When Zionism had its first beginnings, in the early 19th century, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in all of the land, mostly concentrated in the countryside of the West Bank and Galilee, and mostly lacking in national sentiment. Palestine was, in Western eyes, a country without a nation,  as Lord Shaftesbury wrote. Early proto-Zionists did not trouble themselves at all about the existing inhabitants. Many were heavy influenced by utopianism. In the best 19th century tradition, they were creating a Jewish utopia, where an ancient people would be revived. They envisioned a land without strife, where all national and economic problems would be solved by good will, enlightened and progressive policies and technological know-how. Herzl's Altneuland was in in fact just such a utopia. In reality, Jewish population grew, but Arab population grew more rapidly. By 1914, there were over 500,000 Arabs in Palestine, but only about 80,000 to 100,000 Jews.

At the same time,  Zionist pronouncements and outlook were often frankly colonialist, especially when addressing leaders of foreign powers. The plantations sponsored by Baron Rothschild were modeled on plantation settlement in Algeria and other colonies. Colonialism was fashionable and "progressive," and early Zionist leaders saw nothing wrong in assimilating this idea to Zionism along with other modern ideas such as socialism, utopianism and nationalism.

Later  Zionists were heavily influenced by socialism and embarrassed at the colonialist aspects of the Zionist project. They were also aware, of course, that Palestine was already occupied by Arabs. Many however, including the young David Ben-Gurion, who headed the Executive committee of the Zionist Yishuv (Jewish community) in Palestine and was later the first Prime Minister of Israel, initially thought that the Arabs could only benefit from Jewish immigration and would welcome it. Others, such as Eliezer ben Yehuda, frankly envisioned removal of the Arabs from Palestine.

One of the earliest warnings about the Arab problem came from the Zionist writer Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg), who wrote in his 1891 essay "Truth from Eretz Israel" that in Palestine "it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled", and moreover:

From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake... The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand, since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their future... However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place.

Ahad Ha'am, believed that the Jews would need to first build a strong Jewish culture abroad, and that this culture and awareness would then make the dream of a Jewish homeland possible. The Jewish state, he felt should be  a cultural center for Jews of the Diaspora. Nevertheless he was an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism and wrote an article eulogizing Leon Pinsker in glowing terms.

Arab opposition to Zionism grew after 1900. The birth of Arab nationalism and Arab political aspirations in the Ottoman empire coincided with the arrival of fairly sizeable number of Zionists with the announced program of settling the land and turning it into a Jewish national home. In his book, Reveil de la Nation Arab in 1905, Najib Azouri stated that the Jews want to establish a state stretching from Mt Hermon to the Arabian Desert and the Suez Canal. Azoury wrote:

Two important phenomena of the same nature but opposed, are emerging... They are the awakening of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins.

(Mandel, Neville, The Arabs and Palestine, UCLA, 1976)

Rashid Khalidi (Palestinian Identity, Columbia, 1997) notes that beginning about 1908 Palestinian newspapers offer extensive evidence of anti-Zionist agitation. Actual conflicts flared up because the Zionists purchased large tracts from landowners and subsequently evicted the tenant farmers. The former tenants, though they had received some compensation, continued to insist that the land was theirs under time honored traditions and tried to take it back by force. A notable case was Al-Fula, where Zionists had purchased a large tract of land from the Sursuq family of Beirut. Local officials took the side of the Arab peasants against the Zionists and against the Ottoman government, which upheld the legality of the sale. 150 Palestinian notables cabled the Ottoman government to protest land sales to Jews in March 1911. Azmi Bey, Turkish governor of Jerusalem responded:

We are not xenophobes; we welcome all strangers. We are not anti-Semites; we value the economic superiority of the Jews. But no nation, no government, could open its arms to groups... aiming to take Palestine from us.

