Zionism

Zionism

History of Palestine

During the 1880s, a group of Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe launched a political movement called “Zionism”. It called for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state to provide a haven for World Jews from the threats of minority status, assimilation and religious persecution. Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, published Der Juden Staat, a treatise that outlined the prevailing Zionist ideas regarding Jewish settlement in Palestine; and in 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, and the World Zionist Organization was created.

However, the number of Palestinian Jews in Palestine was negligible. When the Turks opened their empire to the thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution during the Spanish Inquisition, the vast majority had obviously not chosen Palestine, as in 1587 they numbered only 980 in Jerusalem. In the 1880s the Jews in Palestine numbered some 25,000, compared with 600,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians.

The first Zionist colony in Palestine was established in 1878, and in 1914 some thirty colonies had been founded, despite repeated Ottoman legislation to restrict them.

Relations between all three religions in Palestine was always peaceful and stable, mellowed by thousands of years of coexistence and shared adversities. As the number of Zionist settlements increased, however, the Palestinians began feeling uneasy.