Talk:Zionism#Question

I have a question, why is there no mention of the name :Bilad al-Sham on the whole article? This is part of the historical naming aspect from another perspective. I am more curious why there is no mention. Regards. Govvy (talk) 21:38, 28 May 2025 (UTC)

::Thank you for your response above. I appreciate the feedback and have reformatted the proposal for clarity, as well as explicitly labeled each source for WP:RS compliance. I confirm that this request is authored and fact-checked by me, with AI used only for assistance. I am fully responsible for the content. To my knowledge, Wikipedia permits editors to use AI as an assistive tool.

::All proposed changes remain unrelated to the sentence currently under community moratorium (as of 21 February 2025). They address misrepresentations and omissions elsewhere in the lead and are based entirely on verifiable, reliable sources per WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:DUE.

{{Edit semi-protected|Zionism|answered=yes}}

::Request to reopen edit proposal – All changes remain unrelated to arbitration-moratorium content.

::== 1. Misrepresentation of the Balfour Declaration ==

::Proposed change:

::> “The 1922 Mandate for Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration, supported the establishment of a Jewish national home while explicitly protecting the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities.”

::Sources (WP:RS):

::* UK National Archives, FO 371/30564 – full text of the Balfour Declaration.

::* League of Nations, 1922 Mandate for Palestine, Articles 2 & 6 – [https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/2FCA2C68106F11AB05256BCF007BF3CB?OpenDocument Official UN archive].

::== 2. Omission of Equal Citizenship Post-1948 ==

::Proposed addition:

::> “Following independence, Israel granted full citizenship to all residents within its borders, including approximately 160,000 Arabs, consistent with the principles outlined in the Balfour Declaration and UN Resolution 181.”

::Sources (WP:RS):

::* UNGA Resolution 181 (1947), Article 2 – [https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text]

::* Israeli Nationality Law (1952), Section 2(a) – [https://www.knesset.gov.il/review/data/eng/law/kns2_nationality_eng.pdf]

::== 3. Anachronistic Use of “Palestinians” Pre-1948 ==

::Proposed correction:

::> “An estimated 160,000 of the approximately 870,000 Arab inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine remained…”

::Sources (WP:RS):

::* Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, Oxford University Press.

::* Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry: “Palestine (pre-1948)” – [https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine]

::== 4. Definition of Zionism ==

::Proposed lead sentence:

::> “Zionism is a Jewish nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century, aiming to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.”

::Sources (WP:RS):

::* Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry: “Zionism” – [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zionism]

::* Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Schocken, 2003).

::* The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 7.

::These changes reflect verified historical content and comply fully with Wikipedia’s sourcing, neutrality, and due-weight policies.

::If any sources are questioned, please tell me which ones so that I can look into the matter and respond appropriately

::I respectfully request reconsideration. Thank you. Utalempe (talk) 15:10, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:{{not done for now}}: This page has 1,731 watchers, and I suggest you start a discussion on the merits of the material and its sources. Inclusion should be based on WP:CONSENSUS, not the opinion of one editor (me or you). —Fortuna, imperatrix 11:31, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

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| result = There is a moratorium on any discussion seeking to remove "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible." from teh article. Please see the current consensus notice at the top of this page. TarnishedPath^talk 01:23, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

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I propose the opening section of this article to begin as below. The article over all has gotten beyond the topic at hand. It ventures into the pejorative connotations of the term "Zionist," and does not clearly explain the basic concept. I state this because scholars have looked at the page and have come away with misconceptions.

Zionism  is the expression of the yearning of the Jewish people for home, what the Welsh would call hiraeth, combined with the Biblical commandment to reside in the land of Judea and Samaria.  To some extent it is a modern movement based upon this ancient one, “modern” meaning having begun in the early 1800s.

The term Zion (Ṣīyyon, or IPA: [tsijon]) comes from the name of the hill upon which King David built his palace.[1]  In early times, the Jews lived in an independent state in the area known as Palestine.  However, in 586 BCE, Babylonians captured Jerusalem and drove out most of the Jews.  The Jews rebuilt both the holy Temple and the society, yet again in 68 CE it was destroyed, this time by the Romans.[2]  Yet Jews have lived there throughout.

