Jewish Political Movements

Jewish political organization has taken different forms across time and place: independent statehood, communal autonomy in exile, and voluntary associations in countries where Jews possessed civil rights.[1] In modern settings, local Jewish communities, regional or countrywide bodies, and organizations claiming to represent Jews as a whole have often coexisted without forming one centralized authority.[1] This plural institutional pattern reflects a recurring question in Jewish political life: whether collective needs are best addressed through a sovereign state, autonomous communities within other states, or participation as citizens in the states where Jews live.[1][2]

Before mass political movements emerged, cross-border advocacy frequently relied on shtadlanim, Jewish notables who used their connections with governments to intervene on behalf of Jewish communities.[1] The 1840 Damascus blood libel case is identified as an early example of coordinated international Jewish political activity: notables from major western European countries worked together, and the affair drew attention beyond the communities directly involved.[1] This activity demonstrated how advocacy could operate across borders before the development of large membership parties and international organizations.

Jewish communal self-government also had deep institutional importance. In diaspora kehilot, communities elected officers, raised voluntary taxes, and maintained communal institutions.[7] Such practices provided a model of collective administration distinct from sovereignty over a territory. Later political parties and organizations drew on, contested, or sought to supplement these modes of communal life, while Jewish political organization continued to vary between local community institutions and bodies with wider ambitions.[1][7]

The nineteenth-century emancipation era sharpened debate about political identity. Many Jews in Western countries sought to define themselves politically as citizens of their respective states who belonged to a different religion, even as Jewish organizations and activists continued to address the circumstances of Jews across borders.[2] The later tension between emancipationist approaches and Jewish nationalism was a disagreement within Jewish life, not a uniform Jewish position.[2] Political arguments about belonging could therefore concern both the rights of Jews as individuals in their countries and the claims or needs of Jews as a people.

The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among Jews in central and eastern Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[8] It advocated secular education, European and Hebrew languages, and culture as supplements to traditional Talmudic study; proposals included reforming Jewish education and synagogue services, adopting the language of surrounding society, and studying Jewish history and ancient Hebrew to encourage national consciousness.[8] Its modernization of religious practice contributed to the emergence of Reform Judaism in Germany in the early nineteenth century, while its ideas later mingled with those of Zionism and also had assimilationist effects.[8]

During the nineteenth century, emancipation and integration did not resolve all questions of Jewish equality or identity. The modern national movements of Europe formed part of the political environment in which modern Zionism developed, alongside histories of anti-Jewish persecution and discrimination.[3] Early Zionist proponents included secular and religious Jewish intellectuals concerned with loss of Jewish identity, failed emancipation, and rising antisemitism, who promoted settlement in the Land of Israel, a stronger Jewish national identity, Hebrew revival, and Jewish cultural and spiritual life.[9] Political Zionism also arose amid continued oppression and persecution in eastern Europe and disillusionment with emancipation in western Europe, which had not ended discrimination or guaranteed integration into local societies.[10][3]

In eastern Europe, late nineteenth-century conditions included poverty, state repression, pogroms, anti-Jewish feeling, and organized political antisemitism.[10] These pressures intensified debate over whether Jews should seek to change the conditions obstructing equality and peaceful coexistence, or leave those conditions through migration or assimilation.[10] Collective political mobilization and organization became another response.[10] The Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland became important centers of modern Jewish party politics, shaped by tsarist restrictions, revolutionary traditions, and rapid population growth.[6]

Modern Zionism transformed the older Jewish aspiration to return to Zion into a practical ideology and, by the end of the nineteenth century, an organized movement.[11][9] Its proponents pursued national self-determination and a home in the Land of Israel, while also advocating cultural renewal, including the revival of Hebrew.[9][3] Its political program joined practical work—immigration, settlement, education, and economic development—to a national claim for a publicly secured Jewish home.[10][3] Zionism itself did not supply one agreed account of how Jewish national life should be built, and its adherents developed distinct political, religious, social, and cultural currents.[12]

