Jewish Homeland Research Articles

إرث بلفور: بريطانيا والصهيونية والطريق المثير للجدل إلى قيام إسرائيل

The research provides an overview of the rise of the Zionist movement, starting from the establishment of the Jewish Colonial Society in 1891 by Maurice de Hirsch, leading to the formation of the World Zionist Organization and the creation of the Jewish National Fund in 1901. It discusses the controversial debates over the location of a Jewish homeland, including the Uganda Scheme, and the advocacy for Palestine by figures like Herzl. The impact of World War I on the Middle East was influenced by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The British Mandate in Palestine, established after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, had significant impacts on Jewish immigration, Arab displacement, and the road to statehood. The United Nations eventually issued a resolution in 1947 to divide Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. This was accepted by Jews but rejected by Arab states. Great Britain's actions towards the end of the mandate aimed to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisioned by the United Nations plan. Drawing on primary and secondary sources from esteemed archives such as the British Library and personal accounts, this research seeks to elucidate the complex historical backdrop, contextualizing key decisions and conflicts that ultimately shaped the creation of the State of Israel. The analysis aims to provide nuanced insights into divergent perspectives held by Palestinians and Israelis regarding the resolution of this enduring conflict, rooted in a legacy of geopolitical manoeuvring and ideological fervour.

The Sabbatean syndrome, the messianic idea and Zionism

My research, still in its early stages, proposes a basic methodological and historiographic perspective that transcends particularistic analysis. This perspective challenges the crisis orientation that has dominated Zionist historiography and examines the roots of Zionism that are integral to the Sephardic diaspora. The purpose, conscious or otherwise, of Zionist historiography that detaches the sixteenth from the nineteenth century is to ensure that the mighty process of return to the Jewish homeland is attributed exclusively to Zionism of the modern era. This ignores all the momentous accomplishments of the sixteenth century that heralded a new age in the settlement of Eretz Israel. Most Zionist historiographers attempt to ‘normalize’ history so that anything hinting at redemption is summarily excised. This is the meaning of the historiographic dispute taking place over the past few decades concerning messianism and the history of Jewish settlement of Eretz Israel in the modern era.

From the American Jewish Conference to the Establishment of Israel: The First Jewish Zionist Grassroots Movement and President Truman

Abstract During the period from 1943 to 1948, the American Jewish grassroots movement organized to pressure Congress and President Truman in support of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This effort was led by Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who worked to promote the Zionist vision of a Jewish state as proclaimed in the Balfour Declaration and endorsed by the San Remo Conference. The activities of the Jewish lobby during this period were numerous and varied. They worked to establish the American Jewish Conference, which operated in the U.S. and abroad to promote the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Additionally, members used their influence in Congress and the media to push for support of the Zionist cause. Through these efforts, the Jewish lobby was able to exert significant pressure on Truman and other decision makers, ultimately leading to the creation of the State of Israel. President Truman found himself caught between the hammer and the anvil of the competing interests of Arabs and Jews, as well as conflicting views within his own administration. Despite these challenges, Truman ultimately played a crucial role in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The Enduring Conflict in the Middle East: Irrational Causes and Viable Solutions that might begin with the Educational Means

This Paper aims at tracing and analyzing the irrational reasons that stood behind the lasting conflict in the Middle East with a refutation of its continuation according to the theory of recognition, as well as the viable solutions that might reduce the tension in the region and end the conflict for a long run. It discussed the reasons that caused the conflict in the region to continue for more than hundred years for the benefit of the colonial states. The paper reached a point that the colonial states were behind the establishment of Israel in the region to be used as a functional state for the perpetuation of colonialism in the region, despite the existence of a Jewish homeland that had been previously announced in Birobidzhan, before the declaration of Israel in Palestine that is why seen today a rebellious state against the legitimacy and international law. The study concluded that it has become necessary to explain more precisely to the youth the cause of the suffering experienced by the peoples of the region of their various races and religions through educational curriculum at all levels of school and university. The study also concluded some proposals that may contribute to ending the unjust conflict gradually in the future.

The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia by Gennady Estraikh (review)

The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia by Gennady Estraikh (review)

Yahudiler Siyonizm’i Hıristiyanlardan mı aldılar?

