Secular Jewish nationalism was based on the cultural identity of the Jews that was fostered and in this period, that is the turn of the century, the end of the 19th and early 20th century. Through the Jewish languages of the time, Yiddish and Hebrew that were both used by the Jews of Europe. Hebrew more by the educated people and Yiddish by the general masses of the pop, the Jewish population. But it is interesting to note that this Jewish nationalism was not fostered in rational Polish languages that the Jews also spoke but in typically Jewish languages emphasizing the connection between language and nationhood as other nations did in Europe at the time. Nationalism was, of course, a secular idea. Nationalism is about the salvation of men by men, salvation of the human condition by the acts of men themselves, that is distancing people from the idea of salvation by god and by religion. A question that arose, of course, in this regard, was why should the Europeans support the idea of Zionism? How would Herzl and the Zionism movement get the Europeans to support the Zionist idea? Herzl was convinced, actually, that since antisemitism was so deeply rooted in Europe,that they would support Zionism, as way of ridding themselves of the Jews. That would allow the Europeans to appear both progressive by supporting the idea of Jewish self determination, without seeming to be racist and thus in conflict with their own humanist and progressive self image. The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in Switzerland in August, 1897,and the congress gave indeed a great deal of publicity to the idea and to the political mobilization of the Jewish people. Herzl, as I mentioned already, as a journalist, was a man of public relations and appearances. It was therefore very important as the pictures of the conference show, how all the delegates to the conference appeared in tuxedos and top hats to make it look very serious and distinguished but Herzl was not just about appearances, his emphasis was on self help. Enough of this protected Jewry, schutz Judentum, that is Jews as protected by their Gentile neighbors which wasn't always a safe policy. Zionism as the historian David Vital points out, re-created the Jews as a political nation and by so doing it revolutionized their collective and private lives. The Jews were now not just a religious community, the Jews were a people, with national rights. Not just a community of believers, which many Jews at this time were no longer that observant in their religious belief and these new Jews, these Zionist Jews, were indeed to seeking to formulate a new secular, Jewish identity. Zionism therefore, was a radical course of departure for those who found the Jewish condition intolerable. Not all Jews agreed on this approach. One for example, was a Jewish publicist of the, the late 19th and the early 20th century, Ahad Haam, who believed very strongly not in the creation of a state for the Jewish people, but just in spiritual Zionism. He argued that the issue was not the predicament of the Jews, but the predicament of Judaism. There was a need not to solve the problem of the Jews but to reform Judaism in accordance with modern times. The problem of the Jews according to Ahad Haam could be solved by immigration to the United States. Palestine rather than being a state for the Jewish people should be a centre for spiritual revival. The creation of a state could be just another Serbia, he argued. No state could be established without the eventual resort to force and that was not Jewish,but mainstream Zionists preferred for the Jews to be a normal people just like all others and events in Europe also had an impressive influence on this discussion. In 1903, there was the terrible Pogrom against the Jews in Kishinev. That is in present-day Moldova, then part of the Russian Empire. Where scores of Jews were raped and massacred by their gentile neighbors and this Pogrom of Kishinev came after a long period of twenty years of relative quiet and the awful nature and the terrible losses of the Pogrom of Kishinev were a huge shock for the entire generation of Jews in Eastern Europe. Change was imperative. The Jewish situation in Europe was intolerable and there were these three options that we've mentioned,immigration, socialist politics, or the Zionist solution. In the poetry of the time, Hebrew poets wrote about the awful helplessness, shame and disgrace of the Jewish predicament. There was a need for self-defense and the whole Zionist idea from the Jewish point of view was a historical act of self defense against their tragic and awful fate. As some put it, a land without a people, for a people without a land. But, in fact, the Zionists knew a lot better than that. A very often quoted sentence. The Zionist knew and as Ahad Haam had often said and others had observed,the land was not empty. There was another people in Palestine, and the Zionists were acutely aware of it from the very beginning,but the Zionists tried to convince themselves that the Arabs were not really hostile, and would ultimately acquiesce, because they would benefit from the advantages that the Zionist project would bring to Palestine. The Zionists would bring modernity and prosperity and the Arabs would benefit from that just like the Jews would, and would eventually acquiesce in the Zionist project. There would be no need to resort to force, so the Jews believed and the Jews never had any force in the beginning anyway,but the Arab response was very different. As we have seen in other contexts relating to the Middle East of the 19th century, the European challenge had exposed the undermining of the historic sense of Muslim superiority. The European challenge was a revelation of the current weakness and inadequacy of Muslim societies in the Middle East. Challenged by the expansionist, modernizing, industrialized west, Designer's project was seen as an extension of this western expansionism in the Muslim heartlands. Zionism challenged the Arabs,at a time of Muslim decline and Zionist success against the odds as things turned out later on, was seen by the Arabs as a symptom and a consequence of Muslim underdevelopment and political failure. Israel was therefore a kind of monument as it developed to Arab political failure. Israel was also a western bridge head, as it was seen from the Arab side and, therefore there was very significant reasons for the Arabs to oppose the project from the very beginning. As for the Zionist they understood the Balfour Declaration from the very beginning to mean support for a Jewish state, which is not exactly what the Balfour Declaration ,did in fact say, as we have already seen. But the Zionists had a few assumptions that were not always proved to be correct. The Zionists believed that they would very soon establish a Jewish majority by immigration in Palestine, and once they established the Jewish majority in Palestine, they would be able to establish a Jewish state. The Jews would soon out number the Arabs, who in the early 20th century were less than 700,000 in Palestine itself,but these Zionist assumptions were flawed. The immigration that they expected of some 70-80,000 a year did not materialize. The belief that they could create a majority in about a decade or slightly more did not turn out to be a very solid belief. By 1930, there were only 170,000 Jews in Palestine, that is just 15 to just 20% of the total, no where near the majority and indeed, until 1948 when the state of Israel was finally established, the Jews had not established a majority in all of Palestine.
