Jump to content

Zionism: In their own words

Add links
From Project Herzl

Ever wondered what did Zionist intellectuals say about Zionism? There has been a trend of “exposing” Zionism with fake quotations, which can be easily debunked. Here, however, we will not debunk them. This is a list of quotes from Zionist intellectuals and thinkers, about Zionism.

Few,... both among the Gentiles and the Jews themselves, have a perfectly clear notion of the aims and ways of Zionism; the Gentiles, because they do not care sufficiently...; the Jews, because they are intentionally led astray by the enemies of Zionism, by lies and calumnies, or because even among the fervent Zionists there are not many who have probed the whole Zionist idea to the bottom, and are willing or able to present it in a clear and comprehensible fashion, without exaggeration and polemical heat.

Quotes by leaders

  • Shall we with our inheritance do less than the Irish, the Serbians, or the Bulgars? And must we not, like them, have a land where the Jewish life may be naturally led, the Jewish language spoken, and the Jewish spirit prevail?

What Zionism is

  • The Zionist aspiration includes not only the return to the Land of Israel, but also the return to the soil.
  • Zionism is not a mere national or chauvinistic caprice, but the last desperate stand of the Jews against annihilation.
  • Zionism is the affirmation of our personality. We have faith in ourselves, our spirit, our destiny to be worthy of our past.
    • Bernard Lazare, Le Nationalisme Juif, 1898. Quoted in N. Sokolow. History of Zionism, 1919. i. 293.
  • [Zionism] provides an opportunity for communal work and political excitement; his emotions find an outlet in a field of activity which is not subservient to non-Jews; and he feels that, thanks to this ideal, he stands once more spiritually erect and has regained his personal dignity, without overmuch trouble and purely by his own efforts…. For it is not the attainment of the ideal that he heeds; its pursuit alone is sufficient to cure him of his spiritual disease, which is that of an inferiority complex, and the loftier and more distant the ideal, the greater its power to exalt.
  • Zionism is the return of the Jews to Judaism, before their return to the Jewish land.
    • Theodor Herzl, address to the first Zionist Congress, Aug. 29, 1897. Quoted in The People in Its Land, p. 108.
  • Let everyone find out what Zionism really is, Zionism, which was rumored to be a sort of millennial marvel—that it is a moral, lawful, humanitarian movement, directed toward the long-yearned-for goal of our people.
    • Theodor Herzl, address to Zionist congress, Basel, Switzerland (aug 29 1897). In Great Jewish Speeches Throughout History, p. 51.
  • It is the task of Zionism in the Diaspora to transform the Jews domiciled there into workers and producers. There, too, the chief thing is creation, not wealth.
  • Judaism is Zionism, and Zionism is Judaism.
  • Zionism is a new word for a very old object, in so far as it merely expresses the yearning of the Jewish people for Zion.
    • Co-Founder of Zionism Max Nordau in “Zionism.”
  • Zionism, as conceived and in part executed by Theodor Herzl, was the half-conscious instinct of a people integrating past and future together into the totality of the will to live and to be itself and only itself.

Spiritual, National, Hebrew revival and redemption

  • The Hebrew nation will either exist on its land with its language, or degenerate without a land and without a language.
  • If we wish that the name Israel be not extinguished, then we are in duty bound to create something which may serve as a center for our entire people, like the heart in an organism, from which the blood will stream into all the arteries of the national body and fill it with life.
  • Only when the day comes that we all speak one language — then we shall be one people.
  • The rebirth of Israel’s national consciousness and the revival of Judaism are inseparable. When Israel found itself, it found its God. When Israel lost itself, or began to work at its self-effacement, it was sure to deny its God.
  • The heart of the people—that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated.
  • For hundreds of years the Jewish masses have blindly searched for a way that will return them to nature, to the soil. At last we have found it. Zionism is the way.
    • Co-Founder of labor Zionism Ber Borochov, Nationalism & Class Struggle, (1907) 1937. p. 74.
  • You have brought me back to my people.
  • Audacity created the Zionist Congress. It was Theodor Herzl’s only weapon. ... The Zionist Congress enabled us to regain corporate responsibility of our national destiny. It gave a Galuth people status and an address. It is the forerunner of the Jewish State.
  • One people, one land, one language!
  • Children of Israel, be one band, and thus prepare yourselves for the redemption!
  • In the building of our ancient land, we will redeem our people, who has given and continues to give their share to human culture.
  • The national regeneration of the Jews must be initiated by a congress of Jewish notables.