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 62)

Likewise, the "conquest of labor" movement displaced some Arab watchmen  and led to violence. While the actual number of persons displaced or dispossessed may have been small, and may have been offset by real economic benefits and increased employment provided by Zionist investment, the feeling grew among the Arabs that the Zionists had arrived to dispossess them. A Nazareth group complained that the Zionists were "a cause of great political and economic injury... The Zionists nourish the intention of expropriating our properties. For us these intentions are a question of life and death." (Morris, loc cit.)  As the conflict intensified, the Zionists formed a guard association, Hashomer, to guard the settlements in place of Arab guards. The attempts to retake land and disputes with Jewish guards led to increased violence beginning in the second half of 1911. ry zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism *

Following World War I, Palestine came under British rule. Even before they had conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Turkish Empire, owing to the efforts of Zionists, the British government declared its intentions, in the Balfour declaration, of sponsoring a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine. Britain was given a League of Nations Mandate to develop Palestine as a Jewish National home. The Arabs of Palestine were appalled at the prospect of living in a country dominated by a Jewish majority and feared that they would be dispossessed. Anti-Jewish rioting and violence broke out in 1920 and 1921.  By this time, Zionist leaders could no longer ignore the conflict with the Arabs. By 1919, representatives of the Jaffa Muslim-Christian council were saying

"We will push the Zionists into the sea or they will push us into the desert"

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 91)

Arab opposition to Zionism was not based only on economic and social issues. It was colored by the traditional Muslim vision of the Jews as second class citizens. By the 1920s, it was also motivated by a strong admixture of Western anti-Semitism.  In 1920, Musa Kazim El Husseini, deposed as Mayor of Jerusalem because of his part in riots earlier that year, told Winston Churchill:

The Jews have been amongst the most active advocates of destruction in many lands... It is well known that the disintegration of Russia was wholly or in great part brought about by the Jews, and a large proportion of the defeat of Germany and Austria must also be put at their door.

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 99)

It is not clear how Churchill received this amazing and unwitting testimonial to the aid proffered to his country's war effort by the Jews, or what Husseini thought to accomplish by it. Aref Dajani had earlier voiced similar sentiments to the King- Crane Commission

It is impossible for us to make an understanding with them or or even to live with them... Their history and all their past proves that it is impossible to live with them. In all the countries where they are at present they are not wanted... because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody...

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 91)

While Palestinian Arabs viewed themselves as a small group of helpless victims of powerful British and Jewish "interests," the Zionists saw the opposite side of the coin. The militant Zionist leader,   Vladimir Jabotinsky, asked in 1918: The matter is not ... an issue between the Jewish people and the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, but between the Jewish people and the Arab people. The latter, numbering 25 million, has [territory equivalent to] half of Europe, while the Jewish people, numbering ten million and wandering the earth, hasn't got a stone...Will the Arab people stand opposed? Will it resist? [Will it insist] that...they...shall have it [all] for ever and ever, while he who has nothing shall forever have nothing?  (Caplan, Neil, Palestine Jewry and the Palestine Question, 1917-1925, Frank Cass, 1978)

Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Soon after World War I, Zionist leaders clearly recognized the problem. David Ben Gurion told members of the Va'ad Yishuv (the temporary governing body of the Jewish community in Palestine) in June 1919:

But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf; and nothing can bridge it.... I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews...We. as a nation,. want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.

(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Knopf 1999 Page 91)

...look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile.

Jabotinsky, was initially against expulsion of the Arabs, which he was "prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never [do]". Rather in The Iron Wall, he argued that  the Jewish presence should be imposed by forming a strong defense that would demonstrate to the Arabs that the Jews could not be forced out of Palestine. However, while The Iron Wall expressed a comprehensive philosophy, its practical background and intent were much more limited. Jabotinsky wanted the British authorities to allow the Jews to form a separate defensive force under British supervision, to combat attacks such as the riots that had occurred in 1920 and 1921. The British refused, and the Zionist organization resigned themselves to the British decision, but Jabotinsky wanted to continue with the formation of such a force. Though the Haganah defensive underground was founded in 1920 by Jabotinsky, it didn't become a major project of the Zionist movement until after the riots of 1929. These riots, and not any intrinsic aspect of Zionist ideology,  were the real trigger for the birth of militant Zionism as a political force, as well as the progressively more important role played by self-defense and military prowess in Zionist thought, action and society.

The conflict was intensified and complicated by the 1948 war. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war, and Israel did not allow them to return. Many Palestinian refugees were settled in camps under miserable conditions, where they have remained for several generations. The Israeli point of view had in mind the recent convulsions of World War II, and the exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan were created. Most Israelis believed the Palestinians became refugees through their own fault. Their exile was the result of the war which the Palestinians  themselves had started by rejection of the UN partition plan, just as, for example, the Germans of Sudetensland, who helped instigate the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, were eventually banished as the result of their own mischief. For the Arabs of Palestine, their Nakba, or catastrophe,  vindicated their fears that the Zionists were bent on dispossessing them. 