“Zionist” has taken on, in some circles, a pejorative connotation, based in part on the notion set forth in propaganda over the past couple hundred years that Jews have limitless power and have been concentrating it on committing heinous acts upon other citizens of the world.  (See also WikiPedia, Antisemitism and Timeline of Antisemitism.)

Over the centuries, Jews have repeated in daily prayers their desire to come back together as one people, in their historic land.  The yearning is so old, they signify it by pulling together the four corners of their prayer shawl and calling for returning “from the four corners of the earth.” (See Numbers 24:17, e.g.)

According to a report put forth on May 11, 2021, by the Pew Research Center, eight in ten U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.  Nearly six in ten express a personal emotional attachment to Israel, and a similar share reports following news about Israel.[3]  Of course, a central tenet in Jewish culture is that the laws of the country in which one lives supersede Jewish law.  Most Jews in the U.S. are Americans first; the idea of split allegiance was introduced to inspire prejudice against Jews (similar to the way it has been used against Catholics with the claim that their allegiance is split with the Vatican).

While some Jews have remained in the city of Jerusalem and surrounding territories for millennia, most have been dispersed to other lands all around the world.  Most of that dispersion has been the result of their place of residence deciding – regardless of how they were contributing to the society, how involved they were, how assimilated they had become, what they had to offer - they were no longer welcome.  In many cases the form of notification was torture and death.  (See also WikiPedia, The Timeline of Antisemitism.)

The feeling of longing to return was expressed in poem by Judah Halevi (ca 1085-1140 CE) living in Spain[4]:

My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west –

How can I find savour in food?  How shall it be sweet

to me?  How shall I render my pledges and vows, while

yet Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in

Arab chains?  A trifle would it seem to me to leave

all the good things of Spain –

Seeing how precious it would be to behold the dust

of the desolate sanctuary.

Underlying Judah Halevi’s expression of what would come to be known as Zionism was the acute awareness of how vulnerable were the Jews in Spain.  After the decline of the Córdoba caliphate early in the eleventh century, Arabs and Berbers rose in influence.  Educated Jews found welcome positions as physician, scribe, scholar, and advisor, but the political instability of the region would prove most unsettling to the Jews employed in the higher courts.  Halevi was said to have set out for the Holy Land, though there is no evidence that he made it there.[5]

On December 31, 1066, came the first recorded instance of Muslim persecution of Spanish Jews, when a Muslim mob stormed through Granada’s Jewish quarter.  In 1090, the Almoravides conquered Granada, and many Jews fled.[6]

Meanwhile, the Christian Crusades had begun.  Rumor had it that circa 1009 the Fatimid caliph had been behind the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and that he had done so on the advice of the Jews of Orléans.  Rodulfus Glaber, an eleventh-century anti-Jewish propagandist, around 1045 completed his Five Books of Histories. Most Christian publications were antithetical to Jews and Judaism, and this laid the groundwork for the centuries of the murderous Crusades across Europe and northern Africa.  The goal was the taking of Jerusalem (from the Muslims) for Christianity.  Meanwhile, Jews were being oppressed throughout the lands, being forced to convert, forced to work only in certain fields, and forced underground with their religious practices.[7]

Eventually, as socialism was being formulated generally among European Jews, Moses Hess (1812-1875) would begin to realize the value of creating a Jewish nation.  He detailed this in his book Rome and Jerusalem (1862).[8]

By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were 4,750,000 Jews in the world, with 72 percent in Eastern Europe, fourteen percent in Western Europe, and 1.5 percent in America.  The Jews of Western Europe found reasons to leave behind their Judaism and actually be welcomed in society, a change from their prior fates.  In Eastern Europe, however, czarist Russia held sway, and the persecution was horrendous.[9]

In 1827, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), a Jew who had served as Lord Mayor of London, visited Palestine and began working on plans to bring agriculture and industry to the region. Larger than life in many ways, and married into the Rothschild family, Montefiore set into motion a movement that Baron Edmond James de Rothschild (1845-1934) would further serve, saving the early modernization initiatives from collapse.  They were not interested in what would come to be known as Political Zionism, the belief that Jews must have their own state; they wanted only to create a refuge in the Holy Land for those who wished to go there to live or die.[10]

