Founder Of Zionism Quotes

1897 Zionist Congress calls for a home for Jewish people in Palestine Pamphlet by founder of socialist Zionism, Nahman Syrkin, says Palestine “must be evacuated for the Jews”.

As for an “anticolonial” Zionism, if such a thing could be spoken of it would come as a shock to the ideology’s founders.

Ben-Gurion himself, writing to his son in 1937, appeared convinced that this was the only course of action open to Zionism: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.’ The opportune moment came in 1948. Ben-Gurion is in many ways the founder of the State of Israel and was its first prime minister. He also masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

As Matzpen’s founder Moshé Machover notes, “Israel is not only a product of the Zionist colonization but also an instrument for its further extension and expansion. . . . Colonization continued between 1948 and 1967 in the territory ruled then by Israel, within the Green Line. Lands belonging to Palestinian Arabs—including those who remained within the Green Line—were expropriated and given over to Zionist colonization.

The term Christian Zionist can be found as early as 1896, when the Jewish Zionist leader Theodor Herzl referred to William Hechler, the Anglican chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, as a “Christian Zionist” and the following year Herzl again used that term to describe Jean-Henri Dunant, a Swiss banker and founder of the Red Cross, and an observer at the First Zionist Conference.

THIS NOTION OF A “new Jew” would become one of Zionism’s most defining ideas. In 1942, some three decades after Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter,” a writer in the Yishuv named Hayim Hazaz wrote a short story—“The Sermon”—that has become an Israeli classic. The narrator of the “sermon” is Yudke, one of the founders of the kibbutz on which he lives. Yudke is trying to explain to his fellow kibbutzniks why he believes that they should not teach Jewish history to their children. His main reason is that “we really don’t have a history at all. . . . You see, we never made our own history, the gentiles always made it for us . . . it wasn’t ours, it wasn’t ours at all!” Yudke’s view of Jewish history is classic Zionist fare. “Persecutions, massacres, martyrdoms and pogroms. And more persecutions, massacres, martyrdoms and pogroms. And more, and more, and more of them without end.” The Jews have been so weak and pathetic (and here Hazaz is almost identical to Bialik) that Jewish children find nothing of interest in Jewish history. “Children love to read historical novels. Everywhere else, as you know, such books are full of heroes and conquerors and brave warriors and glorious adventures. In short, they’re exciting.” The problem is that these children “read novels, but ones about gentiles, not about Jews. Why? You can be sure it’s no accident. Jewish history is simply boring . . . it has no adventures, no conquering heroes, no great rulers or potentates.” Jews in history are not potentates. They are “a mob of beaten, groaning, weeping, begging Jews”—the opposite of inspiring. That is why, says Yudke, “if it were up to me, I wouldn’t allow our children to be taught Jewish history at all. Why on earth should we teach them about the shameful life led by their ancestors? I’d simply say to them ‘look boys and girls, we don’t have any history. We haven’t had one since the day we were driven into exile. Class dismissed, you can go outside and play.

2008 interview with Labor Party member and political philosopher Yuli Tamir, the Minister of Education in the Kadima-Labor government and founder of Peace Now, was fairly typical. Asked her opinion on the wall and on Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, Tamir replied: “There are processes which have been institutionalized, like road 443 [for Jews only].34 And I have always supported a wall. When our citizens are killed in terror operations, I am not a vegetarian. This is not the role of the Left. It [the left] should be activist in regards to the comprehensive solution and the unnecessary attacks on innocent civilians.”35

The Zionism of its founders sought to emancipate Jews in the context of a modern nation-state. Like any nationalism, its ideology drew on an ancestral mythology but was projected towards the future: the Jewish nation had a long history, but once it gave itself a state existence, it would fit into modernity. The upheavals of the twentieth century enabled it to carry out its project but, by a kind of historical irony, Israel put an end to Jewish modernity. Diaspora Judaism had been the critical conscience of the Western world; Israel survives as one of its mechanisms of domination.