Zionism and the Conflict With Britain

The British government increasingly  understood that its promises to the Zionists and Mandate obligations were very unpopular in the Arab world. They split off a large part of the Palestine Mandate territory to form Transjordan and issued the Passfield White Paper  that proposed  limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Passfield White Paper was quietly withdrawn under pressure from Zionists, from British public opinion and from the League of Nations. However, the British eventually did impose a limit on immigration. These policies turned the once-friendly British into antagonists of the Zionist movement. Labor Zionists and the Zionist Executive were in favor of moderate policies that would try to work around the British opposition to Zionism. A faction led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky believed in confronting the British and the Arabs, and if necessary, using force. In 1933, Jabotinsky split from the main Zionist movement and formed the Revisionist movement. In 1936, an Arab Revolt (The Great Uprising) broke out in Palestine, triggered by rising Jewish immigration and systematic agitation by extremists.  In 1937, the British proposed tentatively to partition Palestine in the Peel report. This caused additional divisions in the Zionist movement. Some believed in a bi-national Jewish Arab state and objected to the idea, contained in the Peel recommendations, of transferring Arabs "voluntarily" out of the territory to be allotted to the Jewish state. The revisionists and religious Zionists, on the other hand, objected to giving up any part of the territory of Palestine. Subsequently the British issued the  White Paper of 1939, severely limiting Jewish immigration. The Arab revolt and the reaction to it crystallized the Zionist ethos of self-defense and emphasis on military service.  The Revisionists formed the Irgun underground army, which attacked  British soldiers and administrators and perpetrated terror attacks against Arabs in retaliation for Arab attacks on Jews. Atrocities committed by the Arabs, as well as counter-terror by Jewish groups, inculcated in both Jews and Arabs the idea that any means at all may be used against the enemy, even though the Hagannah officially maintained a military ethic of "purity of arms" - forbidding needless violence. The Arab revolt and the Peel report also legitimized, to some extent, the idea of "transfer," and solidified and entrenched the idea that conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine was inevitable.

The Zionists, attempting to rescue Jews from the Nazis, organized illegal immigration. The Revisionist Zionist movement began to organize immigration, both legal (with certificates) and illegal, in 1937, from Austria, and later from the free city of Danzig. At least 20,000 Jews were saved in this way. The Jewish agency opposed illegal immigration until the promulgation of the British White Paper of 1939, which stopped Jewish immigration. Thereafter, they founded and supported the Mossad l'aliya Bet ("B immigration institution") to bring immigrants from abroad. This operated  between 1939 and 1942, when a tightened British blockade and stricter controls in occupied Europe made it impractical, and again between 1945 and 1948.   Rickety boats full of refugees tried to reach Palestine. Additionally, there were private initiatives, an initiative by the Nazis to deport Jews and an initiative by the US to save European Jews.  Many of the ships sank or were caught by the British or the Nazis and turned back,  or shipped to Mauritius or other destinations for internment. The Patria (also called "Patra") contained immigrants offloaded from three other ships, for transshipment to the island of Mauritius. To prevent transshipment, the Haganah placed a small explosive charge on the ship on November 25, 1940. They thought the charge would damage the engines.  Instead,  the ship sank, and over 250  lives were lost.  A few weeks later, the SS Bulgaria docked in Haifa with 350 Jewish refugees and was ordered to return to Bulgaria. The Bulgaria capsized in the Turkish straits, killing 280. The  Struma, a vessel that had left Constanta in Rumania with about 769 refugees, got to Istanbul on December 16, 1941. There, it was forced to undergo repairs of its engine and leaking hull. The Turks would not grant the refugees sanctuary. The British would not approve transshipment to Mauritius or entry to Palestine. On February 24, 1942, the Turks ordered the Struma out of the harbor. It sank with the loss of 428 men, 269 women and 70 children. Apparently, it had been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, either because it was mistaken for a Nazi ship, or more likely, because the Soviets had agreed to collaborate with the British in barring Jewish immigration.  Illegal immigration continued until late in the war, apparently without the participation of the  Mossad l'aliya Bet. The illegal immigrant Mefukure, organized with the help of the United States government, was sunk by a Soviet submarine in 1944.   Despite the many setbacks, tens of thousands of Jews were saved by the illegal immigration.

To circumvent British regulations against creating new settlements, the Zionists initiated the "stockade and tower" ("homa umigdal") program, that allowed overnight creation of a new "settlement," consisting of a wall and watch tower. Under the law, the British could not destroy such an 'established' settlement.