Saving the Jews

  • [In order] that we may not be compelled to wander from one exile to another, we must have an extensive, productive land of refuge, a center which is our own.
  • I think Zionism a more difficult aim to realize than I ever did before...[but] if not Zionism, then nothing...then extinction for the Jews.
    • Henrietta Szold. After visiting Palestine for the first time in July 1909 and wrestling with the thought of settling there. She stayed for only one year before returning to America.
  • The Jews have but one way of saving themselves — a return to their own people and an emigration to their own land.
  • What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish to deprive Anti-Semitism—which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts—of its victim. They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hands a country (land) that is to-day a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been.
    • Co-Founder of Zionism Max Nordau in Zionism.
  • A day will come when Zionism will be needed by you, proud Germans [German Jews], as much as by those wretched Ostjuden. ... A day will come when you will beg for asylum in the land you now scorn.
  • See also first two quotes in “Spiritual, National, Hebrew revival and redemption”

About Jews

  • Judaism will be Zionist, or Judaism will not be.
  • A Jewish life must have a Jewish land.
  • Itoism says, “Zion is where the Jew lives as a Jew.”
  • The Jews are like other people, only more so.
  • A people that has learned to live without a country is unconquerable.
  • A great people cannot live without an ideal.
    • Max Nordau in a 1915 address delivered in Madrid, Spain.
  • Scratch the Jew and you found the Zionist in him.

Practical

  • If we are Zionists, as we say we are, what is the good of meeting and talking and drinking tea? Let us do something real and practical— let us organize the Jewish women of America and send nurses and doctors to Palestine.
    • Henrietta Szold. From an address to a women’s Jewish study group meeting at Temple Emanu-El in New York on Purim, February 24, 1912.
  • Loyalty to America demands that each American Jew become a Zionist.
  • There will be not only peace between us and the Arabs, ... but close friendship and co-operation.
    • David Ben-Gurion, to Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, March 19, 1946. The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations, p. 117
  • We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. All our aspiration is built on the assumption – proven throughout all our activity … that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs
  • The wealthy... have for the most part been indifferent to the appeal of Zionism. The power of the magnet is not felt by gold!
    • Zionist leader Jonas Friedenwald, Quoted in P. Goodman & A. D. Lewis, Zionism, 1916, p. 136.
  • Not sword, but peace we carry with us to the Land of Israel.
  • I want to express what we mean by a Jewish State. We mean by a Jewish State simply a State where the majority of the people are Jews, not a State where a Jew has, in any way, any privilege more than anyone else. What we want to have is more Jews in Palestine but not more privileges tor the Jews. A Jewish state means a state based on absolute equality of all her citizens and on democracy
  • I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.
  • [Even] after the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.
    • Ze’ev Jabotinsky in “What the Zionist-Revisionists Want,” (1926), trans. S. Weinstein, in The Jew in the Modern Word, A Documentary History, 2nd edition, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York and Oxford, 1995), p. 596.
  • We do not want to eject even one Arab from either the left or the right bank of the Jordan River. We want them to prosper both economically and culturally. We envision…equal rights for all Arab citizens will not only be guaranteed, they will also be fulfilled
  • Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law.
  • When the waste lands are prepared for colonization, when modern technique is introduced, and when the other obstacles are removed, there will be sufficient land to accommodate both the Jews and the Arabs. Normal relations between the Jews and Arabs will and must prevail.
    • Ber Borokhov, Eretz Yisrael in our program and tactics, Sep. 1917.

