nations, which placed Palestine under British mandate. This achievement reflected a heady mixture of religious and imperial motivations that Britain would find difficult to reconcile in the troubled years ahead.

 

The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) » Zionism

The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was Zionism, which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term for the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another example of the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism. In its secular aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation of the Jews by transforming them into a nation like all other nations. Although it drew upon the general currents of 19th-century European nationalism, its major impetus came from the revival of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century, as noted above. Zionism reacted to anti-Semitic contentions that the Jews were aliens in European society and could never hope to be integrated into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge into a basic premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement. Zionism has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new centre of Jewish energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular religion for many Diaspora Jews.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
 

The symbol of the First Zionist Congress

Zionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Zionism is the international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine. The area was the Jewish Biblical homeland, called the Land of Israel (Hebrew: Eretz Yisra'el). Since the creation of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily as support for the modern state of Israel.

Zionism is based on the foundation of historical ties and religious traditions linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, where the concept of Jewish nationhood first evolved somewhere between 1200 BCE and the late Second Temple era (i.e. up to 70 CE). Two millennia after the Jewish diaspora, the modern Zionist movement, beginning in the late 19th century, was mainly founded by secular Jews, largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe, especially in Russia. The re-creation of a Jewish national homeland was also strongly advocated by American scholars, such as Louis Brandeis, as a solution to this "Jewish problem" and a way to "revive the Jewish spirit."

It is a type of the broader phenomenon of modern nationalism. Initially one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to assimilation and the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism grew rapidly and after the Holocaust became the dominant power among Jewish political movements.

The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat. The movement seeks to encourage Jewish migration to the "Land of Israel" and was eventually successful in establishing Israel in 1948, as the homeland for the Jewish people. Its proponents regard its aim as self-determination for the Jewish people. The proportion of world Jewry living in Israel has steadily grown since the movement came into existence. Today roughly 40% of the world's Jews live in Israel. A similar number live in the United States.

Terminology
The word "Zionism" itself is derived from the word Zion (Hebrew: ציון, Tzi-yon‎). This name originally referred to Mount Zion, a mountain near Jerusalem, and to the Fortress of Zion on it. Later, under King David, the term "Zion" became a synecdoche referring to the entire city of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. In many Biblical verses, the Israelites were called the people, sons or daughters of Zion.

"Zionism" was coined as a term for Jewish nationalism by Austrian Jewish publisher Nathan Birnbaum, founder of the first nationalist Jewish students' movement Kadimah, in his journal Selbstemanzipation (Self Emancipation) in 1890. (Birnbaum eventually turned against political Zionism and became the first secretary-general of the Haredi movement Agudat Israel.)

Zionism can be distinguished from Territorialism, because it is the Jewish nationalist movement willing only to contemplate a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel. During the early history of Zionism, a number of proposals were made for settling Jews outside Europe, but ultimately all of these were rejected or failed. The debate over these proposals helped to define the nature and focus of the Zionist movement.

Organization
 

Members and delegates at the 1939 Zionist congress, by country/region (Zionism was banned in the Soviet Union). 70,000 Polish Jews supported the Revisionist Zionist movement, which was not represented.
Country/Region  Members Delegates Poland 299,165 109 USA 263,741 114 Palestine 167,562 134 Romania 60,013 28 United Kingdom 23,513 15 South Africa 22,343 14 Canada 15,220 8

The multi-national, worldwide Zionist movement is structured as a representative democracy. Congresses are held every four years (they were held every two years before the Second World War) and delegates to the congress are elected by the membership. Members are required to pay dues known as a shekel. At the congress, delegates elected a 30-man executive council, which in turn elected the movement's leader. The movement was democratic from its inception and women had the right to vote (before they won the right in Great Britain). Until 1917, the ZO pursued a strategy of building a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration and the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund (1901 - a charity which bought land for Jewish settlement) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (1903 - provided loans for Jewish businesses and farmers). In 1942, at the Biltmore Conference, Zionists changed their program and demanded the establishment of a Jewish state as the aim of the movement.

The 28th Zionist Congress, meeting in Jerusalem 1968, adopted the five points of the "Jerusalem Program" as the aims of Zionism today. They are:

-The unity of the Jewish People and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life;
-The ingathering of the Jewish People in its historic homeland, Eretz Israel, through Aliyah from all countries;
-The strengthening of the State of Israel which is based on the prophetic vision of justice and peace:
-The preservation of the identity of the Jewish People through the fostering of Jewish and Hebrew education and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values;
-The protection of Jewish rights everywhere.

Since the creation of Israel, the role of the movement has declined and it is now a peripheral factor in Israeli politics although different perceptions of Zionism continue to play a role in Israeli and Jewish political discussion.

Labor Zionism
Labor Zionism originated in Eastern Europe. Socialist Zionists believed that centuries of being oppressed in anti-Semitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence which invited further anti-Semitism, a view originally stipulated by Theodor Herzl. They argued that a revolution of the Jewish soul and society was necessary and achievable in part by Jews moving to Israel and becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. Most socialist Zionists rejected the observance of traditional religious Judaism as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people, and established rural communes in Israel called "kibbutzim". Though Socialist Zionism draws its inspiration and is philosophically founded on the fundamental values and spirituality of Judaism, its progressive expression of that Judaism has often fostered an antagonistic relationship with Orthodox Judaism.

Labor Zionism became the dominant force in the political and economic life of the Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine and was the dominant ideology of the political establishment in Israel until the 1977 election when the Israeli Labor Party was defeated. The Labor Party continues the tradition (although it has weakened) and has in recent years taken to advocating creation of a Palestinian State in the West-Bank and Gaza, however the most popular party in the kibbutzim is Meretz.

Labor Zionism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Beginnings of Labor Zionism in Israel: Fourth meeting of the Hapoel Hatzair movement, about 1909. David Ben Gurion is possibly in this photo, first at the left in the second row from the bottom.   Labor Zionism (Labour Zionism, Hebrew: ציונות סוציאליסטית‎, tsionut sotsialistit) can be described as the major stream of the left wing of the Zionist movement. It was, for many years, a significant tendency among Zionists and Zionist organizational structure and the major stream of the Zionist movement. It saw itself as the Zionist sector of the historic Jewish labor movements of Eastern and Central Europe, eventually developing local units in most countries with sizeable Jewish populations. Unlike the "political Zionist" tendency founded by Theodor Herzl and advocated by Chaim Weizmann, Labor Zionists did not believe that a Jewish state would be created simply by appealing to the international community or to a powerful nation such as Britain, Germany or the Ottoman Empire. Rather, Labor Zionists believed that a Jewish state could only be created through the efforts of the Jewish working class settling in Palestine and constructing a state through the creation of a progressive Jewish society with rural kibbutzim and moshavim and an urban Jewish proletariat. Labor Zionism grew in size and influence and eclipsed "political Zionism" by the 1930s both internationally and within the British Mandate of Palestine where Labor Zionists predominated among many of the institutions of the pre-independence Jewish community Yishuv, particularly the trade union federation known as the Histadrut. The Haganah – the largest Zionist paramilitary defense force – was a Labor Zionist institution and was used on occasion (such as during the Hunting Season) against political opponents or to assist the British Administration in capturing Jewish terrorists. Labor Zionists played a leading role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and Labor Zionists were predominant among the leadership of the Israeli military for decades after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Major theoreticians of the Labor Zionist movement included Moses Hess, Nahum Syrkin, Ber Borochov and Aaron David Gordon and leading figures in the movement included David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Berl Katznelson. Albert Einstein was among a number of prominent Jewish personalities that supported the Labor Zionist Movement. Ideology 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. 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 (Gordon and Borochov), 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 communal villages, where newly arrived European Jews would be taught agriculture and other manual skills. Joseph Trumpeldor is also considered to be one of the early icons of the Labor Zionist movement in Palestine.[1] When discussing what it is to be a Jewish pioneer, Trumpeldor stated "What is a pioneer? Is he a worker only? No! The definition includes much more. The pioneers should be workers but that is not all. We shall need people who will be “everything” – everything that the land of Israel needs. A worker has his labor interests, a soldier his esprit de corps, a doctor and an engineer, their special inclinations. A generation of iron-men; iron from which you can forge everything the national machinery needs. You need a wheel? Here I am. A nail, a screw, a block? – here take me. You need a man to till the soil? – I’m ready. A soldier? I am here. Policeman, doctor, lawyer, artist, teacher, water carrier? Here I am. I have no form. I have no psychology. I have no personal feeling, no name. I am a servant of Zion. Ready to do everything, not bound to do anything. I have only one aim – creation." Trumpeldor, an Anarcho-Communist Zionist, gave his life in 1920 defending the community of Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee. He became a symbol of Jewish self-defense and his reputed last words, "Never mind, it is good to die for our country" (En davar, tov lamut be'ad artzenu אין דבר, טוב למות בעד ארצנו), became famous in the pre-state Zionist movement and in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s. Trumpeldor's heroic death made him not only a martyr for Zionists Left but also for the Revisionist Zionist movement who named its youth movement Betar (an acronym for "Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor") after the fallen hero. Parties Initially two labor parties were founded by immigrants to Palestine of the Second Aliyah (1904-1914): the nationalistic and anti-socialist Hapo'el Hatza'ir (Young Worker) party and the Poale Zion party, with socialist roots. The Poale Zion Party had a left wing and a right wing. In 1919 the right wing, including Ben-Gurion, and anti-Marxist non-party people founded Ahdut HaAvoda. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair fused into the Mapai party, which included all of mainstream Labor Zionism. Until the 1960s these parties were dominated by members of the Second Aliyah.[2] The Left Poale Zion party ultimately merged with the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair, the urban Socialist League and several smaller left-wing groups to become the Mapam party, which in turn later joined with other parties to create Meretz. The Mapai party later became the Israeli Labor Party, which for a number of years was linked with Mapam in the Alignment. These two parties were initially the two largest parties in the Yishuv and in the first Knesset, whilst Mapai and its predecessors dominated Israeli politics both in the pre-independence Yishuv and for the first three decades of Israel's independence, until the late 1970s. Decline and transformation Already in the 1920s the Labor movement disregarded its socialist roots and concentrated on building the nation by constructive action. According to Tzahor its leaders did not "abandon fundamental ideological principles".[3] However according to Ze'ev Sternhell in his book The Founding Myths of Israel, the labor leaders had already abandoned socialist principles by 1920 and only used them as "mobilizing myths". Following the 1967 Six-Day War several prominent Labor Zionists created the Movement for Greater Israel which subscribed to an ideology of Greater Israel and called upon the Israeli government to keep and populate all areas captured in the war. Among the public figures in this movement associated with Left-wing nationalism were Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Icchak Cukierman, Zivia Lubetkin, Eliezer Livneh, Moshe Shamir, Zev Vilnay, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isser Harel, Dan Tolkovsky, and Avraham Yoffe. In the 1969 Knesset elections it ran as the "List for the Land of Israel", but failed to cross the electoral threshold. Prior to the 1973 elections, it joined the Likud and won 39 seats. In 1976 it merged with the National List and the Independent Centre (a breakaway from the Free Centre) to form La'am, which remained a faction within Likud until its merger into the Herut faction in 1984. Other prominent Labor Zionists, especially those who came to dominate the Israeli Labor Party, became strong advocates for relinquishing the territory won during the Six-Day War. By the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, this became the central policy of the Labor Party under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. What distinguishes Labor Zionism from other Zionist streams today is not economic policy, an analysis of capitalism or any class analysis or orientation but its attitude towards the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with modern Labor Zionists tending to support the Israeli peace camp to varying degrees. This orientation towards Israel's borders and foreign policy has dominated Labor Zionist institutions in recent decades to the extent that socialist Zionists who support a Greater Israel ideology are forced to seek political expression elsewhere. In Israel the Labor Party has followed the general path of other governing social democratic parties such as the British Labour Party and is now fully oriented towards capitalism and even neo-liberalism, though recently it has rediscovered the welfare state under the leadership of Amir Peretz. The Israeli Labor Party and its predecessors have ironically been associated within Israeli society as representing the country's ruling class and political elite whereas working-class Israelis have traditionally voted for the Likud since the Begin Revolution of 1977. Labor Zionism Today Labor Zionism today has become near synonymous with the Israeli peace camp and its defining characteristic is support for a two-state solution. While Labor Zionist political and educational institutions are inclusive to advocates of a two-state solution who do not adhere to Left-wing economic views they do not include socialists who oppose territorial withdrawals. Some Left-wing nationalists who support retaining the West Bank under Israeli control and hold socialist economic views have found expression in movements like the Nahalah Forum, Zionist Freedom Alliance, the Hatikva Party, Im Tirzu, and Magshimey Herut. Labor Zionism manifests itself today in both adult and youth organizations. Among adults, the World Labor Zionist Movement, based in Jerusalem, has affiliates in countries around the world, such as Ameinu in the United States and Australia, Associação Moshé Sharett in Brazil and the Jewish Labour Movement in the United Kingdom. Youth and students are served through Zionist youth movements such as Habonim Dror, Hashomer Hatzair and college-age campus activist groups such as the Union of Progressive Zionists of the U.S. and Canada.

Liberal Zionism
General Zionism (or Liberal Zionism) was initially the dominant trend within the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 until after the First World War. General Zionists identified with the liberal European middle class (or bourgeois) to which many Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann aspired. Liberal Zionism, although not associated with any single party in modern Israel, remains a strong trend in Israeli politics advocating free market principles, democracy and adherence to human rights, although Kadima does identify with many of the fundamental policies of Liberal Zionist ideology, advocating among other things the need for Palestinian statehood in order to form a more democratic society in Israel, affirming the free market, and calling for equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel.

Revisionist Zionism
Nationalist Zionism originated from the Revisionist Zionists led by Jabotinsky. The Revisionists left the World Zionist Organization in 1935 because it refused to state that the creation of a Jewish state was an objective of Zionism. The revisionists advocated the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine to force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration. Revisionist Zionism evolved into the Likud Party in Israel, which has dominated most governments since 1977. It advocates Israel maintaining control of the West-Bank and East Jerusalem and takes a hard-line approach in the Israeli-Arab conflict. In 2005 the Likud split over the issue of creation of a Palestinian state on the occupied territories and party members advocating peace talks helped form the Kadima party.

 

