User talk:DMH223344/sandbox-zionism-history

Actively returning

'Traditionalist Jews strongly opposed the idea of actively returning to their homeland'

I think the issue was actively returning en masse to Palestine (a national project). Traditionalist Jews did not oppose individual/family aliyot, though I can recall mention of one early rabbinical source which deemed even that sacriligious. No longer remember where. Nishidani (talk) 19:52, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Some further points

• Sela is cited 2002, 2003. Same book or different sources?

Nishidani (talk) 22:03, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

same book, 2002 is correct (now fixed) DMH223344 (talk) 16:37, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

expulsions

from Image and Reality: "Indeed, according to the former director of the Israel army archives, ‘in almost every Arab village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’. The number of large-scale massacres (more than 50 murdered) is put by the archivist at a minimum of 20 and small-scale massacres (an individual or a handful murdered) at about 100. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs’." DMH223344 (talk) 16:50, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, methodologically the essence here is get a broad outline out (we can condense by précis much of the text then) and thereafter thicken. Henry Laurens puts the figure of Palestinians killed in the conflict at over 13,000 (based on Arif's research on people who just disappeared) as opposed to Israel's loss of 6,000 (mostly there in combat with the intruding Arab national forces. Palestinians relative to the other Arab forces played little part: the society and its back and military resources had been thoroughly broken in the 1936-8 revolt.(In not only my view, that was the decisive factor in the successive outcome for a Jewish state in 1948) The best Palestinian estimate for massacres is over 64 if I recall correctly. I must go out for a beer or two but this eventually may be used as well.

• Saleh Abdel Jawad, 'Zionist Massacres: the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War,' in Chaim Gans, Eyal Benvenisti, Sari Hanafi (eds.), Israel and the Palestinian Refugees, Physica-Verlag 2007 978-3-540-68161-8 pp.59-127

No rush on any of this. The outline's the thing. But statistics should eventually play a role. They are often neglected in our history articles.Nishidani (talk) 17:13, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Comments

Hi DMH, sorry for the delay, I finally got around to reading this. This is a difficult topic to tackle and I think this draft tackles it very well. It was interesting to read, and well-sourced. It's much better than what is currently at the Zionist article, and bottom line, I think it'd be fine to publish it as it sits. "Having said that, I do have some thoughts."

• From a content standpoint, one thing I thought was missing was more discussion of the First Aliyah, Bilu (movement), moshava, and moshav, and the changes between First and Second Aliyah, particularly in economics. See Patrick Wolfe's "Purchase by Other Means" (free PDF), also discussed or at least mentioned in Shapira 1992 and 2014, Pappe 2004, and Masalha 2012 and 2018.
• The other thing I thought was missing was mention of the secret Zionist-Jordanian agreement to split Palestine, which I think most of the sources already cited in this draft cover.
• I think throughout, the draft could be improved by being clearer about dates or time periods. As I read through it, I was sometimes confused about when events were taking place, particularly when the text sometimes jumps around a bit chronologically. As an example: when were the forerunners of Zionism, and when were Pinsker and Herzl? This could be resolved by simply putting dates in the subheadings, or working it into the text. It doesn't have to be dates, it could be "early 19th century" or whatever works best.
• You're a good writer but there are times when I think the text gets a little too good for Wikipedia's target audience, which I think of as "bright teenager." The draft, at points, is written at what I'd describe as a post-graduate level, basically matching the level of the sources you're using, and I think that's too high of a level for Wikipedia. In other words, I'd dumb it down a bit in certain places. An example is the very first sentence: "The transformation of a religious and primarily quietistic connection between Jews and Palestine into an active, secular, nationalist movement arose in the context of ideological developments within modern European nations." It's a very well-written sentence, it gives a lot of information efficiently, it flows, but I think it'll go over the heads of most Wikipedia readers, who won't know what "quietistic" means. I'm more at the level of "Zionism arose at a time of ideological changes in Europe." And that's probably too dumbed down, but it's a stylistic preference, and, hey, props for having confidence in our readership.
• This is also a stylistic preference and I'm hesitant to suggest anything that calls for a substantial rewrite, but I think it's better to separate analysis from historical facts. In other words, write what happened in one chronology, and then have a separate analysis section that summarizes why people think it happened. Or another way to put it: have one section that has what everyone agrees on (the basic factual history), and another section that has what everyone does not agree on (analysis). I know there is another viewpoint that it's better to have analysis with the facts, because it aids the reader's comprehension of the facts. I still think for Wikipedia, we should have a "wikivoice section" and a separate "attributed section."
• FWIW Whenever I see a statement cited to a single source, I wonder if that's just the opinion of that one author or if it's a widely-held view.
• I hope you don't mind I fixed some typos I noticed.

