THE ZIONISTIC ROLE ON THE ISRAELI-PALESTINE CONFLICTS

The Zionistic role on the Israeli-Palestine conflicts

The Zionistic role on the Israeli-Palestine conflicts

Introduction

Zionism is the movement that from the late 19th to the mid20th century led the charge to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Although the movement coalesced around the formation of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1897 under the secular leadership of Theodor Herzl, its origins can be traced to the messianic fervor of certain sects of religious Jews who advocated for a Jewish return to the land promised them by God. Secular Zionists drew on these symbols but replaced the messianic rhetoric with an agenda rooted in both nationalism and socialism.

The Zionist movement used a variety of media to realize both its internal communication and public relations goals, including print, still images, film, and broadcasting. Zionists typically targeted non-Zionist Jews as well as non-Jewish populations to build political alliances, inform about and encourage empathy for the Zionist cause, and raise money for repopulation and infrastructure projects in Palestine. This entry examines the development of Zionism and the roles played by Zionist movement media beginning in the late 19th century until the establishment of Israel in 1948 (Carter, 2007).

Zionism was a by-product of the larger 19th-century push toward establishing the nation-state as the world's primary sociopolitical unit but equally a defense against the European nationalisms, which equated each nation with a single cultural/ethnic group often through virulently excluding minority-ethnic groups such as the Jews. Zionists asserted that even as Jews remained marginalized and victimized within newly emergent nation-states, the Jewish people also faced dissolution of their values and cultural heritage through assimilation. Zionists proposed that a Jewish state would offer Jews a sovereign homeland, equal to the other nation-states, but also unique (Buber, 2005).

Although socialism seeks to transcend nationality and address global class inequalities, Zionism meshed socialism and nationalism, encouraging Jewish populations, regardless of their country of origin, to form a separate national culture that would at last grant Jews equality of opportunity and the prospect of building socialist principles into a new state. The WZO sought to unite these different strands around the shared conviction that the Jewish people needed a homeland. Even as, the movement's political leadership considered several possible territories for establishing a Jewish state, including Argentina and Uganda, Palestine remained its primary focus because of the biblical and historical ties of the Jewish people to that body of land (Buber, 2005). In the next section, we will examine the Zionistic role on the Israeli-Palestine conflicts.

Discussion & Analysis

A historical Perspective of the Israeli-Palestine conflict

The Israeli-Palestine conflict has been going on for almost a century. Throughout this period of time, the conflict witnessed a lot of political tensions, military confrontation and open hostilities. These conflicts started with the establishment of the Zionist movement and the sequence of creating Israel in a territory that belongs to Palestinians. The seeds of this conflict were conceptualized earlier in the 19th century when the Zionist Rabbi Yehuda Alcalay published the first book in ...