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Subject: The History of Modern Zionism

History
Dr. Tzvi Howard Adelman

The Rise of Political Zionism

Zionism, not necessarily called as such,
emerged as a an organized movement towards the end of the nineteenth
century as a Jewish, for the most part, but not exclusively, reaction to
the Jewish Question, and especially to the organized antisemitic
movements of both western and eastern Europe. The term was coined in
1893 by Nathan Birnbaum, before Herzl became involved in the movement.
Although I gave several examples of precursors of political Zionism, I
would like to mention three more, not to exhaust the subject, but
because these three give a real sense of the role of Zionism in the
development of individual Jewish identities during this period.

1) Moses Hess (1812-1875), was raised Orthodox by his grandfather in
Germany, studied for a while at the University, wrote philosophical
works, became a socialist revolutionary, and rejected Judaism, was
condemned to death during the Revolutions of 1848 for which he fled and
lived in exile. Hess had great influence on Engels and Marx, edited
Marx's radical papers, and is the only contemporary mentioned by name in
the Communist Manifesto, although as the object of derision for not
agreeing with all of Marx's views. At this stage of his life he felt
that Judaism had outlived its mission and he married a Christian woman,
a prostitute according to some sources which note that he did so to
atone for the sins of man. During the Austro-Italian war of 1859 he was
greatly influenced by Italian nationalism. As a result, after a twenty
year absence he returned to Judaism and Jewish practice, repudiated
socialism and universalism, and wrote Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, a work
which although ignored in its time adumberated much of the subsequent
Zionist program.

The main features of Rome and Jerusalem, inspired by Graetz's History of
the Jews and his own sense of historical memory which included both
ancient Jerusalem and the philosophy of Spinoza, led to his recognition
that most of the attempts to solve the Jewish Question in Europe were
destined to failure because of the basic unwillingness of the German
spirit to accommodate Judaism. He noted the rise of racial antisemitism,
advocated Jewish racial purity, rejected Reform which denationalized and
removed the inner core of Judaism, leaving only the outer shell, found
enlightened principles incompatible with the notion of a Jewish mission,
and observed with chagrin the problems of conversion to Christianity.
He called for Jewish nationalism, the establishment of colonies in
Palestine, a return of the Jews to manual labor, and the negation of the
possibility of Jewish life in the Diaspora, although he conceded that
Jews could still live outside of Palestine (275/239).

2) Leon or Judah Leib Pinsker (1821-1891), was born in Odessa and raised
with little Jewish education. He devoted his early career to Russian
patriotism, government service, and working with the Society for
Dissemination of Enlightenment Among Jews, calling for their
assimilation to Russian society. Like other enlightened Russian Jews,
the pogroms of 1881 had a profound effect upon him because of their wide
scope and the high status of those respected Russians who joined the
mobs. He began to see antisemitism as a permanent aspect of Russian
society and became involved with Hibat Zion. In 1882 he wrote
Autoemancipation, probably unaware of Rome and Jerusalem, as later
writers, including Herzl, would be unaware of his work. In the
anonymously published Autoemancipation he offered one of the first real
statements of the effects of antisemitism on Jews. In it, unlike other
early Zionists, his program was still basically hoping for the
acceptance of the Jews in the world, but acknowledging that until then
they would be ghosts, strangers, and without a home, a passive ball
tossed about by the forces of history. The essence of his idea was that
the Jews indeed constituted a separate ethnic entity that could not be
assimilated and would have to be accepted as a group in its own
homeland, which he as not sure should be in the US, Argentina, or
Palestine, especially because of all the difficulties that would be
involved with Jewish settlement in the middle east. Because of his
early contribution, in 1934 his remains were transferred to Mt. Scopus
in Jerusalem. Two years earlier, as I mentioned in a previous lecture,
also at the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus a ceremony in which the ban
against Spinoza was rescinded.

3) Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, known as Eliezer ben Yehudah (1858-1923),
influenced by Russian nationalism during the 1870s, he was one of the
earliest European Jews who decided to settle in Palestine. His main
mission became the reestablishment of Hebrew as a spoken language, a
journey that took him in search of Hebrew speakers and linguists from
Paris, to North Africa, to Paris. In 1879 he published his first
article on the purpose of establishing a spiritual center for the Jews
in Palestine and in 1881 he left to settle there himself where he,
despite much local religious opposition who managed to have to Turks
jail him for sedition, devoted himself to establishing Hebrew in daily
speech, newspapers, and schools, opposing the traditional religious Jews
who lived on charity (Halukah), the attempt to introduce German as the
language of scientific study at the Technion in Haifa (567), and the use
of Yiddish. Ben Yehudah established the Hebrew Language Academy and
coined many words, few of which actually received acceptance, but his
massive multi-volume dictionary serves as the definitive repository for
the documentation of Hebrew usage throughout the generations. Few other
Hebrew writers or Zionist leaders, including Smolenskin, Lilienblum, and
Herzl, shared his enthusiasm for Hebrew as the language of the Jews of
the land of Israel.

The point of all this information is not just to identify a few more
names of streets in most Israeli cities, but to show that Zionism had
as much if not more to do with the Jewish situation in Europe than it
did with any historical affection for the land of Israel and to show
that by the time that Herzl appeared on the scene most of the
fundamental features of Zionism had been developed and put in place,
albeit on a very small scale.

Political Zionism: Theodor Herzl

The life and work of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) reflect all the
vicissitudes of the Jewish Question. In some histories he is considered
the founder of Zionism, and the Jewish State, often presented as working
from scratch after his mythical conversion at the humiliation of Dreyfus
in Paris. Even if these claims are exaggerated, he did do the major work
for gaining the Jews recognition as a nation, for the public discussion
of the Jewish question, for high level diplomatic involvement with
Jewish issues, and for transforming the Zionist movement, inspiring
courage and daring on the part of individual Jews, and the establishment
of mechanisms for organizing the Zionist movement: press, flag, company,
bank, anthem, and conventions. With his physically imposing good looks,
dignified character, and professional tone, Herzl personified the
Zionist movement for many around the world.

His biography includes the basic facts that in his youth he did attend
the liberal synagogue in Budapest, where he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah,
derived influence from grandfathers who were Orthodox and a
proto-Zionist, and experienced antisemitism as a law student in Vienna
during the 1880s. His own loyalties to Judaism began to flag. He did
not have his son, born in 1891, circumcised. In 1893 he recorded that
the solution to the Jewish Question might be the conversion of all the
Jewish children of Vienna at once to Catholicism. In 1895 he covered the
Dreyfus trial, but at that time there was nothing recorded in his
journals to connect his reactions to it to his vision of Zionism. Later
that year he wrote to and then met with Baron de Hirsch and tried to
present the idea of a Jewish state to him. Later in the year he
presented The Jewish State addressed to the Rothschilds, an idea that
when it was subsequently published in several versions attracted much
interest, mostly negative, sometimes questioning his sanity.

His program was based on his perception that the Jewish Question could
not be resolved in Europe because of the profound level of antisemitism
which he saw as permanent despite the emancipation of the Jews. As a
result, he felt, the nations of Europe would be more than willing to aid
the establishment of a modern, tolerant independent Jewish state to
solve the Jewish Problem and the peaceful exchange of populations. Such
a state would embody the finest principles of European progress: a
seven hour work day (Later on when asked about a five day work week,
David Ben-Gurion said something about first having Israelis put in one
day of work.) Like others before him, Herzl considered both Argentina
and Palestine as the possible locations of the Jewish state, and was
sure that the rulers of either location could be swayed by reason to see
the advantage of the Jews serving as a rampart of European civilization
among barbarians, and by utilitarian interest, including Jewish control
of the finances of all of Turkey. Paradoxically, he never addressed the
question why the rulers and the people of Europe had not been persuaded
of the benefits that the Jews brought to them (533/422).

