People & Histories
1881–1939 (First Zionist Congress, Basel, 29–31 August 1897)

Zionism, Herzl and the first aliyot

Facing pogroms and persistent antisemitism in Europe, Jews organise a national movement to rebuild a homeland in Palestine, and waves of immigrants begin to build it.

  • Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2013)
  • Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) — Theodor Herzl (1896)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Herzl's Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, BlueBridge (2014)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)

Well established nationalismmigrationantisemitismlandpoliticsidentity

Part of the story of Israel and Jewish people.

Jews had prayed for a return to Zion for some 1,800 years, but modern Zionism was a political response to nationalism and antisemitism. For centuries Jews in Europe lived as a tolerated, often persecuted minority. The nineteenth century brought emancipation in the West but also a new, racial antisemitism. In the Russian Empire, home to most of the world’s Jews, a wave of pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and millions emigrated, mostly to America.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)

A few thousand went instead to Ottoman Palestine. These were the First Aliyah (1882–1903): young idealists of groups such as Bilu and Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), who founded farming colonies such as Rishon LeZion, many rescued financially by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)

Herzl

Theodor Herzl, a secular, assimilated Viennese journalist, was shaken by the antisemitism he saw in Vienna and around the Dreyfus affair in Paris, where a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason in 1894. In Der Judenstaat (1896) he argued that Jews were a nation that needed a state. In August 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which declared that “Zionism seeks to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” He wrote in his diary that at Basel he had founded the Jewish state.

  • Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2013)
  • Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) — Theodor Herzl (1896)
He spent his remaining years courting the Ottoman sultan, the Kaiser and Britain, and died in 1904.

Building the Yishuv

The Second Aliyah (1904–14) brought young socialists from Russia, among them David Ben-Gurion, who founded the first kibbutz, Degania, in 1910 and helped found Tel Aviv in 1909. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others revived Hebrew as a spoken language.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
After Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 backed “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, further waves followed: socialist pioneers after 1919, Polish middle-class families in the mid-1920s, and in the 1930s tens of thousands fleeing Nazi Germany.
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)

Many Zionisms

Zionism was never one thing. Labour Zionists such as Ben-Gurion wanted a socialist society of Jewish workers on the land. Cultural Zionists such as Ahad Ha’am wanted a spiritual centre for Jewish renewal more than a state, and warned as early as 1891 that the land was not empty. Religious Zionists, inspired by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, saw the return as the beginning of redemption, while most ultra-Orthodox rabbis opposed a secular Jewish state, as did most Reform Jews and the socialist Bund, who wanted Jews to flourish where they lived. Revisionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky argued in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” that the Arabs would resist and that only overwhelming Jewish strength would bring them to accept a Jewish state.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
Herzl himself had briefly considered a British offer of territory in East Africa in 1903, but the movement insisted on the historic homeland.
  • Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2013)
These strands, and the arguments among them, still run through Israeli politics.

Zionists spoke of “redeeming” the land, and bought it, often from absentee owners; some tenant farmers lost their livelihoods. Arab opposition grew from the 1880s onwards, and the conflict between the two national movements was set.

  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)

How it's seen
Zionist view

The national liberation movement of an oppressed people returning to its homeland, comparable to Italian, Polish or Irish nationalism. Zionists bought land, drained swamps, revived Hebrew and hoped, at least at first, to live alongside the Arabs.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2013)

Diaspora Jewish view

The return of an ancient people to its homeland and an answer to antisemitism: Jews needed a place where they were not a vulnerable minority. Yet many Jews at the time, from Reform to ultra-Orthodox to the socialist Bund, opposed it, and diaspora Jews still debate what Zionism asks of them.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • Herzl's Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State — Shlomo Avineri, BlueBridge (2014)

Palestinian view

A European settler-colonial movement that, backed by imperial powers, aimed to turn an Arab country into a Jewish state. As early as 1899 the Jerusalem notable Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi wrote to Herzl pleading, "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone".

  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)

Historians

Many historians see Zionism as both a genuine national movement of a persecuted people and a settlement project typical of its colonial age. Some early Zionists, such as Ahad Ha'am, warned that the land's Arab inhabitants would resist.

  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)

Why it matters today

Israel

Zionism is Israel's founding idea: that Jews are a people with the right to self-determination in their ancestral land. Israeli streets are named after its thinkers, the kibbutz and Hebrew revival remain sources of pride, and "Zionist" is a positive word for most Jewish Israelis.

Jewish people

Most Jews today feel some connection to Israel, the state Zionism created, though their views of its policies differ widely. "Zionist" means very different things to different people, a national liberation movement to most Jews and a colonial project to most Palestinians, which is why the word can end a conversation fast.