Revisionist Zionism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The British Mandate of Palestine included the modern-day territory of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. The portion west of the Jordan River came to be administered separately as "Palestine". Revisionist Zionists claimed the entire Mandate of Palestine, not only the western portion, as part of the Jewish state. Consequently, for many decades after the establishment of Israel, they did not recognise the existence of Jordan, formally dropping the claim only in the 1990s. Revisionist Zionism is a nationalist faction within the Zionist movement. It is the founding ideology of the non-religious right in Israel, and was the chief ideological competitor to the dominant socialist Labor Zionism. Revisionism is represented primarily by the Likud Party. The ideology was developed originally by Ze'ev Jabotinsky who advocated a "revision" of the "practical Zionism" of David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, which was focused on independent settlement of Eretz Yisrael. In 1935, after the Zionist Executive rejected his political program and refused to state that “the aim of Zionism was the establishment of a Jewish state,” Jabotinsky resigned from the Zionist Organization. He founded the New Zionist Organization (NZO) to conduct independent political activity for free immigration and the establishment of a Jewish State. Revisionist Zionism was instead centered on a vision of "political Zionism", which Jabotinsky regarded as following the legacy of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism. In its early years, and under Jabotinsky's leadership, Revisionist Zionism was focused on gaining British aid for settlement. Later, Revisionist groups independent of Jabotinsky's leadership, conducted campaigns of violence against the British authorities in Palestine to drive them out and establish a Jewish state. Ideology Revisionism was distinguished primarily from other ideologies within Zionism by its territorial maximalism, while not alone, they insisted upon the Jewish right to sovereignty over the whole territory of Eretz Yisrael (originally encompassing all of Mandatory Palestine). The British handing of control of Transjordan to the Hashemites disrupted this dream, however. After this and until statehood, Revisionist Zionism became known more for its advocacy of more belligerent, assertive posture and actions against both British and Arab control of the region. Revisionism’s foremost political objective was to maintain the territorial integrity of the historical land of Israel and establish a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the river Jordan. Jewish statehood was always a major ideological goal for Revisionism, but it was not to be gained at the price of partitioning Eretz Yisrael. Jabotinsky and his followers, therefore, consistently rejected proposals to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's successor, therefore opposed the 1947 United Nations partition plan. Revisionists considered the subsequent partition of Palestine following the 1949 Armistice Agreements to have no legitimacy. During the first two decades after independence, the Revisionist Party, Herut, remained in opposition. The party slowly began to revise its ideology in an effort to change this situation and gain political power. While Begin maintained the Revisionist claim to Jewish sovereignty over all of Eretz Israel; by the late 1950s, control over the East Bank of the Jordan ceased to be an operative element within Revisionist ideology. Following Herut's merger with the Liberal Party in 1965, references to the ideal of Jewish sovereignty over "both banks of the Jordan" appeared less and less frequently. By the 1970s, the legitimacy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was no longer questioned. In 1994, the complete practical abandonment of the "both banks" principle was apparent when an overwhelming majority of Likud Knesset Members (MKs) voted in favor of the peace treaty with Jordan. On the eve of the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Revisionists, as part of the Gahal faction, joined a national unity government under Prime Minister Levi Eshkol; this resulted in Begin serving in the cabinet for the first time. The war also brought to an end Labor’s previous efforts to delegitimize Revisionism, because on the eve of the war, the dominant party felt it had to include the Revisionist opposition in an emergency national unity government. This step not only made the opposition views acceptable in the eyes of the public. It also showed that the dominant party no longer felt that it could monopolize power. This unity arrangement lasted until August 1970, when Begin and Gahal left the government. Some sources indicate the resignation was due to disagreements over the Rogers Plan and its "in place" cease-fire with Egypt along the Suez Canal,; other sources, including William B. Quandt, note that Begin left the unity government because the Labor party, by formally accepting UN 242 in mid-1970, had accepted "peace for withdrawal" on all fronts. On August 5, 1970, Begin himself explained before the Knesset why he was resigning. He said, "As far as we are concerned, what do the words 'withdrawal from territories administered since 1967 by Israel' mean other than Judea and Samaria. Not all the territories; but by all opinion, most of them." Following Israel's capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, Revisionism's territorial aspirations concentrated on these territories. These areas were far more central to ancient Jewish history than the East Bank of the Jordan and most of the areas within Israel's post-1949 borders. In 1968, Begin defined the "eternal patrimony of our ancestors" as "Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Judea, [and] Shechem [Nablus]" in the West Bank. In 1973, Herut's election platform called for the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. When Menachem Begin became leader of the broad Likud coalition and, soon Prime Minister, he considerably modified Herut’s expansive territorial aims. The party’s aspiration to unite all of mandatory Palestine under Jewish rule was scaled down. Instead, Begin spoke of the historic unity of Israel in the West Bank, even hinting that he would make territorial concessions in the Sinai as part of a complete peace settlement. When Begin finally came to power in the 1977 election, his overriding concern as Prime Minister (1977-1983) was to maintain Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. In 1981 he declared to a group of Jewish settlers: "I, Menachem, the son of Ze'ev and Hasia Begin, do solemnly swear that as long as I serve the nation as Prime Minister we will not leave any part of Judea, Samaria, [or] the Gaza Strip." One of the main mechanisms for accomplishing this objective was the establishment of Jewish settlements. Under Labor governments, between 1967 and 1977, the Jewish population of the territories reached 3,200; Labor's limited settlement activity was predicated upon making a future territorial compromise when the majority of the territory would be returned to Arab control. By contrast, the Likud's settlement plan aimed to settle 750,000 Jews all over the territories in order to prevent a territorial compromise. As a result, by 1984, there were about 44,000 settlers outside East Jerusalem. In the diplomatic arena, Begin pursued his core ideological objective in a relatively pragmatic manner. He held back from annexing the West Bank and Gaza, recognizing that this was not feasible in the short term, due to international opposition and that “absorbing the Palestinians could turn Israel it into a bi-national state instead of a Jewish one. He signed the Camp David Accords (1978) with Egypt that referred to the "legitimate rights of the Palestinians" (although Begin insisted that the Hebrew version referred only to "the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael" and not to "Palestinians"). Begin also promoted the idea of autonomy for the Palestinians, albeit only a "personal" autonomy that would not give them control over any territory. But his uncompromising stance in the negotiations over Palestinian autonomy from 1979 to 1981 led to the resignations of the more moderate Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman, Foreign and Defense Ministers, respectively, both of whom left the Likud government. According to Weizman, the significant concessions Begin made to the Egyptians in the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian--Israeli peace treaty of the following year were motivated, in part, by his ideological commitment to the eventual annexation of the territories. By removing the most powerful Arab state from the conflict, reducing international (mainly American) pressure for Israeli concessions on the issue of the territories, and prolonging inconclusive talks on Palestinian autonomy, Begin was buying time for his government's settlement activities in the territories. Begin continued to vow that territory, which was part of historic Eretz Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, would never be returned. His adamant stand on the territory became an obstacle to extending the 1979 peace treaty. The Revisionist ideological stand concerning the territories has continued, although it has moderated some and become more ‘pragmatic’ in the years since, as discussed below. This remains a major obstacle to resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.   Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist ZionismAfter World War I, Jabotinsky was elected to the first legislative assembly in the Yishuv, and in 1921 he was elected to the Executive Council of the Zionist Organization (known as the World Zionist Organization after 1960). He quit the latter group in 1923, however, due to differences of opinion with its chairman, Chaim Weizmann. In 1925, Jabotinsky formed the Revisionist Zionist Alliance, in the World Zionist Congress to advocate his views, which included increased cooperation with Britain on transforming the entire Mandate for Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River into a sovereign Jewish state, loyal to the British Empire. To this end, Jabotinsky advocated for mass Jewish immigration from Europe and the creation of a second Jewish Legion to guard a nascent Jewish state at inception. A staunch anglophile, Jabotinsky wished to convince Britain that a Jewish state would be in the best interest of the British Empire, perhaps even an autonomous extension of it in the Middle East. When, in 1935, the Zionist Organization failed to accept Jabotinsky's program, he and his followers seceded to form the New Zionist Organization. The NZO rejoined the ZO in 1946. The Zionist Organization was roughly composed of General Zionists, who were in the majority, followers of Jabotinsky, who came in a close second, and Labour Zionists, led by David Ben Gurion, who comprised a minority yet had much influence where it mattered, in the Yishuv. Despite its strong representation in the Zionist Organization, Revisionist Zionism had a small presence in the Yishuv, in contrast to Labour Zionism, which was dominant among kibbutzim and workers, and hence the settlement enterprise. General Zionism was dominant among the middle class, which later aligned itself with the Revisionists. In the Jewish Diaspora, Revisionism was most established in Poland, where its base of operations was organized in various political parties and Zionist Youth groups, such as Betar. By the late 1930s, Revisionist Zionism was divided into three distinct ideological streams: the "Centrists", the Irgun, and the "Messianists". Jabotinsky later argued for a need to establish a base in the Yishuv, and developed a vision to guide the Revisionist movement and the new Jewish society on the economic and social policy centered around the ideal of the Jewish middle class in Europe. Jabotinsky believed that basing the movement on a philosophy contrasting with the socialist oriented Labour Zionists would attract the support of the General Zionists. In line with this thinking, the Revisionists transplanted into the Yishuv their own youth movement, Betar. They also set up a paramilitary group, Irgun, a labour union, the National Labour Federation, and their own health services. The latter were intended to counteract the increasing hegemony of Labour Zionism over community services via the Histadrut and address the refusal of the Histadrut to make its services available to Revisionist Party members.   Irgun: Origin and activities The Irgun (shorthand for Irgun Tsvai Leumi, Hebrew for "National Military Organization") had its roots initially in the Betar youth movement in Poland, which Jabotinsky founded. By the 1940s, they had transplanted many of its members from Europe and the United States to Palestine. The movement, now acting autonomously from the Hatzohar leadership in Poland, decided to organize locally, as its small membership was increasingly overshadowed by Labour Zionists, who were predominantly focused on settling the land. While Jabotinsky continued to lobby the British Empire, the Irgun, under the leadership of people such as David Raziel and later Menachem Begin, fought politically against the Labour Zionists and militarily against the British for the establishment of a Jewish state, independent of any orders from Jabotinsky. Acting often in conflict (but at times, also in coordination) with rival clandestine militias such as the Haganah and the Lehi (or Stern Group), the Irgun 's efforts would feature prominently in the armed struggles against British and Arab forces alike in the 1930s and 1940s, and ultimately become decisive in the closing events of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After 1948, members of the Irgun were variously demobilised, or incorporated directly into the nascent Israeli Defense Forces; and on the political front, Irgunist ideology found a new vehicle of expression in the Herut (or "Freedom") Party.   Lehi: Origin and activities The movement called Lehi and nicknamed the "Stern Gang" by the British, was led by Avraham "Yair" Stern, until his death. Stern did not join the Revisionist Zionist party in university but instead joined another group called "Hulda". He formed Lehi in 1940 as an offshoot from Irgun, which was initially named Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael (National Military Organization in Israel or NMO). Following Stern's death in 1942—killed while already in custody by British police—and the arrest of many of its members, the group went into eclipse until it was reformed as "Lehi" under a triumvirate of Israel Eldad, Natan Yellin-Mor, and Yitzhak Shamir. Lehi was guided also by spiritual leader Uri Zvi Greenberg. The Lehi, in particular their members in prison, were encouraged in their struggle by Rabbi Aryeh Levin a greatly respected Jewish sage of the time. Shamir became the Prime Minister of Israel forty years later. Irgun—and, to a lesser extent, Lehi—were influenced by the romantic nationalism of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. The movement's activities were independent of any diaspora leadership, but were backed by several figures in the diaspora. While the Irgun stopped its activities against the British during World War II, at least until 1944, Lehi continued guerrilla warfare against the British authorities. It considered the British rule of Mandatory Palestine to be an illegal occupation, and concentrated its attacks mainly against British targets (unlike the other underground movements, which were also involved in fighting against Arab paramilitary groups). In 1940, Lehi proposed intervening in the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany to attain their help in expelling Britain from Mandate Palestine and to offer their assistance in "evacuating" the Jews of Europe. Late in 1940, Lehi representative Naftali Lubenchik was sent to Beirut where he met the German official Werner Otto von Hentig. See Lehi (group)#Contact with Nazi authorities Lehi prisoners captured by the British generally refused to present a defence when brought to trial in British courts. They would only read out statements in which they declared that the court, representing an occupying force, had no jurisdiction over them. For the same reason, Lehi prisoners refused to plead for amnesty, even when it was clear that this would have spared them from the death penalty. In two cases, Lehi men killed themselves in prison to deprive the British of the ability to hang them. Tensions between the Irgun and Lehi simmered until the two groups forged an alliance during the Israeli War of Independence.   Revisionist Zionism: Ideology Ideologically, Revisionism advocated the creation of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, that is, a state which would include the present-day Israel, as well as West Bank, Gaza and all or part of the modern state of Jordan. Jordan was separated from Mandatory Palestine in 1922 in response to Arab resentment of the Balfour Declaration. All three Revisionist streams, including Centrists who advocated a British-style liberal democracy, and the two more militant streams, which would become Irgun and Lehi, supported Jewish settlement on both sides of the Jordan River; in most cases, they differed only on how this should be achieved. (Some supporters within Labor Zionism, such as Mapai's Ben Gurion also accepted this interpretation for the Jewish homeland.) Jabotinsky wanted to gain the help of Britain in this endeavor, while Lehi and the Irgun, following Jabotinsky's death, wanted to conquer both sides of the river independently of the British. The Irgun stream of Revisionism opposed power-sharing with Arabs. On the topic of "transfer" (expulsion of the Arabs), Jabotinsky's statements were ambiguous. In some writings he supported the notion, but only as an act of self-defense, in others he argued that Arabs should be included in the liberal democratic society that he was advocating, and in others still, he completely disregarded the potency of Arab resistance to Jewish settlement, and stated that settlement should continue, and the Arabs be ignored.   National-messianism vs. Jewish nationalism Up to 1933, a number of members from the national-messianist wing of Revisionism were inspired by the fascist movement of Benito Mussolini. Abba Ahimeir was attracted to fascism for its staunch anti-communism and its focus on rebuilding the glory of the past, which national-messianists such as Uri Zvi Greenberg felt had much connection to their view of what the Revisionist movement should be. Abba Ahimeir's ideology was based in Oswald Spengler's monumental study on the decline of the West, but his Zionist orientation caused him to adapt its ultimate conclusions. Achimeir's basic assumption was that liberal bourgeois European culture was degenerate, and deeply eroded from within by an excess of liberalism and individualism. Socialism and communism were portrayed as "overcivilized" ideologies. Fascism on the other hand, like Zionism, was a return to the roots of the national culture and the historical past. According to Achimeir, Italian Fascism was not anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist, whereas communist ideology and praxis were intrinsically so. He also developed a favorable attitude toward fascist praxis and its psycho-politics, such as the principle of the all powerful leader, the use of propaganda to generate a spirit of heroism and duty to the homeland, and the cultivation of youthful vitality (as manifested in the fascist youth movements). Ahimeir joined the Revisionist movement in 1930, but before joining he wrote a regular column entitled "From the Notebook of a Fascist" in the unaffiliated but pro-Revisionist magazine Doar Hayom. He crafted his pro-fascistic views in these columns, and also wrote an article in 1928 titled "On the Arrival of Our Duce" to celebrate Jabotinsky's visit to Palestine, and propose a new direction for the Revisionist movement, more in line with Achimeir's views. (Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust pg 23.) When Ahimeir was on trial in 1932 for having disrupted a public lecture at Hebrew University, his lawyer, Zvi Eliahu Cohen, argued "Were it not for Hitler's anti-Semitism, we would not oppose his ideology. Hitler saved Germany." Tom Segev has remarked, "This was not an unconsidered outburst." An editorial in the Revisionist newspaper Hazit Haam praised Cohen's "brilliant speech." It continued, that "Social Democrats of all stripes believe that Hitler's movement is an empty shell (but) we believe that there is both a shell and a kernel. The anti-Semitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel. The Revisionists would fight the Nazis only to the extent that they were anti-Semites." (Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust pg 23). In 1933, when Hitler came to power, the newspaper, whose editors were Revisionist Party members, praised Nazism as a German national liberation movement and said that Hitler had saved Germany from Communism. Jabotinsky responded by threatening to have the newspaper's editors expelled if they repeated such "kow-towing" to Hitler. (Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p.216.) The national messianist wing differed from the ideological vision of Jabotinsky to the extent that on August 9, 1932, Jabotinsky wrote to tell Abba Ahimeir that his romantic ideas and the zeal of his followers were considered excessive. Hatzohar, he wrote, was a democratic political movement of a patrician rather than populist or Romantic kind. As a consequence, he argued, the behavior of Ahimeir and his friends threatened Jabotinsky's own movement. He also argued that if Achimeir's views were indeed similar to those which he expressed in his articles and letters, there was no room for the two of them in the same political camp. Despite his flirt with fascism, Ahimeir was also known for his fight against Nazism, with the most visible example being his climb on the German embassy roof in Jerusalem taking off the swastika flag. In later years, Ahimeir said he was sorry for calling himself a "fascistan" (fascist symphatizer).   Irgun to Likud The Irgun largely followed the Centrists' ideals but with a much more irredentist, hawkish outlook toward Britain's involvement in the Mandate, and an ardently nationalist vision of society and government. After the establishment of the State of Israel, it was the Irgun wing of the Revisionist Party that formed Herut, which in turn eventually formed the Gahal party by absorbing the centrist General Zionists. In 1977 the new Likud Party, a right wing coalition dominated by the Revisionist Herut/Gahal, came to power and has been an important force in Israeli politics until March 2006 when they lost most of their seats in favor of the Kadima party. In the decades since first taking power, particularly in the last decade, Likud has undergone a number of splits to its right, including the 1998 departure of Benny Begin, son of Herut founder Menachem Begin (he rejoined Likud in 2008), and in 2005 experienced a split to its left with the departure of Ariel Sharon and his followers to form Kadima. Although the party platform has been consistent with Revisionist ideology, most supporters believe that prime ministers from the party have consistently deviated from what many see as their mandate. The National Union and other parties, such as Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu now claim to be the true representatives of Revisionist Zionism, and that Likud has abandoned its ideology, which is by some evidence true, since although historically, does not in complete form adhere to former Lehi or Irgunist principles. While the initial core group of Likud leaders such as Israeli Prime Ministers Begin and Yitzhak Shamir came from Likud's Herut faction, later leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon have come from or moved to the "pragmatic" Revisionist wing.   Criticism On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published a letter to the editor, signed by over two dozen prominent Jews condemning Menachem Begin and his Herut party on the occasion of Begin's visit to New York City. The letter written by Albert Einstein compared Revisionist Zionism streams to "Nazi and fascist parties", and was signed by Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other prominent American Jews not known for their support of Zionism in general. The letter began: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. Menachem Begin received much criticism for being disloyal to Revisionist ideology by signing the Camp David Accords in 1978.

Religious Zionism
In the 1920s and 1930s Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine) and his son Rabbi Zevi Judah Kook saw great religious and traditional value in many of Zionism's ideals, while rejecting its anti-religious undertones. They taught that Orthodox (Torah) Judaism embraces and mandates Zionism's positive ideals, such as the ingathering of exiles, and political activity to create and maintain a Jewish political entity in the Land of Israel. In this way, Zionism serves as a bridge between Orthodox and secular Jews.

While other Zionist groups have tended to moderate their nationalism over time, the gains from the Six Day War have led religious Zionism to play a significant role in Israeli political life. Now associated with the National Religious Party and Gush Emunim, religious Zionists have been at the forefront of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and efforts to assert Jewish control over the Old City of Jerusalem.

Religious Zionism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Religious Zionism, or the Religious Zionist Movement (a branch of which is also called Mizrachi) is an ideology that combines Zionism and religious Judaism, basing Zionism on the principles of Torah, Talmud et al. and authentic heritage. Ideology Main article: Mizrachi (Religious Zionism) Religious Zionists are a faction within the Zionist movement who justify Zionist efforts to build a Jewish state in the land of Israel on the basis of Judaism. In 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. The main ideologue of modern religious Zionism was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, although Haredi and not Dati Leumi, nevertheless justified Zionism according Jewish law and urged young religious Jews to support efforts to settle the land, and the secular Labour Zionists to give more consideration to Judaism. Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner was another prominent rabbi who supported Zionism. Rav Kook saw Zionism as a part of a divine scheme which would result in the resettlement of the Jewish people in its homeland. This would bring salvation ("Geula") to Jews, and then to the entire world. After world harmony is achieved by the refoundation of the Jewish homeland, the Messiah will come. Although this has not yet happened, Rav Kook emphasized that it would take time and that the ultimate redemption happens in stages, often not apparent while happening. Religious Jews believe that since the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) was given to the ancient Israelites by God, the right of the Jews to that land is permanent and inalienable. To generations of diaspora Jews, Jerusalem, also known as Zion, has been a symbol of the Holy Land and of their return to it, as promised by God in numerous Biblical prophecies. Many other great rabbis who were not necessarily zionist in the same mold as Rav Kook, did view the settlement of the land of Israel to be a divine commandment, especially in light of the Balfour Declaration. Despite this, some religious Jews were not enthusiastic about Zionism before the 1930s, and many religious organisations opposed it on the grounds that an attempt to re-establish Jewish rule in Israel by human agency is blasphemous, since only the Messiah can accomplish this. They considered it religiously forbidden to try to hasten salvation and the coming of the Messiah. They saw Zionism as an expression of disbelief in God's salvation and power, and therefore as a rebellion against God. Rabbi Kook developed a theological answer to that claim, which gave Zionism a religious legitimation. Rabbi Kook's answer was the following: Zionism was not merely a political movement by secular Jews. It was actually a tool of God to promote His divine scheme and to initiate the return of the Jews to their homeland - the land He promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God wants the children of Israel to return to their home in order to establish a Jewish sovereign state in which Jews could live according to the laws of Torah and Halakha and commit the Mitzvot of Eretz Israel (these are religious commandments which can be performed only in the land of Israel). Moreover, to cultivate the land of Israel was a Mitzvah by itself and it should be carried out. Therefore, settling Israel is an obligation of the religious Jews and helping Zionism is actually following God's will. Another big problem of religious Jews with Zionism is that Zionists were largely secular Jews, and in some cases were atheist in their point of view. The atheism of the early Zionists was imported from Marxism by Socialist Zionism which saw Zionism as an avant-garde effort of building an advanced socialist society in the land of Israel, while solving the antisemitism problem. The Kibbutz is a good example of Socialist Zionism: it was a communal settlement set to fulfill national goals, in which no Jewish law was observed (such as Kosher food). Rabbi Kook had an answer to this as well: Secular Zionists may think they do it for political, national or socialist reasons, but in fact - the actual reason for them coming to resettle in Israel is a religious Jewish spark ("Nitzotz") in their soul, planted by God. Without their knowledge, they are contributing to the divine scheme and actually committing a great Mitzvah. The role of religious Zionists is to help them to establish a Jewish state and turn the religious spark in them into a great light. They should show them that the real source of Zionism and the longed-for Zion is Judaism and teach them Torah with love and kindness. In the end, they will understand that the laws of Torah are the key to true harmony and a socialist state (not in the Marxist meaning) that will be a light for the nations and bring salvation to the world. Professor Shlomo Avineri explains the last part of Kook's answer: "... and the end of those pioneers, who scout into the blindness of secularism and atheism, but the treasured light inside them leads them into the path of salvation - their end is that from doing Mitzva without purpose, they will do Mitzva with a purpose." (page 222, 1) History and organizations The first Rabbis who supported Zionism were Rabbi Yehuda Shlomo Alkalai and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. They argued that the change in the status of Western Europe's Jews following emancipation was the first step toward salvation (גאולה) and that therefore one must hasten the messianic salvation by a natural salvation — whose main pillars are the Kibbutz Galuyot ("Gathering of the Exiles"), the return to Eretz Israel, agricultural work (עבודת אדמה) and the revival of the everyday use of the Hebrew language. The Mizrachi (a portmanteau of "Merkaz Ruchani" or "religious centre") is the name of the religious Zionist organization founded in 1902 in Vilna at a world conference of religious Zionists called by Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines. It operates a youth movement, Bnei Akiva which was founded in 1929. Mizrachi believes that the Torah should be at the centre of Zionism, a sentiment expressed in the Mizrachi Zionist slogan Erezt Israel le-am Yisrael al pi Torat Yisrael ("The land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel"). It also sees Jewish nationalism as a tool for achieving religious objectives. The Mizrachi party was the first official religious Zionist party and founded the Ministry of Religion in Israel and pushed for laws enforcing kashrut and the observance of Shabbat - the Sabbath. It also played a role prior to the creation of the state of Israel in building a network of religious schools that exist to this day. Major figures in the religious Zionist movement include Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who became the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1924 and tried to reconcile Zionism with Orthodox Judaism. The Labor Movement wing of Religious Zionism, founded in 1921 under the Zionist slogan "Torah va­'Avodah" (Torah and Labor), it was called Hapoel Hamizrachi. It represented religiously traditional Labour Zionists both in Europe and in the Land of Israel where it represented religious Jews in the Histadrut. In 1956, Mizrachi, Hapoel HaMizrachi and other religious Zionists formed the National Religious Party to advance the rights of religious Zionist Jews in Israel. The flagship religious institution of the religious Zionist movement is "Mercaz haRav" yeshiva (founded by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook), which supplied the religious Zionist movement with most of its Rabbis and scholars. Another branch of Religious Zionism is Kahanism, founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahanism blends Religious Zionism with the ideology of the pre-state Right Wing movements of the followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Today, Hazit is the leading wing of such school of thought within the movement. Other parties and groups such as Gush Emunim, Tkuma, Meimad et al., all represent sectarian interests within the movement. Religious Zionism today Religious Zionists are often called "Kippot Sruggot", which means knitted skullcaps, because of the knitted kippot worn by the men. In Israel, different factions of Orthodox Judaism can be distinguished by the style of dress of their members (such as Litvish Ashkenazi Haredi, Sephardi-Haredi, Ashkenazi-Hasidic, Religious Zionist, etc). Politics Most religious Zionists are right wing supporters.[citation needed] The main party representing them is the National Religious Party, but they also vote for Likud (Conservative party), National Union (nationalist party), Hazit and Shas. However, there is a minority of leftist religious Zionists, headed by Rabbi Michael Melchior and represented by the Meimad party (which ran together with the Israeli Labor party). Many settlers in Judea and Samaria are religious Zionists, along with most of the settlers forcibly expelled from the Gaza Strip in August and September 2005. Many other religious Zionists are supporters of the pro-settlement movements Gush Emunim and the banned Kach. Military service Military service is an important value among most religious Zionists. Many religious Zionists take part in the Hesder program, whereby they are able to combine military service with Yeshiva studies. Others attend a pre-army Mechina, delaying their service by one year. 88% of Hesder students belong to combat units, compared to a national average of below 30%. Female religious Zionists can be exempted from military service, but usually do a one to two-year national service instead (such as working at hospitals, schools and day-care centers). In recent years there have been a growing number of women religious Zionists who choose to serve in the military, although it is still considered controversial among the movement.

Zionism and Ultra-Orthodox Jews
Ultra-Orthodox organizations do not belong to the Zionist movement; they view Zionism as secular, reject nationalism as a doctrine and consider Judaism to be first and foremost a religion. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis do not consider Israel to be a Jewish state because it is secular. However, they generally consider themselves responsible for ensuring that Jews maintain religious ideals and since most Israeli citizens are Jews they pursue this agenda within Israel.

