The Idea of Israel

The idea of Israel joins two related propositions: that the Jewish people constitute a nation and that they possess a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. The Anti-Defamation League defines Zionism as the movement for Jewish self-determination and statehood in the Land of Israel, while the American Jewish Committee places modern Zionism within the broader history of nineteenth-century nationalism.[1][5]

The concept does not prescribe a single position on every question facing the state. Zionists have differed over political institutions, borders, religion, relations with the Arab population, and the balance between cultural renewal and political sovereignty. Support for Zionism is also distinct from support for any particular Israeli government policy and does not, by itself, preclude support for Palestinian self-determination.[1]

The aspiration to return to Zion did not begin with nineteenth-century politics. Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel was a defining feature of communal life across the diaspora, embedded in prayer, ritual, literature, and culture.[1] The continuing hope of return reflected an understanding that exile need not be the permanent condition of Jewish national life.

An early glimpse of how that longing could enter political imagination comes from a letter written in February 1799 by an Irishman named Thomas Corbet to Paul Barras, a leader of the French Directory and a patron of Napoleon. Corbet proposed that Napoleon call on Jews to join his eastern campaign and help them return to their homeland and establish a nation there. National Library of Israel curator Milka Levy-Rubin described the proposal as a Christian millennialist precursor rather than a product of the Jewish political movement, and it remains unknown whether the letter ever reached Napoleon.[6] The episode illustrates that proposals for restored Jewish national life in the Land of Israel circulated well before Herzl, even when their motivations differed sharply from later Zionism.

By the nineteenth century, longstanding attachment to Zion began acquiring the character of a practical ideology. Modern Zionism emerged alongside European nation-states and national liberation movements and in response to persistent anti-Jewish persecution and discrimination. Its advocates promoted both a Jewish state and a cultural renaissance centered on Hebrew and renewed Jewish control over communal traditions, culture, religion, and education.[1]

Modern Zionism coalesced into a formal international movement in the late nineteenth century. Theodor Herzl consolidated several strands of Zionist thought, and approximately 200 delegates from different political and religious backgrounds attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.[7] The Zionist organization established there remained modest before World War I but helped inspire immigration and the establishment of Jewish villages and towns in the Land of Israel.[3]

Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) on February 14, 1896. After encountering antisemitism in Paris and the Dreyfus affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly arrested on espionage charges, Herzl concluded that assimilation would not end antisemitism. He argued that the “Jewish problem” was national rather than merely individual and called for an independent Jewish state with international acceptance.[7]

At the First Zionist Congress, delegates adopted the Basel Program, which sought “to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally assured homeland in Palestine.” Herzl declared, “Zionism is the return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel,” capturing the movement's political and cultural dimensions.[7]

The congress's language nevertheless retained a fundamental ambiguity. Herzl's Der Judenstaat referred explicitly to statehood, while the Basel Declaration spoke of a Jewish homeland “secured by public law.” Shlomo Avineri attributes this caution to the geopolitical circumstances of the period, even as Herzl sought a charter for Jewish immigration, settlement, and practical self-government.[8][9]

The movement attracted both enthusiasts and critics. Many Jews embraced the prospect of a Jewish state, while others rejected it as a messianic fantasy or feared that it would intensify antisemitism and allegations of dual loyalty.[7] The year 1897 also produced competing paths to Jewish political normalization: Herzl convened the Zionist Congress, the Jewish socialist Bund was founded in Vilna, and Walther Rathenau published Hear, O Israel, advocating assimilation into German society. Avineri argues that the Bund's and Rathenau's programs required fundamental changes within European societies, whereas Herzl sought to anchor Jewish normalization outside Europe.[3]

The Zionist movement was never ideologically uniform. In his review of Michael Brenner's In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea, Shlomo Avineri describes sharp disagreements over the political and cultural form that Jewish national life should take.[3]

Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland imagined a Western European-style liberal democracy with equal citizenship for non-Jews, universal suffrage, and a welfare system that included a seven-hour workday. Ahad Ha-Am instead emphasized Jewish cultural renaissance and a Hebrew-speaking society. Brenner summarizes their difference by writing that “Herzl wanted a small Switzerland in the Middle East; Ahad Ha'am longed for a new Judea, in which Hebrew would be spoken.” Ahad Ha-Am also warned that a state preoccupied with survival might undermine the cultural renewal that gave Zionism its purpose, and he anticipated the emergence of an Arab national movement in response to Jewish settlement.[3]

Vladimir Jabotinsky represented another strand. He sought a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan but also advocated individual and collective rights for its Arab population. He proposed that a Jewish head of government have an Arab deputy, and vice versa. Avineri characterizes this aspect of Jabotinsky's ideal as closer to a federal, multiethnic polity than to a conventional nation-state.[3]

These competing visions show that disputes over liberal democracy, Hebrew culture, territorial nationalism, and Jewish-Arab political relations developed within Zionism itself rather than solely between Zionists and their external critics.[3]

