ZIONISM.

 

National self-determination

 Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation, and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine.[c] This belief developed out of the experiences of European Jewry, which the early Zionists believed demonstrated the danger inherent to their status as a minority. In contrast to the Zionist notion of nationhood, the Judaic sense of being a nation was rooted in religious beliefs of unique chosenness and divine providence, rather than in ethnicity. Specifically, prayers emphasized distinctiveness from other nations where a connection to Eretz Israel and the anticipation of restoration were based on messianic beliefs and religious practices, not modern nationalist conceptions.

 

Claim to a Jewish demographic majority and a Jewish state in Palestine

The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs. Israeli historian Yosef Gorny argues that the establishment of a Jewish demographic majority was an essential aspect of Zionism and depended on annulling the status of the Arabs.Gorny argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation "there was no such thing as Palestinians" is a cornerstone of Zionist policy. This perspective was also shared by those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom. British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs.

 

Unlike other forms of nationalism, the Zionist claim to Palestine was aspirational and required a mechanism by which the claim could be realized. The territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine and the subsequent goal of establishing a Jewish majority there was the main mechanism by which Zionist groups sought to realize this claim. By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, the political differences between the various Zionist groups had shrunk further, with almost all Zionist groups seeking a Jewish state in Palestine. While not every Zionist group openly called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, every group in the Zionist mainstream was wedded to the idea of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.

 

In pursuing a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement encountered the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Arab population, which was predominantly non-Jewish. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term "transfer" as a euphemism for the removal, or what would now be called ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. According to Morris, the idea of transfer was to play a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement and was seen as the main method of maintaining the "Jewishness" of the Zionist's state. He explains that "transfer" was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" and that a land which was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population. Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population's fear of displacement. He explains that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population.

 

The concept of "transfer" had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, with moral considerations rarely entering into the discussions of what was viewed as a logical solution—opposition to transferring the Arab population outside Palestine was typically expressed on practical, rather than moral grounds. The concept of removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions,[fn 1][49] from early in the movement's development. "Transfer" was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership.

 

Zionism, antisemitism and an "existential need" for self-determination

From the perspective of some early Zionist thinkers, Jews living amongst non-Jews suffer from impediments which can only be addressed by rejecting the Jewish identity which developed while living amongst non-Jews.[54] Accordingly, the early Zionists sought to develop a nationalist Jewish political life in a territory where Jews constitute a demographic majority. The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with demographic minority status) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. Some Zionist intellectuals, such as Yitzhak Elazari Volcani, even expressed an "understanding" of antisemitism, echoing its beliefs:

 

Anti-Semitism is not a psychosis... nor is it a lie. Anti-Semitism is a necessary outcome of a collision between two kinds of selfhood [or 'essence']. Hate is dependent upon the amount of 'agents of fermentation' that are pushed into the general organism [i.e., the non-Jewish group], whether they are active in it and irritate it, or are neutralized in it.

 

In this sense, Zionism did not seek to challenge antisemitism, but rather accepted it as a reality. The Zionist solution to the perceived deficiencies of diasporic life (or the "Jewish Question") was dependent on the territorial concentration of Jews in Palestine, with the longer-term goal of establishing a Jewish demographic majority there.

 

Racial conceptions of Jewish identity

In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, the founders of Zionism (Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, among others) sought to reformulate conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and the "race science" of the time. They believed that this concept would allow them to build a new framework for collective Jewish identity,[60] and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel. Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories, to argue that only a home for the Jewish people could enable the physical regeneration of the Jewish people and a renaissance of pride in their ancient cultural traditions.

 

The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the orthodox and liberal establishments often rejected this idea. Subsequently, Zionist and non-Zionist Jews vigorously debated aspects of this proposition in terms of the merits or otherwise of diaspora life. While Zionism embarked on its project of social engineering in Mandatory Palestine, ethnonationalist politics on the European continent strengthened and, by the 1930s, some German Jews, acting defensively, asserted Jewish collective rights by redefining Jews as a race after Nazism rose to power.[69] The Holocaust's policies of genocidal ethnic cleansing utterly discredited race as the lethal product of pseudoscience.

 

With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the "ingathering of the exiles", and the Law of Return, the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief.[i] Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.

 

Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in Jewish history and culture.[j] Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an essentialist approach to biology[k] in a similar manner to criticism of the interpretation of archaeology in the region.[l] According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and anti-Zionism.[m] Falk wrote that every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity.[n]