A precursor to organized political Zionism was Ḥovevei Ẕiyyon, or Lovers of Zion, formed among eastern European Jews in reaction to tsarist pogroms.[11] It promoted settlement in Palestine by Jewish farmers and artisans.[11] Hibbat Zion developed from circles of educated eastern European Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the movement spreading among younger and older generations in the 1870s.[13] The YIVO account dates the formal founding of Ḥibat Tsiyon to a Kattowitz conference in November 1884, describing it as growing from societies formed after the pogroms of 1881.[6]

The movement had no single clearly defined ideology and included religious and nonreligious supporters.[13] Its immediate goal was to establish Jewish settlements and a base for further immigration.[13] In the 1880s and 1890s, adherents settled in Eretz Israel and established agricultural settlements; early examples included Rishon le-Tsiyon and Petaḥ Tikvah, whose survival depended substantially on support from Baron Edmond de Rothschild.[13][6] By 1896, Ḥibat Tsiyon had 23 branches, before Herzl’s 1896 booklet and the 1897 Zionist Congress helped revitalize the movement.[6] Local circles and associations were early practical efforts that promoted settlement and a basis for further immigration.[13]

Theodor Herzl brought different strands of Zionist thought together in an organized political movement in the late nineteenth century, advocating international recognition of an independent, sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel.[3] In 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, where the Basel Program called for “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine to be secured by public law.”[10] The congress established the World Zionist Organization, providing a framework for uniting Zionist organizations and pursuing a common program.[1][10]

The Basel Program also called for “the organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry, by means of appropriate institutions, both local and international.”[1] The formulation expressed an aspiration to coordinate Jewish political activity across borders, but did not establish a single authority over world Jewry.[1] Local organizations, national associations, and international institutions continued to coexist, and the political life they represented remained internally diverse.[1][12]

Herzl led the movement until his death in 1904.[7] The Zionist center was established in Vienna, and the movement published the weekly Die Welt.[11] After the Ottoman government refused Herzl’s request for Jewish autonomy in Palestine, he sought British support.[11] Britain’s offer in 1903 of land in Uganda for settlement provoked disagreement: those committed exclusively to the Land of Israel opposed it, while a substantial minority broke away in 1905 and soon joined the Jewish Territorial Organization.[6][11] The Zionist movement ultimately held out for Palestine.[11]

Herzl convened six Zionist congresses between 1897 and 1902.[14] The first brought together about 200 Jewish men and women from 17 countries across Europe.[14] A news account quotes Herzl as saying after the congress, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State... and certainly in 50 years, everyone will know it.”[14] In 1902, he published the utopian novel Altneuland, which ended with the phrase “If you wish it, it is no legend.”[14]

Before the First World War, Zionism represented a minority of Jews, mostly from Russia, although many of its leaders were Austrian and German.[11] The movement developed propaganda, newspapers, and cultural work associated with a Jewish renaissance in literature and the arts; the development of Modern Hebrew took place largely during this period.[11] Zionist activists pursued immigration, Hebrew revival, settlement, education, and economic development even amid ideological disagreements.[9]

The movement’s practical and political ambitions extended beyond settlement. Its program sought to revive Jewish national life socially, culturally, economically, and politically, and to secure an internationally recognized home in the historic homeland.[10][3] Its advocates understood that home as a setting in which Jews could live free from persecution and develop their own lives and identity.[10] The movement’s aims did not require one identical model of society: its adherents differed over the meaning of national renewal and the structures through which it should be achieved.[9][12]

Jewish parties in eastern Europe from the 1880s through 1949 can be grouped broadly into integrationism, nationalism or autoemancipationism, autonomism, and traditionalism or Orthodoxy.[6] Integrationists sought equal membership in the predominant nation; nationalists sought a Jewish majority in a territory and potentially a state; autonomists sought Jewish self-government, especially in cultural affairs, within multinational states; and traditionalists sought to defend rabbinically supervised religious life.[6] These categories describe broad outlooks rather than four unified parties: class, territory, religion, and competing strategies produced many organizations and internal splits.[6] This eastern European framework does not exhaust Jewish political life worldwide.[6]

The political alternatives also included civic integration, territorial autonomy, and Jewish statehood. Some opponents of Zionism worried that identifying Jews in other countries as members of a nation seeking a home in Palestine could make them appear alien, weaken civic equality, or raise concerns about divided allegiance.[10] Anti-Zionist positions arose from a variety of religious, liberal, socialist, universalist, and other traditions, and should not be treated as a single doctrine or motivation.[5][10]

