What exactly is a Zionist? Are all Jews Zionists? Are all Zionists Jews? Why are Zionist so hated in the Middle East? Did any of the early Zionists make agreements with Nazi Germany before WWII?
Zionists are those people who support the existence and proliferation of the modern state of Israel in the same location as the biblical land of Israel. Most, but not all, Jews are Zionists. Most, but not all, Zionists are Jews.
Zionists are hated in the Middle East for many reasons:
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While the land of Israel was inhabited in ancient times by many Jews, between the second and 19th centuries c.e. (or A.D.), very few Jews lived in that area. In the last 100 years or so, the Jews have come back to the land and, in many instances, kicked people out whose families had been on the land for many years. The Jews cited an ancient right and the inhabitants disagreed, but were nonetheless displaced.
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The Q’uran of Islam and the Hebrew Bible have different ideas about who should control the land where both Abraham and Mohammad (at different times in their respective lives) dwelled. Much of the conflict is religiously based.
I don’t know of any agreements between Nazis and Zionists, but, because the area was, more or less, under British control until 1947, there were several agreements with the British relating to the land. Some of these agreements were more favorable to the Zionists while others were more favorable to the Arab population of the land.
At one point, Zionists just wanted a Jewish country for safety and protection–not simply for religious reasons. As such, Uganda was considered, but the idea was ultimately shot down.
1: Zionism was originally the belief that Jews cannot be safe except within the confines of an independent Jewish state. Now it is also the belief that there is a specific critical world-wide need for an independent Israel, be that need the “safety of the Jews”, a “democratic foothold in the Middle East”, or some sort of bizarre extremist apocalyptic Christian agenda.
2: Many Jews are vehemently anti-Zionist.
3: Many modern Zionists are not Jews. Some classic Zionists were not Jews.
4: Zionists are hated in the Middle East because Israel is hated in the Middle East.
5: A Zionist making agreements with Nazis is absurd. The people who made agreements with Nazis were the Mufti (a Palestinian Muslim leader) and similar men.
Zionism was mostly a project of European Jews, who felt that they would always be second class citizens in Europe at best, and victims of violence at worst. Jews off and on moved to Ottoman controlled Palestine in the 1900s, then British controlled Palestine after WWI. But there were never very large numbers, and the area remained firmly under the control of the Imperial powers. But then the 30s and 40s showed that the Zionists were right…most European Jews who didn’t flee Europe were exterminated. Poland used to be 10% Jewish, but today there are only dozens of Jews left. But escaping was difficult, because most countries wouldn’t accept the Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Refugees were turned away, and sent back to the Nazis.
Given the Holocaust, and the refusal of most countries to help fleeing Jews, a Jewish homeland became a top priority for surviving European Jews after WWII was over. The previous trickle of immigrants and refugees coming to Palestine became a torrent. Britain ceded half of the territory west of the Jordan River to the Jews, and the State of Israel was established, then attacked by the surrounding Arab states, etc etc.
I don’t know if I’d say many Jews are vehemently anti-Zionist. Some are, but that’s a pretty small minority.
could someone please describe the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion - and it’s history. I’ve heard this text is mistakenly applied to Zionists, but is actually a forgery. Any more info?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which has nothing to do with Zionism) is a forged document. It purports to be a document of Jewish leaders at the end of the 1800s, detailing how they were going to take over the world econimically and politically.
The document was actually composed for the Russian secret police. It was first published in 1897. It eventually found it’s way into the “mainstream” and was published serially by Henry Ford in the Dearborn Independent in 1920.
Keep in mind, of course, that when the Protocols were written, the idea of a State of Israel was still brand new and no one at the time seriously thought that they’d see it as a reality in the next hundred years.
Zev Steinhardt
No, not all Zionists are Jews (for example it would be no stretch at all to describe Winston Churchill as a Zionist) and not all Jews are zionists (in general Jews who oppose Zionism fall into two catergories, the ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose it for religious reasons and left-wing Jews of various relgious shades who oppose it for political reasons).
Originally it was a right-wing Jewish movement partly inspired by the late 19th century rise in nationalism and partly in reaction to the antisemtism that came with this. Initially it was for the establishment of a Jewish state/homeland in any part of the world, but it was soon decided that this state should be in Palestine. At this time it was almost exclusively an Ashkenazi movement and only a minority movement at that, as most of the European Jews, esp. in the east of Europe, were Orthodox and in general Zionism was against a commonly held Orthodox doctrine that the Jews could only return to Jerusalem with the coming of the Messiah (the ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews mentioned above still oppose it for this reason). In the west of Europe where the movement orginated most of the Jewish population were ‘liberals’ and far more intergrated into the urban society and didn’t really identify with the goals of Zionism.