Two Ultra-Orthodox parties run in Israeli elections. They are sometimes associated with views which could be regarded as nationalist or Zionist and have shown a preference for coalitions with more nationalist Zionist parties, probably because these are more interested in enhancing the Jewish nature of the Israeli state.

The Sephardi-Orthodox party Shas rejects association with the Zionist movement, however its voters generally regard themselves as Zionist and Knesset members frequently pursue what others might consider a Zionist agenda. Shas has supported territorial compromise with the Arabs and Palestinians but generally opposes compromise over Jewish Holy sites.

The Ashkenazi Agudath Israel/UTJ party has always avoided association with the Zionist movement and usually avoids voting on or discussing issues related to peace because its members do not serve in the army. The party does work towards ensuring that Israel and Israeli law are in tune with the halacha.

In recent years the Ashkenazi Lubavitch hassidic movement has adopted an ultra-nationalist agenda and opposed any territorial compromise; however, the movement has never considered itself to be Zionist.

The Satmar Hasidim and the small Neturei Karta group are strongly anti-Zionist. Satmar members do not live in Israel. The primary haredi anti-Zionist work is Vayoel Moshe by Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum. This lengthy dissertation rejects Zionism for religious reasons based on an aggadic passage in the Talmud, tractate Ketubot .

Particularities of Zionist beliefs
The idea of Zionism is being established on the basis of long and continuous association between the Jewish people and land of Israel.Mass return,or Aliyah to the Land of Israel is a recurring theme in Jewish prayers,that continued during the period the Jews lived in diaspora, following the Roman occupation and the destruction of the Second Temple on the hands of Romans in the year 70. Aliyah, however, was associated with the coming of the Jewish Messiah.The core of Zionist ideology is reflected in the principle that the land of Israel is the historical origin of the Jewish people, and in believing that the presence of Jews in any other part of the world is living in exile. The center of the Zionism idea is represented in the Israeli Declaration of Independence:

The Jewish people have grown in the land of Israel, wherein their religious, spiritual and political identity reached the maturity, and in here they lived for the first time in a sovereign state, and in there they produced their human, national and cultural values. When the Jewish people were forcefully dispersed out of their country, they kept their promise to return while in the different countries of exile and never stopped praying and believing in the hope of return to their country and resume their political freedom in there.

Zionism is dedicated to fighting anti-semitism in all its forms. Some Zionists believe that anti-semitism will never disappear (and that Jews must conduct themselves with this in mind while others perceive Zionism as a vehicle with which to end anti-semitism.

Zionists preferred to speak Hebrew, a Semitic language that developed under conditions of freedom in ancient Judah, modernizing and adapting it for everyday use. Zionists sometimes refused to speak Yiddish, a language they considered affected by Christian persecution. Once they moved to Israel, many Zionists refused to speak their (diasporic) mother tongues and gave themselves new, Hebrew names.

According to Eliezer Schweid the rejection of life in the Diaspora is a central assumption in Zionism. Underlying this attitude was the feeling that the Diaspora restricted the full growth of Jewish individual and national life.

History
Since the first century CE most Jews have lived in exile, although there has been a constant presence of Jews in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel). According to Judaism, Eretz Israel, or Zion, is a land promised to the Jews by God according to the Bible. After the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, the Romans expelled the Jews from Palestine, thus forming the Jewish diaspora.

In the 19th century, a current in Judaism supporting a return to Palestine grew in popularity. Jews began to emigrate to Palestine, pre-Zionist Aliyah, even before 1897, the year considered as the start of practical Zionism.

Population of Palestine by religions

year Muslims Jews Christians Others 1922 486,177 83,790 71,464 7,617 1931 493,147 174,606 88,907 10,101 1941 906,551 474,102 125,413 12,881 1946 1,076,783 608,225 145,063 15,488

Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest in 1882. Most immigrants came from Russia, escaping the frequent pogroms and state-led persecution. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. Further Aliyahs followed the Russian Revolution and Nazi persecution.

In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl infused Zionism with a new ideology and practical urgency, leading to the first congress at Basel in 1897, which created the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Herzl's aim was to initiate necessary preparatory steps for the attainment of a Jewish state. Herzl’s attempts to reach a political agreement with the Ottoman rulers of Palestine were unsuccessful and other governmental support was sought. The WZO supported small-scale settlement in Palestine and focused on strengthening Jewish feeling and consciousness and on building a worldwide federation.

The Russian Empire, with its long record of state organized genocide and ethnic cleansing ("pogroms") was widely regarded as the historic enemy of the Jewish people. As much of its leadership were German speakers, the Zionist movement's headquarters were located in Berlin. At the start of the First World War, most Jews (and Zionists) supported Germany in its war with Russia.

Lobbying by a Russian Jewish immigrant, Chaim Weizmann and fear that American Jews would encourage the USA to support Germany culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government. This endorsed the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. In addition, a Zionist military corps led by Jabotinsky were recruited to fight on behalf of Britain in Palestine. In 1922, the League of Nations adopted the declaration in the Mandate it gave to Britain:

The Mandatory (…) will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

Weizmann's role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration led to his election as the movement's leader. He remained in that role until 1948.

The British Mandate caused greater Jewish migration to Palestine and massive Jewish land purchases from feudal landlords, which created landlessness and fueled unrest (often led by the same landlords who sold the land). There were riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, sometimes accompanied by massacres of Jews. The victims were usually local non-Zionist orthodox Jewish communities. Britain supported Jewish immigration in principle, but in reaction to Arab violence imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany, and in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made German Jews (and later Austrian and Czech Jews) stateless refugees. Similar rules were applied by Nazi allies in Europe. The subsequent growth in Jewish migration and impact of Nazi propaganda aimed at the Arab world led to the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. Britain established the Peel Commission to investigate the situation. The commission did not consider the situation of Jews in Europe but called for a two-state solution and compulsory transfer of populations. But Britain rejected this solution and instead implemented White Paper of 1939. This planned to end Jewish immigration by 1944 and to allow no more than 75,000 further Jewish migrants. The British maintained this policy until the end of the Mandate.

Growth of the Jewish community in Palestine and devastation of European Jewish life sidelined the World Zionist Organization. The Jewish Agency for Palestine under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion increasingly dictated policy with support from American Zionists who provided funding and influence in Washington, DC including via the highly effective America Palestine Committee.

After WWII and the Holocaust, a massive wave of stateless Jews, mainly Holocaust survivors, began migrating to Palestine in small boats in defiance of British rules. The British either imprisoned these Jews in Cyprus (including many orphaned children) or sent them to the British-controlled Allied Occupation Zones in Germany. This resulted in universal Jewish support for Zionism and the refusal of the U.S. Congress to grant economic aid to Britain. In addition, Zionist groups attacked the British in Palestine and, with its empire facing bankruptcy, Britain was forced to refer the issue to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended that western Palestine should be partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem. This partition plan was adopted on November 29, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities.

The Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states rejected the UN decision, demanding a single state and removal of Jewish migrants. On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion, declared the creation of the State of Israel, and the same day the armies of seven Arab countries invaded Israel. The conflict led to an exodus of about 711,000 Arab Palestinians and the exodus of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world, mostly to Israel.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, the WZO has functioned mainly as an organization dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel. It has provided political support for Israel in other countries but plays little role in internal Israeli politics.

The movement's major success since 1948 was in providing logistical support for migrating Jews and, most importantly, in assisting Soviet Jews in their struggle with the authorities over the right to leave the USSR and to practice their religion in freedom.

Opposition to and criticism of Zionism
Zionism was opposed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals, particularly after 1948. The Arab League and Arab Higher Committee rejected the UN Partition Plan (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) approving the creation of a Jewish and Arab state in Palestine, and viewed Israel as occupying "Arab land". Arab states continue to reject the Zionist philosophy which underwrote the creation of Israel and in particular maintain that the displacement of some 700,000 Arab refugees in the 1948 Palestinian exodus[26] and the subsequent conflict is the inevitable consequence of the concept of a Jewish State.

Haredi Jewish communities are non-Zionist but willing to participate in Israeli coalitions. A minority, (the Satmar Hasidim and the small Neturei Karta group) are strongly anti-Zionist.

Before Hitler, Jews seeking to assimilate in Europe feared that Zionism would undermine their claims to citizenship since anti-semites claim that Jews are disloyal to their "host" societies. These Jews sought to define themselves as loyal citizens of a different faith, sometimes styling themselves "of the Mosaic persuasion" . This movement was particularly prevalent in Germany, where most Jews supported German nationalism.

Non-Zionist Israeli movements, such as the Canaanite movement led by poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s, have argued that "Israeli" should be a new pan-ethnic nationality. A related modern movement is known as post-Zionism, which asserts that Israel should abandon the concept of a "state of the Jewish people" and instead strive to be a state of all its citizens. Another opinion favors a binational state in which Arabs and Jews live together while enjoying some type of autonomy.

During the last quarter of 20th century, classic nationalism in Israel declined. This led to the rise of two antagonistic movements: neo-Zionism and post-Zionism. Both movements mark the Israeli version of a worldwide phenomenon:
(1) the emergence of globalization, a market society and liberal culture, and (2) a local backlash.

Neo-Zionism and post-Zionism share traits with "classical" Zionism but differ by accentuating antagonist and diametrically opposed poles already present in Zionism. "Neo Zionism accentuates the messianic and particularistic dimensions of Zionist nationalism, while post-Zionism accentuates its normalising and universalistic dimensions".

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
In 1903, following the Kishinev Pogrom a variety of Russian antisemities, including the Black Hundreds and the Tzarist Secret Police began combining earlier works alleging a Jewish plot to take control of the world into new formats. One particular version of these allegations, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (subtitle "Protocols extracted from the secret archives of the central chancery of Zion") arranged by Sergei Nilus achieved global fame. In 1903 the editor claimed that the protocols revealed the menace of Zionism,

...which has the task of uniting all the Jews of the whole world in one union - a union that is more closely knit and more dangerous then the Jesuits.

The book contains fictional minutes of an imaginary meeting in which alleged Jewish leaders plotted to take over the world. Nilus later claimed they were presented to the elders by Herzl (the "Prince of Exile") at the first Zionist congress. A Polish edition claimed they were taken from Herzl's flat in Austria and a 1920 German version renamed them "The Zionist Protocols". The "protocols were one of the earliest, and possibly the most important example of the many cases in which anti-semitism has manifested as anti-Zionism or vice versa and were extensively used by the Nazis. They remain relatively widely distributed in the Arab world and are also referred to in the 1988 Hamas charter (article 32):

The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"...

Resolutions condemning Zionism
Ideological opposition to Zionism later combined with the anti-Israel cold-war politics of the Soviet Union and the Arab antagonism to Israel, as well as with anti-Semitism. Communist states declared Zionism to be a colonialist ideology bent on exploiting and dispossessing the native inhabitants of Palestine, and creating an apartheid colonialist fascist Jewish state.

The Organization for African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement passed resolutions condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s. The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3151 72 to 36, with 32 abstentions, in December 1973, stating that there was an "unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism."  Resolution 3379 passed in November 1975, supported by Arab, African and Soviet bloc states, declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism."

As the war in Iraq began and the South Africa's apartheid government and the Soviet Union collapsed, the resolution was repealed in 1991 with Resolution 4686, after Israel declared that it would only participate in the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 if the resolution were revoked.

At the session revoking the motion, U.S. President George H. W. Bush declared that 3379 had been a betrayal of the United Nations' principles, a distortion of history and an act of conflict promotion. The revocation motion was co-sponsored by 90 nations and supported by 111, and opposed by 26.

Marcus Garvey and Black Zionism
Zionist success in winning British support for formation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine helped to inspire the Jamaican nationalist Marcus Garvey to form a movement dedicated to returning Americans of African origin to Africa. During a speech in Harlem in 1920, Garvey stated: "other races were engaged in seeing their cause through—the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement—and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro's interest through." Garvey established a shipping company, the Black Star Line, to allow Black Americans to emigrate to Africa, but for various reasons failed in his endeavour.

Garvey helped inspire the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, the Black Jews and The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem who initially moved to Liberia before settling in Israel.

Non-Jewish support for Zionism
Political support for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel predates the formal organization of Jewish Zionism as a political movement. In the 19th century, advocates of the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land were called Restorationists. The return of the Jews to the Holy Land was widely supported by such eminent figures as Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, President John Adams of the United States, General Smuts of South Africa, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce from Italy, Henry Dunant (founder of the Red Cross and author of the Geneva Conventions), and scientist and humanitarian Fridtj of Nansen from Norway.

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".

In China, top figures of the Nationalist government, including Sun Yat-Sen, expressed their sympathy with the aspirations of the Jewish people for a National Home.

Christians supporting Zionism
Christians have a long history of supporting the return of Jews to the Holy Land prior to Zionism. One of the principal Protestant teachers who promoted the biblical doctrine that the Jews would return to their national homeland was John Nelson Darby. He is credited with being the major promoter of the idea following his 11 lectures on the hopes of the church, the Jew and the gentile given in Geneva in 1840. His views were embraced by many evangelicals and also affected international foreign policy. Famous early supporters of Zionism include British Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, American President Woodrow Wilson and Orde Wingate whose activities in support of Zionism led the British Army to ban him from ever serving in Palestine. According to Charles Merkley of Carleton University, Christian Zionism strengthened significantly after the Six-Day War of 1967, and many dispensationalist Christians, especially in the United States, now strongly support Zionism.

The founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Joseph Smith, in his last years alive, declared "the time for Jews to return to the land of Israel is now." In 1842, Smith sent Orson Hyde, an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to Jerusalem to dedicate the land for the return of the Jews.

Some Christian Arabs publicly supporting Israel include US author Nonie Darwish, creator of the Arabs for Israel Web site, and former Muslim Magdi Allam, author of Viva Israele, both born in Egypt. Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-born Christian US journalist and founder of the American Congress For Truth, urges Americans to "fearlessly speak out in defense of America, Israel and Western civilization".

A small sect of Christian Zionists, Nazarenes and Nazarene Jews are part of a movement to return Christianity to Judaism.

Muslims supporting Zionism
In 1873, Shah of Persia Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar met with British Jewish leaders, including Sir Moses Montefiore, during his journey to Europe. At that time, the Persian king suggested that the Jews buy land and establish a state for the Jewish people.

On occasion, some non-Arab Muslims such as some Kurds and Berbers have also voiced support for Zionism.
 

Jews place of wailing, 1860

History of Zionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Zionist movement was created by Theodor Herzl in 1897, however the history of Zionism can be seen as beginning earlier and related to the Jewish religion and history.

Before the Holocaust the movement's central aims were the creation of a Jewish National Home and cultural centre in Palestine by facilitating Jewish migration. After the Holocaust, the movement focussed on creation of a "Jewish state" (usually defined as a secular state with a Jewish majority), attaining its goal in 1948 with the creation of Israel.

Since the creation of Israel, the importance of the movement has declined as the Israeli state has grown stronger.

The Zionist movement continues to exist, working to support Israel, assist persecuted Jews and encourage Jewish emigration to Israel. While most Israeli political parties continue to define themselves as Zionist, modern Israeli political thought is no longer formulated within the Zionist movement.

The success of Zionism has meant that the percentage of the world's Jewish population who live in Israel has steadily grown over the years and today 40% of the world's Jews live in Israel. There is no other example in human history of a "nation" being restored after such a long period of existence as a Diaspora.






Jewish life in the Holy Land before

The historic and religious origins of Zionism
 

Biblical precedents
The desire of Jews to return to their ancestral homeland is a Jewish theme that first makes its appearance in the Torah. Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt to escape a drought, where they became a nation and were enslaved. Moses went before Pharoh and demanded, "Let my people go!" Most of the Torah is devoted to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, which is estimated at about 1400 BCE and is celebrated annually during Passover. The Passover meal traditionally ends with the words "Next Year in Jerusalem."

After the Babylonians conquered Judea in 641 BCE, the Judeans were exiled to Babylon and the theme of return to a homeland came up again. In the book of Psalms (Psalm 137), Jews lamented their exile while Prophets like Ezekiel foresaw their return. The Bible recounts how, in 538 BCE Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon and issued a proclamation granting the people of Judah their freedom. 50,000 Judeans, led by Zerubabel returned. A second group of 5000, led by Ezra and Nehemiah, returned to Judea in 456 BCE.

The Jewish presence in Israel
During the Hellenistic Age many Jews left Judea to live in other parts of the Mediterranean basin.

The third great Jewish exile is considered to have begun after the destruction of Judea by the Roman Empire in the year 70 (after the Great Jewish Revolt). A second Jewish revolt against the Romans, Bar Kokhba's revolt of 135, led to further dispersal of Jews to other parts of the Empire.

A Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was maintained even after the Bar Kokhba revolt, and there is evidence of vibrant communities in the first millennium. For example, the Jerusalem Talmud was created in the centuries following the revolt. The inventors of Hebrew vowel-signs, the Masoretes (ba'alei hamasorah, Hebrew בעלי המסורה), groups of scribes in 7th and 11th centuries were based primarily in Tiberias and Jerusalem.

The Crusades were devastating for the Jewish presence in Israel. The Crusaders massacred Jews, both on their path across Europe and in the Holy Land. Palestine was later ruled by the Mamluks and Ottomans.

In 1160 David Alroy led a Jewish uprising in Kurdistan which aimed to reconquer the promised land. In 1648 Sabbatai Zevi from modern Turkey claimed he would lead the Jews back to Israel. In 1868 Judah ben Shalom led a large movement of Yemenite Jews to Israel. A dispatch from the British Consulate in Jerusalem in 1839 reported that "the Jews of Algiers and its dependencies, are numerous in Palestine. . . ." There was also significant migration from Central Asia (Bukharan Jews).

In addition to Messianic movemens, the population of the Holy Land was slowly bolstered by Jews fleeing Christian persecution especially after the Reconquista of Al-Andalus (the Muslim name of the Iberian peninsula). Safed became an important center of Kabalah. Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias also had significant Jewish populations.

Aliyah and the ingathering of the exiles
Among Jews in the Diaspora Eretz Israel was revered in a religious sense. They thought of a return to it in a future messianic age. Return remained a recurring theme among generations, 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 which Jews are supposed to strive to fulfill. From the Middle Ages and onwards, many famous rabbis (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.

Catholic persecution of the Jews
Jews in Catholic states were banned from owning land and from pursuing a variety of professions. From the 13th century Jews were required to wear identifying clothes such as special hats or stars on their clothing. This form of persecution originated in tenth century Baghdad and was copied by Christian rulers. Constant expulsions and insecurity led Jews to adopt artisan professions that were easily transferable between locations (such as furniture making or tailoring).

Persecution in Spain and Portugal led large number of Jews there to convert to Christianiy, however many continued to secretly practise Jewish rituals. The Church responded by creating the Inquisition in 1478 and by expelling all remaining Jews in 1492. In 1542 the inquisition expanded to include the Papal states. Inquisitors could arbitrarily torture suspects and many victims were burnt alive.

In 1516 the state of Venice decreed that Jews would only be allowed to reside in a walled area adjacent to Venice called the Ghetto. Ghetto residents had to pay a daily poll tax and could only stay a limited amount of time. In 1555 the Pope decreed that Jews in Rome were to face similar restrictions. The requirement for Jews to live in Ghettos spread across Europe and Ghettos were frequently highly overcrowded and heavily taxed. They also provided a convenient target for mobs (pogrom). Jews were expelled from England in 1290. A ban remained in force that was only lifted when Oliver Cromwell overthrew the Catholic monarchy in 1649 (see Resettlement of the Jews in England).

Catholic persecution of Jews ended with Napoleon's conquest of Europe after the French Revolution although the short lived Nazi Empire resurrected some of the practises. In 1965 the Catholic Church formally ended the doctrine of holding Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus.



Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896

Pre-Zionist Initiatives 1799–1897
 

The Enlightenment and the Jews
 

The Age of Enlightenment in Europe led to an 18th and 19th century Jewish enlightenment movement in Europe, called the Haskalah. In 1791, the French Revolution led France to become the first country in Europe to grant Jews legal equality. Britain gave Jews equal rights in 1856, Germany in 1871. The spread of western liberal ideas among newly emancipated Jews created for the first time a class of secular Jews who absorbed the prevailing ideas of enlightenment, including rationalism, romanticism, and nationalism.

However, the formation of modern nations in Europe accompanied changes in the prejudices against Jews. What had previously been religious persecution now became a new phenomenon, Racial antisemitism and acquired a new name: antisemitism. Antisemites saw Jews as an alien religious, national and racial group and actively tried to prevent Jews from acquiring equal rights and citizenship.

