# Zionism The modern political movement for Jewish national self-determination in the land of Israel, organised as a movement from the 1890s and realised in the state declared in 1948. It is the parent term the vault has been using without a page: [[Christian Zionism]] is a distinct nineteenth-century Protestant current that ran alongside it and is filed separately, and [[Revisionist Zionism]] is the specific right-wing branch whose descendants govern Israel today. ## Why it appeared when it did Zionism is a product of the same decades that produced most European nationalisms, and its immediate causes were two features of European life that were getting worse rather than better: the **pogroms** of the Russian Empire from 1881 onward, which produced mass emigration; and the discovery that **emancipation and assimilation were not protective**, dramatised for Theodor Herzl by the [[Dreyfus Affair]] in the most republican state in Europe. Herzl's *Der Judenstaat* (1896) and the First Zionist Congress at Basel (1897) turned a scattered set of proto-Zionist societies into an organisation with a programme, a bank and a congress. ## The main currents | Current | Core claim | Outcome | |---|---|---| | **Political Zionism** (Theodor Herzl) | Secure a great-power charter first; settlement follows | Produced the diplomacy that led to the [[Balfour Declaration]] | | **Labour Zionism** (Ben-Gurion, Borochov, Gordon) | Build the state through Jewish labour, collective settlement and unions | Built and then governed Israel 1948–1977 | | **Revisionist Zionism** (Jabotinsky) | A Jewish majority state on both banks of the Jordan, secured by force | Out of power for 30 years, then [[Likud]] and most governments since 1977 | | **Religious Zionism** (Kook) | The secular return has redemptive theological meaning | Marginal until 1967; now the settlement movement and a governing bloc | | **Cultural Zionism** (Ahad Ha'am) | A spiritual centre, not necessarily a sovereign state | Lost the argument; survives as a critical tradition | Zionism also had large Jewish opponents throughout, and still does: Bundist socialists who argued for national-cultural autonomy where Jews already lived; most of the Haredi world before the war, on the grounds that redemption was not a human project; Reform Judaism's nineteenth-century leadership, which held that Jews were a religious community and not a nation; and the post-1967 Jewish left, of which [[Jewish Voice for Peace]] is one American institutional expression. ## Contested meaning "Zionism" now names at least three different things in political argument, and conversations routinely fail because the parties are using different ones: the historical movement that produced the state; support for the state's continued existence; and support for particular Israeli government policies, especially in the territories occupied since the [[Six-Day War]]. The vault's practice is to say which is meant. The term is also an antisemitic euphemism in some settings — the "ZOG" construction of American white nationalism, and older texts including the [[Protocols of the Elders of Zion]], use Jewish national organisation as the frame for a world-control conspiracy. Distinguishing criticism of a state from that literature is a standing analytical task in this knowledge base, not a settled one. > [!important] ⭐ Why this page exists in a right-wing knowledge base > Fifty-eight files in this vault used the word before it had a page — almost all of them about [[Christian Zionism]], the American theological movement, rather than the Jewish national movement it is named after. **A vault that carries the derivative without the source will quietly adopt the derivative's definitions**, which in this case means reading a century of Jewish political argument entirely through the eyes of American evangelicals who joined it late and want something different from it. ## See Also - [[Israeli History Hub]] · [[Revisionist Zionism]] · [[Kahanism]] - [[Christian Zionism]] · [[Dispensationalism]] · [[Christian Eschatology]] - [[Israel]] · [[Likud]] · [[AIPAC]] · [[Jewish Voice for Peace]] · [[Anti-Defamation League]] - [[Balfour Declaration]] · [[Six-Day War]] · [[Oslo Accords]] · [[Holocaust]] - [[Judaism]] · [[Modern Orthodox Judaism]] · [[Haredi Judaism]] · [[Reform Judaism]] · [[Conservative Judaism]] - [[Nationalism]] · [[Ethnonationalism]] · [[Antisemitism]] · [[Dreyfus Affair]]