Along came the WWII, Nazism and the holocaust (the details I am sure are well known to all), this did a couple of things firstly it helped to forge a stronger Jewish ‘national’ identity and changed many Jew’s minds about the need for a Jewish homeland.
Now to adress your question about agreements between the Zionist movement and N. Germany, it is a sensitive subject. In the early days of Nazi Germany the Nazis were keen to promote Jewish emmigration, to this end Gestapo department II-12 “cleverly promoted Zionism” (the words of the head of the that department Dieter Wislicency), this was also partly to divide the Jewish community against itself and certainly did not constitue an agreement with the Zionists. Later the Zionist movement ATTEMPTED to make an agreement with Nazi Germany by trying to get Hitler to help them establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, obviously this did not come to fruition.
What had initially been a trickle of Jewish emmigration to Palestine (at that time a British mandate became a flood esp. with the liberation of holocaust survivors at the end of the war, may entering illegally as the British had imposed a limit on the numbers of Jews allowed to emmigrate into the region due to an earlier Arab revolt (the Arab majority in Palestine felt it was in danger of being dispossesed by the new arrivals).
So in 1948 just before the British left the situation was thus there was a Jewish population of 608,000, mostly new arrivals who owned 6-8% of the land and an Arab population of 1,269,000 who owned 48% of the land with the rest owned by the government. After WWII the situation deterioated rapidly with inter-communal violence and attacks on British targets, which led the British to abandon Palesyine in 1948. The UN then drew up a partition of Palestine which made it into a patchwork of land consisting of two states, one Arab and one Jewish, though the Zionist movement had asked for more than this they accepted this partition, the Arab population did not. The state of Israel was declared as the intercomunal violence contiuned and shortly after the surrounding Arab states attacked (this was also to do with another politcal movement called pan-Arabism which since it’s earliest days had been attached to the struggle in Palestine).
The following war known as either the Israeli war of independece or the 1st Arab-Israeli war was a bloody affair and the Arab states with the exception of Jordan performed woefully which allowed the fledgling Israeli state to increase it’s territory by 50%, During this war many Arabs either fled in terror from the Israelis or were forced off their land meaning that by the end of the war most of the Arabs who were the majority in all areas of Palestine had been pushed off their land in the Israeli controlled areas which now was 75% of Palestine. At the end of the war, despite calls from the UN and the international community the Arab refugees were not allowed to return to their homes in what was now Israel and indeed any Arab trying to sneak back in was generally shot on site under martial law.
In 1967 during the six-day war Israel managed to capture the remaining 25% of what was formally Palestine (it was then under control of Egypt and Jordan), this was populated by mostly refugees from Israel along with Palestinians who were lived in the area anyway. These are what are called the Occupied Territories
One thing I hope have made clear is depsite what many think relgion is not the key factor here, indeed only the last couple of decades has it become important, the intial motivations of both sides ceratinly was not relgion.
Zionism was pretty much always primarily a left-wing political movement. Early Zionism was liberal, and then later 19th century Zionism was socialist. It’s nationalist, but you really can’t say it’s right wing.
It ceratinly had socilaist elements, and the Kibbutzniks who were some of the earliest Zionist settlers are evidence of this.
In general though among the Jewish Liberal population people were much more likely to see themselves their nationailty as for eample ‘German’ rather than ‘Jewish’.
It is generally perceived as right-wing and has been for a long time (certainly since the 1920’s), of course catergorising poltical views as left or right-wing is pretty subjective.
More on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
As stated by an earlier poster, they are thought to have been written at the behest of the Russian secret police. The idea–hardly an original one–was to use Jews as a scapegoat, thus distracting people from the failings of the government–in this case, the government of Czar Nicholas II.
The Protocols are supposed to have been drafted at a secret meeting of Jewish leaders. They outline how the world is to be dominated by promoting public immorality, labor unions, Communism, liberalism, free trade, international banking and practically anything else that a die-hard Czarist would find intimidating or objectionable.
After their initial publication, they were included in expanded form in a book called The Great in the Small, a supposed expose of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy, by a Czarist named Sergei Nilius. This book appears to have had an extraordinary influence on the imaginations of Russians in the years leading to the Bolshevik Revolution–a copy was said to be found among the effects of Czaress Anastasia.
In a weird irony, the book probably helped ensure the overthrow of the Czar; in the fighting following the Communist revolution, some White forces wasted a good deal of time and resources attacking Jews rather than opposing Lenin.
In a connection to real-life Zionism, it is sometimes claimed by conspiracy theorists that the Protocols were the work of Theodor Hertzl, the man widely regarded as the founder of the modern Zionist movement which eventually led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
In 1920 a reporter for the Times of London named Philip Graves demonstrated that the Protocols were not only a fake, but were plagiarized. They borrowed liberally from Dialogue Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell, a satire on the government of Napoleon III written by an attorney named Maurice Joly.