Persecution in Russia (before the revolution)
Jews in Eastern Europe faced constant pogroms and persecution in Tzarist Russia. From 1791 they were only allowed to live in the Pale of Settlement. In response to the Jewish drive for integration and modern education (Haskalah) and the movement for emancipation, the Tzars imposed tight quotas on schools, universities and cities to prevent entry by Jews. From 1827 to 1917 Russian Jewish boys were required to serve 25 years in the Russian army, starting at the age of 12. The intention was to forcibly destroy their ethnic identity, however the move severely radicalized Russia's Jews and familiarized them with nationalism and socialism.

See also: Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire
The tsar's chief adviser Konstantin Pobedonostsev, was reported as saying that one-third of Russia's Jews was expected to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve.

Famous incidents includes the 1913 Menahem Mendel Beilis trial (Blood libel against Jews) and the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.

Between 1880 and 1928, two million Jews left Russia; most emigrated to the United States, a small minority chose Palestine.

Proto-Zionism
Proto-Zionists include the (Lithuanian) Vilna Gaon, (Russian) Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, (Bosnian) Rabbi Yehuda Solomon Alkalay[9] and (German) Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. Other advocates of Jewish independence include (American) Mordecai Manuel Noah, (Russian) Leon Pinsker and (German) Moses Hess.

Moses Hess's 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem. The Last National Question argued for the Jews to create a socialist state in Palestine as a means of settling the Jewish question. Also in 1862, German Orthodox Rabbi Kalischer published his tractate Derishat Zion, arguing that the salvation of the Jews, promised by the Prophets, can come about only by self-help. In 1882, Judah Leib Pinsker published the pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, arguing that Jews would not require emancipation in their own country and analyzing the persistent tendency of Europeans to regard Jews as aliens:

"Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere. That he himself and his ancestors as well are born in the country does not alter this fact in the least... ...to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival."

Pinsker established the Hibbat Zion movement to actively promote Jewish settlement in Palestine. 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.

Early British and American support for Jewish return
Ideas of the restoration of the Jews in the Land of Israel entered British public discourse in the early 19th century, at about the same time as the British Protestant Revival.

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.

At the urging of Lord Shaftesbury, Britain established a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, the first diplomatic appointment in the city. In 1839, the Church of Scotland sent Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne to report on the condition of the Jews there. The 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."

In her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, George Eliot advocated "the restoration of a Jewish state planted in the old ground as a center 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.

In 1842, Mormon leader Joseph Smith sent a representative, Orson Hyde, to dedicate the land of Israel for the return of the Jews. Protestant theologian William Eugene Blackstone submitted a petition to the US president in 1891; the Blackstone Memorial called for the return of Palestine to the Jews.


First aliyah BILU in kuffiyeh

The first aliya
In the late 1870s, Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and the Rothschilds responded to the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe by sponsoring agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in Palestine. The Jews who migrated in this period are known as the First Aliyah.[18] Aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning "ascent," referring to the act of spiritually "ascending" to the Holy Land and a basic tenet of Zionism.

Founded in 1878, Petah Tikva was the first 'proper' Zionist settlement.

Rishon LeZion was founded on 31 July 1882 by a group of ten members of Hovevei Zion from Kharkov (today's Ukraine).

In 1890, Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, was inhabited by about 520,000 people, mostly Muslim and Christian Arabs, but also 20-25,000 Jews.



Jaffa: General view from the sea looking east, 1898-1914. Matson Collection.

Establishment of the Zionist movement 1897–1917

Formation
In 1883, Nathan Birnbaum, 19 years old, founded Kadimah, the first Jewish student association in Vienna and printed Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation.

The Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in France in 1894, profoundly shocked emancipated Jews. The depth of antisemitism in the first country to grant Jews equal rights led many to question their future prospects among Christians. 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 Altneuland ("The Old New Land") in 1897. He described the Affair as a personal turning point, Herzl argued that the creation of a Jewish state would enable the Jews to join the family of nations and escape antisemitism.

Herzl infused political Zionism with a new and practical urgency. He brought the World Zionist Organization into being and, together with Nathan Birnbaum, planned its First Congress at Basel in 1897.

The objectives of Zionism
During the First Zionist Congress, the following agreement, commonly known as the Basel Program, was reached:

Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine 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.

"Under public law" is generally understood to mean seeking legal permission from the Ottoman rulers for Jewish migration. In this text the word "home" was substituted for "state" and "public law" for "international law" so as not to alarm the Ottoman Sultan.

The organizational structure of the Zionist movement
For the first four years, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) met every year, then, up to the Second World War, they gathered every second year. Since the creation of Israel, the Congress has met every four years.

Theodor Herzl addresses the Second Zionist Congress in 1898.Congress delegates were elected by the membership. Members were required to pay dues known as a "shekel," At the congress, delegates elected a 30-man executive council, which in turn elected the movement's leader. The movement was democratic and women had the right to vote, which was still absent in Great Britain in 1914.

The WZO's initial strategy was to obtain permission from the Ottoman Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II to allow systematic Jewish settlement in Palestine. The support of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, was sought, but unsuccessfully. 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 (1901 - a charity which bought land for Jewish settlement) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (1903 - provided loans for Jewish businesses and farmers).

Early arguments

Cultural Zionism and opposition to Herzl
Herzl's strategy relied on winning support from foreign rulers, in particular the Ottoman Sultan. He also made efforts to cultivate Orthodox rabbinical support. Rabbinical support depended on the Zionist movement making no challenges to existing Jewish tradition. However, an opposition movement arose which emphasized the need for a revolution in Jewish thought. While Herzl believed that the Jews needed to return to their historic homeland as a refuge from antisemitism, the opposition, led by Ahad Ha'am, believed that the Jews must revive and foster a Jewish national culture and, in particular strove to revive the Hebrew language. Many also adopted Hebraized surnames. The opposition became known as Cultural Zionists. Important Cultural Zionists include Ahad Ha'am, Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow and Menahem Ussishkin.

The "Uganda" proposal
In 1903, the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, suggested the British Uganda Program, land for a Jewish state in "Uganda" (in today's Uasin Gishu District, Eldoret, 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. Despite its emergency and temporary nature, the proposal 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 committee was established to investigate the possibility, which was eventually dismissed in the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905. After that, Palestine became the sole focus of Zionist aspirations.

Israel Zangwill left the main Zionist movement over this decision and founded the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) . The territorialists were willing to establish a Jewish homeland anywhere, but failed to attract significant support and were dissolved in 1925.

The death of Herzl
By 1904, cultural Zionism was accepted by most Zionists and a schism was beginning to develop between the Zionist movement and Orthodox Judaism. In 1904, Herzl died unexpectedly at the age of 44 and the leadership was taken over by David Wolfsohn, who led the movement until 1911. During this period, the movement was based in Berlin (Germany's Jews were the most assimilated) and made little progress, failing to win support among the Young Turks after the collapse of the Ottoman Regime. From 1911 to 1921, the movement was led by Dr. Otto Warburg.

Anti-Zionism and alternative Proposals

Jewish Orthodox and Reform opposition
Under Herzl's leadership, Zionism relied on Orthodox Jews for religious support, with the main party being the orthodox Mizrachi. However, as the cultural and socialist Zionists increasingly broke with tradition and used language contrary to the outlook of most religious Jewish communities, many orthodox religious organizations began opposing Zionism. Their opposition was based on its secularism and on the grounds that only the Messiah could re-establish Jewish rule in Israel. Therefore, most Orthodox Jews maintained the traditional Jewish belief that while the Land of Israel was given to the ancient Israelites by God, and the right of the Jews to that land was permanent and inalienable, the Messiah must appear before the land could return to Jewish control.

While Zionism aroused Ashkenazi orthodox antagonism in Europe (probably due to Modernist European antagonism to organized religion), and also in the United States, it aroused no such antagonism in the Islamic world.

Prior to the Holocaust, Reform Judaism rejected Zionism as inconsistent with the requirements of Jewish citizenship in the diaspora.

Communism
In Eastern Europe the General Jewish Labor Union, otherwise known as the Bund called for Jewish autonomy within Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish language. The Bund regarded Zionism as a form of Bourgeois nationalism. As with Orthodox Judaism, while the official Bund leadership opposed Zionism (as well as Orthodox Judaism), the rank and file in practice, often had ties with other forms of Jewish life including Zionism. The Bund's influence led to the development of Socialist Zionism which competed with it for Jewish support. In 1917 the Bund had 30,000 members in Russia, compared to 300,000 Zionist members. A 1922 Bolshevik census found less then 1,000 Jewish party members.



Yehuda Leib and Fania Metman-Cohen arrived in Palestine in 1904,
the first year of the Second Aliyah.

The second aliya
In Palestine, the small Zionist community began to expand. Widespread pogroms accompanied the 1905 Russian Revolution, inspired by the Black Hundreds. This and the desire of many young Jews to avoid conscription for the Russo-Japanese war led to a wave of immigrants to Palestine. The new wave of immigrants resurrected the Hebrew Language.

Outside Jaffa, a new town called Tel-Aviv was established. The new town had a modern school, the Herzliya Hebrew High School, which was the first modern school to teach only in Hebrew. In Jerusalem, foundations were laid for a Jewish University (the Hebrew University), one which would teach only in Hebrew and which the Zionists hoped would help them prove their usefulness to the Turks (this did not come to fruition until 1918). In Haifa, the cornerstone was laid for a Jewish Technical school, the Technion.

Jewish migrants and organizations began making large land purchases, in particular buying malarial swamps (of which there were many) and draining them to produce highly fertile land.

Zionism in non-European Jewish communities
The 1911 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia noted the movement's spread: "not only in the number of Jews affiliated with the Zionist organization and congress, but also in the fact that there is hardly a nook or corner of the Jewish world in which Zionistic societies are not to be found."

Zionism was not a purely Ashkenazi phenomenon. The first Zionist branches in the Arab world opened in Morocco only a few years after the first Zionist conference, and the movement was popular among Jews living in Arab states. Although levels of persecution were generally lower in the Arab world, Jews living in the Arab world still faced some religious persecution, prejudice and occasional violence.

A number of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv were Moroccan Jewish immigrants. Ottoman Salonika had a vigorous Zionist movement by 1908.

Socialist Zionism: a new Zionist movement
The chief rival to Zionism among young Jews in Eastern Europe was the socialist movement. Many Jews were abandoning Judaism in favour of Communism or supported the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement which called for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish language.

This led to the emergence of a new Zionist movement, the socialist Zionists, who 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 rejected religion as perpetuating a "Diaspora mentality" among the Jewish people and established rural communes in Israel called "Kibbutzim". Major theoreticians of Socialist Zionism included Moses Hess, Nahum Syrkin, Ber Borochov and Aaron David Gordon, and leading figures in the movement included David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson. Socialist Zionists rejected Yiddish as a language of exile, embracing Hebrew as the common Jewish tongue.

Gordon believed that the Jews lacked a "normal" class structure and that the various classes that constitute a nation had to be created artificially. Socialist Zionists therefore set about becoming Jewish peasants and proletarians and focussed on settling land and working on it. According to Gordon "the land if Israel is bought with labour: not with blood and not with fire".

Opponents of Zionism usually claimed the land could not sustain a large population and so could not house the huge number's of Jews in Europe. Zionists were anxious to develop agriculture and water resources so as to prove they could sustain millions of Jews.

Socialist Zionism became a dominant force in Israel. However, it caused the schism between Zionism and some groups of Orthodox Jews to grow.

Socialist Zionists formed youth movements which became influential organizations in their own right including Hashomer Hatzair, Machanot Halolim and Hanoar Haoved. Because of the lack of available immigration permits to Palestine, the youth movements operated training programs in Europe which prepared Jews for migration to Palestine. As a result most Socialist-Zionist immigrants arrived already speaking Hebrew and prepared for life in Palestine.

Early Zionism and the non-Jewish population of Palestine
Before 1917, Palestine's Arab population mostly saw themselves as Ottoman subjects. They feared the objectives of the Zionist movement, but they assumed the movement would fail. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Arab Nationalism grew rapidly in the area and most Arab Nationalists regarded Zionism as a threat, although a minority perceived Zionism as providing a path to modernity.

While Zionist leaders and advocates followed conditions in the land of Israel and travelled there regularly, their concern before 1917 was with the future of the small Jewish settlement. A Jewish state seemed highly unlikely at this point and realistic aspirations focussed on creating a new centre for Jewish life. The future of the land's Arab inhabitants concerned them as little as the welfare of the Jews concerned Arab leaders.

The Zionist Movement in World War I and the Balfour Declaration
In the search for support, Herzl made most progress with the Kaiser, joining him on his 1898 trip to Palestine. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the offices of the World Zionist Organization were located in Berlin and the Zionist leader, Otto Warburg, was a German citizen. With different sections of the movement supporting different sides in the war, Zionist policy was to maintain strict neutrality and "to demonstrate complete loyalty to Turkey."

At this time, England had a rapidly growing Jewish minority. About 150,000 Jews migrated there from Russia in the period 1881–1914. There was pressure from British voters to halt the influx as well as a strong love for the Old Testament in British society, which made Zionism an attractive solution.

In 1914, most Jews viewed Russia as the historic enemy of the Jewish people, and there was tremendous support for Germany within the Jewish community, particularly in the United States, where the many Russian and German Jews supported the Germans alongside the large Irish-American community. Britain was anxious to win US support for its war effort, and winning over US Jews was considered vital. Most Russian Jewish immigrants to Britain supported Germany in its war against Russia and avoided the draft.

Following Turkey's entry into World War I, the Zionists were expelled from Tel Aviv and its environs. A Polish Zionist, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, worked to create a Jewish division in the British army. The Jewish Legion provided a means of recruiting Russian immigrants to the British war effort and was dominated by Zionist volunteers. The Jewish Legion participated in the 1917 British invasion of Palestine and Jabotinsky was awarded for bravery.

In 1915, the British government fell as a result of its inability to manufacture sufficient artillery shells for the war effort. In the new Government, David Lloyd George became the minister responsible for armaments. Lloyd George was a Christian-Zionist and had represented the Zionist movement in its dealings with the British Government over the Uganda proposal.

The most prominent Russian-Zionist migrant to Britain was Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann developed a means for mass production of Acetone, a critical ingredient of explosives that Britain was unable to manufacture. He did not ask for any payment for his efforts. According to Lloyd George, Weizman told him that he wanted no payment, just the rights over Palestine. Weizmann became a close associate of Lloyd George (Prime-Minister from 1916) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Foreign Secretary from 1916), Arthur Balfour.

In addition to the British desire to cement US Jewish support, there was concern to keep Russia in the war after the overthrow of the Tzar in February 1917. Jews were prominent in the new Russia, and it was hoped that British support for Zionism would help keep Russia fighting Germany.

In 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, made the 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."

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.", the reference to the rights of non-Jews in Palestine was thus demanded by the only Jew in the British cabinet.

Five days after the declaration was published, the Bolsheviks took over Russia.

Massacres of Jews during the Russian civil war
The civil war that accompanied the Russian Revolution (1917), saw terrible atrocities against Jews, particularly in the Ukraine:

...the one and a half million Jews of the Ukraine became the victims of the most vicious attacks since the days of Khmelnitsky. Estimates of the numbers killed run as high as one Jew out of every thirteen. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless.

Antisemites assumed the Bolsheviks were largely Jewish (calling it Jewish Bolshevism) and the Bolsheviks did give Jews equal rights as individuals, however they were intolerant of religious Judaism (see Karl Marx#Marx and antisemitism) and of Zionism, which was banned. As with other groups the Soviets regarded with suspicion, large numbers were sent to the Gulag.

The Communist party and its Jewish sections regarded the values of the Jewish community as so alien to Marxist ideology and to the new society to be based on it that they were determined to eradicate them as soon as possible.

In 1917 there were 300,000 Zionist members in Russia. A 1922 Bolshevik census found less then 1,000 Jewish party members.

The British Mandate and the struggle for Palestine 1918–1939

Weizmann becomes leader
In 1921, the 12th Zionist congress (the first since 1913) was held in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia. 450 delegates attended, representing 780,000 fee paying Zionist members.Chaim Weizmann was elected president in recognition of his role in creating the Balfour Declaration. The conference resolution called on the leadership to "forge a true understanding with the Arab nation". Weizmann led the movement until 1931. From 1931 to 1935 the WZO was presided by Nahum Sokolov (who had also spent the first world war in Britain). Weizmann resumed presidency of the WZO in 1935 and led it until 1946.

The League of Nations endorses Zionism
After the defeat and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by European colonial powers in 1918, the League of Nations endorsed the full text of the Balfour Declaration and established the British Mandate for Palestine).

In addition to accepting the Balfour Declaration policy statement, the League included that “[a]n appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine..." This inclusion paralleled a similar proposal made by the Zionist Organization during the Paris Peace Conference.

The Zionist movement entered a new phase of activity. Its priorities were encouraging Jewish settlement in Palestine, building the institutional foundations of a Jewish state and raising funds for these purposes. 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.

Expansion of the movement: the third and fourth aliya
The success of Zionism in getting international recognition for its project led to growth in the membership and development of new forms of Zionism. The period 1919-1923 saw migration by Jews escaping the civil war in Russia, the period 1924-1929 migration by Jews escaping antisemitic regimes in Poland and Hungary.

Religious Zionism
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 first Chief Rabbi of Palestine) and his son Zevi Judah. Kook was concerned that growing secularization of Zionism and antagonism towards it from the Orthodox Jews would lead to a schism. He therefore sought to create a brand of Judaism which would serve as a bridge between Orthodoxy and secular Jews.

The Religious Zionists established a youth movement called Bnei Akiva and a number of Religious Kibbutzim.

Revisionist Zionism
The Revisionist Zionists were led originally by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. After the 1929 Arab riots, the British banned Jabotinsky from re-entering Palestine, and until his death in 1940, he advocated revisionist ideology in Europe and America. In 1935 the Revisionists left the mainstream Zionist Organization and formed the New Zionist Organization, but they rejoining in 1946.

Revisionist Zionism was detested by the Socialist Zionist movement which saw them as being capitalist and influenced by Fascism and the movement caused a great deal of concern among Arab Palestinians.

Revisionism was popular in Poland but lacked large support in Palestine. The Revisionists refused to comply with British quotas on Jewish migration, and, following the election of Hitler in Germany, the Revisionist youth movements Hehalutz and Beitar began to organize illegal Jewish migration to Palestine. In Europe and America they advocated pressing Britain to allow mass Jewish emigration and the formation of a Jewish Army in Palestine. The army would force the Arab population to accept mass Jewish migration and promote British interests in the region.

Zionism and Feminism
The Zionist movement never restricted female suffrage. Women were active in Zionist parties in many countries before women gained the franchise, and ran for office in Poland where Zionist and other Jewish parties won seats in parliament. In 1911, Zionist activist Hannah Meisel Shochat established Havat Ha'Almot (the girl's farm) to train Zionist women in farming so as to assist in the Zionist program of developing the land for mass settlement. Rachel Bluwstein was one of the graduates. Zionist settlers were usually young and far from their families so a relatively free culture was able to develop. Within the Kibbutz movement child rearing was done communally thus freeing women to work (and fight) alongside the men. Roza Pomerantz-Meltzer was the first woman elected to the Sejm, the Parliament of Poland. She was elected in 1919 as a member of a Zionist party. In Mandatory Palestine women in Jewish towns could vote in elections before women won the right to vote in Britain.

Jewish opposition to Zionism between the wars
International Jewish opinion remained divided on the merits of the Zionist project. Some Jews in Europe and the United States argued that a Jewish homeland was not needed and that Jews should become equal citizens in their countries of residence.

Jews who embraced socialism and proletarian internationalism sometimes opposed Zionism as a form of bourgeois nationalism. The General Jewish Labor Union (Bund), which represented socialist Jews in Eastern Europe, was anti-Zionist and called for Jewish autonomy within Eastern Europe.

Communist Jews often abandoned their connection with the religion, sometimes completely ceasing to identify as Jews but many retained an affiliation with their co-religionists and a sympathy for Zionism. 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.

Zionism and the Arabs
Arab nationalists generally perceived Zionism as a threat. This sense was heightened by the "Hebrew labor" movement of the twenties, which, in an effort to prevent Zionist settlements turning into a standard colonial enterprise and to secure the creation of a Jewish proletariat, campaigned against the employment of cheap Arab labour.

Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland, which described a Jewish state, includes an Arab citizen of the state called Reschid Bey (in conversation with a Christian), who is happy to be a minority in a well-run modern state:

"You're queer fellows, you Moslems. Don't you regard these Jews as intruders?" "You speak strangely, Christian," responded the friendly Reschid. "Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them?

In 1919 King Faisal I of Iraq (who was then King of Syria, before the French expelled him), signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement. 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 by the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.

In their first meeting in June 1918 Weizmann had assured Faisal that

the Jews did not propose to set up a government of their own but wished to work under British protection, to colonize and develop Palestine without encroaching on any legitimate interests

Initially Palestinian Arabs looked to the Arab-nationalist leaders to create a single Arab state, however Faisal's agreement with Weizmann led Palestinian-Arabs to develop their own brand of nationalism and call for Palestine to become a state governed by the Arab majority, in particular they demanded an elected assembly.

