Zionism is not an ancient idea, it is actually a product of the dual influence of the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism in modern Europe.
Text/Duan Yuhong
The "Palestinian-Israeli (Ba-A) conflict" in the Middle East began long before the birth of modern Israel and has lasted for a century to this day, becoming an intractable dead knot. Tracing back to the root causes of the conflict, it was nothing more than the Jews who wanted to rebuild their country and forged a grudge against the Arabs who lived there.
Rebuilding a nation after a thousand years of national subjugation is also a rare miracle in the history of human politics. Understanding the birth of the modern Israeli state cannot circumvent one concept— "Zionism." Located in Jerusalem, Mount Zion is the holy mountain of Judaism, which is translated as Mount Gao in old Chinese, and the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament written in Hebrew) calls it the "City of David" . King David was the second king of the kingdom of Israel in the 10th century B.C., a man who has always been known as a sage and is highly praised in the Bible.
Zion later evolved into synonymous with "Jerusalem" and "land of Israel," Zionism, which means Zionism, which, as the name suggests, is that Jews want to return to their homeland to rebuild their own country. The Jewish community has been scattered around the world for more than 1,700 years after the fall of the Jewish people, but Zionism is not an ancient idea, it is actually the product of the dual influence of the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism in modern Europe.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > the "great diaspora" of Jews</h1>
In 63 BC, pompey, a general of the Roman Republic, led an army to occupy Jerusalem and set up a Jewish province, and Rome appointed a governor while temporarily retaining the Jewish king as a puppet. In 135 AD, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, the Great Uprising of the Jews was suppressed by the Roman army, who expelled the Jews from the region and renamed the province "Palestine", and the Jews began the history of "Great Diaspora".
The Jews after the fall of the Empire were granted citizenship rights within the Roman Empire, indistinguishable from other peoples living in the Empire. In 313 AD, The Roman Constantine the Great granted Christian dominance (in 380 AD it was designated as the state religion). The Christian Church considers Judaism a dangerous competitor and characterizes it as "a blasphemous bunch, a vicious one." In the Christian view, the Jews were traitors who betrayed Jesus, and the Jews began to become discriminated against and persecuted, a situation that continued until the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe.
Between 1870 and 1880, in Jerusalem, Jews prayed before the Western Wall.
The vast majority of diaspora Jews were widespread in Europe, and only a very small number remained in North Africa and Asia. In order to escape persecution, European Jews continued to migrate to areas where Christianity was weak. After thousands of years of evolution, European Jews gradually formed two branches and became the two main ethnic groups of modern Jews.
The Christianization of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal) was late. At the beginning of the 8th century, the Arab Empire conquered most of the peninsula, and Islamic forces infiltrated here, confronting the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula for seven centuries. The Islamic regime here was more tolerant of Jews, and while the two major religions were fighting on the peninsula, Christian forces did not have the upper hand, and most of the Jews in Europe lived in the Iberian Peninsula at that time, creating a golden age.
In the 15th century, the Christian states on the Iberian Peninsula gradually gained the upper hand, and two powerful Christian states emerged, the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon, and the queens and kings of the two countries married to form the predecessor of the Kingdom of Spain. They eliminated Granada, the last Islamic state on the peninsula, and carried out mass deportations of Muslims and Jews who did not want to convert to Christianity.
The Jewish people, who had emigrated from Spain, later spread to southern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and became known as the "Sephardic Jews."
Britain expelled Jews earlier than Spain in the late 13th century and France in the early 14th century. Relatively speaking, Central and Eastern Europe, where the mono-nation state developed late and the process of centralization was slower, created a more friendly living space for the Jews. The Jews who had fled to the Rhineland region of Germany in the early years used this as a stronghold and continued to migrate toward Poland, Ukraine, and Russia from the 10th to the 17th century, and the Jews who originated in Germany were known as the "Ashkenazi Jews", and the Judaized German language written in hebrew, Yiddish.
As the Sefadi Jews declined after their mass expulsion, the Population of Ashkenazi Jews continued to grow as a result of the relatively relaxed living conditions they acquired for a period of time. They made up only 3 percent of the world's Jews in the early 11th century, 90 percent of Jews in the 1930s, and are now the largest ethnic group of Jews in the world, at 80 percent. The Jews of Ashkenazi can be described as a shining star, and many masters and Nobel prize winners have been born. The world-famous Jews, such as Heine, Rothschild, Freud, Marx, Trotsky, Einstein... All belong to the Ashkenazi Jews.
