Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.
Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to new waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Zionist movement, now led by Theodor Herzl, associated this national revival with Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the Mandate for Palestine, governed by Britain, explicitly privileged Jewish settlers over the local population. In 1948, after the end of the British Mandate, the State of Israel declared its independence and war broke out. During the war, Israel expanded its territory to control over 78% of former Mandatory Palestine. As a result of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, an estimated 160,000 of 870,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming a Palestinian minority in Israel.
Zionist views have varied over time and are not uniform, resulting in a variety of types of Zionism. The Zionist mainstream has historically included Liberal, Labor, Revisionist, and Cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement. Religious Zionism is a variant that combines secular nationalism and religious conservatism. Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (who were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors. Opponents of Zionism often characterize it as a supremacist, colonialist, or racist ideology, or as a settler colonialist movement.
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