Zionism

Zionism is an ethnic nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Zionism was the main force behind the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and remains the country's dominant ideology today. Modern Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to new waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Zionist movement, led by Theodor Herzl, associated this national revival with lands in Palestine, a region then under Ottoman rule. The arrival of Zionist settlers in Palestine during this period is widely seen as marking the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionists justified their claim to Palestine by invoking a perceived historical right to it and widely asserted that this right outweighed that of the Palestinian Arab population. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain declared its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". The 1922 Mandate for Palestine placed Britain in control of Palestine until 1948, when the State of Israel declared its independence and war broke out. During the war, Israel expanded its territory to control over 78% of former Mandatory Palestine. After the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, an estimated 160,000 of 870,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming a Palestinian minority in Israel. Zionist views have varied over time and are not uniform, resulting in a variety of types of Zionism. The...