On Arabs, transfer and others

  • Palestine must be built up without violating the legitimate interests of the Arabs.. Palestine is not Rhodesia... 600,0000 Arabs live there, who before the sense of justice of the world have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home.
    • Ḥaim Weizmann, addressing the Fourteenth Zionist Congress in Vienna, 1925, quoted in Tessler, Mark, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 181.
  • We have always stretched out the hand of friendship to the Arab people and we shall continue to do so.
  • There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs... In saying this, I do not assume that there are tendencies toward inequalirty or discrimination. It is merely a timely warning which is particularly necessary because we shall have a very large Arab minority. I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish State by what it will do with the Arabs, just as the Jewish people at large will be judged by what we do or fail to do in this state where we have been given such a wonderful opportunity after thousands of years of wandering and suffering.
  • We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland
    • David Ben-Gurion to Palestinian nationalist Musa ‘Alami 1934, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War, 1985, p. 140.
  • You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non‑Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away? … Their well‑being, their individual wealth, we will increase by bringing in our own.
    • Theodor Herzel in a letter to to Yusuf Diya-uddin al-Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem.
  • We wholeheartedly support the right of self-determination for all peoples... and that undeniably includes the Arab people in Palestine.
    • David Ben-Gurion in 1930, quoted in Teveth, Shabtai, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948, p. 542.
  • The right which the Arabs in Palestine have is theirs as inhabitants of the country... because they live here, and not because they are Arabs... Arabs who do not live here have no rights in Palestine... The Arab inhabitants of Palestine should enjoy all civic and political rights, not only as individuals, but as a national group, just like the Jews.
    • David Ben-Gurion in February 1937, before the Histadrut council, quoted in Teveth, Shabtai, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948, p. 542.
  • Palestine is not an empty country... on no account must we injure the rights of its inhabitants.
    • David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, pp. 37-38.
  • Renewal in this land will come through renewal of the land itself, and that means the renewal of its Arab inhabitants.
    • David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 9.
  • [The Jews would use their] political influence, financial means, and moral support, to bring about the independence and unity of the Arab people.
    • David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 136.
  • Our sense of morality forbids us to deny the right of a single Arab child, even though by such denial we might attain all that we seek.
    • David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 159.

Other quotes

  • The State is not in itself an aim: it is a means to an end, the end of Zionism.
  • The world will be freer by our liberty, richer by our wealth, greater by our greatness.
  • If you will it, it is no dream
  • We come to Zion only by way of Zion.
  • The Jewish people do not want, and it must be said, cannot assimilate. They want to have a proper place among the other civilized peoples; without a special land of their own, they cannot achieve this, and since they need help more than all other peoples, we must come to their aid.
    • Joseph Trumpeldor. In a 1906 letter from his brother, in מחיי יוסף טרומפלדור, pp. 4-5.
  • For the first time the world is witnessing an attempt at settlement on a legal basis of international agreement. This entire situation is new in the eyes of legal science; and whoever comes to discuss a situation that is entirely new must not shrink in fear when encountering a conclusion that, at first glance, has no foundation in the traditions of yesterday.
  • Our idea offends no one's rights or religious feelings; it breathes long-desired reconciliation. We understand and respect the devotion of all faiths to the soil on which, after all, the faith of our fathers, too, arose.
    • Theodor Herzl, (editor Raphael Patai), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, pp. 720-721.
  • Return to Zion will have no brother in history.

Other notables

  • It is a nationalism whose aim is not power but dignity and health. If we did not have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded and violent people, I should be the first to throw over all nationalism in favor of universal humanity.
    • Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1934, p. 167.
  • Palestine is not only a place of refuge for the Jews of Eastern Europe, but the embodiment of the reawakening corporate spirit of the whole Jewish nation.
    • Physicist Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1934, p. 154.
  • Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality.
  • To be or not to be! To be the last Jews or the first Hebrews.
  • The promulgation of the Mission of Israel demands a world center, a world authority whence the forces actuating it could radiate in every direction.
    • David Lubin, letter to Brandeis, March 20, 1918. Quoted in O. R. Agresti. David Lubin, 343.
  • I’ve become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it. My primary aim is to go to Palestine, to work for it.
    • Hannah Szenes. A 1938 entry in her diary, which she kept at age seventeen and was published in Hebrew in 1945.
  • In our age, the choice for the Jew is between Zionism or ceasing to be a Jew.
  • The ultimate aim of the Zionists is to liberate the Jewish people from the peculiar psychological complex induced by the penalization to which they have been subject for centuries in the Gentile world.
  • Are you prepared to give up your mission so easily? Did your people suffer in exile for 2,000 years just to become like any other nation?
    • Orde Charles Wingate. Admonishing the head of the Egyptian Zionist Organization in Cairo in 1941, after he had said to General Wingate, the Bible-toting Scotch-English soldier friend of Israel (who was assigned the task of liberating Ethiopia from Italian occupation): “I am prepared to give up all this idea of a mission in the world; let us just become a free nation in our own country, just like any other nation.” Quoted in Moshe Kohn’s column in The Jerusalem Post, March 26, 1994.
  • Before, or at least along with, the redemption of the soil there must be also the redemption of the soul.
  • Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.
    • Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, 1997, State University of New York Press, pp. 413–14.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.projectherzl.com/wiki/Zionism:_In_their_own_words?oldid=5148"
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.
More information