Europeans have a deep tradition of anti-Semitism, often hostile to Jews, and there are discriminatory and segregation measures against Jews in various countries. Jews could only live in designated narrow areas, requiring permits to pass, paying road and bridge fees twice as much as Christians; Jews had to pay heads and wear Jewish identification signs; they had no resident treatment, they were not allowed to enter schools, they were not allowed to serve as civil servants and soldiers, and they were not allowed to own land to farm.
Therefore, the Jews could only engage in handicrafts, commerce, and finance. These professions required literacy and bookkeeping and management skills, which made Jewish society attach great importance to the education of children. This is the historical origin of the dominance of the Jews in the business and intellectual circles since modern times.
From the Middle Ages to the first half of the 20th century, European Jews were long victims of conspiracy theories such as "blood sacrifice slander"—Jews abducting Christian children and killing them and sacrificing them with their blood; "poisoning in wells"—poisoning Christians' wells that led to regular outbreaks of plague; "Jewish-Freemasonry" —Jews secretly alliing themselves with Freemasons to create disasters and crises in an attempt to control the world.
Whenever there is a natural or man-made disaster, these conspiracy theories will suddenly ferment, and the Jews will inevitably become the scapegoats for the public's anger, and will be expelled, looted, and even slaughtered.
It was not until the 19th century, with the help of the relaxed political environment and the rise of the industrial and commercial revolution, that the Jewish population swelled sharply and unprecedentedly. By the end of the 19th century, there were about 11.5 million Jews in the world, about 7 million living in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Russia), 2 million living in Central and Western Europe, 1.5 million settled in North America, and fewer than 1 million Jews in Asia and North Africa combined.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="53" > the rise of Zionism</h1>
Overall, the situation of Jews in Western Europe has been improving since the 17th century, with Jews re-entering countries such as England and France to settle down, and segregation being abolished everywhere. After the French Revolution, with the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Western Europe progressed faster, and by the middle of the 19th century, Jews were largely treated as residents.
A strange phenomenon arose: by the mid-to-late 19th century, Western European Jews had acquired civil rights that they had longed for for many years, but anti-Semitism among the peoples of various countries was popularized along with nationalism. The advance of democratic politics, the rise of the mass media, and the emergence of racial eugenic theories have increased unabated, but not as violently as in the Middle Ages, but in the form of various conspiracy theories and rumors, and of course, from time to time there will be small-scale anti-Semitic riots. Some ultra-nationalist parties and media are keen to manipulate anti-Semitic topics to benefit, and there is always a part of the public who is convinced.
At the same time, in Eastern Europe, where the level of social development was relatively backward, the situation of the Jews was deteriorating. Beginning in the 17th century, Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, with the connivance of the Tsarist government, often took pleasure in the mass murder of Jews. Several Tsars issued eviction orders, and as the territory of the Russian Empire expanded westward, the Tsar sought to compress the Jewish "ghettos" on the western border and on the newly conquered territories of Ukraine and Poland.
Two major events contributed to the emergence of Zionism and its support for a growing number of Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe.
The first was the "Russian-Ukrainian anti-Semitic riots." On March 1, 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and civil anti-Semitic groups rumored that it was a plot orchestrated by the Jews to destroy Russia. The only thing that had anything to do with the Jews in this incident was that the Assassins had a close companion who grew up in a Jewish family. The anti-Semitic unrest first occurred on Russia's southwestern border and then spread to Ukraine, sweeping through more than 160 towns and cities throughout the summer, burning large numbers of Jewish neighborhoods to ashes.
After the new Tsar Alexander III ascended to the throne, in order to "protect the major population from Jewish exploitation", the Provisional Law was promulgated to restrict the economic activity of Jews. He then introduced educational, social, and other bans on Jews, which led to widespread poverty in the Jewish community until the collapse of Tsarist Russia.
The second was the sensational "Dreyfus treason case" in Western Europe. In 1894, French intelligence obtained a secret document showing that someone in the French army had leaked French military secrets to Germany, and subsequently locked up Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, as a suspect. Despite the lack of evidence and the rough handling of the case, Dreyfus was sentenced to exile on Devil's Island amid the press and civil anti-Semitic clamor. Intelligence captured the intelligence secrets again two years later, revealing that the real spies were not Dreyfus at all. Secret Police Chief Picard decides to pursue it again, but Deputy Commissioner Henry quietly forges materials in an attempt to turn the Dreyfus case into an ironclad case.