Zionist supporters were by now aware of Arab opposition, and this led the movement in 1921 to pass a motion calling on the leadership to "forge a true understanding with the Arab nation".



Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el Husseini - World War 2

The Mufti and the emergence of Palestinian Nationalism
After 1920 Haj Amin al-Husseini became the focus of Palestinian opposition to Zionism. Despite his involvement in the 1920 Palestine riots, Herbert Samuel made him Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921.

The Mufti was concerned that Jews were seeking to rebuild the Jewish Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque and responded by trying to prevent Jews from using the Kotel, also known as the Wailing Wall which was then Waqf property (owned by the Moslem authorities). He claimed it was sacred to the Muslims. Jews have worshipped at the site since the Middle Ages and the British responded by allowing Jews to attend the site but denying them the right to sit down or use furniture of any kind (seats had been used under the Ottomans).

Religious tension, an international economic crisis (affecting crop prices) and nationalist tension (over Zionist immigration) led to the 1929 Palestine riots. In these religious-nationalist riots Jews were massacred in Hebron and the survivors forced to leave the town. Devastation also took place in Safed and Jerusalem. This violence was directed against the non-Zionist orthodox communities; Zionist communities were able to defend themselves and had established defence organizations. As a result the orthodox community in Palestine was increasingly dependent on Zionist support and protection.

In 1936 an Arab uprising occurred, which lasted for three years. The Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine, led by the Mufti, organized the revolt. During the revolt the Mufti was forced to flee to Iraq, where he was involved in a pro-Nazi coup during which the Jewish areas of Baghdad were subjected to a pogrom.

In 1939 he rejected the British White Paper despite extensive concessions to the Arab population.

After the British reoccupied Iraq the Mufti joined the Nazis. He worked with Himmler and aided the SS his main role was broadcasting propaganda and recruiting Moslems, primarily for the Waffen SS in Bosnia. There is also evidence that he was active in promoting the Nazi extermination program.

In 1948 the Mufti returned to Egypt from where he made his way to Palestine and assumed command of the Palestinian-Arab forces.

Growing conflict with the Palestinian Arab population
One issue fatally divided Arab and Jew in Palestine: immigration. Jews would not compromise over immigration which they needed as a means of escaping European persecution and which was a core doctrine of Zionism. The Arabs for their part could not compromise on immigration because to do so would effectively end their majority in Palestine. As time went on the conflict between the two communities became increasingly bitter.

British immigration restrictions
British support for Zionism was always controversial and the issue was periodically debated in Parliament. Following the Arab riots in 1922, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill decided to remove the Transjordan area of Palestine and use it to fulfill British promises to Sharif Hussein, making one of his sons King of Transjordan.

Churchill also restricted Jewish migration to an annual quota decided by the British. Certificates allowing migration were distributed by the Jewish Agency. Jews with 1000 Pounds in cash or Jewish professionals with 500 Pounds in cash could emigrate freely. Churchill's reforms made it hard for Arab Jews, Orthodox Jews and Revisionist Zionistsfrom Poland[50] to migrate to Palestine as the Jewish Agency was dominated by European Zionists, and increasingly by Socialist Zionists. Immigration restrictions did, however mean that Jewish immigrants to Palestine had to prove their loyalty and dedication by spending years preparing for migration. Many immigrants arrived after rigorous preparation including agricultural and ideological training and learning Hebrew.

The rise of Hitler: the fifth aliya and illegal migration
During the 1920s antisemitism gained popularity across Europe. By 1928, nations were increasingly legislating to prevent Jews from entering and new European states established after the First World War perceived Jews as a threat to their stability. Many countries feared that immigrating Jews would bring revolutionary ideas and Jews were often perceived as being a negative moral influence on society.

The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 produced a powerful new impetus for Zionism. The claim that Jews could live securely as minorities in Christian societies was deeply undermined as Germany had been regarded the country in which Jews had most successfully integrated. With nearly all countries closed to Jewish immigration, a wave of migrants headed for Palestine. Those unable to pay the fees demanded by the British had to join waiting lists.

Nazi efforts to push Jews out of Germany were undermined by their refusal to allow Jews to take their property with them. In response Arlozorov negotiated an agreement with the Nazis, the Haavara agreement, whereby German Jews could export capital goods to Palestine. In Palestine the goods were sold and the income given to the migrants. As a result of this agreement Arlozorov was assassinated, probably by members of the Irgun.

In 1934 the Revisionists started organizing illegal emigration to Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine began to rise fast and the financial influx led to an economic boom (ironically leading to Arab migration to Palestine), but the rapid rise of Jewish migration led to an Arab revolt.

In 1938 the pressure in Europe led left-wing Zionists to organize illegal immigration too.

The Struggle Against Britain and the Nazis 1939–1948

The 1939 White Paper and the British break with Zionism
In Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the 1930s saw an increase in antisemitism. A British politician, Oswald Mosley, formed the British Union of Fascists, which claimed that "the Jews" were leading Britain to war and campaigned for peace with Germany. British support for Zionism was further undermined by the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine and concern that millions of Jews would soon be seeking entry to Palestine. The Nuremberg Laws effectively ended the 500,000 Jews of Germany status as citizens, making them refugees in their own country. In March 1938 Hitler annexed Austria making its 200,000 Jews stateless refugees. In September the British agreed to Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland making a further 100,000 Jews refugees.

In the absence of alternative destinations, over 100,000 German Jews headed for Palestine.

In 1939 the British issued a White Paper, in which they declared that a Jewish National Home now existed and that their obligations under the mandate were fulfilled. Further migration would be harmful to the Arab population. A further 10,000 Jews a year were to be admitted from 1939 to 1944 as well as a one-time allowance of 25,000 in view of the situation in Europe. After that Jewish migration would require (the extremely unlikely) agreement of the Arab majority (by this time Jews were about a third of the population). The British promised Palestinians independence by 1949 and banned Jews from purchasing land in 95% of Palestine.

The British were concerned about maintaining Arab support as Italian Fascist and German Nazi propaganda was targeting the Arab world (and winning support). Jewish support in the fight against Fascism was guaranteed. In Palestine, Zionists increasingly viewed the British as an enemy, but they deemed the fight against the Nazis more important. In 1940 a group led by Avraham Stern, later known as Lehi, left the Irgun over its refusal to fight the British.

State of the Zionist movement on the eve of World War II
In 1938–39 the Zionist movement had 1,040,540 members in 61 countries. Zionism was banned in Turkey. Likewise though a significant proportion of the movement's supporters originally came from the USSR, under Stalin. Zionism and Orthodox Judaism were banned and Jews were prominent among the victims of the Soviet genocide.

The following figures relate to the last pre-war Zionist congress in Geneva, 1939. Elections for the congress were held in 48 countries and 529 delegates attended. Members of the movement voted for the parties. Each party submitted a delegate list. Seats were distributed to the parties according to the number of votes they obtained and candidates elected in the order in which they were named on the list. This system today forms the basis for Israeli elections.

 

Delegates per political party at the 1939 Zionist congress Party Number Percentage Worker's Party 216 41 General Zionists (centre) 143 27 General Zionists (conservative) 28 5 Mizrahi(Orthodox religious) 65 12 Radical Workers [far left] 3 2.5 State Party [right-wing] 8 1.5 Others 66 11

Members and delegates at the 1939 Zionist congress, per country Country Members Delegates Poland 299,165 109 USA 263,741 114 Palestine 167,562 134 Rumania 60,013 28 United Kingdom 23,513 15 South Africa 22,343 14 Canada 15,220 8

Zionism during the Holocaust

During the Holocaust Europe's Jews were cut off from and disowned by the outside world. Jews were systematically impoverished, starved and murdered. Where Jews did succeed in fighting the Nazis, Zionists were prominent in the resistance. Nazi allies (Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Croatia were responsible for the deaths of at least 10% of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, mainly Romania. In one particular incident on 22-24/10/1941 30,000 Jews were burnt alive by Romanian troops. Axis governments, local police forces and local volunteers across Europe played a critical role in rounding up or executing Jews for the Nazis.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January and April 1943 included the participation of both right- and left-leaning Zionist organizations. Zionists of all political spectra played a leading role in the struggle. The uprising's left-leaning survivors eventually made their way to Palestine and founded two Kibbutzim, Lohamey ha-Geta'ot and Yad Mordechai.

In Palestine the Zionist leadership instructed all able-bodied Jews to volunteer for the British Army. In addition there was an effort to parachute fighters into Europe, though little came of this. Fearing a Nazi invasion, the Jewish community prepared for a final stand to be made against the Nazis.

Overall there was little they could do. In the words of Tom Segev:

"The story of the yishuv leaders during the Holocaust was essentially one of helplessness. They rescued a few thousand Jews from Europe. They could, perhaps have saved more, but they could not save millions."

Efforts were made to offer the Nazis money for the release of Jews. However, these efforts were systematically (and, according to Segev, cynically) destroyed by the British.

The 1942 Zionist conference could not be held because of the war. Instead 600 Jewish leaders (not just Zionists) met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York and adopted a statement known as the Biltmore Program. They agreed that the Zionist movement would seek the creation of a Jewish state after the war and that all Jewish organizations would fight to ensure free Jewish migration into Palestine.

Impact of the Holocaust
The Nazi-inspired genocide in Europe had grave consequences for the Zionists.

-A large section of the membership was wiped out. The damage was particularly great in Poland where about a third of the Zionist members had lived (the Russian membership had been lost to communism).
-Those Jews who were not killed lost their possessions; the ability of the Zionist movement to raise money in Europe was severely reduced.

This calamity led to important changes in Jewish and Zionist politics:

-Many Jews were now desperate to leave Europe and willing to take grave risks for that purpose
-All Jews now agreed on the need for a Jewish state where Jews could live free of the fear of persecution and which would provide a haven in times of persecution.
-The Jews of the USA were now the dominant force in Jewish politics.
-More Jews were prepared to mobilize on behalf of their brethren.
-Britain was now weakened and less able to resist international pressure.

The rapid growth of illegal immigration to Palestine
In 1945, President Truman sent a personal representative, Earl G. Harrison, to investigate the situation of the Jewish survivors ("Sh'erit ha-Pletah") in Europe. Harrison reported that

substantial unofficial and unauthorized movements of people must be expected, and these will require considerable force to prevent, for the patience of many of the persons involved is, and in my opinion with justification, nearing the breaking point. It cannot be overemphasized that many of these people are now desperate, that they have become accustomed under German rule to employ every possible means to reach their end, and that the fear of death does not restrain them.

Despite winning the 1945 British election with a manifesto promising to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the Labour Government succumbed to Foreign Office pressure and kept Palestine closed to Jewish migration.

In Europe former Jewish partisans led by Abba Kovner began to organize escape routes ("Berihah" taking Jews from Eastern Europe down to the Mediterranean where the Jewish Agency organized ships ("Aliyah Bet") to illegally carry them to Palestine.

The British government responded by trying to force Jews to return to their places of origin. Holocaust survivors entering the British Zone were denied assistance or forced to live in hostels with former Nazi collaborators (Britain gave asylum to a large number of Belorussian Nazi collaborators after the war). In American-controlled zones, political pressure from Washington allowed Jews to live in their own quarters and meant the US Army helped Jews trying to escape the centres of genocide.

Despite the death of almost a third of the world's Jews during the Second World War, the number of fee paying members of the Zionist movement continued to grow. The December 1946 Zionist congress in Basle (Switzerland) attracted 375 delegates from 43 countries representing two million fee paying members. As before the largest parties were the Socialist Zionist parties although these lacked a full majority. Only ten of the delegates were British Jews.

The 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine
In 1947 Britain announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine. An United Nations Special committee investigated the situation and offered two solutions :

-to establish a bi-national state in Palestine (the minority option);
-to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

From the Zionist point of view, the second option corresponded to their goal and they gave full support to this.

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). Amid public rejoicing in Jewish communities in Palestine, the Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Palestinian Arab leadership and the Arab League rejected the decision and announced that they would not abide by it. Civil conflict between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine ensued immediately.

Zionism after the creation of Israel

David Ben Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel, beneath a large portrait of Theodore Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism.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 continuing conflict with the Arabs can be read in the article on the History of Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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 mobilization of world public opinion in support of Israel. Most Jews have come 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.

The 1967 war between Israel and the Arab states (the "Six-Day War") marked a major turning point in the history of both 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) the Gaza Strip (from Egypt) as well as the Golan Heights (from Syria).

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.
 
The election of 1977, characterized as “the revolution”, brought the nationalistic, right-wing Revisionist Zionists to power, after thirty years of opposition to the dominant Labor party and indicated further movement to the political right. Joel Greenburg, writing in the New York Times twenty years after the election, notes its significance and that of related events; he writes:

The seed was sown in 1977, when Menachem Begin of Likud brought his party to power for the first time in a stunning election victory over Labor. A decade before, in the 1967 war, Israeli troops had in effect undone the partition accepted in 1948 by overrunning the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ever since, Mr. Begin had preached undying loyalty to what he called Judea and Samaria (the West Bank lands) and promoted Jewish settlement there. But he did not annex the West Bank and Gaza to Israel after he took office, reflecting a recognition that absorbing the Palestinians could turn Israel it into a binational state instead of a Jewish one.

Control of the West Bank and Gaza placed Israel in the position of control over a large population of Palestinian Arabs. This policy was partially abandoned in 2004 leading to the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Since Israel founding, Zionism and its ideological underpinnings have become less important in Israeli politics, except for on-going national debate over the nature of what is meant by a "Jewish State," and the geographic limits of the State of Israel.

The campaign to free the Jews of the USSR
After 1967, the Zionist movement mounted a major campaign to pressure the USSR to allow Soviet Jews to migrate to Israel. In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 was passed. It stated that "zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Resolution 3379 was rescinded in 1991 by the Resolution 4686. This issue is discussed in length in the article on anti-Zionism.
 

The symbol of the First Zionist Congress

Timeline of Zionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Late 18th Century, A.D..
1777
Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk along with a large group of followers emigrates and settles in Safed. In 1783 they were forced out of Safed, and moved to Tiberias.

Early 19th Century, A.D..
1808
The first group of Perushim, influenced by the teachings of the Vilna Gaon, leaves Shklov and after a 15-month journey settles in Jerusalem and Safed.
1839
Judah Alkalai publishes his pamphlet Darhei No'am (The Pleasant Paths) advocating the restoration of the Jews in the Land of Israel, followed in 1840 by Shalom Yerushalayim (The Peace of Jerusalem).
1844
Mordecai Noah publishes Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews.
1844
The Old Yishuv Jews constitute the largest of several ethno-religious groups in Jerusalem. See Demographics of Jerusalem.

Late 19th Century, A.D..
1861
The Zion Society is formed in Frankfurt, Germany.
1861
Mishkenot Sha’ananim : first neighborhood outside the Old City of Jerusalem, built by Sir Moses Montefiore.
1862
Moses Hess writes Rome and Jerusalem. The Last National Question (text) arguing for the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, and proposes a socialist country in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil". His ideas later evolved into the Labor Zionism movement.
1862
Zvi Hirsch Kalischer publishes Derishat Zion, maintains 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.
1867
Mark Twain visits Palestine as part of a tour of what westerners call the Holy Land.
1869
Twain publishes The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress documenting his observations through his travels. He indicated he observed that Palestine was primarily an uninhabited desert. His account was widely circulated and remains a controversial snap-shot of the area in the late 1800s.
1870
Mikveh Israel, the first modern Jewish agricultural school and settlement was established in the Land of Israel by Charles Netter of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
1870-1890
The group Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) sets up 30 Jewish farming communities in the Land of Israel.
1878
Galician poet Naphtali Herz Imber writes a poem Tikvatenu (Our Hope), later adopted as the Zionist hymn Hatikvah.
1878
Petah Tikva is founded by Jerusalem Jews, but abandoned after difficulties. Resettled in 1882 with help from first aliyah.
1881-1884
Pogroms in the Russian Empire kill several Jews and injure large numbers, destroy thousands of Jewish homes, and motivate hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee.
1881-1920
Over two million of the Russian Jews emigrate. Most go to the US, others elsewhere, some to the Land of Israel. The first group of Biluim organize in Kharkov.
1881
Eliezer ben Yehuda makes aliyah and leads efforts to revive Hebrew as a common spoken language.
1882 January 1
Leon Pinsker publishes pamphlet Autoemancipation (text) urging the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.
1882
Baron Edmond James de Rothschild begins buying land in the region of Palestine and financing Jewish agricultural settlements and industrial enterprises.
1882-1903
The First Aliyah, major wave (estimated at 25,000-35,000) of Jewish immigration to Ottoman-occupied Palestine.
1882
Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pinna, Zikhron Ya'aqov are founded.
1883
Rabbi Isaac Rülf publishes Aruchas Bas-Ammi, calling for a Hebrew-speaking Jewish homeland in Palestine.
1890
Austrian publisher Nathan Birnbaum coins the term Zionism for Jewish nationalism in his journal Self Emancipation.
1890
The Russian Tsarist government approves the establishment of "The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Eretz Israel," a charity organization which came to be known as "The Odessa Committee."
1894
The Dreyfus affair makes the problem of antisemitism prominent in Western Europe.
1896
After covering the trial and aftermath of Captain Dreyfus and witnessing the associated mass anti-semitic rallies in Paris, which included chants, "Death to Jews", Jewish-Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl writes Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) advocating the creation of a Jewish state.
1896-1904
Herzl unsuccessfully approaches world leaders for assistance in the creation of a Jewish National Home.
1897
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is founded.
1897
The First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, urges "a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine" for Jews and establishes the World Zionist Organization (WZO).
January 13, 1898
The French writer Émile Zola exposed the Dreyfus affair to the general public in a famously incendiary open letter to President Félix Faure to which the French journalist and politician Georges Clemenceau affixed the headline "J'accuse!" (I accuse!). Zola's world fame and internationally respected reputation brought international attention to Dreyfus' unjust treatment.
1898
Sholom Aleichem writes an Yiddish language pamphlet Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own?[1]
1899
Henry Pereira Mendes publishes Looking Ahead: Twentieth Century Happenings, the premise of which is that the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over historic Israel is essential to the world's peace and prosperity.

Early 20th Century, A.D.
1901
Fifth Zionist Congress establishes the Jewish National Fund.
1902
Herzl publishes the novel Altneuland (The Old New Land), which takes place in Palestine.
1903-1906
More pogroms in Russian Empire. Unlike the 1881 pogroms, which focused primarily on property damage, these pogroms resulted in the deaths of at least 2,000 Jews and an even higher number of non-Jews.
1903
Uganda Proposal for settlement in East Africa splits the 6th Zionist Congress. A committee is created to look into it.
1904-1914
The Second Aliyah occurs. Approximately 40,000 Jews immigrated into Ottoman-occupied Palestine, mostly from Russia. The prime cause for the aliyah was mounting anti-Semitism in Russia and pogroms in the Pale of Settlement. Nearly half of these immigrants left Palestine by the time World War I started.
1909
Tel Aviv is founded on sand dunes near Jaffa.
1915 October-1916 January
McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, agreeing to give Arabia to Arabs, if Arabs will fight the Turks. The Arab Revolt began in June 1916.
1916 May 16
Britain and France sign the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement which details the proposed division of Arabia at the conclusion of World War I into French and British spheres of influence.
1917 August
The formation of the Jewish Legion (Zion Mule Corps), initiated in 1914 by Joseph Trumpeldor and Zeev Jabotinsky.
1917
T.E. Lawrence leads Arab militias to defeat various Turkish Garrisons in Arabia.
1917 November 2
The British Government issues the Balfour Declaration which documented three main ideas:
First, it declared official support from the British Government for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", and promised that the British Government would actively aid in the these efforts.
Second, it documented that the British Government would not support actions that would prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish residents of Palestine.
Finally, it confirmed that Jews living in any other country would, similarly, not be prejudiced.
1917 November 23
Bolsheviks release the full text of the previously secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in Izvestia and Pravda; it is subsequently printed in the Manchester Guardian on November 26.
1917 December
The British Army gains control of Palestine with military occupation, as the Ottoman Empire collapses in World War I.
1918-1920
Massive pogroms accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the Russian Civil War), resulting in the death of an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000.
1919-1923
The Third Aliyah was triggered by the October Revolution in Russia, the ensuing pogroms there and in Poland and Hungary, the British conquest of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration. Approximately 40,000 Jews arrived in Palestine during this time.
1920
The San Remo conference of the Allied Supreme Council in Italy resulted in an agreement that a Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain would be reviewed and then issued by the League of Nations. The mandate would contain similar content to the Balfour Declaration, which indicates that Palestine will be a homeland for Jews, and that the existing non-Jews would not have their rights infringed. In anticipation of this forthcoming mandate, the British military occupation shifts to a civil rule.
1920
Histadrut, Haganah, Vaad Leumi are founded.
1921
Chaim Weizmann becomes new President of the WZO at the 12th Zionist Congress (the first since World War I).
1921
Britain grants autonomy to Transjordan under Crown Prince Abdullah. Jewish settlement is outlawed there.
July 1922
The offer of a Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain from the San Remo conference is confirmed by the League of Nations.
September 1923
Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain comes into effect.
1923
Britain cedes the Golan Heights to the French Mandate of Syria.
1923
Jabotinsky establishes the revisionist party Hatzohar and its youth movement, Betar.
1924-1928
The Fourth Aliyah was a direct result of the economic crisis and anti-Jewish policies in Poland, along with the introduction of stiff immigration quotas by the United States. The Fourth Aliyah brought 82,000 Jews to British-occupied Palestine, of whom 23,000 left.
1932-1939
The Fifth Aliyah was primarily a result of the Nazi accession to power in Germany (1933) and later throughout Europe. Persecution and the Jews' worsening situation caused immigration from Germany to increase and from Eastern Europe to continue. Nearly 250,000 Jews arrived in British-occupied Palestine during the Fifth Aliyah (20,000 of them left later). From this time on, the practice of "numbering" the waves of immigration was discontinued. ­
1933-1948
Aliyah Bet: Jewish refugees flee Germany because of persecution under the Nazi government with many turned away as illegal because of the British-imposed immigration limit.
1936
The British propose a partition between Jewish and Arab areas. It is accepted by the Zionists, but rejected by the Arab parties (See Jewish Defense Organizations).
1936-1939
Great Uprising by Arabs against British rule and Jewish immigration.
1939
The British government issues the White Paper of 1939, which sets an absolute limit of 75,000 on future Jewish immigration to Palestine and increases Zionist opposition to British rule.
May 1942
The Biltmore Conference makes a fundamental departure from traditional Zionist policy and demands "that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth" (state), rather than a “homeland.” This sets the ultimate aim of the movement.