Please take this feedback with a grain of salt as it's mostly stylistic, and I hope you find at least some of it helpful. Thank you for taking on this rewrite! Levivich (talk) 06:31, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

1. Fair point, the Bilu as I understand it was important in that they inspired the later zionists, but their project was mostly unsuccessful. As for contrasting the first and second aliyah, in the RS I went through I dont recall them emphasizing the point much beyond the emphasis on conquest of labor. I will do some rereading and bring something in that addresses these comments.
2. Thanks, I had meant to come back to this but never did.
3. great point
4. I should be able to take a few more sentences to explain the same concepts in a more straightforward way.
5. Originally, you had mapped out an outline which included a separate historiography section, which I am still planning to work on. The thought of writing a section about chronological facts sounds very dry to write and also to read, so I've tried to avoid that. What I've written here (including the analysis) is I think representative of the mainstream perspective except in the handful of cases where I attribute a claim to a specific author (and also when I just cite a single source for a claim). Even in those cases, I don't think other authors would disagree, but finding quotes from other sources to back up each claim multiple times is of course a lot of work. The historiography section would briefly explore the topics: "historiography of zionism as a form of colonialism" and "historiography of the 1948 palestinian exodus".
6. It would take some time, but basically every claim here should be sourcable from at least two RS
7. thank you!

Lastly, if you have some time still, I have also written a section about Ideology which could also use some feedback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DMH223344/sandbox-zionism-beliefs DMH223344 (talk) 15:44, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

continuation of point 5: Less discussed in RS (but still important) is the discussion around Zionism as redefining what it means to be Jewish (Avineri, Salmon, Shimoni, Yadgar all discuss this in some depth). DMH223344 (talk) 15:55, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

oh and also a discussion around what zionism is today/after 1948 (Lacquer for example thinks zionism is over after 1948 I believe) DMH223344 (talk) 15:58, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

On #1, I happen to have some cites/quotes in my notes, in case this helps:

• Masalha 2012 p. 39: "In the Zionist colony (Moshava), as opposed to the subsequent communal settlements like the Kibbutz and the Moshav, all the land and property are privately owned ... Their economy was based on agriculture, and, like all European colonies, they exploited cheap indigenous labour."
• Wolfe 2012 (linked above) pp. 140-141: "When the Zionist (or, more strictly, proto-Zionist) Bilu group landed in Palestine in the early 1880s, they can hardly have had the foundation of an exclusively Jewish nation-state in mind. At least, if any of them had such ambitions, they would have been hubristic in the extreme. Moreover, unlike their Second-Aliya successors, who began to arrive in the early years of the twentieth century, this group did not object to employing local Palestinian labour on the agricultural co-operatives that, after a false start, it established withfunding from Rothschild. By contrast, the Second Aliya firmly repudiated the Bilu group’s reliance on Native collaboration, devoting its unremitting energies – again, with diasporan financial support – to establishing Jewish-only enclaves, initially the moshav agricultural collectives and, ultimately, the rigorously ethnocratic kibbutzim."
• Shapira 2014: "[p. 32] The First Aliya also included relatively small groups from Hovevei Zion that had organized in their home countries, Russia and Romania, in order to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish agricultural settlement. Driven by nationalist motives, these groups included two groups of intelligentsia. The first, the Bilu association, consisted of young people, some of whom had acquired a higher education in Russia ... [p. 42] After the Uganda crisis, the Zionist movement sank into a deep depression, which worsened after Herzl’s sudden death in 1904 ... The older moshavot began to emerge from the crisis of the transition to JCA control, but the crisis mentality persisted, and numerous members of the second generation left the moshavot. It was amid this gloomy atmosphere that a new wave of immigrants began to reach Palestine—a group that would go down in history as the Second Aliya ... [p. 46] As we have seen, once the moshavot came under JCA control, hardly any Jewish workers remained in them. The youngsters who now began to arrive in the moshavot were a breed totally different from their humble, poor-spirited predecessors. ... They placed great value on their status as laborers, and the idea of overseeing the work of others—that is, exploiting their labor—was anathema to them ... The encounter between these radical, highly ideological youngsters and the reality of the moshavot was traumatic ... [Ben-Gurion] shifted the issue of Arab labor from the practical level of Jews obtaining work in the moshavot to the mythical level of breaking a taboo ... [p. 47] The debate on Jewish labor in the moshavot became a debate on the substance of Zionism ..."
• Liora Halperin's 2021 book The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past is all about the First Aliyah. She writes: "[p. 18] Nonetheless, historians still conventionally divide the period between 1882 and 1948 into five waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine. The moshavot are firmly enshrined as the central accomplishment of the first of these waves—the term is used only for privately owned colonies. The second wave is marked by ongoing labor activism within the older private colonies; the establishment of kibbutzim ( Jewish-only labor communes) and other labor settlements; and, come the 1920s, an infrastructure of workers’ organizations including the Histadrut labor union, various social service arms, and a militia (the Haganah)."
  • She also writes, at p. 44: "When Labor-oriented chroniclers and historians wanted to redeem the First Aliyah as a category, they elevated one tiny and essentially uninfluential group: Bilu."

So per Halperin, maybe Bilu isn't worth mentioning specifically. But I think something about the First Aliyah using Arab labor on the moshavot, and the Second Aliyah rejecting that in favor of exclusively-Jewish-labor kibbutzim, is worth elaborating on in the part where you mention the Conquest of Labor. I don't think it's the Bilu specifically that need to be mentioned, but rather that the views of Zionism, or Zionists relationship with labor, changed between the First and Second Aliyah. And I think it's worth noting that the kibbutz is something that came out of that change; that before the kibbutz, Zionist colonies were organized differently.

More broadly, or thematically, the theme that Zionism started as something broad and vague in the beginning, even contradictory, and ended up, by the time of Israel's creation, becoming something rather narrow and specific, still called "Zionism." From broad to narrow: Judaeism->proto-Zionism->early Zionism->Political Zionism->Labor Zionism->Israel ... and all of these things are called "Zionism." I think it's important for the reader of the Zionism article to know that the word "Zionism" can mean, depending on who's saying it and the context, "the Jews," or "Israel," or the "Political Zionism"/"Labor Zionism" of Herzl and Ben-Gurion; that the "Zionists" of 1948 were a subset of the "Zionists" of 1897, and that even the Israelis of today are different from, maybe a subset of, the Zionists of 1948. As you said, what Zionism is today/after 1948.

I also agree about the redefining the Jew thing, the whole "Heroic Jew" stuff, is another aspect I've seen lots of sources spend lots of pages talking about.

On #5 and #6, yeah, it would be a ton of time to add a second source to everything, I certainly wouldn't suggest you or anyone undertake that (after all, I wouldn't want to spend my time on it). There may be some specific lines where it's worth doing. A couple of examples of "is it just one person's opinion or is it really scholarly consensus?":

1. "Herzl's project was purely secular, the selection of Palestine, after considering other locations, was motivated by the credibility the name would give to the movement." cited to Masalha 2018. Also: was that Herzl's motivation, or Zionism's motivation? Surely, there are plenty of RS that would say the selection of Palestine was motivated by more than just the credibility the name would give to the movement? I mean, Eretz Yisrael isn't just about a name, it's about a certain geographical area, being important to a lot of people. If it wasn't called "Palestine," they'd still want to move there. Right?
2. "Those who went to Palestine were driven primarily by ideas of self-determination and Jewish identity, rather than as a response to pogroms or economic insecurity." cited to Avineri 2017. Per our discussion at Talk:Israel, I think "primarily" is the view of some scholars (Avineri, Stanislawski, Rabkin), but other scholars say "equally important" (Shimoni, Sternhell, Shlaim). (Our recent discussion about this is why that line jumped out at me.)

