The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
Zionism
Zionism is the political creed, dating from early in the diaspora, that the old Jewish national homeland of Palestine should be regained by Jews and run as a national home and centre for world-wide Jewish solidarity. Although Zionism grew with increasing fervour from the early 20th century, the rise of vicious anti-Semitism in Europe during the 1930s greatly increased its support. For a long time the area demanded, Palestine, was governed under a mandate from the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, by the United Kingdom, because, whatever international Judaism might argue historically, it was a fully populated Arab country which could not be evacuated or suddenly flooded with European Jews, and tight immigration controls were applied. After the European Holocaust, however, it became both morally and practically difficult for Western powers to maintain their protection of the area and, after a terrorist campaign and the withdrawal of British troops, militant Jewish groups founded the State of Israel as the official Zionist homeland.
While the general doctrine of Zionism has remained vitally important to most Jews, world-wide, the problem of the Palestinian people, especially in the areas which Israel added to its control after its defensive wars against Arab states, has diminished external support, and even produced political strains inside Israel. Nowadays Zionism principally refers to a hawks and doves orientation towards Israeli policy.
Zionists support at least the retention of the land gained in the various Arab–Israeli conflicts since 1947, and possibly a further integration of these areas by the settlement of Jewish immigrants, mainly from the former Soviet Union. Zionism still retains considerable support, often among financially and politically powerful Jewish lobbies in Western countries, and especially in the USA. Non-Zionists, whether Jewish, Israeli or neither, increasingly believe that some sort of accommodation, almost certainly involving the creation of a Palestinian state somewhere inside the current de facto Israeli borders, is both right and politically necessary.
At a UN conference on racism in September 2001, a number of Arab states, led by Syria, proposed a that the conference equate Zionism with racism, claiming that in its contemporary sense the suppression of the Palestinian people was a necessary constituent of the Zionist programme. Israel and the USA stated that the proposals amounted to an attempt to impose an anti-Israel agenda on the conference, and withdrew in protest; the motion to have such wording included in the conference’s declaration was defeated.
A secondary meaning sometimes given to Zionism refers to the internal politics of Israel, and especially to the extent to which the theological, rather than purely ethnic and cultural aspects of Judaism, should be enforced or encouraged by the state.