Late 20th Century, A.D..
1947 November 29
The United Nations approves partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It is accepted by the Jews, but rejected by the Arab leaders (See [1] [2]).
1947 November 30
The 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine starts between Jewish forces, centered around the Haganah and Palestinians supported by the Arab Liberation Army.
1948 May 14
Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
1948 May 15
Five neighboring Arab countries invade, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ensues.
1975
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 equates Zionism with racism.
1991
The UN GA resolution 3379 is revoked by Resolution 4686.

 

Jews place of wailing, 1860

Theodor Herzl



Theodor Herzl

Austrian Zionist leader

born May 2, 1860, Budapest, Hungary, Austrian Empire [now in Hungary]
died July 3, 1904, Edlach, Austria

Main
founder of the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland. His pamphlet The Jewish State (1896) proposed that the Jewish question was a political question to be settled by a world council of nations. He organized a world congress of Zionists that met in Basel, Switz., in August 1897 and became first president of the World Zionist Organization, established by the congress. Although Herzl died more than 40 years before the establishment of the State of Israel, he was an indefatigable organizer, propagandist, and diplomat who had much to do with making Zionism into a political movement of worldwide significance.

Early years.
Herzl was born of well-to-do middle-class parents. He first studied in a scientific secondary school, but to escape from its anti-Semitic atmosphere he transferred in 1875 to a school where most of the students were Jews. In 1878 the family moved from Budapest to Vienna, where he entered the University of Vienna to study law. He received his license to practice law in 1884 but chose to devote himself to literature. For a number of years he was a journalist and a moderately successful playwright.

In 1889 he married Julie Naschauer, daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman in Vienna. The marriage was unhappy, although three children were born to it. Herzl had a strong attachment to his mother, who was unable to get along with his wife. These difficulties were increased by the political activities of his later years, in which his wife took little interest.

Conversion to Zionism.
A profound change began in Herzl’s life soon after a sketch he had published in the leading Viennese newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, led to his appointment as the paper’s Paris correspondent. He arrived in Paris with his wife in the fall of 1891 and was shocked to find in the homeland of the French Revolution the same anti-Semitism with which he had become so familiar in Austria. Hitherto he had regarded anti-Semitism as a social problem that the Jews could overcome only by abandoning their distinctive ways and assimilating to the people among whom they lived. At the same time, his work as a newspaperman heightened his interest in, and knowledge of, social and political affairs and led him to the conviction that the answer to anti-Semitism was not assimilation but organized counterefforts by the Jews. The Dreyfus affair in France also helped crystallize this belief. French military documents had been given to German agents, and a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely charged with the crime. The ensuing political controversy produced an outburst of anti-Semitism among the French public. Herzl said in later years that it was the Dreyfus affair that had made a Zionist out of him. So long as anti-Semitism existed, assimilation would be impossible, and the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organized emigration to a state of their own.

Herzl was not the first to conceive of a Jewish state. Orthodox Jews had traditionally invoked the return to Zion in their daily prayers. In 1799 Napoleon had thought of establishing a Jewish state in the ancient lands of Israel. The English statesman Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew, had written a Zionist novel, Tancred. Moses Hess, a friend and co-worker of Karl Marx, had published an important book, Rom und Jerusalem (1862), in which he declared the restoration of a Jewish state a necessity both for the Jews and for the rest of humanity. Among the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe, a number of groups were engaged in trying to settle emigrants in agricultural colonies in Palestine. After the Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker had written a pamphlet, “Auto-Emanzipation,” an appeal to western European Jews to assist in the establishment of colonies in Palestine. When Herzl read it some years later, he commented in his diary that, if he had known of it, he might never have written The Jewish State.

Herzl’s first important Zionist effort was an interview with Baron Maurice de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest men of his time. De Hirsch had founded the Jewish Colonization Association with the aim of settling Jews from Russia and Romania in Argentina and other parts of the Americas. The 35-year-old journalist arrived at the Baron’s mansion in Paris with 22 pages of notes, in which he argued the need for a political organization to rally the Jews under a flag of their own, rather than leaving everything to the philanthropic endeavours of individuals like the Baron. The conversation was notable for its effect on Herzl rather than on the Baron de Hirsch, who refused to hear him out. It led to Herzl’s famous pamphlet The Jewish State, published in February 1896 in Vienna. The Jewish question, he wrote, was not a social or religious question but a national question that could be solved only by making it “a political world question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.” Some of Herzl’s friends thought it a mad idea, but the pamphlet won favourable response from eastern European Zionist societies. In June 1896, when Herzl was en route to Constantinople (Istanbul) in the hope of talking to the Ottoman sultan about obtaining the grant of Palestine as an independent country, his train stopped in Sofia, Bulg.; hundreds of Jews were present at the station to greet Herzl and to hail him as a leader. Although he remained in Constantinople for 11 days, he failed to reach the Sultan. But he had begun the career as organizer and propagandist that would end only with his death eight years later.

The First Zionist Congress.
Herzl went to London in an effort to organize the Jews there in support of his program. Not all the Jewish leaders in England were happy to see him because his political approach was not in tune with their ideas, but at public meetings in the East End he was loudly cheered. He was a tall, impressive figure with a long black beard and the mien of a prophet. Despite his personal magnetism, he found that his efforts to influence Jewish leaders in England were of little avail and therefore decided to organize a world congress of Zionists in the hope of winning support from the masses of Jews in all countries. He proposed to hold the congress in Munich, but as the Jews there—who were mostly assimilated—opposed it, he settled upon Basel. The congress met at the end of August 1897, attended by about 200 delegates, mostly from central and eastern Europe and Russia along with a few from western Europe and even the United States. They represented all social strata and every variety of Jewish thought—from Orthodox Jews to atheists and from businessmen to students. There were also several hundred onlookers, including some sympathetic Christians and reporters for the international press. When Herzl’s imposing figure came to the podium, there was tumultuous applause. “We want to lay the foundation stone,” he declared, “for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation. Zionism is the return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel.” One of Herzl’s most faithful supporters was the writer Max Nordau, who gave a brilliant address in which he described the plight of the Jews in the East and in the West. The three-day congress agreed upon a program, henceforth to be known as the Basel Program, declaring that “Zionism aspires to create a publicly guaranteed homeland for the Jewish people in the land of Israel.” It also set up the Zionist Organization with Herzl as president.

Later accomplishments
The seven remaining years of his life were devoted to the furtherance of the Zionist cause, although he remained literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse in order to earn a living. He established a Zionist newspaper, Die Welt, published as a German-language weekly in Vienna. He negotiated unsuccessfully with the Sultan of Turkey for the grant of a charter that would allow Jewish mass settlement in Palestine on an autonomous basis. He then turned to Great Britain, which seemed favourable to the establishment of a Jewish settlement in British territory in the Sinai Peninsula. When this project failed, the British proposed Uganda in East Africa. This offer, which he and some other Zionists were willing to accept, aroused violent opposition at the Zionist congress of 1903, particularly among the Russians. Herzl was unable to resolve the conflict. He died of a heart ailment at Edlach, near Vienna, at the age of 44. He was buried in Vienna, but, in accordance with his wish, his remains were removed to Jerusalem in 1949 after the creation of the Jewish state and entombed on a hill west of the city now known as Mt. Herzl.

After the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Herzl had written in his diary:

If I had to sum up the Basel Congress in one word—which I shall not do openly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in 50, everyone will see it.

While the Jewish state was the product of many complex historic forces, including two world wars and the labours of Herzl’s many followers, it was he who organized the political force of Jewry that was able to take advantage of the accidents of history. Through the strength of his personality, he aroused the enthusiasm of the Jewish masses and gained the respect of many statesmen of his time, in spite of the opposition of some Jewish leaders to his plans.

David Ben-Gurion

Encyclopaedia Britannica
 

The symbol of the First Zionist Congress

Max Nordau


Max Nordau

Hungarian-French physician and writer
original name Max Simon Südfeld
born July 29, 1849, Pest [now Budapest], Hung.
died Jan. 23, 1923, Paris, France

Main
physician, writer, and early Jewish nationalist who was instrumental in establishing recognition of Palestine as a potential Jewish homeland to be gained by colonization.

In 1880, after serving as Viennese correspondent for a Budapest newspaper and traveling extensively in Europe, Nordau settled permanently in Paris, where he established a medical practice. A prolific writer of travel books, plays, poems, and essays, he achieved his greatest success in 1883 with Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization), a vitriolic attack on the inadequacy of 19th-century institutions to meet human needs; he took a particularly harsh look at organized religion. Banned in Russia and Austria, the book nevertheless was translated into numerous languages and went into some 73 editions.

After he met the charismatic Jewish nationalist Theodor Herzl in Paris in 1892, Nordau became deeply interested in Zionism and served as vice president of the Zionist congresses under Herzl, delivering a number of brilliant addresses on the condition of world Jewry. Following Herzl’s death in 1904, Nordau broke with the “practical Zionists” (younger men advocating colonization of Palestine without guarantees of political sovereignty), who gained control of the Zionist congresses; Nordau refused to participate in these meetings after 1911.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
 

Jews place of wailing, 1860

First Zionist Congress

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



The delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland (1897).


The First Zionist Congress (Hebrew: הקונגרס הציוני הראשון‎) is the name given to the congress held in Basel (Basle), Switzerland, from August 29 to August 31, 1897. It was the first congress of the Zionist Organization (ZO) (to become the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1960). It was called for and chaired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. The major achievements of the Congress were its formulation of the Zionist platform, known as the Basle program, the foundation of the World Zionist Organization, and the adoption of Hatikvah as its anthem (already the anthem of Hovevei Zion and later to become the national anthem of the State of Israel).

Origins
The first Zionist Congress was set up by Theodor Herzl as a symbolic Parliament for those in agreement with the implementation of Zionist goals. The Congress was due to be taken place in Munich, Germany. However, because of local opposition by both Orthodox and Reform community leadership, Herzl decided to transfer the gathering to Basel. The Congress took place in the concert hall of the Basel Municipal Casino on August 29, 1897.

Congress
Herzl acted as chairperson of the Congress which was attended by some 200 participants from seventeen countries, 69 of whom were delegates from various Zionist societies and the remainder were individual invitees. Ten non-Jews were also in attendance and were expected to abstain from voting.Seventeen women attended the Congress, some of them in their own capacity, others accompanying representatives. While women participated in the First Zionist Congress, they did not have voting rights. Full membership rights were given them the following year, at the Second Zionist Congress.

Following a festive opening in which the representatives arrived in formal dress, tails and white tie, the Congress moved onto the agenda. The most principal items on the agenda were the presentation of Herzl's plans, the establishment of the Zionist Organization and the declaration of Zionism's goals-the Basel program.

At the Congress, Herzl was elected President of the Zionist Organization and Max Nordau one of three Vice-Presidents. Also, an Inner Actions Committee and a Greater Actions Committee were elected to run the affairs of the movement between Congresses.

Basel Program
On the second day of its deliberations (August 30), the version submitted to the Congress by a committee under the chair of Max Nordau, it was stated: "Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law." This gave clear expression to Herzl's political Zionism in contrast with the settlement orientated activities of the more loosely organized Hovevei Zion. To meet halfway the request of numerous delegates, the most prominent of whom was Leo Motzkin, who sought the inclusion of the phrase "by international law," a compromise formula proposed by Herzl was eventually adopted.

The political program, which came to be known as the Basel Program, laid out Zionism's goals. It was adopted on the following terms:

“ Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine. For the attainment of this purpose, the Congress considers the following means serviceable:

1. The promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.

2. The federation of all Jews into local or general groups, according to the laws of the various countries.

3. The strengthening of the Jewish feeling and consciousness.

4. Preparatory steps for the attainment of those governmental grants which are necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose.”

The symbol of the First Zionist Congress

Balfour Declaration of 1917

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Arthur James Balfour.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 (dated 2 November 1917) was a formal statement of policy by the British government stating that "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The declaration was made in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, a Zionist organization. The letter reflected the position of the British Cabinet, as agreed upon in a meeting on 31 October 1917. It further stated that the declaration is a sign of "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations."

The statement was issued through the efforts of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, the principal Zionist leaders based in London but, as they had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as “the” Jewish national home, the Declaration fell short of Zionist expectations.

The "Balfour Declaration" was later incorporated into the Sèvres peace treaty with Turkey and the Mandate for Palestine. The original document is kept at the British Library.

The anniversary of the Declaration, 2 November, is widely commemorated in Israel and among Jews in the Jewish diaspora as Balfour Day.

Text of the declaration
The declaration, a typed letter signed in ink by Balfour, reads as follows:

 

Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely
Arthur James Balfour

Text development and differing views
The record of discussions that led up to the final text of the Balfour Declaration clarifies some details of its wording. The phrase "national home" was intentionally used instead of "state", and the British devoted some effort over the following decades, including Winston Churchill's 1922 White Paper, to denying that a state was the intention. However, in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be the eventual outcome.

The initial draft of the declaration, contained in a letter sent by Rothschild to Balfour, referred to the principle "that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people." In the final text, the word that was replaced with in to avoid committing the entirety of Palestine to this purpose. Similarly, an early draft did not include the commitment that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. These changes came about partly as the result of the urgings of Edwin Samuel Montagu, an influential anti-Zionist Jew and Secretary of State for India, who, among others, was concerned that the declaration without those changes could result in increased anti-Semitic persecution. The draft was circulated and during October the government received replies from various representatives of the Jewish community. Lord Rothschild took exception to the new proviso on the basis that it presupposed the possibility of a danger to non-Zionists, which he denied.

At that time the British were busy making promises. At a war Cabinet meeting, held on 31 October 1917, Balfour suggested that a declaration favorable to Zionist aspirations would allow Great Britain "to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America" The British also dropped Balfour Declaration leaflets written in Yiddish over Germany.

Henry McMahon had exchanged letters with Hussein bin Ali, Sherif of Mecca, in 1915, in which he had promised Hussein control of Arab lands with the exception of "portions of Syria" lying to the west of "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo". Palestine lies to the south of these areas and wasn't explicitly mentioned. That modern-day Lebanese region of the Mediterranean coast was set aside as part of a future French Mandate. After the war, the extent of the coastal exclusion was hotly disputed. Hussein had protested that the Arabs of Beirut would greatly oppose isolation from the Arab state or states, but did not bring up the matter of Jerusalem or Palestine. Dr. Chaim Weizmann wrote in his autobiography Trial and Error that Palestine had been excluded from the areas that should have been Arab and independent. This interpretation was supported explicitly by the British government in the 1922 White Paper.

Lord Grey had been the Foreign Secretary during the McMahon-Hussein negotiations. Speaking in the House of Lords on the 27th March, 1923, he made it clear that, for his part, that he entertained serious doubts as to the validity of the British government's interpretation of the pledges which he, as Foreign Secretary, had caused to be given to Sharif Hussein in 1915. He called for all of the secret engagements regarding Palestine to be made public. Many of the relevant documents in the National Archives were later declassified and published. Among them were the minutes of a Cabinet Eastern Committee meeting, chaired by Lord Curzon, which was held on 5 December 1918. Balfour was in attendance. The minutes revealed that in laying out the government's position Curzon had explained that: "Palestine was included in the areas as to which Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent in the future".

Milner as the chief author
In his posthumously published 1982 book The Anglo-American Establishment, Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley explained that the Balfour Declaration was actually drafted by Lord Alfred Milner. Quigley wrote:

"This declaration, which is always known as the Balfour Declaration, should rather be called 'the Milner Declaration,' since Milner was the actual draftsman and was apparently, its chief supporter in the War Cabinet. This fact was not made public until 21 July 1936. At that time Ormsby-Gore, speaking for the government in Commons, said, 'The draft as originally put up by Lord Balfour was not the final draft approved by the War Cabinet. The particular draft assented to by the War Cabinet and afterwards by the Allied Governments and by the United States. . .and finally embodied in the Mandate, happens to have been drafted by Lord Milner. The actual final draft had to be issued in the name of the Foreign Secretary, but the actual draftsman was Lord Milner."

Negotiation
One of the main proponents of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the leading spokesman for organized Zionism in Britain. Weizmann was a chemist who had developed a process to synthesize acetone via fermentation. Acetone is required for the production of cordite, a powerful propellant explosive needed to fire ammunition without generating tell-tale smoke. Germany had cornered supplies of calcium acetate, a major source of acetone. Other pre-war processes in Britain were inadequate to meet the increased demand in World War I, and a shortage of cordite would have severely hampered Britain's war effort. Lloyd-George, then Minister for Munitions, was grateful to Weizmann and so supported his Zionist aspirations. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George wrote of meeting Weizmann in 1916 that Weizmann

... explained his aspirations as to the repatriation of the Jews to the sacred land they had made famous. That was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for the Jews in Palestine .... As soon as I became Prime Minister I talked the whole matter over with Mr Balfour, who was then Foreign Secretary.
However, this version of the story of the declaration's origins has been described as "fanciful", a fair assessment considering that discussions between Weizmann and Balfour had begun at least a decade earlier. In late 1905 Balfour had requested of his Jewish constituency representative, Charles Dreyfus, that he arrange a meeting with Weizman, during which Weizman asked for official British support for Zionism, and they were to meet again on this issue in 1914.

During the first meeting between Weizmann and Balfour in 1906, Balfour asked what Weizmann's objections were to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Uganda, (the Uganda Protectorate in East Africa in the British Uganda Programme), rather than in Palestine. According to Weizmann's memoir, the conversation went as follows:

"Mr. Balfour, supposing I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" He sat up, looked at me, and answered: "But Dr. Weizmann, we have London." "That is true," I said, "but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh." He ... said two things which I remember vividly. The first was: "Are there many Jews who think like you?" I answered: "I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves." ... To this he said: "If that is so you will one day be a force."

Conflicts and broken treaty commitments (contradictory assurances)
The Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918 pledged that Great Britain and France would "assist in the establishment of indigenous Governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia by "setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations".

Balfour resigned as Foreign Secretary following the Versailles Conference in 1919, but continued in the Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. In a memorandum addressed to the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, he stated that the Balfour Declaration contradicted the letters of the covenant (referring to the League Covenant) the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions of the King-Crane Commission. All of the other engagements contained pledges that the Arab populations could establish national governments of their own choosing according to the principle of self-determination.
 

Balfour explained:

"The contradiction between the letters of the Covenant [of the League of Nations] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the ‘independent nation’ of Palestine than in that of the ‘independent nation‘ of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country though the American Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.

The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.

What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonized with the [Anglo-French] declaration, the Covenant, or the instruction to the [King-Crane] Commission of Enquiry.

I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

If Zionism is to influence the Jewish problem throughout the world Palestine must be made available for the largest number of Jewish immigrants. It is therefore eminently desirable that it should obtain the command of the water-power which naturally belongs to it whether by extending its borders to the north, or by treaty with the mandatory of Syria, to whom the southward flowing waters of Hamon could not in any event be of much value.

For the same reason Palestine should be extended into the lands lying east of the Jordan. It should not, however, be allowed to include the Hedjaz Railway, which is too distinctly bound up with exclusively Arab Interests..."

