Since the beginning of the current war in Palestine, the meanings and choices of certain words has been a key point of political discussion. Words such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, retaliation and antisemitism have all been defined and re-defined with political purpose in mind. Zionism has been no exception. And yet, for all of this debate, the discussion of Zionism’s history has been oddly shallow, and has involved a strange, implicit agreement between Zionism’s supporters
and opponents.

For example, Dr Ramzy Baroud has written that ‘Zionism in all its manifestations has essentially followed the same trajectory of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing’ and, similarly, a history of Zionism in Counterfire describes how Theodore Herzl developed the ideas that would ‘shape modern Zionism’, most crucially, that “Palestine…became the place to form the Jewish state.” The Israeli government’s own “Introduction to Zionism” states that “Zionism is the national movement espousing repatriation of Jews to their homeland - the Land of Israel and the resumption of sovereign Jewish life there.”

Despite the directly opposed politics and framing of these descriptions, both Zionist and anti-Zionist histories return to an overall picture that looks roughly like this: Zionism begins with Herzl, gains political muscle through the British government and the Balfour Declaration, and then mass popular support in the era of Nazism and the Holocaust. Finally, it achieved its goal of a Jewish nation-state in 1948. This is an oversimplified narrative that still dominates popular and expert narratives
of Zionism.

This central picture involves two key ideas about the history of zionist thought: that Zionism was only ever about Palestine, and that the goal was a nation-state. These foundations give the impression that Zionism developed as a clear, homogenous movement, achieving in 1948 what it had dreamt up in the years preceding it. This is Zionism, with a capital Z. The problem is the intellectual history of Zionism in the early 20th century is full of contradiction and disagreement.

To start with, the decision to make Palestine the location of a Jewish homeland was a key point of contention in early Zionist thought. For some, the goal was Palestine alone, with no other option. But this was not the case for the Territorialist movement – formally organised as the Jewish Territorialist Organisation, or ITO (1905-1925) and the Frayland-Lige (1935 - early 1960s). They were an influential group of committed Zionists, who saw a Jewish homeland as necessary and urgent, but directly opposed creating it in Palestine. Instead they sought a large, unpopulated land to provide a refuge for Jews who increasingly felt minority existence in European nations offered no security and threatened Jewish identity. Crucially, this was not a fringe group in early Zionism. The Territorialists felt that they were the true heirs of Zionist visionaries like Theodore Herzl and Leon Pinsker. Pinsker, for example, wrote an essay entitled Autoemancipation! as early as 1882 which stated, “the goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own”.

Territorialism’s rejection of Palestine rested on a central proposition – Jewish national belonging had nothing to do with an attachment to a particular piece of land, and everything to do with a shared faith, culture, and language. Pinsker made this clear when he noted that it was, “the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former fatherland…which have made [it] the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem of the Jordan.” Likewise, the ITO’s leader Israel Zangwill argued in 1908, that the Jews needed “territory without insidious colonization”, something he feared would happen in Palestine. Academic Gur Alroey also highlights the Territorialist poet Hillel Zeitlin, who argued that “[what] testified to the failure in Zionist ideological thought was the Arab question and the illegitimacy of the Zionist claim to the land.” It is important to note that Territorialists still fundamentally relied on a colonial view of the world, seeing it as the most likely path to achieving ownership of an alternative piece of land. Many of their proposed locations – Uganda, Suriname, Australia – may well have still involved the displacement of people already living there. Territorialists – especially the ITO – are not forgotten anti-colonial heroes whose views we should simply resurrect for the modern era.

Nonetheless, Territorialism’s history demonstrates that Palestine was not always fundamental to Zionism, and in doing so, it actively challenges many of the narratives that are used to justify the violent founding of the Israeli state. For example, Territorialism attacked other Zionists for not caring enough about the fate of Jews in Europe, the very problem Israel was supposedly the only necessary solution for. They argued that the desire to settle in Palestine greatly reduced the hopes for a Jewish state in the near future, due to the complex politics of the region and local Palestinian opposition. Territorialists argued that choosing a less politically fraught land, or even having another location for Jewish emigration alongside Palestine, would allow for easier and faster migration, which had begun to face restrictions. When the British White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to 1,500 people a month despite the terrifying rise of Nazi Germany, Territorialists felt they were seeing definitive proof of what they had warned against: that Zionists focused on Palestine had directly endangered Jewish lives by choosing a homeland fraught with difficulty.