The Bund. The General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—usually called the Bund—was founded in Vilna in 1897 as a Jewish social-democratic party.[12][15] Its founders initially sought to organize Jewish workers within the broader Russian revolutionary movement and did not initially regard the organization as specifically Jewish nationalist.[15] Debate over whether Jews constituted a nation and what rights Jewish workers should have changed its position over time.[15]

At its Fourth Congress in 1901, the Bund moved toward autonomism; its 1905 platform proposed democratically elected minority institutions with authority over cultural affairs, education, and domestic law.[15] The Bund’s platform called for “national and cultural autonomy.”[4] It regarded Yiddish as the Jewish national language and opposed Zionism, which it viewed as representing bourgeois Jewish interests.[15] The Bund adopted a platform in 1901 calling for national and cultural autonomy and made Yiddish its official language, in contrast to Zionism’s eventual emphasis on Hebrew.[4]

Bundist doikayt—“hereness”—emphasized sustaining Jewish political and cultural life in the diaspora, where Jews already lived, rather than concentrating Jews in a homeland in Palestine.[5][15] Vladimir Medem strengthened this idea after the Balfour Declaration of 1917.[15] The Bund joined this position to socialist politics, Jewish education, trade unions, cultural activity, and opposition to antisemitism.[15] Its constituency included sections of the working class, radical and semi-intellectual groups, and Jews with limited general education who were steeped in Jewish culture.[12]

The Bund became a substantial political organization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it claimed 34,000 members in 274 branches and was described by YIVO as the largest and best-organized Jewish party in eastern Europe at that time.[15] A separate account says it grew from a small founding gathering into a mass movement, at one point had more members than the general Russian Social Democratic Labor Party with which it was affiliated, and was for a time the largest Jewish party in Poland’s Sejm after the First World War.[7] It was active in tsarist Russia, interwar Poland, and diaspora communities elsewhere.[12]

Bundist activity combined party politics with practical cultural and social institutions. The Bund helped spread educational institutions and organizations for adults and young people and provided self-defense training.[16] In interwar Vilna, its members participated in the city council and in Yiddish educational and cultural institutions, supporting a lecture hall, the YEKOPO Jewish Aid Committee, the TSBK Yiddish Education Network, and the ORT professional training network.[16] It fought Zionist movements, though it sometimes cooperated with Po‘alei Tsiyon on educational work.[16]

Religious Zionism and Orthodox politics. Mizrachi emerged in 1902 as a religious Zionist movement that sought to combine participation in the Jewish national project with Jewish tradition and Halakha.[6][17] Its program joined settlement and Hebrew religious education to the shaping of public life in the spirit of Jewish tradition.[17] Religious Zionism thus formed a current within Zionism rather than a single position shared by all Orthodox Jews.[6][17]

Agudat Israel emerged from a different Orthodox political response. Founded in Kattowitz in 1912, it represented Orthodox Jews who wished to regulate life according to tradition and maintain loyalty and peace toward the states where they lived.[12][17] It was anti-Zionist before statehood, while after 1948 it participated in Knesset elections and represented ultra-Orthodox interests.[17] The Holocaust Encyclopedia describes the party as feeling threatened by Zionist activity, including religious Zionism, and by the Bund’s secular political program.[12]

Orthodox political organization was not uniform. The choices debated included forming an Orthodox party within Zionism, establishing an independent Orthodox party, or rejecting party politics as a concession to modernization.[6] Agudat Israel, unlike Mizrachi, opposed Zionism in all forms, while Mizrachi advocated Orthodox participation in the Zionist movement.[6] Agudat Israel later participated in elections and government coalitions, generally without cabinet posts except during 1949–1952.[17]

Socialist and other Zionist currents. Zionism developed into multiple political currents, including Labor Zionism, religious Zionism, and Revisionism.[12] Labor Zionism associated the rebuilding of Jewish life in the Land of Israel with socialist and collectivist methods, social justice, and concern for the poor.[18] It promoted collective enterprises, including kibbutzim, as a means of building a Jewish state, and later formed much of Israel’s political left.[11] The political influence of socialist ideology and practice changed over time.[18]

Po‘alei Tsiyon was a socialist Zionist current, described in the Holocaust Encyclopedia as a Yiddish-based party.[12] In contrast to the Bund’s diaspora-centered autonomism, Po‘alei Tsiyon remained committed to Palestine, while territorialist parties emerged on the socialist wing.[6] Youth movements carried several versions of Zionist ideology into organizing and education. Dror was a pioneering socialist-Zionist movement; Gordoniah, established in Poland in 1925, was socialist but non-Marxist and grounded in A. D. Gordon’s writings on Labor Zionist settlement; Hashomer Hatzair combined settlement in the Land of Israel with left-wing socialism and Marxism and prepared youth for kibbutz life; and HaNoar Hatzioni represented non-socialist General Zionism.[12]

Revisionism. The Revisionist Zionist movement was founded at a Paris conference on 26 April 1925 under Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s leadership.[19] Jabotinsky viewed a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan as a central aim, while Revisionism emphasized immediate statehood, military preparedness, and forceful self-defense.[7][17]

The Revisionist current also built youth organizations. Betar, founded in 1923 and affiliated with the Revisionist party, advocated immediate Jewish statehood and military preparedness; its anti-socialist stance led to clashes with youth movements affiliated with the Histadrut.[17] A 2015 feature reports that a small group of Zionist boys in Riga initiated Betar in 1923, inspired by Tel Hai and Joseph Trumpeldor, and that Jabotinsky later agreed to sponsor it on condition that he serve as its supreme commander.[19] The feature dates the founding conference of Revisionist Zionists in Paris to 26 April 1925 and says Jabotinsky interpreted the Balfour Declaration as demanding a Jewish state, a Jewish majority, and a Jewish army.[19]

Revisionism’s emphasis on military preparedness contrasted with Labor Zionist currents that emphasized socialist and collectivist state-building.[18][17] These were broad tendencies rather than exhaustive descriptions of either camp.

Territorialism. Territorialism proposed Jewish autonomy in a territory other than the Land of Israel.[20] An early formulation is traced to Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882), which argued that a Jewish homeland need not be in the Land of Israel and could provide a safe haven elsewhere.[20] After Herzl’s death in 1904, a split led to the Jewish Territorial Organization, which sought territory and autonomous status for Jews unable or unwilling to remain where antisemitism was widespread or violent.[20] Its leader, Israel Zangwill, and his supporters viewed territorialism as compatible with Zionist ideals, but feared that the Zionist movement could not establish a Jewish state in Palestine quickly enough; the organization disbanded in 1925.[20]

Assimilation and civic integration. Assimilationist proposals offered another response to Jewish political vulnerability and questions of belonging. In 1897, Walther Rathenau’s Hear, O Israel proposed integration into German society by redefining Jews as a German tribe; the source stresses that Rathenau spoke for himself, not for an organized movement.[7] Some secular Jewish critics feared Zionism would impede assimilation into non-Jewish societies, while other critics opposed nationalism or the nation-state more generally.[11] These positions differed from both territorialist proposals and the Bund’s effort to sustain Jewish cultural distinctiveness in the countries where Jews lived.

Political movements translated broad ideas into parties, communal institutions, publications, education, settlement, and youth organizations. The variety of these forms meant that Jewish political activity was not confined to parliamentary parties or to a single international body.[1][6] In eastern Europe, Jewish parties operated as minorities within states and faced limits on their influence, yet they organized substantial followings.[6] Emigration carried their ideas and influence to the Americas, South Africa, and Palestine.[6]

The Zionist movement established organizations for international coordination while local associations encouraged immigration and settlement.[9] The World Zionist Organization’s founding in 1897 followed Herzl’s effort to unite Zionist organizations, and the movement’s activities included settlement, Hebrew education, economic development, and cultural work.[11][9] Its political framework was one among several forms of Jewish collective organization, not a replacement for all communal or diaspora institutions.[1]

