Introduction

Zionism is everywhere. It commands global headlines, racks up billions of views on social media, rises to the top of political discourse, turns people out to protest by the tens of thousands, and arouses such passionate emotions—particularly hostility—that Jews are routinely attacked over it, even murdered. 

Few subjects seem to descend so quickly into heated recriminations. Yet Zionism has relatively few adherents. Around 90 percent of the world’s 16 million Jews identify with Zionism’s core principles—a far cry from the hundreds of millions or even billions of followers of other major movements, like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Chinese communism. It’s a number only slightly larger than the population of the state of Pennsylvania, on par with the nation of Rwanda, and dramatically fewer than the followers of major celebrities. 

There is widespread confusion and disagreement about what Zionism means. Is it simply the effort to establish a Jewish state? Or is it a broader question about Jewish power? Is it about contemporary Israeli politics, the Palestinians, or anti-Western ideology? Is it a moral, political, social, or historical question? There are a number of starting points, making a common baseline difficult to agree on. 

Let’s begin by taking the word at face value: how its founders understood it and how subsequent Zionists thought about it. Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people to achieve self-determination in their ancient homeland. That is, Jews saw in their history a need for their own independent state, where they could be free to determine their own fate, and where their belonging would go unquestioned. The natural place was the one they had never left: the Land of Israel, where Jews have lived for thousands of years. 

If you support the Jewish right to self-determination and believe that Jews are entitled to a state just like other peoples, then you support Zionism. 

Few people, though, know Zionism’s actual history and purpose. So much of today’s discourse is based on partisan loyalties that prize simplistic assumptions, platitudes, or even outright lies to argue one side or the other. People debate fragments of ideas, facts, and figures that they barely know about, don’t quite understand, and struggle to place in context. The premise of this book rests on the simple conjecture that too many people don’t know very much about Zionism, and this ought to change.

Zionism is a project of rescue, return, renewal, redemption, and reflection. Zionism sought to rescue millions of Jews under threat in Europe and the Middle East and to return them to their indigenous homeland from which they had been exiled. Zionists believed the movement would lead to personal and collective Jewish renewal through a deep connection with the land and the creation of a modern Hebrew society. Some religious Jews, though not all, believed that Zionism was a great step toward redemption, fulfilling the Jewish covenant with God by ending exile and oppression. Others hoped that the project would reflect the highest moral aspirations of humanity through the development of a model society based on ethics and social justice.

These are Zionism’s ideals. At the same time, Zionism is, and has always been, a human endeavor. It is therefore subject to flaws, setbacks, inconsistencies, and the tensions that arise when idealism meets reality. Zionism has not fully realized these principles, but it hasn’t neglected them, either.

This book is a starting point. It’s the historical story you should know as you consider the Middle East, Israel, Jews, and Judaism. But it is not the final or definitive word. My goal is to chart Zionism comprehensively but not exhaustively. It cannot be stressed enough that every paragraph here is a book unto itself. Every sentence can be expanded, every angle explored more deeply, every claim challenged and debated. Sometimes I will engage those debates. Other times I will quickly move on to keep the narrative flowing. Partisans on all sides will find moments they wish were more nuanced. Fair enough. 

The writer Sarah Hurwitz once worried about digging into Israel’s history, lest she find that “there was some kind of original sin at the heart of its very founding, something sinister that I would not be able to defend once I uncovered it.”1 It’s true that this history is complicated and sometimes painful. But there is no single nugget of fact beneath all the layers that invalidates Israel’s existence. Zionism was not a nefarious plot but a reasoned response to how Jews perceived their past and present experiences and thought about their future. It developed through a historical process that did not have a central moment of origin. It did, however, profoundly affect people’s lives, including those of the Arabs in and around Palestine. Their experiences are part of the Zionist story, too.

This book is a retelling of the historical Zionist story, not a reimagining. Consider it an introductory volume to a vast subject. As much as possible, it follows a chronological outline. This book will trace Zionism’s main ideas, origins, conflicts, key figures, and evolution from a revolutionary ideology to the established doctrine of a nation-state—from the end of the 18th century through the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. 

This knowledge matters. In the wake of October 7, Zionism has become a flashpoint: misunderstood, vilified, defended, and debated with intensity. This book is not, however, a comprehensive history of the State of Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict. We will dip into issues that affected Zionism—such as the rise of Arab and Palestinian nationalism, various bouts of violence, peacemaking efforts, Jewish settlements, and Palestinian terrorism. But we will do less justice to those accounts than a dedicated book on those subjects would. 

While the aim of this book is objectivity—in the sense of relating historical facts rather than myths—we should be mindful that there are any number of perspectives from which to slant this story. More than a few books, especially since the October 7 attack, tell the Zionist story through the perspective of its harshest critics, casting Zionism as an “imperialist,” “racist,” and even “genocidal” tool. This viewpoint is not “anti-Zionist” but “antizionist.” We’ll encounter the hyphenated version as genuine Jewish opposition to Zionism before Israel’s establishment in 1948. Antizionism, however, is the ideological rejection of Jewish self-determination, based on lies and accusations, that paints Israel, Jews, and Zionism as the epitome of evil.

This book tells the Zionist story from the perspective of its Jewish adherents, who have a much more positive viewpoint. Readers may have to read multiple accounts of the same history to reach their own conclusions. As the French historian Maxime Rodinson wrote in 1967, the attitudes and actions of early Zionist leaders were “perfectly natural given the atmosphere of the period. There is no need for us to moralize by applying to the Zionist leaders or masses of that time criteria that have become common today. But neither do we have the right to deny that their attitude was what it was, nor to disregard its objective consequences.”2 

Zionism was intended to be a new beginning for world Jewry. Zionism arose because Jews had to choose between dying and saving themselves, and because they wanted to be “normal”—to live as others live, to have a country as others have, and to make their own decisions as others can. As their oppression increased, fewer and fewer countries would take them in, and their home societies were unable or unwilling to alleviate their plight. With nowhere else to go, they went to their ancestral homeland. These Jews, quite simply, had no other choice.

Yet Zionism was not based on a theological claim that God had granted the land to the Jews, as told in the Hebrew Bible. Zionism was largely a secular movement concerned with political realities and cultural revival. The fact is that Jews had never fully left the Land of Israel, which was called Judea in antiquity and later renamed Palestine by the Romans. Though conquerors had exiled Jews to other parts of the world, archaeological, historical, textual, and even genetic evidence shows an unbroken Jewish presence there going back more than 3,000 years. The first known reference to a collective people called “Israel” comes from the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, who bragged in 1208 BCE that he had destroyed them (he was wrong). 

This idea that Jews are a people is essential to understanding Zionism. Although Jews have long debated about what “genre” they are, in the last couple hundred years they have tended to see themselves as a people—in Hebrew, am (ahm, meaning “nation”), a notion they revived from ancient times. Though Judaism is a religion, Jews are not just a religious group—there is no universally agreed-upon set of beliefs that one must adopt in order to identify as Jewish, and many Jews identify as secular. Most Israeli Jews are not religiously observant. Nor are Jews a single racial group. There are white, Black, brown, and Asian Jews from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Ethiopia, South and East Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. Roughly half of Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern and North African heritage rather than European. Jews, then, are not “just” a religious group or an ethnicity but instead see themselves as a people obligated to one another because of a shared history, culture, and ancestral homeland. They welcome converts, emphasize belonging and communal ties, and feel a kinship with other Jews around the world. It’s this notion of a nation that Zionism adopted to argue for Jewish self-determination.

Zionism was a liberation movement seeking to break free of European and Middle Eastern empires in a bid for Jewish self-determination. But it wasn’t only about creating a homeland. Zionism also sought to create a new kind of Jew to live there, who would be strong, free, and committed to renewing Jewish life. Zionism transformed the Jewish condition from powerlessness to strength, irrevocably altering Jewish identity and self-consciousness, and forever changing the trajectory of Jewish history. 

One theme that we’ll encounter again and again is the tension between rescuing Jews and building a model moral society—“a light unto the nations,” in the words of the biblical book of Isaiah. For many Zionists, a safe haven was just one part of this historic project. They also wanted to build a modern state that would embody Jewish values, like social justice and equality, while overcoming mentalities that had been shaped by centuries of powerlessness, ghettoization, and persecution. This process, they hoped, would prove to Jews that they shared a destiny, and show the world that Jewish sovereignty could be a moral beacon. Building that model society provoked much debate among the Jewish people.