They also borrowed liberally from an 1868 novel called Biarritz by Hermann Goedsche. In his novel the Twelve Tribes of Israel are still active entities, and the heads of the tribes hold an annual meeting at night in a Jewish cemetery in Prague to compare notes about their progress in conquering the world. These annual meetings ares chaired by Satan.
Courts around the world have ruled that the Protocols are a fake. In 1927 Henry Ford–who, as noted by a previous poster–gave them very wide dissemination–admitted this after losing a lawsuit. Ford was later the recipient of the highest medal Hitler’s government awarded foreigners. He is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, and it has been widely reported that Hitler kept a picture of Ford hanging in his office.
Hitler, of course, spoke of the Protocols as being authentic. So did the government of the Soviet Union, even though the document suggested that Communism was just another evil Jew trick. Moamar Qadaffi has spoken of them as being real.
While Idi Amin was dictator of Uganda he allowed a European film crew to shoot a documentary about him. Called Idi Amin by Himself, the film is alternatively horrifying and comical. There is a scene in the movie where an announcer on the nightly national television news reports as the top story of the day that Amin has uncovered important new evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. It is, in fact, just an old dog-eared copy of the Protocols.
MC Master of ceremonies has it right. The World Zionist Organization was founded by Theodore Herzl. It was considered a possible answer to the Jewish Question in Europe (not to be confused nazis and the final solution, this is way before that), which was how the problem of trying to assimilate the Jewish population into European society. It was a response to antisemitism and a desire for some Jews to return to their ancestoral homeland. In addition to the return to Palestine, 19th century Zionists were also interested in solving some disputes concerning Judaism and reviving Hebrew and diplacing Yiddish as the offical Jewish language.
I’ll agree with you that left/right wing distinctions are subjective. But where’s your evidence that Zionism is/was a right wing philosophy? You’re right that the anti-Zionist Jews were left wing or liberal, but I don’t think that supports your theory that the Zionists were right wing. Most Jews active in European politics in the 19th century were left-wing, because the right-wing was anti-Semitic.
Here’s how it looks to me.
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At the Second Zionist Congress, socialist delegations demanded seats and got them and were at every Zionist congress after that.
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The Zionist groups were strong advocates of collective farming and common ownership of land. The first Zionist settlements by Bilu in the first Aliyah were collective farms, and in the second Aliyah, almost all the farm settlements were kibbutz or moshav.
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There have been a lot of Socialist Zionist groups (Poale Zion, Hashomer, the Jewish Bund when it was in a Zionist mood…it reversed positions a lot), and Socialist Zionism has always been one of the major schools of Zionist thought.
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The Labour Party controlled Israel and there was a Labour Prime Minister consistantly from its founding to 1977. If Zionism was right wing, how, in a state founded by Zionists and holding Zionist ideology, did a Socialist coalition remain in power for the first thirty years after its founding?
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I’m not sayiong that there weren’t Zionists with pretty left-wing tendencies, however pre-facists Europe in general there was a clear fault-line between Jewish Liberals and Zionists. It’s clear that many, including staunch-Zionist Winston Churchill who wrote an article on the subject saw socialism and Zionism battling each other for the minds of the Jeiwsh people.
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This is certainly true, I have a book written in about 1920 which rather quaintly describes all the earlier Zionist settlements (at that time the oldest was about 30 years old) as being taken over by “Bolsheviks”, but also this by thenyour seeing the more right-wing settlements coming in.
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Yes as I said there is a socialist element in Zionism and there are socilaist Zionists
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But looking back pre-Israeli independance the main groups such as Haganah and Irgun were generally right-wing with thhose two groups almagamating to form the Liberal Party, which then formed a a coaliton in 1973 (with among others the Herut party) and became ‘Likud Liberalim Leumi’ or ‘Likud’ for short.
Well, the Haganah and Irgun were military organizations. The Haganah wasn’t political…it was set up after the Arab riots as a defensive organization. If anything, it was dominated by the Socialist parties (And went on to become the Israeli army after independence). The Irgun, which split off from the Haganah, was controlled by Jablotsky’s Revisionists (who were in the minority, btw), and might be considered “right wing”, but a word about that…
It’s really a mistake, I think to see Revisionist Zionism as “right wing”…it’s right wing for Zionism, sure, but it was a liberal democratic movement, and in the framework of European politics couldn’t be considered right wing. It wasn’t facist or monarchist, stressed free market and democratic principles, and talked about inherant human rights.
The Jewish immigrants to the land, or which there was a mass immigration around 1900, came to a desert. Most of the land was uninhabitable and uninhabited. They purchased the land from the ostentatious owners, and the owners thought they got the better deal, selling the worthless lands. However, the immigrants irrigated and tilled the lands and the lands became quite valuable.
