Zionism: history of colonization

Zionism is an European colonial ideology that proposed from its inception the establishment of a state for the Jewish people in Palestine. Zionism emerged in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Its founder was the Austro-Hungarian journalist of Jewish origin Theodor Herzl, who took advantage of the anti-Semitic wave that swept through Europe in those years to advance the colonization of Palestine under the British mandate.

Zionism accepted and inverted the values of the racist thesis of the essential otherness of the Jewish condition and the incompatibility of nations. For Zionism, Jewish existence in a non-Jewish society is a problem, and the solution is the same as that advocated by anti-Semites: the construction of a Jewish society separate from gentile society (Izquierdo, 2006: 4-5).

Zionism were emerged in the context of the European nationalist effervescence, influenced by it, and whose promoters would instrumentalise as a mobilising slogan for the Jewish community in the Diaspora the biblical paradigm of “the promised land – the chosen people”, based on the nationalist logic of the time and with a clear political aim: to take over all the Palestinian land, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

While occupation and colonisation are undoubtedly root causes of the violence, it is also true that they are above all symptoms of Zionism, which is undoubtedly the main driving force on which the vast majority of Israeli society and its rulers rely as the current and hegemonic ideology in Israel.

The colonial character of Zionism is essential from the 19th century to the present day. Zionism has been and remains a colonial ideology and movement. As was common at the time, Zionism also took the colonial movement as its point of reference, and in fact eventually took the colonial movement as its point of reference, and in fact ended up seeking support from European imperialism and colonial expansion.

Currently, the objectives of recent Israeli governments and of the hegemonic ideology in the Israeli state, Zionism, which has maintained from its origins three fundamental hallmarks: (ultra-)nationalism, racism (ethnicism and ethnocracy of the Zionist state) and colonialism.1

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