A small number of progressive politicians and cultural figures continued to support Dreyfus, and the writer Zola was threatened by the anti-Semitic mob after his grievances and was once exiled. In June 1899, Dreyfus was remanded to France for retrial, where he was physically and mentally tortured, at the age of 39 but already bald and hunched over, like an old man. The new evidence was clearly in Dreyfus's favor, but he was sentenced to ten years in prison. It was not until the Liberal Party won the election in 1902 that the new president pardoned Dreyfus; in 1906 the Supreme Court annulled the previous ruling, rehabilitating Dreyfus and restoring his rank and reputation. The case was widely reported and discussed, tearing apart French politics, the judiciary and the press.
These two events deeply touched the Jews of Europe. Some have begun to reflect that no matter how loyal they are to the country in which they live, they still cannot escape the shadow of a deep anti-Semitic tradition, which is still the "homeland of freedom, equality and fraternity" in France.
The first to react was Leon Pinsk, a Jewish doctor living in Odessa, Ukraine. In 1882, he published Self-Liberation, reminding Jews that in some countries it appeared that they had acquired equal rights, but that such rights could be lost at any time, and Jews who had tasted freedom would not give it up. He suggested that Jews should live together in a land to realize their ideals, which was the fundamental way to solve the Jewish problem, and that this land should be Palestine, and That Pinsk had set off a "love for Zion" movement among the Jews of Eastern Europe.
In the anti-Semitic atmosphere of Tsarist Russia, hundreds of thousands of Jews began to migrate, a small number of them responded to Pinsk's call to move back to Palestine, and most of them migrated to Western Europe and North America.
Herzl, a Writer and Journalist of Jewish Origin from Hungary who had attended the Dreyfus trial in the Dreyfus case, was originally an assimilated Jew, which inspired his national consciousness. Herzl's 1896 book The Jewish State, unlike Pinsk's mere "love of Zion" and "move back to Zion," formally envisioned the re-establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine. Herzl was a landmark figure in turning Zionism into a global political practice.
As a chemist and politician, Khaim Weizmann gave a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and contributed to the preparation of the Hebrew University.
Western European Jews reacted lukewarmly to Herzl's vision, believing that there was no Jewish problem in Western Europe, and that raising the issue would easily provoke contradictions with the local population. But Herzl resonated among Eastern European Jews, inspiring nationalist ideas among large numbers of young Jews.
After Herzl's tireless propaganda and activities, and even his own money, finally on August 29, 1897, the "First Congress of Zionists" was held in Basel, Switzerland. The venue was hung with a flag (later the flag of Israel) on a white background, two blue bands on the top and bottom, and a large satellite in the middle. From left to center to right, from secularism to religiousism, 197 representatives of Jewish organizations from around the world attended the congress, the first international Jewish conference since the Great Diaspora.
The congress proclaimed the establishment of the Zionist Association, adopted a common programme, elected the flag and the national anthem, and elected Herzl as its first president. The conference ended with a cheer. From this time on, Herzl gradually became the organizational and spiritual leader of Zionism.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="54" > the birth of Israel</h1>
At the beginning of the 20th century, for most Jews, the rebuilding of the Jewish state was still out of reach, at best a beautiful dream. Opponents of Zionism even think that this is hysteria and fantasy. Herzl himself was serious, going from a mercurial literati to a political activist intoxicated with Zionism, tirelessly wandering among the princes, nobles, and celebrities and merchants of the Middle East and Europe, trying to persuade them to support his ideas.
Herzl encountered more difficulties than he had imagined. He visited the Ottoman Sultans, asked the British colonial minister Neville Chamberlain, and sought out the German Emperor Wilhelm II, and spent a lot of money on this, but his hopes were disappointed again and again. The emigration to Palestine also did not go well, when Palestine was under ottoman rule, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were often intercepted and repatriated by Ottoman officials, and the Ottomans issued orders prohibiting Jews from buying land. In 1901, Herzl established the "Jewish Colonial Trust" and established the Jewish National Fund to assist Jews in immigrating to Palestine, but the company sold only $1 million in shares for three years.