Youth movements trained participants in distinct political traditions and practical programs. HeHalutz served as an umbrella association for pioneering Zionist youth groups, intended to prepare members to settle in the Land of Israel.[12] It spread across Europe and overseas after the First World War and had 100,000 adherents at its peak between 1930 and 1935.[12] Tzukunft was the Bund’s youth movement, while Skif was its children’s group.[12] The existence of such organizations shows how movements sought to pass political commitments to younger generations through education and preparation for communal or settlement life.[12]

Before the Second World War, Zionist youth organizations often focused on young people preparing for aliyah and depended substantially on emissaries from Palestine for policy.[21] Under German occupation, they broadened their activity, ran educational programs that included underground schools and kibbutz groups in ghettos, and became more independent as communications with the outside world were cut off.[21] Members took leadership roles in ghetto resistance and partisan organizations; the movements named in this account include Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Betar, and He-Halutz.[21] Zionist parties and associated youth groups were ideologically diverse, debating class, religion, and culture while connecting national struggle to cultural transformation and the use of Hebrew as a daily language.[12]

Jewish political organizations also worked through associations meant to represent communities beyond one country. Founded in 1936, the World Jewish Congress sought to create a political framework or federation encompassing Jews in Israel and the diaspora.[22] The organization says it supported the Zionist movement from its founding, while its work during the Holocaust and its aftermath was driven by rescue and the reparation and rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe.[22] It did not become fully representative of every Jewish community.[22] That limitation illustrates the difference between an organization’s claim to broad representation and the diverse institutions through which Jews actually organized.[1][22]

Political organization also involved temporary collaboration between groups whose larger goals diverged. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, Zionists and the Bund cooperated in seeking Jewish national autonomy, including democratic reorganization of Jewish communities and an elected congress that would act as a constituent assembly for Russian Jewry.[6] Elections took place late in 1917, but the Bolshevik regime prevented the assembly from meeting, and autonomism received no official recognition.[6] In Ukraine, the Rada adopted a law granting “national personal autonomy” to Jews, Poles, and Russians; Ukraine declared independence in January 1918, and Moyshe Zil’berfarb of the Fareynikte became minister for Jewish affairs.[6] These initiatives were historically specific attempts to secure minority rights and self-government, not an enduring settlement of the question.[6]

The eastern European party era ended under the Communist regimes that liquidated the remaining Jewish parties after the Second World War; YIVO dates the end of this political era by 1949.[6] This did not erase the influence of the movements, which had spread through emigration and continued in other communities.[6] The experience also underscores that political movements developed within particular state systems: parties could flourish as minority organizations, face repression, migrate with their members, or be dismantled by governments.[6]

Zionist political activity expanded during the early twentieth century from international advocacy and settlement toward institutions of national life. Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow were instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, in which Britain promised support for a Jewish national home in Palestine; the declaration was incorporated into Britain’s League of Nations mandate over Palestine in 1922.[11] The Haganah, a Zionist military organization later transformed into the core of the Israel Defense Forces, was established in 1920.[11] Zionist activity also expanded Jewish settlements, autonomous organizations such as kibbutzim, Hebrew education, and cultural life; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded in 1918 and opened in 1925.[11]

Immigration to Palestine remained relatively slow until Adolf Hitler’s rise in Europe, according to Britannica’s account.[11] The Arab population feared that Palestine would become a Jewish state and resisted Zionism and British policy supporting it.[11] Following the Arab revolt of 1936–39, Britain’s 1939 restrictions on Jewish immigration were intended, in Britannica’s account, to maintain peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs and retain Arab support during the Second World War.[11] Underground Revisionist groups opposed the restrictions through violence and assassination against the British and by organizing illegal Jewish immigration.[11]

The Holocaust led many Jews to seek refuge in Palestine and many others, particularly in the United States, to embrace Zionism.[11] On 29 November 1947, the United Nations proposed partition into Arab and Jewish states and internationalization of Jerusalem; Israel was established on 14 May 1948.[11] Britannica reports that the 1949 armistices left Israel with more territory than the UN partition plan had allotted.[11] Its account describes the flight or expulsion of about 800,000 Arabs from the area that became Israel as an event remembered as the Nakba, and also reports that about 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Middle Eastern countries and were absorbed by Israel.[11] These figures and descriptions are presented here as Britannica’s account of events whose framing remains contested.[11]