Zionism pursued social and cultural transformation alongside political sovereignty. The movement sought to revive Hebrew and enable Jewish self-determination over traditions, education, culture, and religious life.[1] Before statehood, Zionist organizations also encouraged immigration and helped establish villages and towns that contributed to the developing infrastructure of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine.[3]

Avineri argues that Israel's democratic traditions drew partly on practices of Jewish communal self-government. Diaspora kehilot elected officers, raised voluntary taxes, and appointed rabbis and teachers. In 1920, the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine established the Assefat ha-Nivharim, or Representative Assembly, whose elected Va'ad Leumi became a de facto governing body.[3]

These institutions supplied administrative infrastructure for the provisional government and the independent state in 1948. Israel held its first Knesset elections within months of independence, during the War of Independence itself.[3]

Immigration was another practical dimension of the movement. Under British restrictions, the Ha'apalah clandestine immigration campaign sought to bring Jews to the country despite Mandatory policy. In the postwar period, this effort formed part of a broader independence campaign that combined immigration, political and armed struggle against British rule, and international diplomacy.[10]

The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, was the first major international endorsement of the Zionist project. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” pledging that Britain would use its best endeavours to facilitate it.[11] The declaration also stated that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status of Jews in other countries.[11]

The declaration's meaning was contested from the outset. Zionist leaders welcomed it, while Arab leaders rejected it. The phrase “national home” was deliberately ambiguous, leaving open whether it implied eventual statehood and how its territorial scope should be understood.[12] Its formulations were incorporated into the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and interpreted differently by Zionists, British administrations, and Arabs in Palestine.[8]

During the first decade and a half of the British Mandate, Zionist policy concentrated on immigration, land purchase, settlement, and institution-building while deferring final political aims.[8] The situation shifted in the 1930s. Immigration after Hitler's rise to power more than doubled the Yishuv's population between 1933 and 1936. The Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and disputes over immigration brought Palestine's final status to the fore. In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed partition into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem and a corridor to Jaffa under British control.[9]

The Holocaust devastated European Jewry and transformed the political case for Jewish statehood. The postwar campaign was driven in significant part by the perceived need for a safe haven for a people decimated by genocide. It combined political and armed struggle against British Mandatory rule with international diplomatic campaigning.[10]

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states and a separate international regime for Jerusalem.[13] The vote was 33 in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions; the United States and Soviet Union both voted in favor.[9] Zionist leaders and the Jewish community accepted the plan, while Arab leaders rejected it, arguing that Palestine was wholly Arab and questioning the UN's authority to divide the territory.[14] David Ben-Gurion responded to the vote: “I could not dance. I knew we faced war, and that in it we will lose the best of our youth.”[14]

Avineri identifies moral and strategic arguments behind Zionist acceptance of partition. The moral argument held that Jewish self-determination should not deny Arabs the same right. The strategic argument was that international backing for a Jewish state required accepting a limited territorial claim. A saying attributed to Chaim Weizmann captured the tension: “the conflict in Palestine is not between right and wrong, it is between right and right.”[9]

Israel's Declaration of Independence was signed in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, and proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state called Israel.[2] Because May 15 fell on Shabbat, the National Council issued the declaration on Friday, May 14, shortly before the British Mandate expired.[4]

The declaration grounds the legitimacy of Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel's role in the formation of the Jewish nation, generations of yearning to return, Zionist immigration and settlement, the Holocaust, and the United Nations partition resolution of November 29, 1947. It also invokes the 1897 Zionist Congress and Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration, and the League of Nations Mandate.[2]

The declaration states that Israel would be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles and that the country would be developed for the benefit of all its inhabitants. It pledges complete social and political equality for all citizens without distinction of religion, race, or sex and guarantees freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture. It calls on Arab residents to participate in building the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and appropriate representation.[2] The declaration did not specify Israel's borders.[4]

Avineri identifies a tension at the declaration's core: it combines Jewish national self-determination, grounded in history and culture, with equal citizenship and communal rights regardless of religious or national identity. The relationship between Israel's identity as the Jewish people's nation-state and its commitment to equal citizenship has consequently remained a subject of political debate.[8]

The Law of Return, passed by the Knesset in 1950, gave legislative expression to one of the declaration's central commitments by guaranteeing Jews the right to immigrate to Israel and obtain citizenship.[5]

The Anti-Defamation League characterizes Zionism as a movement whose adherents hold substantially different positions on Israeli government policies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peace efforts, a two-state solution, and settlements. It distinguishes Zionism from support for any particular Israeli government and states that Zionism does not rule out support for Palestinian self-determination and statehood.[1]

The American Jewish Committee places modern Zionism within the category of ethnic nationalism, defined around shared heritage, language, and culture, and contrasts it with civic nationalism organized around institutions and liberal principles.[5] These categories provide one lens for understanding visions as different as Herzl's liberal republic, Ahad Ha-Am's cultural renaissance, and Jabotinsky's proposed protections for Arab individual and collective rights.[3]

