Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reviews how Zionism as a historical phenomenon is commonly described as having two fundamental characteristics: one temporal and one spatial. Temporally, Zionism is usually characterized as a revolution. The Zionist movement is described as seeking to fundamentally change the face of the Jewish people so that it would no longer resemble the Jewish collective entity that preceded it. Spatially, it is generally agreed that Zionism wished to normalize the status of the Jewish people and transform it into a national group like all other nations in the modern geopolitical space. Combining these temporal and spatial characteristics leads to one of the most widely held arguments about Zionism: that in order to turn the Jews into a nation like all other nations, modern Zionism had to radically change the contemporary Jewish existence.

Ahad Ha’am

This chapter analyzes the political outlook of Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am, 1856–1927), the founder of spiritual–cultural Zionism. The approach to Ahad Ha'am in this historiography, however, is another instructive example of the distortion that the nation-state paradigm creates in the study of the history of Zionist national thought, and any reevaluation of the ideological history of Zionism must contend with this distortion as well. Here, it will also become clear that the nation-state methodology creates a somewhat artificial dichotomy in its representation of the Jewish national vision held by Zionism's founders. This time, the dichotomy to be overcome is between the Herzlian “Jews' state” and the Ahad Ha'amian so-called spiritual center.

Theodor Herzl

This chapter examines Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of political Zionism. The very expression “Herzl, visionary of the state,” which has become common not only in Israeli public discourse but in academic discourse as well, contains more than a little anachronism. Here, the anachronistic approach creates an artificial dichotomy that disregards certain conceptual aspects of Herzl's thought while selectively emphasizing and isolating others. By way of comparison between Herzl's and Max Nordau's cultural–linguistic vision and the cultural–national conceptions of the Slovenian, Czech, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and other national movements of the nineteenth century's non-dominant nationalities, the chapter sheds new light on Herzlian Zionism as a cultural–national approach that is embedded in the historical context of its time.

David Ben-Gurion

This chapter concentrates on the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), and traces the continuum of his positions about the issue of Jewish national self-determination from before World War I until after the Holocaust. Before World War I, Ben-Gurion wholeheartedly supported the continued existence of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of a revised multinational blueprint that was based on his own assessment of “what is good for the Jewish people.” Furthermore, Ben-Gurion copied the idea of “decentralization” from the Ottoman context and made it a part of his vision for the future character of the Jewish state in Palestine as supported by him throughout most of the Mandate period.

Vladimir Jabotinsky

This chapter explores the political approaches toward self-determination, the nation, and the state by the founder of the right-wing revisionist movement, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940). According to Jabotinsky, every nation aspires to “social self-determination,” meaning an optimal demographic concentration in one region that is understood to be its historical homeland. Politically speaking, however, those same nations are also interested in becoming a part of a larger multinational federative state that would serve as an organizing political framework that includes all citizens. Each citizen's national districts/communities would have the critical role of mediating their inclusion as subjects of the governmental sovereignty of the multinational federative state.

Leon Pinsker

This chapter focuses on a figure that the existing historiography considers to be the first to articulate the principle of territorial self-determination in modern Jewish nationalism: Leon Pinsker (1821–1891). He is the founder of the Hibat Tsiyon movement and author of the formative text of the modern Jewish political nationalism, “Autoemancipation!” (September 1882). The account of how Pinsker came to write “Autoemancipation!,” became a fixture of the historiography discourse on Pinsker. However, the chapter shows that a reexamination of recently uncovered writings by Pinsker reaches conclusions that are fundamentally different from the conventional account.