The Zionist Argument and the Argument about Zionism

Key Findings:

The Beginning in Europe 

• Zionism was one of several responses to the massive changes engulfing nineteenth century Europe that widened opportunities but also posed special risks for Jews.

British Mandate [1922-1948]

• The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and Great Britain’s support for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home ironically provided Zionism with international legitimacy before it earned widespread backing from Jews.

• Jews who lived outside of Palestine could embrace Zionism and one or another of its visions of a national home as an abstract ideal. In Palestine, Jewish immigrants understood Zionism as an assortment of institutions shaping their lives.

• Religiously observant Jews could not help but feel discomfort with the radical transformative vision projected in classical Zionist discourse even as they carried their religious and communal associations with them in settling in Palestine. Not surprisingly, they often created the same kinds of neighborhoods they left behind in the towns and villages of their birth.

• Zionism’s utopianism may have been distant from the way most Palestine’s Jews lived, but it was critical to shaping conventional histories supposedly explaining how the Jewish National Home was developed.

• This is why the settler colonial rubric makes so little sense in explaining Zionism’s impact on Palestine’s Arabs and why branding Zionism a settler colonial project is as much a misuse of language as it is of history. Zionists aimed not at bringing a new civilization to the Arabs they encountered in Palestine but rather to the Diaspora Jew.

• In short, because Zionism focused on transforming the Jewish people, this was a cultural program that at least, initially, was more than willing to make room for the Arab, non-Jewish ‘other’. By the time circumstances—fierce Arab resistance combined with sustained outbursts of violence and an impending global conflict—convinced British policymakers to alter the principles of their Mandate policies in 1939, Zionism’s momentum was too strong to be stopped by proclamations, and Palestinian society too fragmented to see the burgeoning possibilities for their own independence in sharing the land.

1948: The Beginning in Israel

• In 1948, while Israel's foundational socialist Zionist creed could take credit for establishing a state, it increasingly lost its vigor in trying to sustain it. Its idioms seemed both unpopular and a non-response to the country’s serious problems. No one suffered more than the multitudes of people brought together in a newly established Jewish state: immigrants who initially viewed one another as foreign and alien, but who encountered one another in ways that changed everyone and reshaped the nation's society and culture.

• That Israel’s citizens were not all enmeshed in identical obligations could be read as a sign of respect for the country's diversity; that such differences imposed on the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities a certain dependence on the state could be interpreted as a portent of problems later encountered and the reason the country’s discourse on citizenship continues to provoke dissent.

Zionism and the Arabs in Israel 

• While Israel’s founding in the midst of war produced severe dislocations for Jews, it generated almost total chaos for the Arabs who remained within the 1949 Armistice lines. Once part of what had been the British Mandate Palestine’s majority population, Arabs found themselves a distinct minority when the guns were silenced.

• Adjusting to life in the Jewish state may have been unsettling for Arabs but it, nevertheless, had profound implications for how Arabs came to understand citizenship as comprising a calculation and pursuit of their interests, a definition of their identity, and an assessment of their political rights.

• Israeli rule has admittedly cast Arabs into the throes of modernization. Israel granted Arab women both the vote and the possibility of securing jobs outside the home.

Conclusion

• The Jewish people, itself, a confounding collection of diversity always shaped and reshaped Zionism blending it with religious values and imperatives into a cultural touchstone for Israel. Once Judaism shadowed the very definition of Zionist culture; now it invigorates it and helps produce a more coherent set of shared values for Israeli society.