Zionism, the main ideology of the State of Israel, emerged as an intellectual movement and social movement at the end of the 19th century. While this development is subjectively related to the conditions in the Christian world, it is objectively related to the internal dynamics of Judaism. The exclusion of Jews by Catholics and Orthodox has prevented them from integrating into society, nurtured national consciousness and pushed them to seek salvation. On the other hand, Protestants believed that it is necessary to establish a Jewish state in Palestine for the return of Jesus Christ to the earth and endeavored for this sake since the 17th century, These views and efforts, which were fermented among Christians for two centuries, found its expression among the Jews with the concept of Zionism. Considering this fact it can be thought that Zionism passed to the Jews from the Christians. However, although Zionism emerged theoretically and socially in the late date, its intellectual foundations are found in Jewish scriptures as well as its actual examples in Jewish history. The concept of the chosen people, the idea of the promised land and the constant emphasis in liturgy on returning to Jerusalem provide the theological basis for the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. It is also undeniable that throughout history Jews made many efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine or to create such an opportunity. Experiences such as Jesus is the expected Messiah, the Bar Kokhba revolt, attempts to the Julian The Apostate and Princess Eudoxia, provoking the Persians against Byzantium, and following false Christ figures such as David Alroy and Sabbatai Zevi, the construction of a Jewish homeland in Tiberia at the initiative of Yasef Nasi can be given as examples. The appropriate ground in Europe created by the conditions in 19th century offered the Jews the opportunity to theorize this theoretical and practical legacy in the form of Zionism.

Poetry at the Priory: George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism

Poetry at the Priory:George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism Kathleen Mccormack (bio) As George Eliot was nearing the age of fifty, she conceived a daring ambition. She wanted to become one of the superior poets of her time and place, as beloved and respected as Browning and Tennyson.1 Having finished Felix Holt in 1866, for three years she wrote line after line of lyrics, sonnets, rhymed couplets, and blank verse and did not begin seriously on Middlemarch until 1869. With The Spanish Gypsy finally in print in 1868, she continued to publish poetry during the early years of the next decade, including poetry which, like many of the long poems by her contemporaries, engages topics directly or indirectly relevant to British imperialism.2 Several circumstances and events shared by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes during the 1870s helped nourish her poetic ambitions. After buying their country home near Tennyson's Aldworth in 1876, their friendship with the laureate flourished just as he too was trying out a new genre: five-act historical dramas written for the stage. Meanwhile, the Leweses continued to host their Sunday salons, occasions that attracted sometimes overlapping groups including Lewes's fellow proto-psychologists; educators involved in women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge; George Eliot's often younger women friends; visual artists (Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Burton, Barbara Bodichon, Helen Allingham, George du Maurier); dozens of periodical editors and contributors; people usually identified as Pre-Raphaelites; singers sometimes invited to perform—and poets of lasting or temporary fame who turned out lyrics, sonnets, and ballads, as well as dramas and narratives many thousands of lines long. While music eventually became more frequent and guests with political similarities and differences still mingled, the poets helped keep Sunday at the Priory primarily a literary salon. Finally, the Leweses were at this time sustaining their friendship with the world's most prominent human symbol of the Victorian empire, the queen's viceroy in India, Lord Robert Lytton, who also wrote long poems, notably King Poppy. After several years of epistolary discussions with Lewes about Lytton's [End Page 115] writing and strategies for publication (1865–1876), Lewes switched to delivering epistolary advice regarding two of Lytton's worst challenges as viceroy and governor general of India: famine and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Concerning these disasters, during the last two years of his life, Lewes came close to turning eminence grise to the viceroy who was representing the newly named Empress of India. Discussions of the kind and degree of imperialist ideology lurking in the late writing of Eliot have most often concerned the ending to Daniel Deronda, in which Daniel and Mirah depart for "the East" with unspecified intentions that may or may not include colonization of a land already occupied by non-Jewish groups.3 Although Eliot leaves the future of Daniel and Mirah undescribed, she delivers the couple to the only setting where they might fulfill Mordecai's hopes for founding a Jewish homeland that will thrive under Daniel's leadership. Meanwhile, during the years she was writing Deronda, she also created Deronda-esque characters in her poetry. Additional versions of such characters and their plots recur in long poems by friends and Priory visitors, as exemplified by William Allingham's Lawrence Bloomfield, Tennyson's Harold, and Lytton's own King Poppy. Nancy Henry's definitive study of George Eliot and the British Empire not only details the Deronda debate but also cautions that Eliot's biography supplies additional connections between Eliot and Britain's colonies (p. 3). Henry specifies heavy investments in particular in railway stocks in India and argues that Lewes's sons' emigration to Africa (unhappily ending in the deaths of both Thornie and Bertie) nevertheless demonstrates a willingness to draw on the colonies as resources for placing younger sons. Only Thornie's failure at the required civil service exam redirected him from India to Natal. Eliot's poetic ambitions and her late-1870s friendships create additional biographical connections between Eliot and India, many of them fortified by interactions at her Sunday salons. Writers of long poetry who might visit at the Priory during the 1870s included Browning and Tennyson...

