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Zionism
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Zionism was not a purely Ashkenazi phenomenon. The first Zionist branches in the Arab world opened in Morrocco only a few years after the first Zionist conference, and the movement was popular among Jews living in Arab states. A number of the founders of the city of Tel-Aviv were Moroccan Jewish immigrants and there was significant early migration from Yemen (10% of Yemenite Jews moved to the Holy Land between 1880 and 1914) and Uzbekistan. Ottoman Salonika had a vigorous Zionist movement by 1908.
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Zionism was a natural product of the culture of the Jewish people in exile. It did not spring full blown from a void with the creation of the Zionist movement in 1897. Jews had lived in "Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel, called "Palestine" by the Romans and Greeks) since about 1200 B.C.E. The land of Israel was at a crossroads of the Middle East and the Mediterranean and was therefore conquered many times: by Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucid Greeks and Romans, as well as invading Philistines. Of these, only the Jews made the land into their national home. Jewish national culture, fused with religion, centered around the geography, seasons and history of the land and of the Jews in the land.
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When Zionism had its first beginnings, in the early 19th century, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in all of the land, mostly concentrated in the countryside of the West Bank and Galilee, and mostly lacking in national sentiment. Palestine was, in Western eyes, a country without a nation, as Lord Shaftesbury wrote. Early proto-Zionists did not trouble themselves at all about the existing inhabitants. Many were heavy influenced by utopianism. In the best 19th century tradition, they were creating a Jewish utopia, where an ancient people would be revived. They envisioned a land without strife, where all national and economic problems would be solved by good will, enlightened and progressive policies and technological know-how.
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The history of the world must be rewritten so as to give account of the guiding, imperious influence which Zionism has had upon countries, peoples and events. Unfortunately, the noiseless work of Zionism has gone largely unnoticed by historians, or rather it appears to have been inevitable that it should go unnoticed, as it is not customary to leave for posterity any documents relating to this matter. If any works containing any hints in that regard did appear, they were promptly removed from circulation (see the section in the text below on how Zionists deal with publications). Zionists have at all times endeavoured to organize situations, or at least to involve themselves in situations, from which they would be able to derive important material benefits. One example of such situations was wars, especially conquests. Apart from carrying out one task or another relating to re-drawing the maps of countries and of nations and shaping the world to move it in a direction favourable to the attainment of the Zionist goal, a quite narrow and specific interest was ... being pursued: that of gold.
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From the beginning of the British Mandate, Arab opposition to Zionism coalesced into organized resistance, taking the form of riots and later a revolt. The chief architects of this mischief were the Husseini clan led by Hajj Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti. The Mufti and others convinced Palestinian Arabs that the Zionists were going to dispossess them of their lands by force, and spread false rumors that the Jews were going to desecrate the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Riots and pogroms were instigated in 1920, 1921 and 1929 resulting in deaths and injuries in Jaffa, Hebron, Jerusalem, Motza and elsewhere. The British government increasingly understood that its promises to the Zionists and Mandate obligations were very unpopular in the Arab world. They split off a large part of the Palestine Mandate territory to form Transjordan and issued the Passfield White Paper that proposed limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
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Zionism did not spring full blown from a void with the creation of the Zionist movement in 1897. Jews had maintained a connection with Palestine, both actual and spiritual, even after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135, when large numbers of Jews were exiled from Roman Palestine, the remains of their ancient national home. The Jewish community in Palestine revived and, under Muslim rule, is estimated to have numbered as many as 300,000 about 1000 AD, prior to the Crusades. The Crusaders killed most of the Jewish population of Palestine or forced them into exile, so that only about 1,000 families remained after the reconquest of Palestine by Saladin. The Jewish community in Palestine waxed and waned with the vicissitudes of conquest and economic hardship, and invitations by different Turkish rulers to displaced European Jews to settle in Tiberias and Hebron. At different times there were sizeable Jewish communities in Tiberias, Safed, Hebron and Jerusalem, and numbers of Jews living in Nablus and Gaza. A few original Jews remained in the town of Peki'in, families that had lived there continuously since ancient times.
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Zionism