I'll add the ideology draft to my reading list. Cheers, and thanks again for undertaking this! Levivich (talk) 23:02, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

all great points, thank you. and thanks for those quotes.

"I think it's important for the reader of the Zionism article to know that the word "Zionism" can mean, depending on who's saying it and the context,..." I think this is important as well, although I've tried in this article (and the ideology one) to highlight the basis of zionism rather than explore the full ontology. What I've tried to do here is make a distinction between groups based on time periods: forerunners, early zionists and zionists. The different brands of zionism (revisionist, labor etc) are all just zionist factions--not really different ideologies or movements. Maybe I need to make that a little more clear in my writing. I will have to do another literature review to understand zionism in Israel (post 1948).

I think Penslar wrote in one of his books that the term "Zionism" has been used to describe many approaches to addressing the "jewish question". I'm unsure what you mean when you say that "Judaeism" is called "Zionism" though. DMH223344 (talk) 23:56, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Like when it's used as a dog whistle, like when a British politician said "the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler" [1] [2]. Come to think of it, this stuff about how the word is used or what it means probably belongs in the "Terminology" section and not the "History" section. Levivich (talk) 00:05, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

ah i see--quotes in this topic can be nauseating. i think in this draft it should already be very clear that judaism is not the same as zionism, so is it even worth addressing? It seems like undue weight DMH223344 (talk) 00:17, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's worth addressing in the History section, but maybe in the Zionism#Terminology section. My thinking on that is that it's a global encyclopedia, and I can easily imagine that some readers -- like, because of where they grew up or were educated -- might actually be surprised to learn that "Zionist" does not mean "Jew." "Not all Jews are Zionists" seems to me to be an important point (but not part of the history section). (Admittedly I'm pretty biased on that as a non-Zionist Jew.) Levivich (talk) 00:30, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

wanted to add this quote from Shafir to the list you gave above:

The former, the ethnic plantation colony, was the dominant colonization model of the First Aliyah (1882–1903), in which low-paid Palestinians served as a lower caste in the settler colony. The latter, the pure settlement colony of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), which worked toward excluding Palestinians from the new soci- ety and its labor market, eventually predominated. The Second Aliyah’s revolution against the First Aliyah did not originate from opposition to colonialism as such,but out of frustration with the inability of the ethnic plantation colony model to pro- vide sufficient employment for Jewish workers, i.e., from opposition to the particu- lar form of their predecessor’s colonization. The Second Aliyah’s own method of set- tlement, and subsequently the dominant Zionist method, was but another type of European overseas colonization – the pure settlement colony, also found in Austral- ia, the northern USA, and elsewhere. Its threefold aim was control of land, massive immigration, and employment that ensured a European standard of living.

DMH223344 (talk) 23:32, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Comment from Bitspectator

Hello DMH. This is good work. My feelings as a new editor interested in this topic -- I'm not sure why you start where you start. You eventually hit these topics, but I would begin by talking about: Jews becoming a diaspora, ethnogenesis of Jewish groups, ethnogenesis of the Palestinians, demography of Palestine, Jewish persecution. Then emergence of Jewish national consciousness. I would like to know who the players are before you start. Also, I think your writing is too poetic. I would prefer more simple and matter-of-fact writing for such a sensitive topic. Thank you for your efforts. Bitspectator (talk) 19:47, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi Bitspectator, thanks for your comments. Other editors also commented on the style. It's on my list to address that. As for the "why did I start there", it's where most RS start when talking about Zionism. Many of them start later than I do. DMH223344 (talk) 20:24, 20 September 2024 (UTC)