Review: Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978

Review: <i>Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978</i>

Pilgrimage Zionism: The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine and the divergent processes of Zionist meaning making

ABSTRACT This article shows Zionist emergence as processes of meaning making that took place while organizing and enacting a modern Jewish pilgrimage from London to Palestine and back in 1897. Through ‘thick’ descriptions by the pilgrims, the article offers a bottom-up account of the central boundary formations that in early 1897 demarcated Jewish national collectivity, homeland, and homecoming. Following the Danish-Jewish participant, Louis Frænkel, it shows how Zionist meaning making happened before, during, and after his experiences on the pilgrimage, and how this related to the kind of Zionism that Frænkel eventually would push for in Denmark.

Mainstream and Radicalism in American Zionism: The Avukah Affair, 1934–1945

Mainstream and Radicalism in American Zionism:The Avukah Affair, 1934–1945 Tal Elmaliach (bio) The American Zionist student organization Avukah embarked on a profound transformation in the mid-1930s. Avukah, founded in 1925, was the main representative of the Zionist movement on American campuses. In the years that followed, it metamorphosed from being apolitical, in the sense that it did not support or affiliate with any specific Zionist party or ideology, into a radical left movement that viewed the world through the lens of Marxist analysis, while critiquing American capitalism. It also supported a socialist and binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. This put the movement into conflict with both the American Zionist establishment and other groups of young Zionists. At the beginning of the 1940s, the conflict grew more acute, and its adversaries demanded that Avukah disband. They refused to have any connection with it and, in 1943, the Zionist leadership established a new student organization in its place. Avukah carried on for another two years without support from the Zionist establishment, finally disintegrating in 1945. Avukah's story is not well known, and so far, no coherent account of its path to radicalism and oblivion has been written. That is not to say that its history has not been told—indeed it has, at times in great detail, in a number of works that have focused on subjects indirectly connected to it.1 But these works contradict each other. Some take no account of Avukah's radicalization, while others recount it while disagreeing about [End Page 343] its causes and its manifestations. Neither is there any consensus about how and whether its radicalization contributed to its demise. Furthermore, the case of Avukah does not fit easily into the larger historical context, either that of young Jews around the world during that same period or that of American Zionism. In fact, the study of the Zionist movement has addressed other instances in which the mainstream grappled with groups of young people who underwent left-wing radicalization (mostly, like Avukah, in the 1930s).2 But Avukah's case is different. The left-wing radicalization that took place simultaneously in Europe and in the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—consisted largely of cases of young Zionist leftists who shifted into anti-Zionist movements. For the most part, they adopted communism and idolized the Soviet Union, which led to them being condemned by mainstream Zionism. Avukah, in contrast, was firmly anti-Bolshevik, and remained Zionist throughout its existence. It thus does not fit into the common model of the leftward turn as it appears in Zionist historiography of Europe and Palestine. That begs a question: Was American Zionism different in this regard? When Avukah's story is examined in relation to the conventions of historical writing on American Zionism, it challenges the existing research. These works depict the movement in the United States as having American liberal-progressive characteristics, currently referred to as "General Zionism" in Zionist politics.3 As Rafael Medoff has written, "After all, most American Zionists were 'stam Zionists.' They were convinced of the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not wedded to any particular vision of that homeland's future economic, social, or religious contours."4 [End Page 344] On the face of it, Avukah seems simply to have adopted the views of the socialist wing of American Zionism, which included established organizations such as the avowedly Marxist Poale Zion and the Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement.5 But that view is problematic for several reasons. First, socialist Zionism did not have much influence in the United States, and during the period in question, its youth wings were riven by internal conflict and had little capacity for recruiting new members.6 It was thus unreasonable to expect that this wing could incorporate all Zionist activity on US campuses. Second, by the mid-1930s, Poale Zion had become relatively moderate in its social views, and was largely a Palestine-centered group that focused on the settlement of that country.7 Hashomer Hatza'ir was more radical, and indeed maintained relations with Avukah on that basis, but differed from it in that it explicitly sympathized with the...

