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.

The Palestinian hovers around the edges of Zionist history as a poltergeist, only acknowledged when he thwarts the colonial project — for instance, by refusing to sell his land. This is a double bind that has not gone away. It is what Nasser Abourahme calls the “foundational impasse” of Zionism; despite its essentially unlimited access to weapons of mass destruction, despite its capacity to “evaporate” Palestinians with American munitions, Israel has not managed — and perhaps cannot ever manage — to exorcise the Palestinian from Palestine. It cannot even name the Palestinian in its midst.

In his exacting attention to detail, Jiryis does not editorialize. This is not a polemic. What emerges nonetheless is a portrait of Zionism as a clumsy, petulant, and desperate ideology: a mass movement that struggled to recruit its masses, a colonial organization whose settlers were ill-equipped for and immiserated by life in Palestine, a European political endeavor paralyzed by egoistic conflicts over succession and petty infighting among its leaders who cynically sought alliances with the very statesmen who sanctioned pogroms against the Jews. Zionism’s only real victory came through its canny appeals to imperial power. To succeed, in other words, Zionism made itself another name for Empire.

This strategy found its opportunity in World War I. The Zionist Organization played all sides, brokering pledges of support for the Jewish settlement in Palestine from France, Italy, the Vatican, Germany, Britain, and the United States. This ensured that the triumph of Zionism would be a foregone conclusion no matter who won the war. Ultimately, its alliance with Britain won the day, affording the British significant influence over the partitioning of the postwar Middle East. The Zionist Organization came to an agreement with the British Mandate to share power in Palestine, exploiting legal loopholes to streamline land acquisition and making Hebrew an official language. Zionist institutions also imposed restrictions on who could own land: once it passed into settler hands it could not pass back into indigenous ownership. 

It was also in this immediate postwar moment and the early years of the British Mandate that the Palestine Arab Congress was established, the first Palestinian political organization intended to address the growing emergency of Zionism. The Mandate and its Zionist partners refused to recognize the legitimacy of this Congress, and unsuccessfully sought to stir up divisions among Arab clans in Palestine in order to cultivate Arab sympathy for the Zionist cause.

From our vantage point, it might seem striking, troubling even, that Palestinian efforts to organize against Zionism came only after the war, more than thirty years after the first waves of Jewish settlement. Why wasn’t there a concerted political organization until that time? Yet the Zionists of the time had a highly sensible explanation for that: “There is no Arab national or political movement in Palestine,” proclaimed the Russian Zionist Yitzhak Epstein in a lecture titled “The Hidden Question” at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, in one of the few instances in which this generation of Zionists acknowledged the existence of Palestinians. “But this people has no real need of a movement,” he continued. “It is large and numerous and does not require a revival because it never ceased to exist for even a moment. In its physical growth, it exceeds all the nations of Europe. … Let us not make light of its rights.”

Amid all the Zionist grandstanding and moralizing in the early 20th century, this is an astonishing moment of candor that reads almost as a confession, not of guilt so much as of intent. This moment and others like it are constellated throughout The Foundations of Zionism, bare admissions that the lands claimed by Zionism already belong rightfully to the Palestinians who have always inhabited them and who never ceased to exist for even a moment. No sooner does the Palestinian appear in Zionist history than the legitimizing terms of Zionism collapse under their own weight.

What use is this history now, if we already recognize Zionism as a colonial project originating in imperial Europe? What does such granular knowledge offer to Palestinian solidarity?

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Part of the answer lies in the origins of The Foundations of Zionism in the milieu of the PLO Research Center in Beirut. From 1965 until its destruction during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the center produced translations of foundational Jewish and Zionist texts and commissioned Palestinian intellectuals to analyze them. Jiryis became its director in 1978. Soon after the raid in 1982, Israeli forces assassinated his wife Hanneh, along with seven others, prompting his relocation to Cyprus with his daughters. As a result, the third volume of The Foundations of Zionism never materialized. The book we have today — ending with the British Mandate — is the result of a militant experiment in anticolonial knowledge production, interrupted by the very colonial forces it sought to clarify.