Thus, beginning in the 1880s, Jews were traveling to Palestine for such refuge.  Each year between 1881 and 1899, an average of 23,000 Jews left Russia, with most going to the United States, a few remaining in Europe, and even fewer going to Palestine.[11]  Living in Palestine was incredibly difficult.  They relied upon occasional contributions from Russian and Romanian philanthropic Zionists (known as the Hibbat Zion, lovers of Zion), and were battling the anger of the Turks who really did not want them in the Ottoman Empire.  According to one estimate, in 1914 there were 604,000 non-Jews and 85,000 Jews as the land became Palestine under the British Mandate.[12]

According to author Charles E. Silberman, in ''A Certain People"[13], some Jewish writers expressed the feeling that life living under other peoples' rule was a waste:

"In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, … secular Zionists accepted the notion that anti-Semitism was the inevitable if unfortunate by-product of the fact that Jews were different and thus resented by the host peoples among whom they resided.  The solution to “the Jewish problem,” therefore, was what Zionists called the “normalization” of Jewish life.  If Jews were allowed to create their own state, they would become k’chol ha-goyim, a nation like every other nation.  Those who wanted to remain Jews would move to the Jewish state, while those who remained in the Diaspora would disappear through assimilation – a phenomenon devoutly to be hoped for, because, as one Zionist theorist wrote, 'The Judaism of the Galut [Diaspora] is not worthy of survival.'"

He goes on, “To many Zionists of that time, the preceding eighteen centuries of Jewish history had been an aberration and a waste,” the thought being that the Jews had not made their own history, the non-Jews had made it for them.  Thus was the beginning of Secular Zionism which arose among those Jews who wished to shake the bonds of religion and recreate themselves as a people.[14]

See detailed information about Theodor Herzl, below, for historic context of this time period.

In 1904, soon after the death of Theodor Herzl, a young chemist named Chaim Weizmann moved from Vienna to Manchester, England.  Feeling the burden of the Zionist movement upon him, he continued to support what Herzl had created.  Both his career in chemistry and his work toward Zionism flourished.

World War I pitted the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria against the British Empire, France, Russia, and eventually Italy and the United States.  Dr. Weizmann recognized a difficulty in providing military munitions, and devised a formula for creating saltpeter (potassium nitrate) without the use of organic matter.  He offered the formula to the British government.  Asked what payment he was requesting, he indicated that he would give the formula to the government and would continue to produce the saltpeter through the fighting in return for a homeland for the Jewish people.[15]

Weizmann had met Arthur James Balfour (1^st Earl of Balfour, 1848-1930) in 1906.  Under consideration for a homeland was Uganda, despite Jews already living and actively immigrating to Palestine. According to Weizmann’s autobiography, as reported by Abba Eban[16], Weizmann met with Balfour, and to point out a different way of viewing the question:

Then suddenly I said:  “Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?”

He sat up, looked at me, and answered: “But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London.”

“That is true,” I said.  “But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.”

Meanwhile, Weizmann collected friends to the Zionist cause, including Charles Prestwich Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian (1846-1932); Herbert Samuel (1870-1963), first Jew to enter the cabinet and later the first high commissioner for Palestine; and David Lloyd George (1863-1945), who became minister of munitions in 1915 and prime minister in 1916.[17]

On November 2, 1917, Lord Balfour’s Declaration was put forth, saying:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Although the details remained to be determined, reclamation of a homeland was within sight.

----[1] The World Book Encyclopedia, January 1, 1961, edition, “Zionism.”

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/

Pew Research Center, Report of May 11, 2021.

[4] Eban, Abba, Heritage – Civilization and the Jews, Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1984, p. 144.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 145.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., page 237.

[9] Ibid., page 238.

[10] Ibid., page 246.

[11] Ibid., page 249.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Silberman, Charles E., A Certain People, Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1985.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Story Corps Archive, interview of E. Joseph Charny, October 26, 2016, https://archive.storycorps.org/interviews/mby015533/, at 16:00.

[16] Eban, Abba, Heritage – Civilization and the Jews, Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1984, p.255.

[17] Ibid. Etheldreda (talk) 18:51, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

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