هل "إسرائيل" مشروع غربي في فلسطين؟

This study aims to ascertain the extent to which it was Western powers or Zionists that founded Israel. The study argues that Israel was established by Western powers, while not ignoring the partial but significant role of Zionists that sought for a Jewish homeland. The West needed a Jewish homeland in order to utilise Jewish wealth, while also keeping Jews away since they were disturbed by the presence of the Jewish community. On the other hand, the World Zionist Organisation, motivated by anti-Semitism and nationalism, pioneered the idea of a Jewish national home and tried to persuade Western leaders as to the viability of a homeland in Palestine. While Zionist lobbying was influential, it can hardly be argued that they would have founded Israel without the help and permission of Western states, and in particular, the British Empire. The study aims to reveal external roles in nation-building by analysing the case of Israel. Methodologically, both quantitative and qualitative researches were used.

Amos Oz inA Tale of Love and Darkness

AbstractThis paper looks at the call for a dialogue underlying Amos Oz’s autobiographical novelA Tale of Love and Darkness.1As a peace activist,2Oz depicts the Arab Palestinian under Israeli military occupation as a victim and reintroduces himself as a new, unorthodox Jew. In this context, the paper approaches the author-narrator’s message calling for a dialogue with the Palestinian other, albeit through a Chekhovian solution to an existentialist conflict entangling both the Arabs and the Jews over the Question of Palestine. Thanks to the complicity between the Western Colonial Project3and the Zionist plan to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, most of the Palestinian population was expelled and dispossessed. Oz condemns that complicity and stands out as a Jewish voice for peace. His narrative discourse implies that he is crossing a minefield while trying to help resuscitate the current stale-mate peace process in the Middle East.

Zionism - The integral component of Jewish identity that Jews are historically pressured to shed

ABSTRACTThe yearning and determination of Jews to re-establish their Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel is “Zionism” – an integral component of Jewish identity. It is more than the political movement launched in the 1800’s. The deep religious, ancestral, and ethnic connection of Jews to the Land of Israel is as old as Abraham and the Bible. Jewish messianic movements brought Jews to Israel between the 13th and 19th centuries, proving the Jews’ historic sense of peoplehood and their belief in the “ingathering of the exiles.” Only in the 18th century did Jews first shed this element of Jewish identity because European governments demanded this surrender in exchange for citizenship. Why are Jews demonised and marginalised today when they express support for Israel? It is a modern manifestation of the antisemitic pressure on Jews to shed the national and ethnic part of their Jewish identity. Discrimination against anyone who observes the Jewish Sabbath, wears a kippah, or maintains a kosher diet is universally recognised as antisemitism. It is equally antisemitic to marginalise or harass Jews for expressing the Zionist component of their Jewish identity. Isolating and dehumanising Zionists is akin to branding Jews with a virtual “yellow Star of David.” To ensure that history does not repeat itself, we must forcefully condemn this modern mode of antisemitism.

Władza, przywództwo i siła polityczna w amerykańskim ruchu syjonistycznym w latach 1914-1920. W stulecie ustanowienia Brytyjskiego Mandatu Palestyny

World War I marked the beginning of a significant role of American Jewry in global affairs. Both the emergence of the United States as the new world power and the financial status of the Jewish American community contributed to a considerable participation of American Jews in the councils of world Jewry. The war and its aftermath brought fundamental changes to the Zionist movement, which offered the pragmatic approach to the actual problems of Diaspora Jews. There appeared both the necessity and possibility for uniting all the American Zionist factions into a powerful organization with an efficient party apparatus and prominent leadership which revitalized the Zionist movement and made it responsive to its main aim, i.e., the establishment of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine. Louis D. Brandeis’s leadership marked a turning point in the history of American Zionism through a combination of his potent personality with a coherent ideology that reflected the American conditions. All those developments helped create the most powerful American Zionist organization in the world, with the sole aim to effectually implement the idea of a home for the Jewish people. The Americanization of Zionism, based on practical work in building up Palestine, was a direct reason for a bitter conflict between Brandeis and Weizmann, the leader of European Zionism, that is between fostering Jewish settlement in Palestine through a systematic and methodical economic process on the one hand, and through implementing a synthesis of socio-ethical and cultural values that Zionism in Weizmann’s view should represent, on the other. The article discusses the circumstances which triggered the American Zionist movement to assume power, prestige, and large following; it also analyzes the reasons for an orchestrated and determined diplomatic action on the part of both the Zionist Organization of America and the World Zionist Organization to articulate and achieve their direct aim first through the Balfour Declaration and then through the San Remo Conference decision of entrusting the Mandate over Palestine to Great Britain. They both proved to have been the indispensable prerequisites for the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine.