Controversy behind Declaration
British public and government opinion became increasingly less favorable to the commitment that had been made to Zionist policy. In Feb 1922 Winston Churchill, a fervent Zionist himself, telegraphed Herbert Samuel asking for cuts in expenditure and noting:

In both Houses of Parliament there is growing movement of hostility, against Zionist policy in Palestine, which will be stimulated by recent Northcliffe articles. I do not attach undue importance to this movement, but it is increasingly difficult to meet the argument that it is unfair to ask the British taxpayer, already overwhelmed with taxation, to bear the cost of imposing on Palestine an unpopular policy.

Sir John Evelyn Shuckburgh of the new Middle East department of the Foreign Office discovered that the correspondence prior to the declaration was not available in the Colonial Office, 'although Foreign Office papers were understood to have been lengthy and to have covered a considerable period'." The 'most comprehensive explanation' of the origin of the Balfour Declaration the Foreign Office was able to provide was contained in a small 'unofficial' note of Jan 1923 affirming that:

little is known of how the policy represented by the Declaration was first given form. Four, or perhaps five men were chiefly concerned in the labour-the Earl of Balfour, the late Sir Mark Sykes, and Messrs. Weizmann and Sokolow, with perhaps Lord Rothschild as a figure in the background. Negotiations seem to have been mainly oral and by means of private notes and memoranda of which only the scantiest records are available, even if more exists.

The long term motives behind the British policy of allowing Jewish immigration into the League of Nations Mandate of Palestine was in order to protect the nearby Suez Canal which formed part of the sea lane to British India, and the use of Palestine as a terminus at the Mediterranean sea port of Haifa of an oil pipeline which led to the Iraqi city of Mosul, construction of which was completed in 1935. The Iraqis cut off the flow of oil via this pipeline to Haifa after Israel declared its independence in 1948.

Arab opposition
The Arabs expressed disapproval in November 1918 at the parade marking the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The Muslim-Christian Association protested the carrying of new 'white and blue banners with two inverted triangles in the middle'. They drew the attention of the authorities to the serious consequences of any political implications in raising the banners.

Later that month, on the first anniversary of the occupation of Jaffa by the British, the Muslim-Christian Association sent a lengthy memorandum and petition to the military governor protesting once more any formation of a Zionist state.

 

Jews place of wailing, 1860

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Ze'ev Jabotinsky
 

Ze'ev Jabotinsky MBE (Hebrew: זאב ז'בוטינסקי‎), born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky (Russian: Âëàäè́ìèð Åâãǻíüåâè÷ Æàáîòè́íñêèé) (born on October 18, 1880, died August 4, 1940) was a right-wing Revisionist Zionist leader, author, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. He also helped form the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I, and was a founder and early leader of the militant Zionist underground organization, Irgun.

Biography

Jabotinsky and his familyBorn Vladimir Jabotinsky in Odessa, Russian Empire, he was raised in a Jewish middle-class home and educated in Russian schools. While he took Hebrew lessons as a child, Jabotinsky wrote in his autobiography that his upbringing was divorced from Jewish faith and tradition.

Jabotinsky's talents as a journalist became apparent even before he finished high school. His first writings were published in Odessa newspapers when he was 16. Upon graduation he was sent to Bern, Switzerland and later to Italy as a reporter for the Russian press. He wrote under the pseudonym "Altalena" (the Italian word for 'swing'; see also Altalena Affair). While abroad, he also studied law at the University of Rome, but it was only upon his return to Russia that he qualified as an attorney. His dispatches from Italy earned him recognition as one of the brightest young Russian-language journalists: he later edited newspapers in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. He married Jeanne in late 1907. They had one child, Ari Jabotinsky, who was a member of the Irgun-inspired Bergson Group; Ari died after the Six Day War in 1969.

Zionist activism
After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Jabotinsky joined the Zionist movement, where he soon became known as a powerful speaker and an influential leader. With more pogroms looming on the horizon, Jabotinsky established the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group, to safeguard Jewish communities throughout Russia. Jabotinsky became the source of great controversy in the Russian Jewish community as a result of these actions. Around this time, he set upon himself the goal of learning modern Hebrew, and took a Hebrew name—Vladimir became Ze'ev ("wolf"). During the pogroms, he organized self-defense units in Jewish communities across Russia and fought for the civil rights of the Jewish population as a whole. His slogan was, "better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!" Another call to arms was, "Jewish youth, learn to shoot!" That year Jabotinsky was elected as a Russian delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. After Herzl's death in 1904 he became the leader of the right-wing Zionists. In 1906 he was one of the chief speakers at the Russian Zionist Helsingfors Conference in Helsinki, which called upon the Jews of Europe to engage in Gegenwartsarbeit (work in the present) and to join together to demand autonomy for the ethnic minorities in Russia. He remained loyal to this Liberal approach scores of years later with respect to the Arab citizens of the future Jewish State: "Each one of the ethnic communities will be recognized as autonomous and equal in the eyes of the law."] In 1909 he fiercely criticized leading members of the Russian Jewish community for participating in ceremonies marking the centennial of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. In view of Gogol's anti-Semitic views, he said, it was unseemly for Russian Jews to take part in these ceremonies; it showed they had no Jewish self-respect.

Military career
Badge of Members of the Order of the British Empire, obverse and reverseDuring World War I, he conceived the idea of establishing a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British against the Ottomans who then controlled Palestine. In 1915, together with Joseph Trumpeldor, a one-armed veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he created the Zion Mule Corps, which consisted of several hundred Jewish men, mainly Russians, who had been exiled from Palestine by the Turks and had settled in Egypt. The unit served with distinction in the Battle of Gallipoli. When the Zion Mule Corps was disbanded, Jabotinsky traveled to London, where he continued his efforts to establish Jewish units to fight in Palestine as part of the British Army. Although Jabotinsky did not serve with the Zion Mule Corps, Trumpeldor, Jabotinsky and 120 V.M.C. did serve in Platoon 16/20th Battalion of the London Regiment. In 1917, the government agreed to establish three Jewish Battalions, initiating the Jewish Legion. Jabotinsky soldiered in the Jordan Valley in 1918 and was decorated for bravery. As an officer in the 38th Royal Fusiliers, Jabotinsky fought with General Allenby in 1917, and was decorated with the MBE for heading the first company to cross the River Jordan into Palestine.

Jewish self-defense
After Ze'ev Jabotinsky was discharged from the British Army in September 1919, he openly trained Jews in self-defense and the use of small arms. After the 1920 Palestine riots, at the demand of the Arab leadership, the British searched the offices and apartments of the Zionist leadership, including Weizmann's and Jabotinsky's homes, for arms. In Jabotinsky's house they found 3 rifles, 2 pistols, and 250 rounds of ammunition. Nineteen men were arrested, including Jabotinsky.

A committee of inquiry placed responsibility for the riots on the Zionist Commission, for provoking the Arabs. Jabotinsky was given a 15-year prison term for possession of weapons. The court blamed 'Bolshevism,' claiming that it 'flowed in Zionism's inner heart' and ironically identified the fiercely anti-Socialist Jabotinsky with the Socialist-aligned Poalei Zion ('Zionist Workers') party, which it called 'a definite Bolshevist institution.' Following the public outcry against the verdict, he received amnesty and was released from Acre prison.

Founder of the Revisionist movement
In 1920, Jabotinsky was elected to the first Assembly of Representatives in Palestine. The following year he was elected to the executive council of the World Zionist Organization. He quit the latter group in 1923, however, due to differences of opinion between him and its chairman, Chaim Weizmann, and established the new revisionist party called Alliance of Revisionists-Zionists and its youth movement, Betar (a Hebrew acronym for the "League of Joseph Trumpeldor"). His new party demanded that the Zionist movement recognize as its objective the establishment of a Jewish state along both banks of the Jordan River. His main goal was to establish a modern Jewish state with the help and aid of the British Empire. His philosophy contrasted with the socialist oriented Labor Zionists, in that it focused its economic and social policy on the ideal of the Jewish Middle class in Europe. An Anglophile, his ideal for a Jewish state was a form of nation state based loosely on the British imperial model, whose waning self-confidence he deplored. His support base was mostly located in Poland, and his activities focused on attaining British support to help in the development of the Yishuv. Another area of major support for Jabotinsky was Latvia, where his fiery speeches in Russian made an impression on the largely Russian-speaking Latvian Jewish community.

Exiled by the British
In 1930, when Jabotinsky was visiting South Africa, he was informed by the British Colonial Office that he would not be allowed to return to Palestine.

The movement he established was not a monolithic entity, but contained three separate factions, of which Jabotinsky's was the most moderate. Jabotinsky favored cooperation with the British, while more irredentistically-minded individuals like David Raziel, Abba Ahimeir, and Uri Zvi Greenberg focused on independent action in Mandate Palestine, fighting politically against Labor, the British Authorities, and retaliating against Arab attacks. During his time in exile, Jabotinsky started regarding Benito Mussolini as a potential ally against the British, and contacts were made with Italy. However, unlike the Maximalists, Jabotinsky never embraced fascism, instead wanting Palestine to become a democratic state.

Evacuation plan for the Jews of Poland, Hungary and Romania
During the 1930s, Jabotinsky was deeply concerned with the situation of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. In 1936, Jabotinsky prepared the so-called 'evacuation plan', which called for the evacuation of the entire Jewish population of Poland, Hungary and Romania to Palestine. Also in 1936, he toured Eastern Europe, meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck; the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, and Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu of Romania to discuss the evacuation plan. The plan gained the approval of all three governments, but caused considerable controversy within Polish Jewry, on the grounds that it played into the hands of Polish anti-Semites. In particular, the fact that the 'evacuation plan' had the approval of the Polish government was taken by many Polish Jews as indicating Jabotinsky had gained the endorsement of what they considered to be the wrong people. The evacuation of Jewish communities in Poland, Hungary and Romania was to take place over a ten-year period. However, the controversy was rendered moot when the British government vetoed it, and the World Zionist Organization's chairman, Chaim Weizmann, dismissed it. Two years later, in 1938, Jabotinsky stated in a speech that Polish Jews 'were living on the edge of the volcano' and warned that a wave of bloody super-pogroms would be happening in Poland sometime in the near future. Jabotinsky went on to warn Jews in Europe that they should leave for Palestine as soon as possible.

Belief in integrating the Arab minority
Jabotinsky was a complex personality, combining cynicism and idealism. He was convinced that there was no way for the Jews to regain any part of Palestine without opposition from the Arabs, but he also believed that the Jewish state could be a home for Arab citizens. In 1934 he wrote a draft constitution for the Jewish state which declared that the Arab minority would be on an equal footing with its Jewish counterpart "throughout all sectors of the country's public life." The two communities would share the state's duties, both military and civil service, and enjoy its prerogatives. Jabotinsky proposed that Hebrew and Arabic should enjoy equal rights and that "in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa."

Death
Jabotinsky died of a heart attack in New York, on August 4, 1940, while visiting an armed Jewish self-defense camp run by Betar. He was buried in New Montefiore cemetery in New York rather than in Palestine, in accordance with the statement in his will, "I want to be buried outside Palestine, may NOT be transferred to Palestine unless by order of that country's eventual Jewish government." After the State of Israel was established, the governments headed by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion did not make such a decision. In 1964, shortly after becoming prime minister, Levi Eshkol ordered the reinterment of Jabotinsky and his wife in Jerusalem at Mount Herzl Cemetery. A monument to Jabotinsky remains at his original burial site in New York.

Legacy and commemoration
Ze'ev Jabotinsky's legacy is carried on today by Israel's Herut party (merged with other right wing parties to form the Likud in 1973), Herut – The National Movement (a breakaway from Likud), Magshimey Herut (young adult activist movement) and Betar (youth movement). In the United States, his call for Jewish self defense has led to the formation of Americans for a Safe Israel and the Jewish Defense Organization. The JDO's training camp is named Camp Jabotinsky. In Israel, there are more streets, parks and squares named after Jabotinsky than any other figure in Jewish or Israeli history.The Jabotinsky Medal is awarded for distinguished service to the State of Israel, and most Israeli cities have streets named after him. On 11 August 2008 left wing Israeli Education Minister Yuli Tamir announced plans to remove Jabotinsky's work from the Israeli national education curriculum.

 

The symbol of the First Zionist Congress

Chaim Weizmann


Chaim Azriel Weizmann


Main
Israeli president and scientist
in full Chaim Azriel Weizmann

born Nov. 27, 1874, Motol, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Belarus]
died Nov. 9, 1952, Reḥovot, Israel

first president of the new nation of Israel (1949–52), who was for decades the guiding spirit behind the World Zionist Organization.

Early life and education.
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was born of humble parents in November 1874, in Motol, a backwater hamlet in the western Russian empire, the third of 15 children of Ezer Weizmann, a lumber transporter. Motol lay close to dense forests, surroundings that instilled in the boy a love of trees that was to persist the rest of his life. He spent adolescent summers riding his father’s log rafts downriver to Baltic ports.

Despite slender means, the parents arranged for their offspring to receive the benefits of advanced education after strict Jewish orthodox schooling in childhood. All except one of the children ultimately became scientists, physicians, dentists, engineers, and pedagogues. Chaim himself, on reaching 11, was sent to the secondary school in nearby Pinsk, where his unusual scientific aptitude was encouraged by a discerning science master.

Upon matriculating (1891), the young student, irked by university quotas restricting Jewish admissions, left Russia to study chemistry in Germany and Switzerland, eking out small remittances from home by teaching science and Russian. After obtaining the Ph.D. magna cum laude at Fribourg, Switz. (1900), Weizmann taught chemistry at Geneva University and concurrently engaged in organic chemistry research, concentrating on dyestuffs and aromatics. By selling several patented discoveries in the late 1890s, he mitigated his chronic financial straits and was able to help his younger brothers and sisters through college. In 1900 he met Vera Chatzman, a medical student, in Geneva, and six years later they married; they had two sons.

Weizmann settled in England in 1904 upon taking up a science appointment at the University of Manchester. During World War I he gave valuable assistance to the British munitions industry, then (1916) in dire need of acetone (a vital ingredient of cordite), by devising a process to extract the solvent from maize. This achievement signally aided the Zionist political negotiations he was then conducting with the British government.

Although he gained international renown as a chemist, it was as a politician that he was most eminent. As a youth he imbibed Jewish nationalist culture and ideals (as distinct from traditional pietistic knowledge) under his father’s influence. At the age of 11 he wrote a letter in Hebrew to his Hebrew teacher in Motol urging with boyish fervour that the Jewish people must return to Zion.

Early political involvement.
Throughout his student and teaching years he assumed increasing dominance as a Zionist politician. He initially gained prominence as the leader of the “Young Zionist” opposition to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, especially in the “Uganda dispute,” which erupted in 1903–05 over a British proposal for Jewish agricultural settlement in East Africa. Elected to the General Council (Actions Committee) in 1905, he played only a secondary role in the movement until 1914. Then, during the early years of the war he took an important part in the negotiations that led up to the government’s Balfour Declaration (November 1917) favouring the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

While in Jerusalem he travelled to ʿAqaba, southern Transjordan (June 1918), where he met Amīr Fayṣal of Hejaz (later first king of Iraq) to discuss Jewish–Arab cooperation. They met again and reached written agreement during the Versailles peace conference (July 1919). As an observer, Weizmann attended the San Remo conference of Allied Powers (1920), which confirmed the Balfour Declaration and awarded the Palestine Mandate to Great Britain. The same year, Weizmann, who had been president of the English Zionist Federation from 1917, became head of the World Zionist Organization. From 1921 onward he travelled the world tirelessly, preaching Zionist ideology and appealing for funds at mass rallies.

Weizmann’s skill as a negotiator was severely tested during the 1920s. Great Britain, confronted by the mounting problems and civil disorders stemming from nascent Arab nationalism, gradually retreated from its commitment to foster a Jewish national home. A dauntless protagonist, Weizmann nevertheless plunged into the ceaseless imbroglios of British policy vacillations, Arab and Jewish revolts, and Zionist internecine feuds and conflicts that were commingled with opposition to himself by adversaries.

Conflict with Zionist extremists.
Eventually, Weizmann’s doctrines of caution antagonized extremist politicians. Exasperated by counsels of gradualism, some Zionists accused him of undue amenability toward Britain in his political thinking and performance—a characteristic they averred he owed to the genteel influences of the upper English society in which he moved. His control over the world nationalist movement was challenged after Britain announced policy changes unfavourable to Zionist work in Palestine. He therefore resigned in pique in 1930 but was prevailed upon to remain in office. At the 1931 congress, however, he was subjected to a vote of nonconfidence and was not reelected president of the Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency, the expanded body of which he had been the main architect in 1929.

Weizmann turned again to science, founding the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Reḥovot, Palestine (1934), with the help of friends in England. Earlier, he had toured South Africa (1931) and played a leading part in public efforts to save German Jewry and its property after the advent of the Nazis (1933).

Back in office by election (1935), Weizmann supported the recommendation of a British royal inquiry commission (1937) to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas, arguing that “half a loaf was better than none.” Opponents furiously challenged this expedience as pusillanimity and craven submission to British interests, though in the end the commission’s plan failed because of Arab rather than Jewish rejection.

Weizmann’s unflagging insistence during World War II brought about the formation of the Jewish Brigade Group in the British army. The Sieff Research Institute under his direction also aided the Allied military effort by providing essential pharmaceuticals, and Weizmann conferred with the United States and British governments on methods of producing synthetic rubber. His younger son, Michael, was killed in 1942 while serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force.

Zionist antagonists revived allegations of Weizmann’s pro-British prejudice after he had denounced (1945) on moral grounds the violent campaign waged by Jewish dissident groups against British forces in Palestine. He again lost the world Zionist presidency (1946) and never returned to the official leadership. Nevertheless, Jewish people as a whole continued to revere him.

President of Israel.
Early in 1948, though divested of formal office, he was sent to Washington by the Zionist leadership for crucial talks with Pres. Harry Truman. Weizmann persuaded the United States administration both to drop its trusteeship plan for Palestine—a plan that would have jeopardized founding the State of Israel—and to forego its proposal to exclude Palestine’s southern province (Negev) from Israel. His intervention also led to American recognition of the newly proclaimed state (May 14) and the grant of a $100,000,000 loan. That September Weizmann became president of the Provisional State Council and the following February was elected president of the State of Israel.

Worn out by sorrow and arduous political strife and afflicted by frail health and failing sight, he nevertheless maintained a brave front in postwar years. He died in November 1952, after a long illness. He was given a state burial on his estate at Reḥovot. More than 250,000 people filed by the catafalque. The simple, unadorned grave is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

Julian Louis Meltzer

Aliyah


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aliyah (Hebrew: עלייה Translit.: Aliya Translated: "ascent") is the immigration of Jews to Eretz Israel. It is a basic tenet of Zionist ideology, and a value in almost all movements of Judaism. The opposite action, Jewish emigration from Israel, is referred to as Yerida ("descent").

Religious, ideological and cultural concept
Aliyah is widely regarded as an important Jewish cultural concept and a fundamental concept of Zionism that is enshrined in Israel's Law of Return, which accords any Jew (deemed as such by halakha and/or Israeli secular law) and eligible non-Jews (a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew), the legal right to assisted immigration and settlement in Israel, as well as automatic Israeli citizenship. Someone who "makes aliyah" is called an oleh (m. singular) or olah (f. singular); the plural for both is olim. Many Religious Jews espouse aliyah as a return to the Promised land, and regard it as the fulfillment of God's biblical promise to the descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Aliyah is included as a commandment by some opinions on the enumeration of the 613 commandments.

In Zionist discourse, the term aliyah (plural aliyot) includes both voluntary immigration for ideological, emotional, or practical reasons and, on the other hand, mass flight of persecuted populations of Jews. The vast majority of Israeli Jews today trace their family's recent roots to outside of the country. While many have actively chosen to settle in Israel rather than some other country, many had little or no choice about leaving their previous home countries. While Israel is commonly recognized as "a country of immigrants", it is also, in large measure, a country of refugees.

According to the traditional Jewish ordering of books of the Bible, the very last word of the Bible (i.e. the last word in the original Hebrew of verse 2 Chronicles 36:23) is veya‘al, a jussive verb form derived from the same root as aliyah, meaning "let him go up" (to Israel).

Historical background
Mass return to the Land of Israel is a recurring theme in Jewish prayers recited every day, three times a day, and holiday services on Passover and Yom Kippur traditionally conclude with the words "Next year in Jerusalem." since Jews are members of both a nation and a religion, aliyah (returning to Israel) has always had both a secular and a religious significance. In all historical periods during which return to the Land of Israel was possible, Jewish groups and individuals have immigrated back to the Jewish homeland.

For generations of religious Jews, aliyah was associated with the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Jews prayed for their Messiah to come, who was to redeem the Land of Israel from gentile rule and return world Jewry to the land under a Halachic theocracy.

