Zionism in practice

Zionism in practice

Credit: The author. I relied heavily on The Routledge Handbook of Zionism (2025) and (of course) Wikipedia. References I’ve accessed follow.

I’m not going to point out all the knee-jerks in here—there a lot of them. Deal with it. Nor will I succumb to those of limited attention span. Read or don’t. TL:DR yourself!

When Zionism was established largely due to the efforts of Theodor Herzl and the World Zionist Congress in 1897.

Right from this Congress, the goal of Zionism was to create a homeland in Palestine…”with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible”.

The early part of the 20th century saw European (Ashkenazi) Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The First Aliyah. Calling themselves ‘settlers’, “the Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews’ historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs”.

This inequity has driven Israeli-Palestinian enmity to this day. No people is above another. All of us are human.

The Balfour Declaration of 1922 largely agreed with this view although the land was divided in fair proportions to each.

Bear in mind, this was more than a decade before Hitler rose to power.

But in 1948, after the founding of the State of Israel war broke out, and Israel expanded its territory over 70% of the former Mandate. It was land theft from the beginning, justified solely by ‘victory’ war.

The Palestinian expulsion from their traditional landholdings and flight is called the Nakba, the catastrophe. Would you, too, not find it a catastrophe if overnight you became homeless because of another’s violence?

“Opponents of Zionism often characterise it as a supremacist, colonialist and racist ideology” along with settler colonists seizing Palestinian land with violence.

Is Eretz Israel a place unified by religious practice or modern nationalism? I submit the latter. No one is Israel is really practicing peace.

By 1943, Zionists wanted to annul the majority of the Arabs. The Arabs had no spokesmen and no political power to defend their rights.

Zionists adopted the neutral term “transfer” to mean the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. This was Zionism’s way of dealing with the “Palestinian problem”. Such euphemisms were also common ‘elsewhere’..

“Zionism portrayed the Diaspora Jew living abroad as mentally unstable, physically frail, and prone to engaging in transient businesses. They were seen as detached from nature, purely materialistic, and focused solely on their personal gains” as ”weak, unproductive, parasitical Jewish masses”. “Zionism instead adopted a racial understanding of Jewish identity” The reader may notice that non-Jews have also promoted such tropes.

With a State of Israel, Zionism held the promise that antisemitism could be erased from the world. One scholar opined “antisemitism was primarily driven by Jews' lack of a homeland”. We can see how well that worked.

In the new Israel, only Jews were to have jobs. Crucial was the worry that "employment of Arabs would lead to 'Arab values' being passed on to Zionist youth and nourish the colonists' tendency to exploit and abuse their workers", as well as security concerns.

Early Zionists “thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel. Zionist nationalism embraced pan-Germanic ideologies, which stressed the concept of das Volk: people of shared ancestry should pursue separation and establish a unified state. “Themes of ‘blood logic’ or ‘race’ have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief. This sounds all too familiar.

“To redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people."  “Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Meaning, of course, of of the view of the rest of the world. That didn’t work out either: there’s an Internet.

The Jewish ‘settlers’ of the Second Aliyah formed the first underground military group, Ha-Shomer, which later evolved into the Haganah and eventually became the core of the Israeli army.

PM Arthur Balfour himself was an antisemite who denied Jews immigration to England. He was all too happy to sequester and isolate them in Palestine, particular after lobbying by the Rothschild family.

Another early Zionist, Ze-ev Jabotinksy, openly rejected the possibility of a "voluntary agreement" with the Arabs of Palestine. He instead believed in building an "iron wall" of Jewish military force to break Arab resistance to Zionism, at which point an agreement could be established.

In 1936, the Arabs had had enough of being marginalised in their own land. During the revolt, the Jewish self-described terrorist militants Irgun Zvai Leumi engaged in the use of terror attacks against the Arabs of Palestine.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (no relation to Ze-ev above), the right-wing Zionist leader, drew inspiration from the Nazi demographic policies that resulted in the expulsion of 1.5 million Poles and Jews, in whose place Germans were ‘resettled’.

In 1938, Ben-Gurion wrote “politically we are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves",

At the end of the Second World War, the Zionist leadership decided it necessary to adopt the tactics of the Irish Republican Army in their own war of independence. The Irgun and Lehi, who had once sought an alliance with the Nazis, began terrorist attacks against the British in 1944, targeting hotels, police stations, tax offices and immigration stations. This violence grew into a civil war between Arab and Zionist militias. The Haganah shifted to “aggressive defence” without any restraint, a policy which is continued by the IDF today. Their reprisals relied on violence disproportionate to the Arab attacks.

Twelve days after the UN approved a partitioned Palestine, Zionists began expelling Arabs and “eliminating” the first Palestinian village. Zionists carried out 24 massacres of civilians. 710,000 Palestinians were driven out of their country and 40,000 were displaced.

It was then that the new State of Israel declared democracy and equal rights for citizens which, of course, did not include Palestinians. Israel took 78% of Palestine by force rather than the 55% allotted under Partition. Instead, Zionists played merely beyond the Pale.

This war, led by the Zionist Yishuv was framed by its leaders in biblical and messianic terms as a 'miraculous clearing of the land,' akin to the biblical War of Joshua, displacing the land's indigenous inhabitants, who had long cultivated and owned it.

The first Israeli government prevented displaced Palestinians from claiming private property. What really happened was no less than the apartheid against Blacks in South Africa. Israel keeps grabbing more land and planting colonists (euphemistically, ‘settlers’) in the West Bank using violence against Palestinians living on their ancestral land or lands purchased  by Palestinians before 1948. “The ruthless ethnic cleanser is commonly hidden behind the peaceful settler who arrived in an 'empty land' to start a new life. Theft, pure and simple.

Apartheid South Africa collaborated on apartheid Israel’s nuclear weapons programme. The UN in 1975 declared "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" in Resolution 3379. I attended the UN Conference on Racism (which included the AIDS epidemic) in 2001 in Durban. Israel and the United States walked out after the human rights forum equated Zionism with "racist crimes, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The characterisation of anti-Zionism as antisemitic continues to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions.

Zionism has depended on support from Christians since its inception. Christian Zionism is primarily driven by the belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land will either lead to their conversion to Christianity or their destruction. The largest Zionist organisation is Christians United for Israel, which has 10 million members.

The overriding impulse of post-1948 Jewish anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else. I can accept the pre-1967 borders and the displacement of colonists to bring peace to both Israel and the region as a show of good faith.

Israel’s war policy hasn’t worked in at least 87 years, before the State of Israel. Isn’t it time to try something new? For example, could not Palestinians be welcomed by kibbutzim to work alongside Jews?

The problem, of course, is that Israel has yet to show any good faith whatsoever to its neighbours. Israel’s regime supports war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In fact, it celebrates them.

I’m sorry to say, I’ve reached the point where I believe this image: https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/2024/09/19/milwaukee-swastika-star-of-david-mural-vandals-israel/75275414007/. Yes, the irony.

I believe in the Zionist concept of a homeland for Jews. But only if they can live in peace. At war, there is no home.

References. Gans (2008); Murphy (2005); Yadhar (2017); Collins (2011); Jabotinsky (1923); Manna (1922); Khalidi (2020 & 2024); Segev (2019); Shlaim (2001 on Jabotinsky, 2009 & 2014); Omer (2026); Avineri (2017) on Pinsker; Rabkin (2006); Halamish (2008); Penslar (2023); Gorny (1987); Rabkin (2006); Finkelstein (2003); Judt (2003)