In Reading Herzl in Beirut, Jonathan Gribetz describes the center’s work as an effort to “know the enemy.” With the intention of producing critical knowledge on Zionism, Judaism, and Israel, the center’s work was grounded in two beliefs: that making sense of the Zionist project is an essential first step in dismantling it, and that such knowledge would hone the edge of revolutionary praxis. But Gribetz ultimately argues that the work of the Center had a politically moderating effect on the PLO — that the militant scholars who strove to understand Israel did so in pursuit of “coexistence,” “sympathy,” and mutual understanding. This stands at odds with Jiryis’ conclusion published in the 2025 edition: “The indigenous people have not forgotten their rights and will not give them up.”

This is as close as Jiryis comes to editorializing. But it is a claim predicated on the 500 pages of history that preceded it, on his demonstrated mastery over the works of Zionist history. “It is fitting,” Mary Turfah writes of the introduction and the conclusion in her recent review of the book, “that the Palestinian appears before and after, presiding over the main text, seemingly preserved in a fantastic, self-enclosed world.” But the book derives its rhetorical force less from what Said might call Jiryis’s “permission to narrate,” his authorial authority over Zionist sources, than from his willingness to allow the Zionists to speak for themselves, to tell us themselves where the cracks in the proverbial armor can be found. Because the sum of Zionist history is marked by the unbearable and anxious contradiction at the heart of the colonial enterprise.

Consider what Russian Zionist Ahad Ha’am wrote upon his first visit to Palestine in 1891, at the height of the first aliyah:

“Those of us outside the country are used to thinking that all Arabs are primitive men of the desert, a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going on around it. But this is a great error, because Arabs, especially urban residents, see and understand our activity and goals in the country. They are silent and feign ignorance, because, as yet, they do not see our business as a threat to their future. … But if there comes a time when the activity of our people in the Land of Israel will develop to the point of pulling the rug, a little or much, from under their feet, then these people will not easily step aside.”

Ha’am is warning the future of what is already a clear impasse for Jewish settlement in Palestine: there is a people who will not step aside. He is anticipating a threat that is already clear and present, a threat that already unsettles the fantasy of Zionism as a “return home.” Indeed the mere watchful presence of the Palestinian preempts the very possibility that Zionists could ever feel “at home” in Palestine. Already, Zionism is “imagined, implemented, and lived,” to borrow from Ann Stoler, “in this anxious future tense.” There is no securable horizon for Zionism; there is “only an unsettled waiting for something else, for release from that anxious labor.”

The colonial project is too haunted by what Yitzhak Epstein called the “issue” that “outweighs them all”: the Palestinian. “The time has come,” he said, “to dispel the misconceptions among the Zionists that the land in Palestine lies uncultivated for lack of working hands or laziness of the local residents. There are no deserted fields.” Here he calls the annihilatory nature of Zionism into question here not because he believes it is wrong, but because it marks Zionism’s latent crisis. “Will those who are dispossessed remain silent and accept what is being done to them?” he asked. “In the end, they will wake up and return to us in blows what we have looted from them with our gold!”

These are neither pangs of conscience nor admissions of guilt; they are confessions of a truth that Zionists rarely name so clearly. Zionism, built as it was on untenable foundations, could not stand forever. And although Epstein called for more compassionate relations with the Arab peasants — to mollify their rage by hiring them as laborers on the settlements — he could not help but see Zionism as engaged in a zero-sum game, an ultimatum for the fate of Palestine: “Let us not depend upon the ash that covers the embers: one spark escapes, and soon it will be a conflagration out of control.” The appearance of the Palestinian in the history of Zionism is the possibility, indeed the promise, of the colony in flames.

To read The Foundations of Zionism today is to participate in something like a tribunal of history, and every last Zionist is guilty. But these confessions are moments of revelation that are also politically useful — because in them the Spartan facade of Zionism gives way to its anxious reality. These are truths that the Zionists can hardly admit to themselves: that the colonial settlement of Palestine was not, is not, will never be inevitable, that the forefathers and architects of the Nakba already recognized the coming intifada, that every attempt to extinguish the embers of Palestinian freedom only sets loose sparks that will burn the colony down. All those sparks, with any luck, will burn long and bright.