One of the results of Herzl's program was the unification of German
Reform and Orthodox rabbis against him. They publicly denounced him for
making his views for a Jewish state--as opposed to agricultural
communities--known in German rather than Hebrew (referring to Hovevei
Zion and unaware of Hess annd Pinsker) and for undermining the Jews'
chances of finding accommodation and gaining rights in the European
countries in which they currently lived (538/427). As a result, Herzl
shifted the site of his first Zionist Congress from Germany to
Switzerland. In August at the municipal casino of Basle Herzl, residing
at the Three Kings Hotel, convened the First Zionist Congress. It
attracted 200 people, including twelve women who were not allowed to
vote because of the pressure put on Herzl from Orthodox Jews whom he
wanted to keep in the movement (540/429). However, by 1898, women were
allowed to vote at the Second Zionist Congress, despite concern that
their close alignment with socialism and the movement for full equality
for women might diminish the acceptance of Zionism by the rulers of
Europe. From the beginning, Zionism for Herzl and Max Nordeau was a
movement for the "new man" so that Jews could become "real men"
(547/434).

Strong criticism of the Congress came from Ahad Haam, who questioned
whether the Jews were ready for the burdens of statehood and whether the
middle east would be hospitable to such a state, raising doubts if Herzl
had not raised the expectations of the Jewish people to an unattainable
level (541/430).

Herzl continued his attempt to win the support of world leaders, Jewish
capitalists, and Jewish liberals, often with very little success. In
1898 he traveled to Jerusalem to meet with the Kaiser of Germany, a trip
that produced little in the way of support but much in the way of
Zionist legend. A famous picture showing Herzl looking out over the
city of Jerusalem with the tower of David basking in optimistic rays of
sunlight was actually the same photograph of him standing on the balcony
of the Three Kings Hotel in Basle overlooking the Rhine River
superimposed on a sketch of Jerusalem (if you can see the two pictures
next to each other, notice that the railing supporting Herzl is the same
in both). There also existed in Motza a tree that he had planted until
it mysteriously disappeared.

The one positive response that Herzl received to his program was an
offer in 1903 from the British for the Jews to settle in Uganda,
actually Kenya today. In the wake of the Kishnev pogroms and the
immediate security needs of a large number of Russian Jews, he
considered the offer very seriously as a short term solution. The Sixth
Zionist Congress in 1903 debated the Uganda Plan vigorously and the
motion passed, with most of the opposition to it, paradoxically coming
from Russians, in whose service such a plan was considered in the first
place. In July of 1905, After Herzl's death, the Seventh Zionist
Congress, following an investigation of the proposed area in Africa
voted against the Uganda plan and against all future territorial
settlements involving other than large scale settlement in Palestine
(548/437, 549/438). Some territorialist Zionists wiling to settle
elsewhere rejected these motions and left the Zionist movement
(550/438). Paradoxically, Eliezer Ben Yehuda one of the first modern
settlers in Palestine supported the Uganda plan.

Herzl died of a heart problem in 1904, perhaps due to the stress of the
Uganda Plan. His burial in Vienna was a major event in the history of
Zionism, as was his re-interment in Jerusalem in 1949.

Family Life and Jewish Cultural Developments

Herzl's family life was a shambles. He was separated from his wife for
a period in 1891, even before he turned to Zionism. His daughter died a
drug addict in France, one son converted and committed suicide, his
youngest daughter, fulfilling her father's greatest fear about life in
Europe, was killed by the Nazis, and his grandson, after changing his
name, visited Palestine in the service of the King of Great Britain,
served Britain in the United States, and committed suicide.

Herzl's family, was not alone among the leaders of each of the major
movements among the Jews during this period. As we saw, a generation
earlier Mendelssohn's children converted. The son of the great Yiddish
writer, Mendele Moyker Seforim, converted. Similarly the Yiddish writer
Y. L. Peretz was alienated from his son. The daughters of Ahad Haam and
Simon Dubnow married Christians, and despite each father's disdain for
Judaism as a religion and their attempt to develop secular forms of
identity, they could not cope with what they considered to be a betrayal
of the religion and broke off contact with their daughters.

