Review: “The Foundations of Zionism”

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For many of the earliest Zionist writers, there were no Palestinians in Palestine. Florid in their descriptions of Palestine as a millenarian utopia, they wrote barely a word about the people who had lived in that land for generations. The Jews will arrive, wrote the German proto-Zionist Moses Hess, at the “gates of Jerusalem,” a city seemingly without people; “fortified by its racial instinct,” the Jewish people will establish colonies “at the Suez Canal and on the banks of the Jordan”; and in so doing, they shall “turn the ancient soil into fruitful valleys, reclaim the flat lands from the encroaching sands of the desert.”

Energized by the nationalist heyday across Europe in the mid-19th century, these proto-Zionists primed the social, political, and religious institutions of Jewish life for the Zionism still to come. Decades before Christians in the West framed Zionism as a claim to “a land without a people for a people without a land,” these ideologues hardly made mention of the people of Palestine.

Perhaps this absence is hardly surprising, given that Palestine existed, in this proto-Zionist imaginary, as nothing more than the crucible for the end of the world. The Zionists’ messianic imaginations, likewise rooted in the land of Palestine, are totally unpeopled too: “We shall hear the trumpet blowing in the Galilee,” wrote Judah al-Kalai, a rabbi from what is now Bulgaria, “and our feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives.” Theodor Herzl himself famously never wrote publicly about the indigenous people of Palestine; the closest he ever came was to say that the Jewish state should be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

Palestinians would eventually make their appearance in the Zionist historiography, but crucially only as obstacles to the colonization of Palestine. It is this tension in the canonical texts of Zionist history that animates Sabri Jiryis’s magisterial book The Foundations of Zionism. First published in Arabic in two volumes — the first in 1977 and the second in 1986 — and newly translated by the author’s daughter, the writer Fida Jiryis, the book is an exhaustive history of Zionism’s emergence and its path to domination in Palestine. Sabri Jiryis, who was born a full decade before Israel even existed, studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and spent much of the 1960s seeking Palestinian self-determination by running for the Knesset. But after multiple stints in prison during those years, and certainly after the Naksa of 1967, his faith in the possibility of coexistence with the state of Israel seems to have vanished. In the new conclusion he has written for the English-language publication of Foundations, he affirms this impasse, given the extent of Israel’s exterminationism; his history of Zionism should be read, in this regard, as a history of the present.

This is a history that many readers could narrate in fairly broad strokes. Zionism originated in the crucible of European nationalism and imperialism as a solution to the so-called Jewish question in Europe. It found footing in Palestine with the assurances of the Balfour Declaration, and its appeal to European Jews grew as the Holocaust unfolded. By the end of World War II, the political and military infrastructure of Zionism was robust enough to seize upon the power vacuum of British withdrawal from Palestine. This would allow the Zionists to establish the state of Israel through the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in the Nakba.

It is indeed a history familiar enough. And yet it is one thing to know the broad strokes; it is another to follow event by event, decision by decision, plan by plan, how it came to pass. The genocide in Gaza, the settlement of the West Bank, the ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon, the bombardment of Iran, and the ultimate vision of “greater Israel” must be understood not merely as acts of monstrous violence but as the culmination of a methodical colonial project that was never inevitable. The history that Jiryis has produced in The Foundations of Zionism is so granular in nature that Theodor Herzl does not appear until more than 150 pages into the book; Britain does not issue the Balfour Declaration until page 312.

All the more significantly, the bulk of Jiryis’s sources were written in Hebrew; they are sources of history, in other words, by Zionists and for Zionists. This is because Jiryis takes seriously the need to reckon with the implicit logics of Zionism as a worldview, one that, for all its distortions of reality, all its Orientalist deliria, all its destructive tendencies, is at least partially internally coherent. Unlike Edward Said’s injunction to understand Zionism “from the standpoint of its victims,” Jiryis is telling us that those victims have good reason to understand Zionism from the standpoint of its zealots. The stories that Zionists tell of themselves, to themselves are often the most damning indictments of Zionism.