The following years would begin to provide harrowing examples. One of the most shocking was the sinking of the Struma, a passenger ship carrying over 700 Jewish refugees attempting to reach Palestine from Nazi-allied Romania. They were denied passage by the British because of the 1939 White Paper. Unable to turn back or carry on, they were forced back out to sea, and eventually sunk by a Soviet submarine. Territorialists and other non-statist Zionists saw events like this as precisely the fault of Israel’s eventual founders. Thus, the Territorialist paper Oyfn shvel would write in 1951 that, “because there were no territories for Jewish settlement ten years ago, thousands of Jews perished in gas chambers.” Whether they were right or not, the position of the Territorialist Zionists should give us reason to question the often-invoked narrative that a Jewish state in Palestine was necessary to protect the Jews. For Territorialists, it was this very decision that helped to condemn many Jews, who might have otherwise found a place of refuge, to the most terrible of fates. Though of course all Jews were victims in this situation, the anger and frustration of the ITO and the Frayland-Lige with the members of their own community was no less real for that fact.

Along with the rejection of Palestine, many Zionists also rejected the idea that Jews should live in a nation-state at all. Perhaps the most prominent of these figures was Isaac Nachman Steinberg, who led the Freeland League until his death in 1957. Writing an article titled ‘Yavneh or Jerusalem’ in 1955, he argued that Judaism was above all “a system of moral maximalism” and rested on key principles and challenges from the Torah, such as “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation”. To Steinberg, these cherished ideals were near irreconcilable with the fundamentals of the state which he summed up as “state, army, and war” resting on the principles “Right or wrong, My Country” and ‘A la guerre, comme a la guerre’”, the latter a phrase that Meir Sheetrit, a long serving Likud MK and Minister, would use in an interview explaining the IDF’s response at the start of the Second Intifada. 

I mention this modern parallel because some of Steinberg’s challenges feel depressingly prophetic. Following the Qibya Massacre in 1953 he wrote, “The fact that Jews…could in cold calculation murder dozens of innocent men, women, and children…is in itself a hair-raising crime. But far worse is the indifferent or satisfied reaction to this event on the part of the Jewish population in Israel and almost everywhere else in the world. It has been made “kosher” by all possible strategic, political, sentimental arguments—and the moral issue has been completely ignored.”

That these dissenting voices were not the mainstream of Zionism should not be a reason to discount them from our historical understanding. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the fact that Herzl himself, perceived arch-Zionist, was deeply invested and interested in Territorialist Zionism. Indeed, the founding of the ITO occurred because of its support for a Jewish homeland in British Uganda, a plan that Herzl himself brought to the 7th Zionist congress
in 1905. 

If this history feels too distant to be relevant, perhaps the example of Noam Chomsky might make the point feel more current. Chomsky was, after all, a Zionist in his youth. He did not undergo some radical disillusionment with the ideal that led him to his position today. Simply, his Zionism was one that was of a completely different ilk. As he says in On Palestine, “in the mid-1940s, I was a Zionist youth leader, but strongly opposed to a Jewish state. I was in favor of a Jewish-Arab working-class cooperation to build a socialist Palestine”. This was not something that was Chomsky’s sole ideal. In an interview with Gabriel Schivone he remembers being “connected to a considerable part of the Zionist movement which was opposed to a Jewish state”. This was part of the early Kibbutz movements, as well as organisations like Hashomer Hatzair, which were bi-nationalist and anti-Statist. And if this history does feel very distant, or seems surprising, that is no accident. Alternative Zionist thinkers have not, for obvious reasons, been a part of Israel’s official narratives. The founding of a statist Israel in Palestine ushered in the simplified picture we have today. As Chomsky puts it, “From 1948 on, ‘Zionism’ meant the ideology of the state. A state religion.” 