At congresses, Herzl was still warmly welcomed, but the anxiety and dissatisfaction of the delegates grew, because they did not see much success. Herzl himself once wanted to abandon the "migration to Palestine program" and proposed the "migration to the Sinai Peninsula" and "migration to Uganda" respectively, but both were resolutely resisted by the Russian Jewish delegation. They claimed not to agree with any deviation from the Basel Programme, and some even called Herzl a traitor, almost leading to the collapse of the Zionist organization.
Herzl called a reconciliation conference in 1904, stated that he would not abandon the Palestinian solution, and reunited the Zionist organization. Shortly after the meeting, he died of illness and ascended to the status of a national saint.
Herzl's achievements far outweighed his setbacks in terms of popularity. The number of delegates participating in the Zionist Congress has increased year by year, and only the second Zionist Congress has tripled the number of 913 branches in the world, with more than 400 delegates attending the conference, and has also attracted a large number of journalists from various countries to come to interview. The Jewish trust he had established in Herzl later evolved into "Britain-Palestine" and in 1950 became the National Bank of Israel. With the National Foundation, it was later possible to establish agricultural cooperatives (kibbutz).
While human efforts are important, it is the opportunities presented by the course of history that are decisive. Of course, without the ideological and organizational foundation laid by Herzl, the Zionist State could not seize the opportunity.
During the First World War, the european countries that participated in the war gave priority to war, and any activity that deviated from the objectives of the war was prohibited, and Zionism almost came to a standstill.
After World War I, Zionism ushered in an opportunity. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Hayim Weizmann (later the first President of Israel), then president of the Zionist Society, was known as the "father of bacterial fermentation technology" and was an influential British chemist who contributed to the Allied victory in the war. Under Weizmann's influence, British Foreign Secretary Belfort issued a declaration in favor of the return of Jews to Palestine to establish a nation-state. It happened that in 1920, Britain was entrusted with the rule of Palestine by the League of Nations, which triggered a climax of Jewish emigration to Palestine.
After the collapse of the Ottomans, nationalism in the Arab region also flourished, and with the increase of Jewish immigration, the contradictions between Arabs and Jews began to intensify, and bloodshed often broke out on both sides. Although the British authorities only wanted stability in the area, did not want to offend either side, and issued immigration bans on several occasions to prevent European Jews from moving in, the end result was neither able to prevent violent conflict nor flattery on both sides.
By the time of 1922, the number of Jews living in Palestine had risen to 100,000, and by the late 1920s and early 1930s, due to the outbreak of the economic crisis, the United States revised the immigration bill to tighten the immigration policy of European Jews, and the rise of the Nazis in Germany led to a triple factor that led to a surge of Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Jews who immigrated at this stage, mainly from Poland and Germany, were resettled with financial help from the Anglo-American Jewish community.
The outbreak of World War II only put a pause in the conflict between the Jewish and Albanian communities for several years. In order to stabilize the anti-immigrant operation, the British authorities captured migrant ships at sea that had not yet docked, and detained Jews from Europe in internment camps. The policies of the British authorities infuriated the Jewish community, and during the pre-war conflict, the paramilitary organizations established by Jewish immigrants, "Haganah", "Ilgun", and "Lehi", targeted the British authorities, blew up police stations and radar stations, and attacked internment camps.
On Black Saturday, June 29, 1946, the conflict between the British authorities and the Jewish armed forces reached a fever pitch. British forces raided Jewish agencies and the Office of the Palestinian Jewish National Council in Jerusalem, arresting their leaders; raiding dozens of Jewish communes, rounding up thousands of people and sending them to internment camps. At the same time, the Anglo-American Jewish community waged political and public opinion battles in London and Washington to exert pressure on the government.
Britain announced a "Plan for the Partition of Palestine" in July 1946, but both Jews and Arabs refused to accept it. Desperate to get out of the quagmire, Britain, devastated by the conflict, announced that it would hand over its plans to the United Nations for arbitration. The United Nations sent a committee to the area to study the situation and put forward the "Plan for the Establishment of the Argonautical State". The Jews agreed to the plan, but the Arabs refused. The soviet union and the United States, the leaders of both camps, supported the plan and passed it on by a vote of the United Nations General Assembly.
Seeing the opportunity to withdraw, Britain immediately stated that it would end its mandate of Palestine at 00:00 on 15 May 1948 and withdraw its troops from there. On May 14, Gurion, president of the Zionist Society, declared: "The Jewish state was formally established under the name of the State of Israel. ”