For many American Jewish supporters of Zionism, support for a Jewish homeland did not imply an intention to emigrate. Some viewed a Jewish state primarily as a haven for European Jews and as a possible refuge if conditions for Jews in the United States deteriorated.[15]

A 2021 Globes opinion essay described the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People as a major statutory assertion of Israel's Jewish national character and its continuing legal connection with Jews in the diaspora. The essay noted that the law sparked debate over the nature of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and characterized post-Zionism as favoring a state of all its citizens without a special relationship to diaspora Jews.[4]

The transformation of Jewish longing into national expression found one of its most durable forms in music. The Hebrew poem “Tikvatenu” (“Our Hope”), written by Naphtali Herz Imber in 1878, later became the basis of “Hatikvah,” Israel's national anthem.[15] Written before the Zionist movement acquired a formal international structure, the poem expressed a hope for national return that resonated widely.

British authorities in Palestine temporarily banned public performances and radio broadcasts of the song in 1919 in response to Arab reaction to growing Jewish immigration. After Israel's establishment in 1948, “Hatikvah” served as its principal patriotic song and was formally designated the official national anthem in 2004.[15]

In Itamar Rabinovich's account, the 1948 War generated sharply contrasting national narratives. For Israel, it was the War of Independence and the culmination of the Jewish quest for statehood and return to Zion. For Palestinians and the Arab world, the same conflict became the nakba, or catastrophe, associated with displacement and the fragmentation of Palestinian society.[16]

The term nakba gained currency after Syrian intellectual Qustantin Zurayq used it in Ma'na al-Nakbah, which criticized Arab weakness, division, and corruption as factors in the war's outcome. Questions about how many Palestinians left, whether they fled or were expelled, and the roles of Palestinian leaders and Arab states became subjects of continuing historical dispute.[16]

Beginning in the 1980s, Tom Segev and Simha Flapan challenged parts of the established Israeli account, followed by Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim, who became known as the “new historians.” Their work drew on newly accessible Israeli, American, and European archives and was written amid the political debates following the 1982 Lebanon War and the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987. Critics including Shabtai Teveth and Efraim Karsh accused the new historians of misrepresenting evidence, weak archival practice, and politicizing history. Rabinovich presents these as continuing historiographical disputes rather than settled conclusions.[16]

Avineri identifies the Six-Day War of 1967 as a major turning point in the idea and politics of Israel. The war's territorial gains, including the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — reopened questions about partition that had appeared settled after 1948 and strengthened nationalist-religious politics.[3]

Avineri describes religious Zionism before 1967 as distinguishing practical efforts to create a refuge for the Jewish people from messianic expectations. Control of Jerusalem's Old City and sites throughout Judea and Samaria helped transform the National Religious Party into a leading political voice for the settlement movement and a messianic interpretation of Zionism.[3] The war thereby reopened foundational debates over Israel's borders, the relationship between Jewish nationalism and democracy, and the rights and aspirations of Palestinians living under Israeli control.

The phrase “the idea of Israel” points beyond any single political program to an enduring argument about Jewish national life. Avineri frames a central tension as the disagreement between those seeking a state “like all other nations” and those expecting Israel to be culturally, morally, or politically distinct. The phrase “like all other nations” appears in Israel's Declaration of Independence, even as the declaration articulates commitments extending beyond sovereignty alone.[3]

Political Zionism sought Jewish normalization through statehood; the Bund pursued Jewish cultural and linguistic rights within a transformed socialist order; and Rathenau advocated assimilation into German society. Avineri argues that the latter alternatives depended on fundamental changes in the societies where Jews lived, while Herzl's proposed path was anchored outside Europe. Of these competing programs, Zionism ultimately achieved its political goal.[3]

The ADL describes contemporary Zionism as a diverse movement whose adherents disagree on many of Israel's major political questions.[1] What unites them is the conviction that the Jewish people possess a right to self-determination in the Land of Israel. They continue to differ over the state's borders, internal character, relationship with diaspora Jews, and the terms on which peace and Palestinian self-determination should be pursued.[1][3]

The idea of Israel encompasses contested terrain in modern political and historical scholarship. The Balfour Declaration's language was deliberately ambiguous and was interpreted differently by Zionists, British administrations, and Arab leaders in Palestine.[12][8] Whether the term “national home” implied eventual statehood remained disputed throughout the Mandate period.

Acceptance of the 1947 partition plan by the Zionist movement and its rejection by Arab leaders preceded competing narratives of the War of Independence. Within the Zionist movement, partition was itself contentious: supporters advanced moral and strategic arguments for compromise, while others resisted limitations on Jewish territorial claims.[8][14] Later debates associated with Israel's “new historians” raised further contested questions about the conduct and consequences of the war.[16]

The relationship between Israel's identity as the Jewish people's nation-state and its democratic commitments to all citizens, including Arab citizens, remains a subject of public debate. The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law crystallized this disagreement by prompting renewed arguments over the nature of Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state.[4] These disputes reflect competing interpretations of the founding idea rather than questions with simple or universally accepted answers.