Palestine is a small region of land that has played a prominent role in the ancient and modern history of the Middle East. The history of Palestine has been marked by frequent political conflict and violent land seizures because of its importance to several major world The long-term effects of the Balfour Declaration, and the British The Oslo Accords were a landmark moment in the pursuit of peace in the Middle East.
Actually a set of two separate agreements signed by the government of Israel and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO —the militant organization established in to On October 6, , hoping to win back territory lost to Israel during the third Arab-Israeli war, in , Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Taking the Israeli Defense Forces by Over time, the PLO has embraced a broader role, claiming to Syria is home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with a rich artistic and cultural heritage.
From its ancient roots to its recent political instability and the Syrian Civil War, the country has a complex and, at times, tumultuous history. Ancient Syria Following years of diplomatic friction and skirmishes between Israel and its neighbors, Israel Defense Forces launched preemptive air strikes that Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Theodor Herzl Modern Zionism was officially established as a political organization by Theodor Herzl in Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland.
How the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Began. But rising ethnic nationalism and growing economic pressures compromised this trend. Debates raged throughout the late ss about whether Jews could be fully integrated. This came to be called the Jewish Question.
And indeed the more Jews were integrated, the more grew the perception that they were a potential fifth column, that they would weaken the state. Most Jews in Central and Western Europe continued at that time to believe that integration was possible and the best solution to rising anti-Semitism. But some secular Jews, initially committed to the principles of liberalism and integrated, came to feel that Jews could not be accepted as members of a host nation, but instead should cultivate their own identity as a nation of their own.
Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jewish journalist from Budapest, who, watching rising anti-Semitism culminating in with the accusation of Alfred Dreyfus in France of treason , concluded that anti-Semitism would not end and that the solution was Jewish statehood. This is the political mix that spawned Zionism: disenchantment with liberalism in Western Europe, combined with political upheaval and violence in Eastern Europe, a setting more generally conducive to thinking about identity in ethno-nationalist terms.
Though Zionism has a particular logic that emerged from the events surrounding it, not all Jews subscribed to that logic and in fact a majority of Jews initially did not. Their opposition stemmed from a number of directions.
Jewish liberals, committed to the idea of Jewish integration, thought that Zionism, by conceding to the permanence of anti-Semitism, would in turn lead to more anti-Semitism.
They believed that taking action to return to Palestine en masse was nothing short of heresy. This religious opposition would change as religious streams of Zionism emerged, but it is important to recall that Orthodoxy was initially deeply opposed to Zionism. Another Jewish group, Autonomists, believed in the national and cultural specificity of Jews, but believed that the solution to Jewish problems would be found within the places they lived, by demanding cultural autonomy.
Many of them promoted Yiddish not Hebrew as the Jewish national language. Meanwhile, some Jews thought that the division by nationality was highly inappropriate and joined socialist movements not organized in national terms. To understand how this initially small movement evolved into a major political force, we need to look at it in stages, always understanding the tension between the national purpose Zionism would serve in Europe and the settlement project itself.
The earliest Zionist settlers, known as the first Aliyah wave of immigration , emerge in Eastern Europe following the events of But they were very disorganized.
Still, though, they believed that the actual target population was those facing pogroms in Eastern Europe, most of them assumed they would not personally move. If Central European Jews had provided the organizational impetus, and Eastern European Jews had provided the willing immigrants, the early Zionist settlements, places like Rehovot, Rishon LeZion, and Zikhron Yaakov, succeeded after initial failures only because of the investment of wealthy Western European Jews—most famously Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the noted banking family, who pumped capital into struggling wheat and grape plantations, which employed mainly native Arab labor.
With Central and Western European Jews providing much of the organizational backbone of the still tiny Jewish settlement movement, the ongoing tensions and violence in the Russian Empire—most notably the Kishinev Pogrom in —drove further waves of Jews to Palestine.
In the 10 years before World War I, this group, known as the second wave of Zionist immigration Second Aliyah arrived to find the plantation colonies of their predecessors. However, strongly influenced by the socialist trends and emphasis on labor of early 20th century Russia, they expressed concern at the tendency of Jewish colonists so they called themselves at the time to be uninvolved with physical labor, and to hire native Arab labor at a low cost.
They were convinced that this path was bad for Jews who were not properly connected to the soil and to Palestine in general because plantation owners would be seen as exploitative. They pushed for the separation of Jewish and Arab agricultural economies, and founded all-Jewish farming cooperatives called Kibbutzim.
There are two different ways to look at this development, both of which have truth in them. On the one hand, the members of the Second Aliyah who, because of their socialist focus would be called Labor Zionists, were convinced that their path was enlightened, non-exploitative, and sensitive to the needs of local Palestinian Arab peasants, who they assumed were at a lower stage of development. They believed that their new economic structure would work better for Jews, for Palestinian Arabs, and for the land as a whole.
On the other hand, the model of a separate economy eliminated Palestinian Arabs from the picture. With Arabs no longer essential as workers, the Zionist movement began to imagine a more fully Jewish project, which would build an all-Jewish model society from scratch. This thinking, though rooted in progressive values, introduced new challenges and conflicts.
The Second and Third Aliyot, Zionists from the Russian empire, were strongly influenced by the idea that national identity was rooted in Hebrew. They were people who, a generation before, had been promoting Hebrew and Yiddish literature as tools of modernization within the Russian empire; and they brought this focus on culture to Zionism.
They were conducted wholly in German. A group of Eastern European Zionists, however, were already working in Palestine to promote Hebrew as the national language. Why Hebrew?
Hebrew was the language of the Hebrew bible and of the period of Jewish autonomy in the ancient Holy Land. It was mainly spoken and written in religious contexts but had become a language of modern literature.
A colonial movement supporting the establishment by any means necessary of a national state for Jews in historic Palestine. Zionism is a nationalist, political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state, and now supports the continued existence of Israel as such a state. The Zionist movement started in the late 19th century, amidst growing European anti-Semitism.
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