Childrearing and excellence in Hebrew literature did not always seem to
be compatible: The children of Shai Horowitz intermarried,
Berdichevsky's line ended with drug addiction in Israel, Tchernachowski
had a daughter out of wedlock with a Russian countess (for which rabbis
wanted to prevent streets from being named after him, but obviously
failed), and the great national poet Bialik, my Israeli students tell
me, had a child out of wedlock--his only one--whom he refused to
recognize. A recent doctorate has been completed in Israel about the
high level of suicide among the early Zionist pioneers in Palestine.

I mention all this information not in the name of historical revisionism
or for titillating gossip but because it raises fundamental questions
either about the nature of leaders and geniuses to raise children or the
ability of secular, cultural, and national responses to the Jewish
question to produce results that can endure across generations. Indeed,
the question of informed Jewish continuity and even issues of
intermarriage with Christians and Muslims are now facing Israeli
families who thought that by living in a Jewish cultural and even
religious environment in Israel they would not have to face such
questions.

Zionism and Religion

Subsequent hostility came from the Hasidim who, asserting that Jewish
life was not in danger religiously or physically, maligned the Zionists
as fools and malicious conspirers who were using scare tactics to rouse
the Jews of Europe and who were working against the will of God
(544/432). Some religious Jews, however, established in 1902 a
religious Zionist movement, the Mizrahi, in addition to meaning East
stood for merkaz ruhani, spiritual center (546/436). In 1912 Orthodox
Jews from both eastern and western Europe founded Agudat Yisrael modeled
on the organizational structure of Zionism but rejecting its secular
cultural program, passed in 1912. Agudat Yisrael affirmed the centrality
of the Torah and Jewish law and opposed Zionism for usurping what they
felt should be a divine and not a human process of redemption (565/446).
In 1919, Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937), the protean Jew who had coined the
term Zionism in 1893 and after involvement in various forms of Zionism
and Jewish diasporan nationalism turned to Yiddish, ultra-Orthodoxy, and
rejected both the enlightenment and Zionism. As a member of Agudat
Yisrael he wrote that Zion and Hebrew had religious but not political or
secular meaning (568).

Socialist Zionism

Hardly in the spirit of bourgeois Herzl, one of the most enduring
features of Zionism was socialist Zionism, a synthesis of Marxism and
Zionism articulated by Ber Borochov (1881-1917). In 1906 he put forward
his proposal for the participation of Poalei Zion, the Russian Jewish
Socialist Workers Party, in the World Zionist Organization. Essential
to his synthesis of Marxism and Zionism was acceptance of the notion,
not always popular among socialists, that the Jews constituted a people
entitled to territorial autonomy. His position stressed that Jewish
workers as Jews must participate in the class struggle of the workers
against the capitalists and saw Zionism as a movement against bourgeois,
philanthropic, idealistic, and obsequious forces, including those within
the Zionist movement. His program, like Russian Zionism in general was
committed to what was called Gegenwartsarbeit, the daily work of
survival and settlement in Palestine even prior to the acquisition or
recognition of Jewish rights there (552/441).

At about the same time, beginning in 1903 during what became known as
the Second Aliya, the second wave of immigration to Palestine, this time
inspired in part by both the pogroms in Russia and the Uganda Plan,
emerged Hapoel Hatzair, the young workers, a non-Marxist,
non-international socialist group in Palestine that questioned the
applicability of the terms of the class struggle to the problems of the
Jewish people (556/445).

In 1916 Hashomer Hatzair, a German style Jewish youth movement, was
established in Vienna on the principles of Marxist-Socialism and
settlement in Palestine. Key to its organization was its rebellion
against the bourgeois values of their parents and contemporary Jewish
culture and its creation of new surrogate family attachments and values,
perhaps what the first generation of Zionist luminaries could not offer
to its children. Hashomer Hatzair advocated more than just the study of
Hebrew and Jewish history for the creation of a new type of Jewish human
being. The program continued many of the themes in the Jewish
Kulturkampf of the past half century in both the west and the east of
Europe. Questioning some Jews whose transvaluation of values led them
to violence, they wanted a return to nature. Asserting the centrality
of Hebrew and the Bible, it questioned the study of Talmud, but viewed
Yiddish as essential for communicating between Jews (577/445).

In 1919 the General Assembly of the Workers in Eretz Yisrael, Ahdut
Haavodah, formed under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak
Ben-Zvi, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin and others who would play a
crucial role in the running of the Jewish settlements in Palestine and
the State of Israel during its formative years (585). They saw
themselves both as a branch of the socialist international as well as
the Zionist movement, linking both universalism and particularism, a
balance that was often difficult to maintain over the years.
Paradoxically, in their attempt to avoid the exploitation of others they
ended up rejecting the labor of local Arabs, furthering alienation
between the two people.

Arabs in the Promised Land

As we have seen in some of the earliest deliberation about Zionism, the
issue of the Arab presence was raised as a possible obstacle to Jewish
settlement. For the most part, however, most Zionists created their
visions and programs in a state of denial or blissful ignorance
concerning the Arabs. Typical was Herzl himself who anticipated that
the medical advances and capitalist benefits brought by the Jews would
be welcomed by the local Arabs.

One of the first clear pronouncements concerning the Arab presence was
delivered by Yitzhak Epstein (1862-1943), a Hebrew writer, agricultural
worker, and educator from Palestine, at the Seventh Zionist Congress and
then published in 1907 in the Hebrew journal Hashiloah with an
introduction by the editor, Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Epstein raised in the
Zionist context the issue of the presence of the Arabs, noting that it
had been unnoticed by the Zionists, due not to malicious intentions, but
to their ignorance of the land of Israel. However, after thirty years
of settlement activity there it was now impossible to ignore the problem
which was still treated as if it were new. He observed that there were
500,000 Arabs living in the land of Israel and they owned all the arable
land. Zionists, therefore, must dispel the notion that the land of
Israel was an uncultivated land and he pleaded that the way that the
Arabs are being treated constituted a mistake. The Arabs, although not
currently organized into a movement, would not abandon their homeland
and they would someday return in "blows" what the Jews have "looted"
from them. He sensed when writing that he would be viewed as disloyal,
and urged that Jews and Arabs can work together. His program with the
Jews serving as enlightened owners, agronomists, and doctors, sounds
slightly colonial and patronizing, but prophetically recognizes a
problem that would continue (558).

Thirty years later, David Ben-Gurion, then Chair of the Jewish Agency,
presented testimony on the relations between Jews and Arabs before a
British commission investigating the Arab riots of 1936. In this
testimony Ben-Gurion asserted that Jews had to right to be in Palestine
because "The bible is our mandate." But he also expressed the idea that
the Jews came to Palestine to solve the Jewish Problem of Europe,
inflicted upon them by centuries of Christian persecution. He elaborated
upon the historical right of all Jewish people to live in circumstances
in Palestine that are different than they lived in Europe. He denied
that any other people had a national right to Palestine as its homeland,
but certainly the rights of other inhabitants born there could not be
negated. He then raised the issue of minority and majority rights in
Palestine under an anticipated Jewish state or, as he preferred, a
National Home. He noted that the Jews had never ignored the presence of
other people in Palestine and affirmed that the Jewish presence would
aid all people there. He compared the positive moment of Jewish renewal
to the negative aspects of Arab aggression, noting the great civilizing
task that lay ahead for the Jews in Palestine in which the Jews could
benefit their Arab neighbors in their colonization of the land.
Paradoxically, he ended on the positive note of what European culture
could contribute to the development of the entire region, the same
culture we have already noted so many times that most Zionists had
rejected as hostile, violent, and alien (603).