 

Pre-Zionist aliyah

Biblical
The Bible relates that the Jewish patriarch Abraham came to the Land of Canaan with his family and followers in approximately 1800 BC. His grandson, Jacob, went down to Egypt with his family, and after centuries there, they went back to Canaan under Moses and Joshua, entering it in about 1250 BCE.

After the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people, approximately 50,000 Jews returned to Israel following the Cyrus Proclamation of 538 BCE. The Jewish priestly scribe Ezra led about 50,000 Israelite exiles living in Babylon to their home city of Jerusalem in 459 BC. Others returned throughout the era of the Second Temple.

200–500 AD
In late antiquity, the two hubs of rabbinic learning were Babylonia and Israel. Throughout the Amoraic period, many Babylonian Jews immigrated to Israel and left their mark on Israeli life, as rabbis and leaders.

10th–11th century
In the 10th century, leaders of the Karaite Jewish community, mostly living under Persian rule, urged their followers to settle in Eretz Yisrael. The Karaites established their own quarter in Jerusalem, on the western slope of the Kidron Valley. During this period, there is abundant evidence of pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Jews from various countries, mainly in the month of Tishrei, around the time of the Sukkot holiday.

1200–1882
The number of Jews returning to the Land of Israel rose significantly between the 13th and 19th centuries, mainly due to a general decline in the status of Jews across Europe and an increase in religious persecution. The expulsion of Jews from England (1290), France (1391), Austria (1421) and Spain (the Alhambra decree of 1492) were seen by many as a sign of approaching redemption and contributed greatly to the messianic spirit of the time.

Aliyah was also spurred during this period by the resurgence of messianic fervor among the Jews of France, Italy, the Germanic states, Poland, Russia and North Africa. The belief in the imminent coming of the Jewish Messiah, the ingathering of the exiles and the re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel encouraged many who had few other options to make the perilous journey to the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).

Pre-Zionist resettlement in Palestine met with various degrees of success. For example, little is known of the fate of the 1210 "aliyah of the three hundred rabbis" and their descendants. It is thought that few survived the bloody upheavals caused by the Crusader invasion in 1229 and their subsequent expulsion by the Muslims in 1291. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and the expulsion of Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1498), many Jews made their way to the Holy Land. Then the immigration in the 18th and early 19th centuries of thousands of followers of various Kabbalist and Hassidic rabbis, as well as the disciples of the Vilna Gaon and the disciples of the Chattam Sofer, added considerably to the Jewish populations in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed.

The messianic dreams of the Gaon of Vilna inspired one of the largest pre-Zionist waves of immigration to Eretz Yisrael. In 1808, hundreds of the Gaon's disciples, known as Perushim, settled in Tiberias and Safed, and later formed the core of the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem. This was part of a larger movement of thousands of Jews from countries as widely spaced as Persia and Morocco, Yemen and Russia, who moved to Israel beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century - and in even larger numbers after the conquest of the region by Muhammad Ali of Egypt in 1832 - all drawn by the expectation of the arrival of the Messiah in the Jewish year 5600, English year 1840, a movement documented in Arie Morgenstern's Hastening Redemption.

There were also those who like the British mystic Laurence Oliphant tried to lease Northern Palestine to settle the Jews there (1879).

Zionist Aliyah (1882 on)

In Zionist history, the different waves of aliyah, beginning with the arrival of the Biluim from Russia in 1882, are categorized by date and the country of origin of the immigrants.

First Aliyah (1882–1903)
Between 1882 and 1903, approximately 35,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. The majority, belonging to the Hovevei Zion and Bilu movements, came from the Russian Empire with a smaller number arriving from Yemen. Many established agricultural communities. Among the towns that these individuals established are Petah Tikva (already in 1878), Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pina, and Zikhron Ya'aqov. In 1882, the Yemenite Jews settled in an Arab suburb of Jerusalem called Silwan located south-east of the walls of the Old City on the slopes of the Mount of Olives.

Second Aliyah (1904–1914)
Between 1904 and 1914, 40,000 Jews immigrated mainly from Russia to Palestine following pogroms and outbreaks of anti-semitism in that country. This group, many of whom were infused with socialist ideals, established the first kibbutz, Degania, in 1909 and formed self-defense organizations, such as Hashomer, to counter increasing Arab hostility and to help Jews to protect their communities from Arab bandits. The suburb of Jaffa, Ahuzat Bayit, established at this time, grew into the city of Tel Aviv. During this period, some of the underpinnings of an independent nation-state arose: The national language Hebrew was revived; newspapers and literature written in Hebrew published; political parties and workers organizations were established. The First World War effectively ended the period of the Second Aliyah.

Third Aliyah (1919–1923)
Between 1919 and 1923, 40,000 Jews, mainly from the Russian Empire arrived in the wake of World War I, the British conquest of Palestine; the establishment of the Mandate, and the Balfour Declaration. Many of these were pioneers, known as halutzim, trained in agriculture and capable of establishing self sustaining economies. In spite of immigration quotas established by the British administration, the population of Jews reached 90,000 by the end of this period. The Jezreel Valley and the Hefer Plain marshes were drained and converted to agricultural use. Additional national institutions arose: The Histadrut (General Labor Federation); an elected assembly; national council; and the Haganah.

Fourth Aliyah (1924–1929)
Between 1924 and 1929, 82,000 Jews arrived, many as a result of anti-semitism in Poland and Hungary. The immigration quotas of the United States kept Jews out. This group contained many middle class families that moved to the growing towns, establishing small businesses and light industry. Of these approximately 23,000 left the country.

Fifth Aliyah (1929–1939)
Between 1929 and 1939, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, a new wave of 250,000 immigrants arrived, the majority of these, 174,000, arrived between 1933–1936, after which increasing restrictions on immigration by the British made immigration clandestine and illegal, called Aliyah Bet. The Fifth Aliyah was again driven mostly from Eastern Europe as well as professionals, doctors, lawyers and professors, from Germany. Refugee artists introduced Bauhaus (Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world) and founded the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra. With the completion of the port at Haifa and its oil refineries, significant industry was added to the predominantly agricultural economy. The Jewish population reached 450,000 by 1940.

At the same time, tensions between Arabs and Jews grew during this period, leading to a series of Arab riots against the Jews in 1929 that left many dead and resulted in the depopulation of the Jewish community in Hebron. This was followed by more violence during the "Great Uprising" of 1936–1939. In response to the ever increasing tension between the Arabic and Jewish communities married with the various commitments the British faced at the dawn of World War II, the British issued the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 people for five years. This served to create a relatively peaceful 8 years in Palestine while tragically The Holocaust unfolded in Europe.

Shortly after their rise to power, the Nazis negotiated the Ha'avara or "Transfer" Agreement with Zionists under which 50,000 Jews and $100 million of their assets would be moved to Palestine.
 

Aliyah Bet: Illegal immigration (1933–1948)
The British government limited Jewish immigration to Palestine with quotas, and following the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, illegal immigration to Palestine commenced. The illegal immigration was known as Aliyah Bet ("secondary immigration"), or Ha'apalah, and was organized by the Mossad Le'aliyah Bet, as well as by the Irgun. Immigration was done mainly by sea, and to a lesser extent overland through Iraq and Syria. Beginning in 1939 Jewish immigration was further restricted, limiting it to 75,000 individuals for a period of five years after which immigration was to end completely. The British made it illegal to sell land to Jews in 95% of the Mandate.[citation needed] During World War II and the years that followed until independence, Aliyah Bet became the main form of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Following the war, Berihah ("flight"), an organization of former partisans and ghetto fighters was primarily responsible for smuggling Jews from Poland and Eastern Europe to the Italian ports from which they traveled to Palestine.

Despite British efforts to curb the illegal immigration, during the 14 years of its operation, 110,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine.

In 1945 reports of the Holocaust with its 6 million Jewish dead, caused many Jews in Palestine to turn openly against the British Mandate, and illegal immigration escalated rapidly as many Holocaust survivors joined the Aliyah.

Early statehood (1948–1950)
After Aliyah Bet, the process of numbering or naming individual aliyot ceased, but immigration did not. A major wave of immigration of over half a million Jews went to Israel between 1948 and 1950, many fleeing renewed persecution in Eastern Europe, and increasingly hostile Arab countries.

This period of immigration is often termed kibbutz galuyot (literally, ingathering of exiles), due to the large number of Jewish diaspora communities that made aliyah. However, kibbutz galuyot can also refer to aliyah in general.

Aliyah from Arab countries


Yemenite Jews on their way to Israel

In the course of Operation Magic Carpet (1949–1950), nearly the entire community of Yemenite Jews (about 49,000) immigrated to Israel. Most of them had never seen an airplane before, but they believed in the Biblical prophecy that according to the Book of Isaiah (40:31), God promised to return the children of Israel to Zion on "wings".

In three and a half years, the Jewish population of Israel had doubled, inflated by nearly 700,000 immigrants, which was one of the causes of the austerity. Huge numbers of Jewish refugees were temporarily settled in "cities of tents" called Ma'abarot. As the residents were gradually absorbed into Israeli society, the Ma'abarot were phased out.

Many Israeli immigrants were Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews who left Arab countries to move to Israel. In many of these cases they had been persecuted and sometimes forced to leave their homes. 114,000 Jews came from Iraq in 1951 in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

Over 30,000 Iranian Jews immigrated to Israel following the Islamic Revolution. Most Iranian Jews, however, settled in the United States (especially in New York City and Los Angeles).

Ethiopian Aliyah
The massive airlift known as Operation Moses began to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel on November 18, 1985 and ended on January 5, 1986. During those six weeks, some 6,500–8,000 Ethiopian Jews were flown from Sudan to Israel. An estimated 2,000–4,000 Jews died en route to Sudan or in Sudanese refugee camps.

In 1991, Operation Solomon was launched to bring the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia. In one day, May 24, 34 aircraft landed at Addis Ababa and brought 14,325 Jews from Ethiopia to Israel.

Since that time, Ethiopian Jews have continued to immigrate to Israel bringing the number of Ethiopian-Israelis today to over 100,000.

Aliyah from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states


 

January 10, 1973. Soviet authorities break up a demonstration of Jewish refuseniks in front of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the right to immigrate to Israel

A mass emigration was politically undesirable for the Soviet regime. The only acceptable ground was family reunification, and a formal petition ("âûçîâ", vyzov) from a relative from abroad was required for the processing to begin. Often, the result was a formal refusal. The risks to apply for an exit visa compounded because the entire family had to quit their jobs, which in turn would make them vulnerable to charges of social parasitism, a criminal offense. Because of these hardships, Israel set up the group Lishkat Hakesher in the early 1950s to maintain contact and promote aliyah with Jews behind the Iron Curtain.
 

Year Exit visas to Israel Olim from the USSR       1968 231 231 1969 3,033 3,033 1970 999 999 1971 12,897 12,893 1972 31,903 31,652 1973 34,733 33,277 1974 20,767 16,888 1975 13,363 8,435 1976 14,254 7,250 1977 16,833 8,350 1978 28,956 12,090 1979 51,331 17,278 1980 21,648 7,570 1981 9,448 1,762 1982 2,692 731 1983 1,314 861 1984 896 340 1985 1,140 348 1986 904 201

In the wake of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the USSR broke off the diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Anti-Zionist propaganda campaign in the state-controlled mass media and the rise of Zionology were accompanied by harsher discrimination of the Soviet Jews. By the end of 1960s, Jewish cultural and religious life in the Soviet Union had become practically impossible, and the majority of Soviet Jews were assimilated and non-religious, but this new wave of state-sponsored anti-Semitism on one hand, and the sense of pride for victorious Jewish nation over Soviet-armed Arab armies on the other, stirred up Zionist feelings.

After the Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair and the crackdown that followed, strong international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960–1970, the USSR let only 4,000 people leave; in the following decade, the number rose to 250,000. Many of those allowed to leave to Israel chose other destinations, most notably the United States. In 1989 a record 71,000 Soviet Jews were granted exodus from the USSR, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. Since the dissolution of the USSR, over one million Soviet Jews have immigrated to Israel. See The collapse of the Soviet Union and Jewish immigration to Israel and Jackson-Vanik amendment.

Argentine Aliyah
In the 1999–2002 Argentine political and economic crisis that caused a run on the banks, wiped out billions of dollars in deposits and decimated the country's middle class, most of Argentina's estimated 200,000 Jews were directly affected. Some chose to start over and move to Israel, where they saw opportunity.

More than 10,000 Jews from Argentina immigrated to Israel since 2000, joining the thousands of previous olim already there. The crisis in Argentina also affected its neighbour country Uruguay, from which over 500 Jews made aliyah in the same period. During 2002 and 2003 the Jewish Agency for Israel launched an intensive public campaign to promote aliyah from the region, and offered additional economical aid for immigrants from Argentina. Although the economy of Argentina improved, Jews continue to immigrate to Israel, albeit in smaller numbers than before.

French Aliyah
From 2001 to 2005, 11,148 Jews made Aliyah from France, including a 35-year high in 2005, with 3,300 immigrants.] With the start of the Second Intifada in Israel, anti-Semitic incidents became more frequent in France. In 2002, the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'homme (Human Rights Commission) reported six times more anti-Semitic incidents than in 2001 (193 incidents in 2002). The commission's statistics showed that anti-Semitic acts constituted 62% of all racist acts in the country (compared to 45% in 2001 and 80% in 2000). The report documented 313 violent acts against people or property, including 38 injuries and the murder of one person with Jewish Maghrebin origins by Muslims. Since 2005, the number of acts dropped but is still at a significantly higher level than during the previous decade.

North American Aliyah



There are approximately 110,000 North American immigrants in Israel. There has been a steady flow of olim from North America since Israel’s inception in 1948. Record numbers arrived in the late 1960s after the Six-Day War, and in the 1970s. Many immigrants began arriving in Israel after the First and Second Intifada, with a total of 3,052 arriving in 2005 — the highest number since 1983. Like Western European olim, North Americans tend to immigrate to Israel more for religious, ideological and political purposes, and not financial ones[citation needed]. Nefesh B'Nefesh, founded in 2002 by Rabbi Yehoshua Fass and Tony Gelbart, works to encourage Aliyah from North America and the UK by providing Hebrew Language assistance for potential olim, streamlining the process already offered by the Jewish Agency and Israeli Government. A group of students at Brandeis University founded ImpactAliyah in 2007 to support campus communities of student pre-olim and run pilot trips to Israel.

From the 1990s
Since the mid 1990s, there has been a steady stream of South African Jews, American Jews, and French Jews who have either made aliyah, or purchased property in Israel for potential future immigration. Specifically, many French Jews have purchased homes in Israel as insurance due to the rising rate of anti-Semitism in France in recent years.

The Bnei Menashe Jews from India, whose recent discovery and recognition by mainstream Judaism as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes is subject to some controversy, slowly started their Aliyah in the early 1990s and continue arriving in slow numbers.

Organizations such as Nefesh B'Nefesh and Shavei Israel help with aliyah by supporting financial aid and guidance on a variety of topics such as finding work, learning Hebrew, and assimilation into Israeli culture.

In early 2007 Haaretz reported that aliyah for the year of 2006 was down approximately 9% from 2005. They state that: "Only 19,264 people immigrated to Israel in 2006, down nine percent from 2005. It is the lowest number of immigrants recorded since 1988"

The number of new immigrants in 2007 was 18,127, the lowest since 1988. Only 36% of these new immigrants came from the former Soviet Union (close to 90% in the 90's) while the number of immigrants from countries like France and USA is stable.

Statistics
The number of immigrants to Israel during 1919–2006 period is given in the table below. The table details the number of olim for the specific time periods by country of birth. (For the year 2006, the last country of residence is also given).

Region   2006 LCR   2006 COB   2005   2000–2004   1990–1999   1980–1989   1972–1979   1961–1971   1952–1960   1948–1951   1919–1948   TOTAL                             GRAND TOTAL 19,269 19,269 21,180 60,647 956,319 153,833 267,580 427,828 297,138 687,624 482,857 3,374,275                           Asia 1,777 1,261 2,239 8,048 61,305 14,433 19,456 56,208 37,119 237,704 40,895 478,668 Iran 74 90 146 449 0 8,487 9,550 19,502 15,699 21,910   75,833 Afghanistan 0 0 2 0 0 57 132 516 1,106 2,303   4,116 India 304 308 61 211 1,717 1,539 3,497 13,110 5,380 2,176   27,999 Israel 0 192 105 69 954 288 507 1,021 868 411   4,415 Lebanon 0 7 8 4 0 179 564 2,208 846 235   4,051 Syria 0 0 4 16 0 995 842 3,121 1,870 2,678   9,526 China 10 14 4 16 192 78 43 96 217 504   1,164 Iraq 11 11 12 50 0 111 939 3,509 2,989 123,371   130,992 Yemen 9 10 4 3 0 17 51 1,066 1,170 48,315   50,636 Other 14 26 18 29 7,362 594 213 349 103 1,254   9,948 USSR (As) 1,287 533 1,814 7,069 49,524             58,940 Africa 3,801 4,508 4,518 2,912 48,558 28,664 19,273 164,885 143,485 93,282 4,041 514,126 Ethiopia 3,595 3,595 3,573 2,213 39,651 16,965 306 98 59 10   66,470 South Africa 114 139 135 202 2,918 3,575 5,604 3,783 774 666   17,796 Libya 0 3 3 6 0 66 219 2,466 2,079 30,972   35,814 Egypt/ Sudan 0 19 17 15 176 352 535 2,963 17,521 16,024   37,622 Morocco 53 233 284 205 2,623 3,809 7,780 130,507 95,945 28,263   269,649 Algeria 0 275 280 131 1,317 1,830 2,137 12,857 3,433 3,810   26,070 Tunisia 32 236 218 125 1,251 1,942 2,148 11,566 23,569 13,293   54,348 Other 6 8 8 15 888 125 544 645 105 244   2,582 Europe 9,872 10,063 10,736 46,516 812,079 70,898 183,419 162,070 106,305 332,802 377,381 2,112,269 Austria 12 12 24 23 317 356 595 1,021 610 2,632   5,590 Italy 42 37 35 40 595 510 713 940 414 1,305   4,589 Nordic 36 34 35 41 1,071 1,178 903 886 131 85   4,364 Bulgaria 22 19 38 199 3,673 180 118 794 1,680 37,260   43,961 Belgium 91 78 70 102 891 788 847 1,112 394 291   4,573 USSR (Eu) 6,185 7,069 7,763 43,801 772,239 29,754 137,134 29,376 13,743 8,163   1,049,042 Germany 112 87 112 177 2,150 1,759 2,080 3,175 1,386 8,210   19,136 Netherlands 50 45 36 30 926 1,239 1,170 1,470 646 1,077   6,639 Hungary 63 63 108 180 2,150 1,005 1,100 2,601 9,819 14,324   31,350 Yugoslavia 25 26 7 98 1,894 140 126 322 320 7,661   10,594 Greece 3 8 7 6 121 147 326 514 676 2,131   3,936 UK 594 506 341 318 4,851 7,098 6,171 6,461 1,448 1,907   29,101 Spain 33 20 23 16 242 321 327 406 169 80   1,604 Poland 36 90 94 169 2,765 2,807 6,218 14,706 39,618 106,414   172,881 Czechoslovakia 16 26 15 61 479 462 888 2,754 783 18,788   24,256 France 2,411 1,781 1,836 842 10,443 7,538 5,399 8,050 1,662 3,050   40,601 Romania 50 76 107 330 5,722 14,607 18,418 86,184 32,462 117,950   275,856 Switzerland 85 69 52 71 904 706 634 886 253 131   3,706 Turkey 67 70 61 131 1,095 2,088 3,118 14,073 6,871 34,547   62,054 Other 6 17 33 12 646 303 252 412 91 1,343   3,109 America/Oceania 3,813 3,437 3,687 21,718 33,367 39,369 45,040 42,400 6,922 3,822 7,754 211,329 Australia/NZL 66 44 53 68 1,017 959 1,275 833 120 119   4,488 Uruguay 73 76 107 105 724 2,014 2,199 1,844 425 66   7,560 Cen Am 91 120 77 102 125 8 104 129 43 17   725 Argentina 293 299 413 9,917 8,886 10,582 13,158 11,701 2,888 904   59,041 USA 2,159 1,809 1,706 1,098 15,480 18,904 20,963 18,671 1,553 1,711   81,895 Brazil 232 226 278 225 1,937 1,763 1,763 2,601 763 304   9,860 Venezuela 134 98 84 62 319 180 245 297 0 0   1,285 Mexico 72 76 56 70 916 993 861 736 168 48   3,924 Paraguay 4 3 6 7 21 62 73 210 42 0   424 Chile 61 56 77 85 521 1,040 1,180 1,790 401 48   5,198 Colombia 142 179 154 54 545 475 552 415 0 0   2,374 Canada 228 210 214 163 1,717 1,867 2,178 2,169 276 236   9,030 Other 258 241 462 94 1,159 522 500 1,125 91 327   4,521 Not known 6 0 3 4 419 469 394 911 3,307 20,014 52,786 78,307

see also: United Nations member states - Israel