Seven Theses on Zionist History for Today[1]

1. What is “Zionism”?

The only definition possible for “Zionism” is the simplest: “The modern movement for Jews to immigrate to the Land of Israel aka Palestine.” On the other hand, there is no possible definition for the word “Zionist”; any attempted definition would include many who would deny they are Zionists, or fail to include many who think they are  – or would (most likely) be so politically skewed as to be nonsense.

The word was invented by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890 but popularized by Theodore Herzl, whose own  Zionism, as expressed in his books Die Judenstaat  (The State of the Jews) and Altneuland (Old-New Land) are fantasies, but they inspired, and still indirectly inspire, various progressively more extreme ideologies and movements, many active in the real world.

Perhaps the words “Islamism” and “Islamist” are similar in this respect.

2. Why Zionism?

Zionism was a real expression of Jewish longing; it was not a colonial invention.  That said, it is hard to imagine it being actualized any time other than the late 19^th century and the first third of the twentieth.  That was a time in which educated, even liberal, Europeans and Americans became used to seeing other Europeans and Americans undertake expeditions designed to take over and rule most of the rest of the world.  Undoubtedly the reframing of Judaism into Zionism borrowed from well-known  theories of nationalism, but Judaism fit well enough into contemporary nationalism that the lack of significant Jewish presence on the land it claimed seemed remediable, though, admittedly not easily. And the biblical origin and references made more sense to Christian Europeans then than they do now.

3. “Settler Colonialism” is a tautology

Settler colonialism was originally used to describe the Anglo-Saxon colonies, i.e. those that became the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand where, unlike most other colonies, the original (“indigenous”) people largely disappeared through disease and other means, and their few descendants constitute a tiny minority.  Israel was added to this category because, well, it fits, except for such details as the lack of a sponsoring country and the occurrence of a major war between Zionists and Palestinians, as well as the failure of the latter to disappear.

The lack of a sponsoring country (“metropol”) became irrelevant to many since “westerners” in the 1970s morphed for many into  a category superseding specific national allegiance.  Thus the lack of a metropol can be finessed, since “westerner” covers all sins. I call it a tautology because it’s a definition that can’t be proven or disproved by factual analysis.

The Levant was one of the few parts of Asia and Africa not colonized before 1914 because it had already been colonized centuries earlier by a country Europeans had to at least pretend to respect, namely, the Ottoman Empire.  European nations had taken away all the Empire’s African possessions and Christian nationalism had nibbled up its European possession since the 1820s, but the Empire’s core, Anatolia and the Levant through Iraq, was still Ottoman.  Thus, Palestine was comparatively open to foreigners coming – and staying for the price of a small bribe, something Herzl was unlikely to be aware of. As is well-known, the British offered a part of “Uganda” (actually Kenya today), which Herzl strongly supported.  The traditionalist majority in the movement he had created strongly opposed this – and it was dropped.  That proves nothing about Zionism except that it was lucky; could Israel have survived the era of decolonization had it been located in East Africa?

4. Zionist Intentions

Once Zionism was a going concern, having survived World War I and astonishingly succeeded in getting Britain on board with the Balfour Declaration, the focus for Zionist leaders became how tp attain a Jewish majority in Palestine.  Arithmetically, there were only two ways of doing this: increase the number of Jews or shrink the number of Arabs. Reaching a majority, it should be noted, would be much harder than formerly because of the public health measures the British were introducing, which helped increase the Palestinian population from an estimated 690,000 in 1918 to about 1.050,000 in 1939.[2]  Zionist officials talked about encouraging a vast immigration from Europe – and they indeed tried but with initially meager results; the Jewish population of Palestine increased from about 58,000 in 1918 to only 174,000 in the 1931 census as life in Palestine was hard and the new USSR had closed  its borders to would-be emigrants.   However,  it increased to  450,000 in 1939, demonstrating that Hitler, who came to power in 1933, was more successful in inducing Jews to make aliyah than Ben-Gurion or Weizmann.

