Josemaría Moreno
The origins of Zionism are difficult to pinpoint. A religious Jew might trace them back to the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish exile in the 6th century BCE. But as a modern political movement, Zionism emerged alongside the rise of European nation-states. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, some of these states began granting Jews equal civil rights without requiring conversion. In this sense, historical Zionism mirrored the formation of modern European nations—a shift toward a new civil and secular identity, no longer grounded solely in tribal, religious, or local ties.
But it was only a mirror image, not an exact replica. The Jewish experience was unique: no other ancient people survived for centuries without a homeland—scattered across continents—yet still maintained a shared identity and cultural continuity.
In 19th-century Central Europe, many Jews sought to assimilate into the nations they lived in. But in Eastern Europe—where Jewish communities were larger and emancipation remained out of reach—many dreamed instead of freedom in their ancestral homeland. This age-old aspiration, combined with the spirit of European Romanticism and growing anxiety over the spread of communism, led to the birth of a distinct Jewish nationalism. It was shaped by the Enlightenment ideals of Jewish intellectuals across Europe and a spiritual and territorial reconnection to Eretz Yisrael, the ancient land later renamed Syria Palestina by Emperor Hadrian in the 1st century CE.
Early Zionism emphasized hard work, connection to the land, collective cooperation, and justice—values embodied by the kibbutzim, those utopian agricultural communities admired by thinkers like Kafka and Einstein.
From this point forward, the history of Zionism becomes inseparable from Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a land then inhabited by fewer than a million Arabs and several thousand Jews—and from the escalating antisemitism spreading across Europe. The Holocaust marked the most horrific chapter: a genocide whose scale and cruelty defied comprehension. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. War followed shortly after, and Palestinians lost over 70% of the land they had inhabited under British rule. Nearly one million were expelled and denied the right of return. More than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in what came to be known as the Nakba (“catastrophe”)—an event that many historians now describe as ethnic cleansing.
Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians—and, more broadly, between Israel and the Arab world—has remained unresolved. Historians like Ilan Pappé argue that the only just and lasting solution is the creation of a single democratic state “from the river to the sea,” where Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, and all residents live with equal rights. This would require not only a unified political framework but also a program of reparations for Palestinians displaced during and after the Nakba and whose lands remain under illegal occupation. The two-state solution, in Pappé’s view, would only formalize mutual destruction.
What began as a nationalist movement seeking justice for a stateless people has, over time, been transformed into an ideological, colonial, and militarized force—backed by U.S. power—that now actively sustains a system of dispossession, occupation, and what many international observers call apartheid or even genocide. The next installment of this column will explore that transformation in greater depth.