Security and Identity in Jewish Utopias of the Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

ABSTRACT This article seeks to examine three works of fiction: Nava Semel's Isra Isle (2005), Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007), and Philip Jose Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979). All three of these works imagine a Jewish state other than Israel. These works speak specifically to two fundamental questions that informed Zionist thought—that of safety and that of identity. While each novel implies skepticism toward contemporary Israel, the utopias presented, too, fail to guarantee security for the Jewish people or a solution to the “Jewish question” of cohesive identity. Each novel acknowledges the centrality of a return to Zion in Jewish culture and beliefs, suggesting that, even if Israel itself falls short of its mythic potential, the promise of a return ensures that no alternative Jewish homeland will ever provide an adequate final home.

Fanning the Flames or a Troubling Truth? The Politics of Comparison in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

ABSTRACTThe politics of comparison in the Israel-Palestine conflict is largely encapsulated in the use of two analogies. The first is the ‘Holocaust-Hitler analogy’ used by Israel and its supporters, which portrays Israel as a beleaguered nation surrounded by Nazi sympathisers who seek to destroy it as the Jewish homeland. The second is the ‘apartheid analogy’, which compares the conflict to that of Apartheid-era South Africa and portrays Palestinians as being the victims of racism and settler colonialism. This article analyses why, how and with what desired impact these two comparisons are invoked.

The Club Scene: The Influence of George Eliot’s 'Daniel Deronda' in the History of the Proto-Zionist Movement

This essay explores one very significant but for the most part forgotten milestone in the history of Zionism: the publication in 1876 of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and the nearly simultaneous publication of one section of the novel, nicknamed The Club Scene, that was widely disseminated in numerous periodicals throughout Europe. The Club Scene, informed by Charles Darwin’s recent publications as well as a much older tradition of racial theory, was a fictional depiction of a meeting of ‘The Philosopher’s Club” whose characters, particularly Mordecai, a Jewish mystic, suggested an intriguing new way of looking at the relationship between Christians and European Jews. It suggested a much more secular connection than had been widely envisioned before, downplaying religion as a sole motivating force for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the east, and putting forward a joint restoration project that emphasized kindred races rather than kindred religions.

Crossing boundaries

The main argument of this article is that Israel seeks to govern its expat citizens not so much through the mobilisation of their ‘rational capacities to evaluate truth claims but through affects’ (Isin, 2004:225). Such viscerality of Israeli nationalism can be seen in the ways in which speci?c emotions – mourning, shame, guilt and fear of loss – are activated through particular semiotic choices. These affective resources, in turn, are marshalled together in order to create a sense of nostalgia, a desire to return ‘home’, which is deeply imbricated with processes of territorialisation of Israel as the Jewish homeland par excellence, and consequently engenders a problematic regime of identities – Israeli Jewish versus Diasporic Jewish. By exploring an example of how national (be)longing is activated through the circulation of emotions across texts and spaces, the article not only seeks to contribute to current discussions about affect in linguistic landscape scholarship, but also offers a fresh perspective on critical sociolinguistic work on nationalism.

Revisiting Hitti's Thoughts on Palestine and Arab Identity

Philip K. Hitti was the first scholar to study Arab-American immigration to the United States. Highly influential during the twentieth century, his ideas have lost much of their appeal to current interpreters of the early diaspora of Arab-Americans called Syrians at the time. This article revisits Hitti's thought, focusing on the issues of Palestine and Arab identity. Using primary source material from Hitti's archived papers, plus multiple secondary sources, I argue that Hitti maintained consistency, both in his advocacy of the general Arab stance opposing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and in his construction of Arab identity as different from Syrian identity. On Palestine, Hitti clashed with Albert Einstein, in public discourse and in an acerbic private exchange of correspondence. On Arab identity, Hitti held firm to a strict interpretation, distinguishing Syrians, conceptualized as Christian, from Arabs, conceptualized as Islamic.

Perspectives: University of Haifa Israel Studies

University of Haifa International School offers an MA in Israel Studies over an approximately one-year period. As a final exam exercise, the student is asked to write an essay describing his/her interaction with the Israel national narrative as taught in courses and experienced during field trips and personal interactions with the surrounding land and landscapes, museums, archeological sites and living “inside the Judaic calendar” for the whole year. In effect, the student’s encounters may be summed up as an interface with memoryscape. The following is one student’s interpretation of this assignment. The scope of this work is an exploration of the Israel narrative, as it was shaped from the early settlement years into the modern and complex State of Israel. My ambition is to trace the early settlement periods, let’s say counting from the late 1880’s, through the development of Eretz Israel into the Jewish homeland, a concept that seemed like the story of the “impossible dream.” Over the course of my studies, we were presented with many “up close” views of the historical markers that are present in this narrative. No textbook reading alone can equal the experience a student has when history can be seen from a local, palpable and “up-front” viewpoint.