Zionism

Zionism is a racial supremacist and ethnonationlist ideology which calls for the creation of a Jewish ethnostate and the eradication and cleansing of its native population.

The modern Zionist movement emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It began as an unpopular reactionary Jewish supremacist movement to colonize and establish nationhood in Palestine. Bourgeois financiers supported the project to colonize Palestine, and thereby contradicted the semitic movement in Europe. For example, in 1903, Theodore Herzl, the first modern Zionist, went against the Jewish worker’s struggle for rights and justice and convinced the Russian Minister of Interior, who instituted pogroms against Jewish workers, to support the Jewish colonization of Palestine. In 1917, Britain approved the Balfour Declaration, which formally enabled Zionists to colonize Palestine and establish a “national home”.

There were once a large number of other proposals for the location for a Jewish homeland. Most of these various ideas were suggested by Jewish Zionists, though some were also promoted by viciously antisemitic individuals. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime promoted one such plan and in 1940 seriously proposed sending all the European Jews to Madagascar, almost entirely against their will. Most of proposals by Jewish Zionists for lands to be colonized included the land of Palestine due to its significance in Jewish religion and European imperialist support. Today, Zionism is the leading ideology of the State of Israel and represents a major justification for its ongoing genocide and settler-colonialism in Palestinian lands.

See also

• Manifest Destiny
• Lebensraum