For David Ben-Gurion – Israel’s first prime minister, often seen as the man who realised what Herzl and others had only imagined – emphasising the statist strand of Zionism was an important part of his thinking in the years leading up to, and following,
Israel’s founding. As Dmitry Shumsky has shown, it was the Peel Commission’s report in 1937 that was crucial on this front. The report suggested partitioning Palestine and using ‘population transfer’ - ethnic cleansing - to secure the two new states. This was an idea that even horrified Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism and the notion of the ‘iron wall’, who stated that this could “hardly be done without coercion” and that “[f]orcing Arabs who live in a Jewish country to emigrate would be a most dangerous precedent”. Ben-Gurion was more willing to seize the moment, marking the first serious commitment to Israel as a state that could be ethnically Jewish alone. In doing so, he adopted the nation-state as the only legitimate form of Zionism, casting any other expressions of Jewish national belonging as irrelevant or dangerous.

Since then, Israel has continued to affirm this picture of Zionism in its official messaging. Speaking at Israel’s 70th anniversary of independence, for example, Netanyahu stated that, where “all other ancient nations that were exiled from their lands ultimately vanished” the Jews “remained faithful to Zion. We dreamed of returning to Jerusalem”. This was not simply a story of Ancient continuity, but of twentieth century continuity -  “When my grandfather’s generation came here 100 years ago, they kissed the ground of our homeland.” And if reference to his grandfather’s generation were not clear enough, Netanyahu invoked the key name of Zionism’s continuity narrative: “There is no other country like [Israel]. And it doesn’t surprise me because Herzl, the founder of Zionism, prophesied, “Give us a piece of land to hold on to, and the rest we will do ourselves.” He was so right.” Netanyahu’s vision confirms this continuity narrative; a nation-state eternally longed for and finally,
rightfully, delivered.

Yet Israel has not been the only force cementing this narrative of Zionism’s history. Indirectly, pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices have been doing the same. In part this is because, in the end, the State of Israel was founded in Palestine in 1948 and on distinctly statist ideals. So when it comes to discussing the political history of Zionism and Israel, it is not surprising, nor entirely wrong, that the focus is on this particular narrative. Yet this central version of Zionist history is also focused on because it is simply a more straightforward enemy to battle than a fully nuanced understanding of Zionist history. Yet sometimes, this focus can reflect that a clear-cut narrative of a homogenous, ‘invented’, and colonial-from-inception Zionism serves as a powerful call to action. We should point to the ways in which the form of Zionism that became dominant was colonial, racist, and expansionist. The problem comes when this is presented as the sum total of Zionist thought and history, the extent of what Jews imagined for themselves as they sought for solutions to their desperate position in Europe.

Recapturing this history has an innate value to the many Jews like myself, who are appalled by Israel’s current actions, but feel the need for narratives of Jewish belonging. But recapturing this complex history has practical value too. Currently, the ability for Israel to act with such impunity rests on a lack of international pressure, especially from key Western powers. For example, the UK government has walked a deliberately vague public line on the issue, while consistently failing to support bodies like the ICJ (for example, by frequently abstaining from its resolutions) and continuing to sell parts for F-35 jets to Israel. This response still serves to facilitate Israel’s actions, despite some lukewarm calls for ceasefires. It is hard, however, to believe that the government could take such a path if its own Jewish community spoke in a louder, more united, voice against Israel. There are many Jews like myself trying to do this, but there need to be more, and this is where the practical value of Zionism’s history has a role to play.