Revionist Zionism

All Zionism was not socialist, especially a seen in the work of Vladimir
Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a Russian Jewish orator, writer, soldier who had
fought for the British in the First World War in the Jewish Brigade, and
member of the Zionist Executive. He resigned in 1923 in protest against
the Jewish acquiescence to British policy that, in light of their
granting the Balfour Declaration in 1917 assuring the Jews a national
home Palestine, which may not prejudice the rights of existing
non-Jewish communities (582/458), protected the Arabs as the majority in
Palestine. He formulated a Revisionist View of Zionism on the basis of
which he organized the World Union of Zionist Revisionists in 1925.
Essential to his view was a sovereign capitalist Jewish state, in which
the Jews would constitute the majority, within its historical borders,
meaning both sides of the Jordan River, referred to as Kol Yisrael
Shelemah, or the Movement for a Greater Israel. In light of the massive
immigration to Palestine during the 1920s he opposed the vagueness of
the Zionist view and the slowness of its program, which he felt might
only create a new ghetto in Palestine. He based his program both on the
biblical mandate, European circumstances, and Herzl's program. In his
position he advocated full equality between Jews and Arabs as a matter
of right and justice as well as a necessity for the development of the
Jewish state (594/462).

In a later statement before the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937 he
elaborated on these themes and noted, after examining what was happing
to the Jews of Europe, that the position of the Arabs of Palestine could
not be exaggerated, that Arabs are migrating to Palestine, and that
while the Arabs will become a minority this will not be a hardship for
them (609). The Revisionists left the World Zionist Organization.
During the 1930s members of the Revisionists began for form underground
fighting organizations such as the Irgun Tzevai Leumi to fight both
local Arabs and the British until armed show downs between the forces of
Mapai (Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin) and the various Revisionist gangs.

Political Parties

Israeli political parties were formed and reformed during these early
pre-State years. By word of background, the Israeli government consists
of 120 seats in the Knesset. There are not direct or regional elections
but the entire country votes for party lists. The order of the
candidates on each party's list is determined in closed party sessions.
As each party receives a mandate, meaning a minimal threshold percentage
of the vote it is able to send another candidate to the government. The
prime minister was until the last election picked by parties that formed
a coalition so that between them they could get enough votes, 61, to
pass legislation. Now the prime minister is directly elected, a system
that some think is flawed, but the parties still must form a coalition
to rule.

Left: Labor-Socialist

In 1930 Hapoel Hatzair would form Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, or
Mapai, which, as a non-Marxist democratic socialist party, would be the
leading political party of the Histadrut workers organization and David
Ben- Gurion for the next thirty years.

In 1944, Yitzhak Tabenkin left Mapai and formed Ahdut Haavodah, less
orthodox in its Marxist orientation, and particularly militant towards
the Arab world and less sympathetic to the Arab minority.

In 1948 Ahdut Haavodah joined Hashomer Hatzair to form Mifleget Poalim
Me-ukhedet, Mapam, a Marxist-Zionist Party with leanings towards Moscow
and the most sympathy for the Arab minority in the country, which would
become the third major party during the early 1950s.

In Israel a small Communist Party with loyalty to Moscow emerged often
opposed to the existence of a Jewish state.

Center

In the middle between the socialists and Herut was the moderate right of
center Liberal Party, founded in 1961 with a combining of Progressive
and General Zionist Parties, the former representing central European
reformists, intellectuals, and professionals, the latter representing
the businessmen. In 1965 the right wing Herut and the Liberals joined
to form the Gahal block, though the Progressives then left to form the
Independent Liberal Party; this new coalition would later emerge as
Likkud.

Right: Revisionist

At the other extreme was the Herut Party, for many years in the Likkud
coalition, but now re-emerging on its own. With roots that went back to
the Revisionists of 1925, Herut, under the leadership of Menahem Begin,
became the major opposition party for both oriental (Sephardi) urban
poor and ideological dissent against the socialist governments and the
Histadrut during the 1950s and 1960s until under the leadership of Begin
in 1977 it won the election.

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