In 1923, rightwing Zionist leader Vladimir had advocated an “Iron Wall” to prevent Arabs from interfering with Zionism.  That was never defined but it was clearly not peaceful.   By 1936, mainstream Zionists leaders were talking of “transfer,” the still-employed euphemism for expulsion of  Palestinian Arabs. Control of Palestine had, in less than 20 years, become absolutely existential; both sides were determined to prevail by any means necessary. The Zionists did reluctantly accept the first partition plan of 1937 offered by the British, which would have given them about 20% of historic Palestine, but convenient Palestinian rejection of both that plan and of the 1939 White Paper (the best deal Palestinians have ever been offered), allowed Zionist hopes and plans to grow.

5. The 7% paradox and other important numbers

In early 1948 there between 500,000-600,000 Jews and about 1,200,000 Muslims and Christians in Mandatory Palestine.  Palestinians often  point out, correctly, that Jews/Zionists only owned 7% of the land in the territory that became Israel in 1948,  though it should be noted that for tax and other reasons dating back to Ottoman times, most agricultural land was not legally owned by those (i.e. Palestinian Arabs) who farmed or lived on it. The 7% figure also proves Zionists had not enserfed or dispossessed of their land the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.  However they had unquestionably created a large, growing, and unwelcome presence in what, at the time of Balfour in 1917, had been a land solidly Palestinian Arab, with around 30-35,000 Zionist Jews, plus about 25,000 mainly Sephardi Jews whose families had been there before Zionism, and whose lifestyle harmonized with that of Palestinians, and most of whom did not identify with the Zionist settlers.  Thus, the Zionists had indeed colonized Palestine by 1948 , or, more correctly, created an immovable presence there, but had not colonized the people or much of the land itself. In other words, Zionism needed a place, especially that  place, Palestine, but not the people.

5.Was the War of 1948 Inevitable?

The 1930s plus the Holocaust made the Nakba virtually inevitable, though one could plausibly argue that the British promise of a Jewish “national home” had already done so. The 1930s proved the Palestinians unwilling to compromise on their right to all of Palestine, which the British would have recognized had they accepted the 1939 White Paper. On the other hand, the  Holocaust’s 6 million dead Jews proved, to Jews and to the victorious Allies that Jews/the Jewish People needed protection; most obviously the hundreds of thousands still living strewn across Europe in the wake of the war.  Western European countries were unwilling and perhaps unable to resettle foreign Jews while undertaking their own reconstruction. The US certainly could have taken them in but refused, though it did end up admitting between 80,000 and 96,000 Jewish refuges during the subsequent decade.

It must be recognized that the Holocaust was understood by Zionists as the horrific fulfillment of what Herzl and all Zionists had been predicting for half a century, though very few envisaged what actually transpired.  From 1939, mainstream Zionists prepared for a war in Palestine once the big war was over, though they also, of course, were committed to an Allied victory. After the experience of the 1930s, Zionists realized, as Jabotinsky had predicted, that the Palestinians were unwilling to compromise, and they started buying arms.  Ben Gurion’s famous phrase – to fight the Germans as if there were no White Paper and to fight the White Paper as if there were no war – made that clear, as did the decision at the Biltmore Conference in 1942 to move  towards a state after the war.  30,000 Jews from Palestine joined the British with the active encouragement of the Haganah, so they would receive military training. Money was raised for arms purchases – which were freely available as of 1945 as the world (temporarily) disarmed.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians, suffering as usual from terrible leadership, did none of these things.  To the extent they thought about the coming conflict, they hoped to be protected by the neighboring Arab states, which had received various degrees of independence during the 1930s and ‘40s.  Those states indeed had so-called regular armies, but all suffered from incompetent and corrupt leadership, with the notable exception of the Jordanian “Arab Legion,” led by British officers, which was more than a match for the newly-formed IDF in many, though not all, of their battles.

6. Why the Nakba?

“Nakba”  means “catastrophe” in Arabic, universally employed to refer to the events of 1948.  I use it here to mean the flight and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs during the war.

Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis (as they were after May 14, 1948) had any other home, and both sides believed their enemies were out to destroy them, egged on by their own propagandists. Had the Arabs accepted the UN’s Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, would the Zionists have accepted those borders?   Probably, until the inevitable next confrontation.  But there was no chance that the Palestinians or Arab states would have accepted the resolution, which Zionists gradually realized in the context of the  guerrilla war that started the day after the resolution was  passed.  The Zionists were winning the guerrilla war against the Palestinians by March 1948 – and likewise defeated the Arab armies, which entered Palestine after Israel declared independence. The Zionists were better prepared, trained, and armed and we now know their army was larger than the Arab armies in Palestine, facts not obvious at the time.

Palestinians fled for two reasons: out of the entirely understandable fear of a hostile army, or because they were forced  out by the IDF, as soberly described in Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land, based on the published memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin, who was in command of the expulsions in the towns of Lod and Ramle. There were also some, perhaps more than some, massacres, whose existence have come to light in the memoirs of aging Palmach veterans.  The best known was Deir Yassin, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where the Irgun and Lehi, under the personal command of Menachem Begin, massacred 105 Palestinians, mostly women and children.  The atrocities at Deir Yassin were widely broadcast and even exaggerated by all groups involved: by the Irgun and Lehi  to frighten more Palestinians into leaving; by the Palestinian and Arab leadership to show the barbarity of the Zionists; and by the mainstream Labor Zionist leadership to show the barbarity of their internecine rivals, the Irgun.  The publicity had the predictable effect, compounded with that of rumors off other massacres and  the ongoing war: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in understandable fear.

According to credible reports, it was then that that flight triggered the Zionist policy that made the 750,000 Palestinians who fled permanently homeless: No right of return. From a Zionist point of view it made absolute sense: why  allow the return of an assured fifth column, whose numbers  roughly equaled or exceeded the total number of Israelis when the war ended.  A Jewish state, they felt, must have a strong majority of Jews in order to survive. Whether by accident or design, the Palestinian percentage of Israel’s population was a “manageable” 20%, a percentage that has stayed approximately constant ever since.  Various fictions were deployed to justify the policy; the best known was the claim that Arab leaders had broadcast calls for the Palestinians to leave so the Arab armies could more easily find and massacre the Zionists.  No trace of such a call has been found.  All Israeli historians know it is a fiction by now, but many ordinary Israelis still believe it.

7. Was there an alternative?

From a Zionist perspective, not really.  I am not defending that decision; I am trying to explain it. Israelis had every reason to believe all Arabs  wanted to destroy the Jewish state. The trauma of the war – and the recent, undigested horror of the Holocaust, plus the deprivations as tens of thousands, and eventually millions of Jews immigrated (under a different “right of return”) made most Israelis oblivious to the suffering of Palestinians.  The disparate narratives of both sides reinforced their oblivion.

I believe that Zionists genuinely, if self-interestedly, analogized the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews getting thrown  out of European cities and countries, as they had over many centuries.  What do you do in that case? You go to another city with a Jewish community, join it, and get absorbed.  That was what  Jews told themselves that Palestinians would do.   They’d go to neighboring countries, be absorbed into them, and within 2-3 generations, Palestine would be barely a memory.

SPOILER ALERT: That didn’t happen.

Next we’ll examine the post-1948 growth and the perversions of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. I will also explore the Israelis’ failure to come to terms with the obvious failure of their hopes that Palestinians would disappear as a people. Israel argues that a Palestinian state constitutes an existential danger to Israel.  I will discuss how it is the lack of a Palestinian state that actually constitutes the existential danger to Israel – and is directly responsible for many of Israel’s woes, including Hamas’s atrocious attack of October 7, 2023.

[1] With apologies to the late Shlomo Avineri

[2] I obtained the figures used here from various online sources; all correlate with generally accepted figures from reputable sources that I have used for years.  If anyone doubts a particular figure, let me know and I’ll source it.