The establishment of Israel changed the practical setting of Jewish political movements, but did not end their disagreements. After statehood, Zionism’s political concerns included defending the state and securing its international legitimacy.[11] Political debate also addressed how Jewish self-determination could be reconciled with democracy and a Jewish demographic majority.[11] Britannica describes many Labor Zionists as favoring a two-state solution as a way to preserve both democracy and a Jewish majority, while many Revisionist Zionists viewed a Palestinian state in the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—and the Gaza Strip as an existential security risk; a smaller group considered those territories integral to Jewish history.[11]

Zionism continued to contain diverse political positions. The ADL account describes disagreement among Zionists over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peace, a two-state solution, and settlements, and states that support for Zionism does not require support for every Israeli government policy.[3] It also distinguishes criticism of Israeli government policy from anti-Zionism.[3] In this account, Zionism is a broad movement whose adherents do not share one contemporary political program.[12][3]

Israel’s political system and the earlier institutions of Jewish communal self-government reflect different but related forms of political pluralism. A commentary account describes Israel’s system as multiparty and coalition-based, noting that no party has ever achieved a parliamentary majority and that more than 25 parties contested elections for the Representative Assembly established in Mandatory Palestine in 1920.[7] It links this political tradition to the self-governing practices of diaspora kehilot, which elected officers, raised voluntary taxes, and maintained communal institutions.[7] The comparison points to a continuity of collective organization, while the political structures and aims of diaspora communities and a sovereign state remain distinct.[1][7]

Jewish political movements have never represented one uniform position on peoplehood, nationalism, religion, sovereignty, or diaspora life. The sources describe Zionists, Bundists, religious opponents of Zionism, autonomists, territorialists, and integrationists as pursuing distinct programs, sometimes with internal disagreements of their own.[5][6] A source-focused classification of eastern European party politics, in particular, should not be mistaken for a complete account of Jewish political movements across all regions and periods.[6]

Disagreement over Zionism has involved competing views of Jewish identity and political belonging. The 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of American Reform Judaism described Jews as a religious community rather than a nation and rejected expectations of a return to Zion.[5] Bundist doikayt placed emphasis on building Jewish political and cultural life where Jews already lived, while other critics opposed nationalism or the nation-state, or feared that Zionism could undermine civic equality and make diaspora Jews appear alien.[5][10] Some religious opponents believed that Judaism forbade establishing a Jewish state in Israel before the coming of the Messiah; Britannica notes that some marginal groups, including Neturei Karta, continue to hold this view.[11] Other forms of opposition arose from secular concerns about assimilation, socialism, communism, cultural autonomism, universalism, and traditional Orthodoxy.[5][10]

These differences do not establish a single explanation for anti-Zionism. The cited INSS discussion explicitly cautions that anti-Zionism has arisen from different religious, liberal, socialist, universalist, and other traditions, some not rooted in hostility toward Jews.[5] Conversely, the sources describe Zionism as a movement for Jewish self-determination and statehood in the Land of Israel, while also including a cultural revival project involving Hebrew, education, religion, and Jewish tradition.[3] Because the subject’s terms and political implications remain contested, specific interpretations are attributed to the sources that advance them rather than treated as a universal consensus.[5][3]

Territory and strategy also divided Jewish national movements. The Uganda proposal and subsequent territorialist split exposed disagreement over whether a refuge elsewhere could meet urgent Jewish needs or whether national restoration had to be centered in the Land of Israel.[6][20] Within Zionism, currents differed over labor and collectivism, religion, the use of force, and the political boundaries of the proposed state.[12][17] Revisionism’s maximal territorial program remained one current among competing Zionist approaches.[7][17]

The history of Zionism and the state’s establishment is also bound up with contested accounts of the conflict in Palestine and the consequences of the 1947–49 period. Britannica’s account describes both the flight or expulsion of Palestinians from the area that became Israel and the flight or expulsion of Jews from Middle Eastern countries, while identifying the Palestinian experience as the Nakba.[11] The figures and wording cited above are therefore attributed to that account rather than presented as a resolution of competing historical interpretations.[11] This article focuses on political movements and their stated programs; it does not treat one party, organization, or source as speaking for all Jews or all positions.