Zionism

Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), he set out a political vision for establishing an independent Jewish nation during the twentieth century. His ideas emerged in a period of rising antisemitism in Europe and drew upon earlier currents of Jewish cultural revival, eventually shaping one of the most influential nationalist movements of the modern era—Zionism.
Zionism is an ethnic-nationalist movement that developed in Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. It sought to establish and maintain a national home for the Jewish people in the Palestine region, an area historically linked to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition and central to Jewish religious and cultural identity. Although pastoral and religious attachments to Zion predate the modern period, the political form of Zionism crystallised through Herzl’s leadership, the First Zionist Congress of 1897, and the institutional foundations of the World Zionist Organization.
Zionist immigration to Palestine in the early twentieth century is widely regarded as marking the beginning of the modern Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine rested on the belief in a historic Jewish right to the land, which proponents argued superseded that of the local Arab population. Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration expressed imperial support for the Zionist project, and the 1922 Mandate for Palestine formally privileged Jewish settlement under British administration. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, followed by the Arab–Israeli war, resulted in the expansion of Israeli-controlled territory to roughly 78 per cent of Mandatory Palestine. Around 160,000 of approximately 870,000 displaced Palestinians remained within Israel’s borders, forming a long-term Palestinian minority.
Zionism developed multiple ideological branches, including Liberal Zionism, Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and Cultural Zionism. Other groups, such as Brit Shalom and Ihud, represented dissident currents that favoured binational arrangements. Religious Zionism combined secular nationalism with Jewish theological traditions. Supporters have interpreted Zionism as a national liberation movement for an indigenous people repeatedly subject to persecution, dedicated to restoring Jewish national consciousness and self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Critics, however, have characterised Zionism variously as a settler-colonial, exceptionalist, or supremacist ideology, arguing that its practices and objectives imposed harm on the existing Palestinian population.

Terminology and Origins

The term Zion—a hill in Jerusalem and a poetic Biblical term for the Land of Israel—has long served as a symbol of Jewish longing and messianic expectation. Its first modern political use appeared in the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement of the 1880s, whose delegates gathered at the 1884 Katowice Conference inspired by Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation. The term Zionism itself was introduced by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890 and was later popularised by Herzl, particularly through the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897) and the subsequent establishment of the World Zionist Organization.

Beliefs

A central tenet of Zionism is that Jews constitute a nation possessing a moral and historical right to national self-determination in the Palestine region. Early Zionists viewed the precariousness of Jewish minority life in Europe as evidence of the need for political sovereignty. This understanding differed from traditional Judaic nationhood, which rested less on ethnicity and more on religious chosenness, divine covenant, and liturgical references to Eretz Israel. Modern Zionism reframed these older elements in secular nationalist terms.

Claim to a Jewish Majority and a Jewish State

Zionist ideology emphasised the necessity of achieving a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine. After centuries of minority status, Zionist thinkers argued that Jewish safety and cultural revival depended upon numerical predominance in a sovereign state. Immigration (aliyah) was therefore encouraged, while antisemitism in Europe acted as a powerful push factor. Scholars such as Yosef Gorny have argued that achieving demographic majority required overturning the pre-existing Arab majority, fundamentally altering the political balance in Palestine.
Some Zionist leaders denied the political legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, asserting instead that Jewish historical claims outweighed those of the local Arabs. Even left-leaning figures such as Martin Buber and members of Brit Shalom, though advocating binationalism, challenged the notion of a distinct Palestinian national identity. Others, such as Judah Leon Magnes, supported a binational state even after the Holocaust, though their influence diminished as violence escalated during the 1947–48 war.
The British administration under the Mandate often shared Zionist assumptions regarding Jewish claims to the territory and implemented policies that facilitated the creation of a Jewish national home.
Zionism thus operated simultaneously as a territorial and demographic project. Its goal was not minority rule but the establishment of a Jewish majority capable of sustaining sovereign statehood. By the late 1930s, despite ideological differences among Zionist factions, most groups converged on the aim of a Jewish state in Palestine.