Reports of Nazi atrocities became increasingly frequent and vivid. Despite the desperate need to find a haven for refugees, the doors of Palestine remained shut to Jewish immigration. The Zionist leadership met in the Biltmore Hotel in New York City in 1942 and declared that it supported the establishment of Palestine as a "Jewish Commonwealth."  This was not simply a return to the Balfour declaration repudiated by the British White Paper, but rather a restatement of Zionist aims that went beyond the Balfour declaration, and a determination that the British were in principle, an enemy to be fought, rather than an ally. This was a defeat for the left-wing party of the Labor Zionists, Mapam, who wanted a bi-national Zionist state, and for Chaim Weizmann, who opposed confrontation with the British and favored partition. The Revisionists rejoined the Zionist movement, but were still called "dissidents" and did not merge their underground armies, the Irgun and the Lehi (also called the "Stern Gang") into the Hagannah defense organization of the mainstream Zionists. 

On November 6, 1944, members of the  Lehi underground  Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri  assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo. Moyne, a known anti-Zionist, was  in charge of carrying out the terms of the 1939 White Paper. The assassination turned Winston Churchill against the Zionists.  The Jewish Agency and Zionist Executive believed that British and world reaction to the assassination of Lord Moyne could jeopardize cooperation after the war, that had been hinted at by the British, and might endanger the Jewish Yishuv if they came to be perceived as enemies of Britain and the allies. Therefore they embarked on a campaign against the Lehi and Irgun, known in Hebrew as the "Sezon" ("Season"). Members of the underground were to be ostracized. Leaders were caught by the Hagannah, interrogated and sometimes tortured,  and about a thousand persons were turned over to the British.

Following World War II, Britain continued to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionist factions united and conducted an underground war against the British, as well as applying pressure on the British government through the United States. In June of 1947, the British rammed the Jewish illegal immigrant ship Exodus (formerly "President Warfield") on the high seas. They towed it to Haifa where it was the subject of extensive publicity, generating public sympathy for the Zionist cause. The passengers were eventually disembarked in Hamburg. The incident set world and particularly US opinion against the British, and caused the British to intern illegal immigrants thereafter in Cyprus, rather than attempting to return them to Europe. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs did not accept the partition plan, and a war broke out. The state of Israel was established on May 15, 1948.

Click this link for information about President Harry S. Truman and US Support for Creation of Israel

	Labor Zionism vs Revisionism - After independence, the Labor Zionist movement became, for many years, the leading political force in Israel. Mapai (Miflegeth Poalei Eretz Yisrael - the party of the workers of the land of Israel)  party led by David Ben-Gurion and his successors held power continuously until 1977. The Zionist movement had split when Jabotinsky led the revisionists out of the Zionist organization in the 1930s. The Zionist executive was led by Labor Zionism under David Ben-Gurion. Revisionists and Labor Zionists had separate underground armies.  Revisionists and Labor Zionists cooperated against British after World War II. However, the "Sezon" in 1944-45,  the massacre perpetrated at Deir Yassin by the Revisionists in April 1948, and the subsequent sinking of the "Altalena" Irgun arms ship by the Israeli government,  as well as numerous smaller incidents, helped to deepen the split between mainstream Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism. Begin, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists, was distrusted by Ben-Gurion and viewed a dangerous extremist. It was not until the 6-day war in 1967 in 1967 that revisionists were allowed to participate in a government coalition.
David Ben-Gurion

Anti-Zionism ry zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism * history zionism *

Anti-Zionism is often defined as "opposition to the existence of Israel," but that definition is a historical distortion and probably detracts from understanding the nature of anti-Zionism and its diverse ideological roots. It is true that anti-Zionists are necessarily opposed to the existence of a Jewish state, but it is not the essence of their ideology. Anti-Zionism existed long before there was a Jewish state and long before the Zionist movement formally adopted the goal of founding an independent Jewish state in 1942. Anti-Zionists were and are opposed to Zionism for a variety of reasons. Assimilationist Jews denied that there is a "Jewish people." Marxists admitted that there is a separate Jewish group, but believed that it is undesirable to perpetuate its existence (see Marxist anti-Semitism A href="http://www.zionism-israel.com/his/The_Jewish_Bund.htm">The Jewish Bund and Anti-Zionism ).

. Marx's views of Judaism are more or less indistinguishable from those of anti-Semites. In "A World Without Jews," Marx wrote,

The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed.