Zionism

Zionism is a national movement that holds that Jews are a people with a right to self-determination in their historic homeland, the Land of Israel. The name comes from Zion, a biblical name for Jerusalem. Modern political Zionism emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century as a response to antisemitism and the limits of Jewish emancipation, and it aimed to create a Jewish state, achieved in 1948. Today the term is used both for support of Israel's existence as a Jewish state and for the many different political currents within that support. Zionism has been one of the most debated ideologies of the modern era, and its supporters and critics describe it in very different terms.

Small groups known as Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) began promoting Jewish agricultural settlement in Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s, after waves of violence against Jews in the Russian Empire. Leon Pinsker argued in 1882 that Jews needed a homeland of their own. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, published The Jewish State in 1896 and convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which founded the Zionist Organization. In 1917 the British government's Balfour Declaration supported a Jewish national home in Palestine, and Britain governed the territory under a League of Nations mandate from the 1920s. Jewish immigration grew, as did conflict with the Arab population. After the Holocaust, the United Nations proposed partition in 1947, and Israel declared independence in 1948. The war that followed led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, an event Palestinians call the Nakba.

Political Zionism, associated with Herzl, focused on international recognition for a state. Cultural Zionism, associated with Ahad Ha'am, stressed a spiritual and cultural center for Jewish life. Labor Zionism, led by figures such as David Ben-Gurion, combined nationalism with socialism and dominated Israeli politics for decades. Revisionist Zionism, founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, favored a more assertive stance and free enterprise, and influenced the Likud party. Religious Zionism, shaped by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, saw the return to the land in religious terms. Christian Zionism is a separate movement of Christians who support Jewish return for religious reasons.

Palestinian and many Arab critics argue that Zionism led to the dispossession of Palestinians, and some scholars describe it as a form of settler colonialism, a view that supporters strongly reject. Some ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups opposed a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah, and early Jewish socialists such as the Bund preferred rights in the diaspora. Some left-wing critics, including some Jews, oppose Israel's definition as a Jewish state. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism a form of racism, which it revoked in 1991. Supporters argue that Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement for a persecuted people and that criticism of it can overlap with antisemitism, a question that remains intensely debated.

Zionism shaped the institutions of Israel, including the Law of Return, which grants Jews the right to immigrate and gain citizenship, and the revival of Hebrew as a national language. Israeli parties from the center-left to the religious right describe themselves as Zionist while disagreeing on borders, settlements, religion and state, and relations with Palestinians.