For Jews who oppose Netanyahu’s Israel, the only political identities they can reach are those of ‘non-Zionist’ or ‘anti-Zionist’, both vague, and both defined in relation to Zionism itself. This lack of a political alternative is central to the passive and half-hearted support many Jews in Britain and across the diaspora lend to Israel. Despite reticences, many Jews often feel that the choice fundamentally boils down to pro- or anti-Israel, Zionist or not. In this situation, many Jews quite understandably find the latter hard to choose. This may explain why polls done early last year found that the vast majority of Jews still felt ‘attached’ to Israel, but that fewer were identifying directly as Zionist (63% in 2024 compared to 72% in 2014). Equally the Institute for Jewish Policy Research’s 2024 poll suggests a picture of continued connection to, even pride in Israel, along with growing concerns about the state of Israel’s democracy. This suggests that most British Jews do not want to give up on a vision of Israel, but have misgivings about where it is now. What they need is a means of bringing these two positions together, beyond effectively meaningless propositions such as the two-state solution, and a ‘peace process’ - both holdovers from the days of Oslo which the current demolition of Gaza has rendered inconceivable. And there is considerable space for such a narrative. Recently, thirty six representatives of the Board of Deputies, a key representative body for UK Jews, published a letter in the Financial Times decrying the Israeli government for “openly encouraging violence against Palestinians… strangling the Palestinian economy and building more new settlements than ever”. They spoke in the name “of the Israel we love and have such close
ties to.”

It is in precisely this space that these alternative and discarded forms of Zionism can play their role. It is thus no surprise that Netanyahu and Israel promote the flattened version of Zionism’s history so clearly. It stops counternarratives that one might even term ‘pro-Israeli’ from forming and undermining the beliefs they use to justify the killing of Palestinians. We see this in the mantra ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’, which rests on the picture that statist Zionism is the only Zionism, and so to oppose modern Israel is to deny Jews a right to national determination. Such a definition would make a great many early Zionists anti-semites. Reminding ourselves that Zionism and the State of Israel are not historically the same unpicks this belief and opens up room for new ones. In this way, dissenting Zionist voices from the past may help to bring about a more coordinated response to Israel by bringing in the final missing piece: a Jewish diaspora opposed in majority to the current state of Israel.

Thinking in the long-term, there is a possibility too, that if diaspora Jews can begin to redefine Zionism and use it to critique, not support Israel, that this might inspire a transformation in Israeli identity itself. I am hesitant about suggesting any directions for Israeli politics or Israeli society. I am not an Israeli, indeed I have never been to Israel, and so my knowledge is outsider, and relies
on research. 

All the same, a kind of Zionism that refers more to
the restoration and upkeep of Jewish morality and learning – of Jews being ‘a light unto the nations’ – than of a Jewish state, may just prove useful to the Israeli left, who have, for a long time, lacked any meaningful narrative attached to Jewishness itself. This is something that the last leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Merav Michaeli, was deeply aware of. Speaking to Anshel Pfeffer in an article for The Jewish Quarterly, she critiqued the left for allowing Netanyahu to cement his framing that “the right is good for Jews and the left loves Arabs. The left is exploding buses and the left have forgotten what it means to be Jewish”. 

The idea of a ‘new’, reimagined Zionism may sound a little far-fetched, or ungrounded, but in the same piece, pollster Dahlia Scheindlin gives a picture of Israeli attitudes which suggests there should be space for a ‘new’ Zionism. She notes that where few Israelis identify as ‘left-wing’, “many more hold views that could be identified as left-wing”. Interestingly, “the proportion of Israelis who in principle support things like the two-state solution…is much higher than the vote share for the so-called left-wing parties”. Recent protests against the war in Gaza from Israelis, including some on Holocaust Memorial Day, are proof this feeling remains
active today.

We must remember that before this war began, Netanyahu was facing huge popular protests, and remains a deeply divisive figure in Israel. It is hard to know if Zionism can ever truly be reclaimed as an idea and a word, and certainly any change will be slow, and far too late to help the Palestinian lives which have been destroyed over the last few years. But it is equally true that Zionism in all forms started out as a fringe, and hated position within the Jewish community. And it was once true that the idea of Likud forming the Israeli government would have been laughable (they did not win an Israeli election until 1977). 

In 1992, Edward Said wrote astutely that in the debate around Palestine, “The terms of debate are impoverished, for…Palestinians have been known only as refugees, or as extremists, or as terrorists”. If for Said, the terms used to discuss Palestinians aided the neglect of Palestinian rights to self-determination, the homogenised understanding of Zionism facilitates a rigid understanding of Jewish nationhood. For Jews, activists, activist Jews and all of us who are deeply appalled by the actions of Netanyahu’s government, it is oddly a relearning of the history of Zionism itself, in its full historical context, that may provide some new avenues of opposition, change, and one day, hope.