MC Master of Ceremonies:
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Actually, many fled in terror from the Arabs, or more specifically, the forthcoming Arab attack. In many instances the Arabs were encouraged to stay to help build a strong nation. It is true that many fled in view of propaganda spread by the Arabs that the Jews massacred women and children at Deir Yassin. Whatever happened there is in dispute, but the Arab radios broadcast of a massacre, precipitating a flight of the Arab population away from the areas with large Jewish populatin. Many found refuge in neighboring Arab countries, but the vast majority were not admitted to any country and became refugees in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Arabs told these refugees that they would soon return in the wake of the conquering armies of the Arab states.
According to * The Siege * by Conor Cruise O’Brien (1986), “by the time of the second truce [of the first war, which second truce was in July 1998], more than 500,000 Arab refugees had left Israeli-held territory. In the long and sterile polemical war that has been conducted over these unfortunate people, the Arab side refers to the refugees as “driven out,” while the Israeli side prefers to say that they “fled.” In fact it appears that some – perhaps a majority – fled, while some were driven out. Some, including the Palestinian Arab leadership, left of their own accord as early as January 1947. In the early phase of the fighting – before the intervention of the Arab regular armies – the Hagana had no policy of driving out Arabs and in at least one case, at Haifa, tried hard to persuade them to stay.”
Population, immigration and land history of Palestine:
Palestine prior to large scale Jewish emmigration had a thriving olive industry and was always one of the most fertile areas in the middle-east esp. compared to what is now Jordan. However under late Ottoman rule it was much neglected and not used to it’s full potential and both the Arab and Jewish population (who were almost entirely in Jerusalem except a population in Hebron who had mostly emmigrated there from an ancient population in Gaza) were destitute. The first Zionist settlers were certainly richer than the local Jewish population (who had been arriving since the middle ages (after the area became safe for Jews with the expulsion of the crusaders) in several revivals of Jewish mysticism) who were in general reliant on alms from Europe. The regeneration of Palestine did not really begin until the arrival of the British, this was thanks to the British, the Zionist Commission ans also native Arab craftmen who learn there trade abroad in for example the US and returned rich increasing the prosperity of the area.
An Ottoman 1878 census in the districts of Nabulus, Jerusalem and Acre show that there was quite a sizeable population in the area of about 450,000 Arabs and 25,000 Jews. The first Zionist immigrants arrived in about 1890, and contiuned to arrive at an ever increasing rate as Zionism (the first Zionist Congress met in 1897) gained momentum. In 1912 the estimated population was 525,000 Arabs and 40,000 Jews (this is quite a conservative estimate the number of Jews could of been 10,000 more). The area fell into British hands in 1917 during the Great War (which reduced both the Arab and Jewish population of the area) and when it became a British mandate in 1922 the British census gave figures of 660,000 Arabs and 85,000 Jews.
Under the Balfour declaration the Jewish emmigration to Palestine increased until the population situation in 1948 (see above.
I’m not quite sure where the idea that irrigation by Zionist settlers comes from, as farming in the area didn’t rely on irrigation due to the lack of surface water, though springs were used for water. A whole range of crops including oranges, olives, cereals were produced in the generally fertile soil.
Also by 1948 Jews only owned 6-8% of the land in Palestine which was only 20% of the land that could be cultivated.
The 1948 war:
Well there’s little doubt that Irgun did indeed kill women and children at Deir Yassin, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dispute that. Irgun were responsible also for terrorist attacks on Arab Bazaars in order to scare the population out. Operating at this time were the Revisionist Movement too who also used terrorism and had long declared there intention of a Jewish state in the WHOLE of Palestine.
The Arab radio broadcasts had little actual effect on the flood of refugees and the actual historical eveidnece for them is small. Also Haifia was the only town were the Jewish population asked the Arab population to stay (and partly because of this the Jews and Arabs of Haifia enjoy a much closer relationship than in any other part of Israel). The number of Arab refugees in 1948 was about 750,000.
It was more general reclamation, like the draining of the Huleh Valley,and marshes in general.
The big irrigation projects happened later, in the Negev.
Also, in the Mandate period, most of the land was owned by the Government, so saying that Jews owned 6-8% of the land is a larger percentage than it otherwise would seem.
The drainage of the Huleh Valley happened in 1951 tho’.
Clearly Zionist seetlement did have a postive impact on the land of Palestine, but it’s importance is overplayed, you also have to remeebr as late as 1931, the population of the Jewish settlements were only 32,000 (there were a further 55,000 Jews there at this time also)and that most of the major improvements happened later.
sorry about the poor punctuation of the last post.