The writer Amos Oz observed in his 1983 book, In the Land of Israel, that “people of different intentions and viewpoints all agree fundamentally with one another that the Jews must come home, though they do not agree, and even fight bitterly, over the blueprint of that home and its furnishings.”3 Zionists argued fiercely about which ideological foundation best suited the Jewish homeland: Socialism? Capitalism? Democracy? Halacha (hah-lah-hah, Jewish law)? 

All human ventures struggle to reconcile deeply held values with the messiness of reality. For most of their history, Jews did not have to wrestle with the compromises necessary to run a country or the ethical consequences of sovereignty beyond their own communities. In exile, they were a powerless minority, excluded from politics and kept on the margins of society. That left them free to live their principles without compromise. But it also meant they had no practice with wielding power. And while Jewish texts are filled with guidance on how to rule justly, Jews had rarely been in a position to put those ideas into practice over others. 

Meanwhile, they faced genocidal enemies. In both Europe and the Middle East, powerful actors sought to annihilate them. These forces were relentless. No compromise was possible, and Jewish survival itself hung in the balance.

This security dilemma is another core theme weaving through Zionist history. There is a tricky balance between writing a book on the history of Zionism and writing one that is a defense of contemporary Israel. The philosopher Hussein Aboubakr Mansour delineates the difference between the “real conflict over land, territory and property,” which can be explained by the historian, and the “imaginary” conflict portrayed as “a metaphysical war between eternal good and evil.”4

This book remains within the realm of history. But the hope is that telling the Zionist story offers a way of thinking about the Jewish relationship to Zionism and Israel in light of the difficult choices Jews have faced. This knowledge will promote, if not a defense of Israel, at least empathy and understanding. For example, unyielding European antisemitism forced Jews to decide whether to stay and risk annihilation or leave altogether. Similarly, contemporary enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran insist they are in a zero-sum war for Israel’s destruction that will not end until their victory is achieved. No number of negotiations, cease-fires, or peace offers will stop their ambitions, nor is there a clear military path to defeating them. Jews often faced difficult choices with imperfect solutions and sometimes no good options. One question that runs through this history is this: Given these realities, what choices should Jews make?

These situations forced Jews to confront a new moral dilemma: how to balance the imperative to save Jewish lives with the one to build a just society. Can Jews protect themselves without compromising their ethical ideals? To put it more starkly: What happens when saving Jewish lives requires taking non-Jewish ones? Before Zionism, it was easy for Jews to follow the commandment “You shall not murder,” because in exile they were never in a position to wage war. But with statehood came an army that had to defend its citizens by force. Jewish wisdom has much to say about the ethics of self-defense. But those principles had never been tested under modern real-world conditions, when a Jewish army confronted ruthless enemies. Those wars—fought with the force necessary to repel a genocidal threat—could be brutal. That raised moral questions without easy answers. For example, an Israeli military checkpoint outside a Palestinian village protects Jewish lives from terrorists, but it also eats away at Zionism’s commitment to human dignity and freedom. Any resolution of this dilemma involves agonizing trade-offs. 

To offer another example: maintaining a Jewish majority is essential to preserving Israel’s Jewish character. But that means privileging Jewish identity, risking an antidemocratic situation in which minority rights might not be fully equal. Moving too far in either direction could compromise the Zionist goal of a Jewish safe haven or tip the Jewish state into authoritarianism.

Spoiler alert: there are no definitive answers to these dilemmas. What we will see instead are Zionist thinkers, activists, and leaders constantly wrestling with the balance. Sometimes they succeeded admirably, and other times they fell short. Above all, they shared a single purpose, which was to make Jews active participants in their own history. For millennia, Jews had felt that events happened to them in ways they couldn’t control. Zionists thought that by reclaiming their sovereignty, Jews would henceforth control their own destiny and therefore join the community of nations as equals. 

What follows is that story—its many ups and downs, uncertainties and convictions, factions and solidarities, hopes and losses. Through war and peace, exile and homecoming, Jews sought belonging, safety, and freedom in a home of their own. Let us begin.