Zionism: In their own words

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.

• Co-Founder of Zionism, Max Nordau, in “Zionism.”

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?
  • Louis D. Brandeis, A Call to the Educated Jew, 1916.

What Zionism is

• The Zionist aspiration includes not only the return to the Land of Israel, but also the return to the soil.
  • Menaḥem Ussishkin in “Between Shiny Gold to a Burning Sword”
• Zionism is not a mere national or chauvinistic caprice, but the last desperate stand of the Jews against annihilation.
  • Arthur Ruppin, The Jews of Today, 1913, p. 300
• 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.
  • Aḥad Ha‘am. Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism, p. 162.
• 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.
  • A. D. Gordon, Quoted in Shalom Spiegel. Hebrew Reborn, p. 416.
• Judaism is Zionism, and Zionism is Judaism.
  • Max Nordau, address, II Zionist Congress, Aug. 28, 1898.
• 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.
  • Stephen Samuel Wise, A Century of Jewish Progress, 1933.

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.
  • Menaḥem Ussishkin in “On The Revival of The 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.
  • Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in “A Burning Question.”
• Only when the day comes that we all speak one language — then we shall be one people.
  • Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in HaTzvi, 10 February 1888, “The Chronicles of the Week”
• 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.
  • Solomon Schechter, 1906. Quoted in J. H. Hertz. A Book of Jewish Thoughts. 116f.
• The heart of the people—that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated.
  • Aḥad Ha‘am, “The Wrong Way,” 1889. Ten Essays, 14.
• 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.
  • Louis D. Brandeis. After listening to an address by Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow in 1913.
• 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.
  • Louis Lipsky, Nov. 1921. Selected Worlds, 1927, i.161.
• One people, one land, one language!
  • Revivor of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, quoted in Ḥemda Ben Yehuda, New Palestine, Dec. 1950.
• Children of Israel, be one band, and thus prepare yourselves for the redemption!
  • Judah Alkalai. Havatzelet, vii. Oct. 22, 1876.
• In the building of our ancient land, we will redeem our people, who has given and continues to give their share to human culture.
  • Menaḥem Ussishkin in “The Yishuv and The War.”
• The national regeneration of the Jews must be initiated by a congress of Jewish notables.
  • Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation

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.
  • Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation
• 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.
  • Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896.
• 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.
  • Max Nordau, speech, Berlin, Jan. 23, 1899.
• See also first two quotes in “Spiritual, National, Hebrew revival and redemption”

About Jews

• Judaism will be Zionist, or Judaism will not be.
  • Max Nordau, address, Amsterdam, April 1899.
• A Jewish life must have a Jewish land.
  • Shmarya Levin. From his Arena (1932).
• Itoism says, “Zion is where the Jew lives as a Jew.”
  • Israel Zangwill, Territorialism as Practical Politics, 1913.
• The Jews are like other people, only more so.
  • Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917-1949 (1949).

• A people that has learned to live without a country is unconquerable.
  • Israel Zangwill. From The Future of the Jewish People
• A great people cannot live without an ideal.
  • Max Nordau in a 1915 address delivered in Madrid, Spain.

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.
  • Louis D. Brandeis, The Jewish Problem, 1915.
• 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
  • David Ben-Gurion in a 1937 letter to his son, Quoted in Palestine Betrayed.
• 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.

Other quotes

• The State is not in itself an aim: it is a means to an end, the end of Zionism.
  • David Ben-Gurion, speech, Aug. 13, 1948. Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, 276.

• The world will be freer by our liberty, richer by our wealth, greater by our greatness.
  • Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896.

• If you will it, it is no dream
  • Theodor Herzl, The Old New Land, 1902.

• We come to Zion only by way of Zion.
  • Martin Buber, Zion als Ziel und Aujgabe, 1936.

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.
  • George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876, chapter 42.

• To be or not to be! To be the last Jews or the first Hebrews.
  • Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Quoted in Not in the Heavens, p. 86.

• 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.
  • Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission, 1947, p. 66.

• 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.
  • Arnold J. Toynbee. From his Study of History (1934).

• 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.
  • Judah Leib Gordon, letter to S. Bernfeld, Jan. 31, 1888. Igrot, ii. p. 248.
• 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.