Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Debra and Avi Naider and Jody and Ari Storch. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or just to say what up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.

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Welcome back to our five-part journey across the centuries, exploring why Jews have remained so connected to the land of Israel. 

Last week, we explored the reawakening of spiritual Zionism all over the world, as medieval poets and hilltop mystics and ordinary, humble Jews dreamed of Jerusalem. Some Jews actually made the difficult journey towards the dusty land that had once been the crown jewel of the Levant. Others funded these expeditions, eager to see Zion rebuilt. Most Jews, however, merely prayed and hoped, Jerusalem no more concrete to them than a dream.

But the world was changing. In the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas began to knock down ghetto walls. Emancipation raised questions. Nationalism suggested answers. Antisemitism took on new forms. An ancient dream collided with modern upheavals, eventually resulting in a state.

It was messy. It was complicated. And it is where this episode begins.

Chapter 1: Free at Last, Maybe
If humanity had been fumbling in the dark for centuries, the Enlightenment claimed to flip the switch.

For much of Europe’s history, power rested with Church and Crown. Ordinary people weren’t meant to question authority, expect rights, or imagine alternatives. The Enlightenment challenged all of that. Thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke argued that human beings were born with inherent rights that governments had an obligation to protect. More radical still, they suggested those governments should be accountable to the people they ruled.

Today, this sounds obvious. But at the time, it was explosive. These ideas didn’t just reform European society, they destabilized it. Revolutions followed, most famously in France, where thousands died in pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

For Jews, this new world was both thrilling and disorienting. Freedom and equality were not simple gifts, especially for a people who had spent centuries on the margins of European society. 

In 1791, France became the first country to grant Jews full civic equality. Slowly, much of Western and Central Europe followed. After centuries of persecution, Jews were emancipated, freed from legal discrimination, and granted citizenship. They now enjoyed possibilities their grandparents could not have imagined, including suffrage, access to universities, and a role in public life.

But emancipation came with strings attached.

Before fully emancipating French Jews, Napoleon posed a blunt set of questions to Jewish leaders. Were Jews allowed to intermarry? Did they see non-Jewish Frenchmen as brothers? Would Jews born in France consider themselves French, fight for France, obey its laws?

The question underneath all of it was simple and familiar. Could Jews be loyal citizens of the countries they lived in, or were they forever a people apart, their hearts always turned toward Jerusalem?

The rabbis who answered Napoleon’s questions knew they were walking a tightrope. Emancipation meant equality, but it also meant expectations. In exchange for full citizenship, Jews were asked to become less conspicuously Jewish. Instead of being Jews first and only, they would now be Frenchmen or Germans who just happened to practice a peculiar religion. For many Jews in Western and Central Europe, this seemed like a fair trade.

From that tension emerged a distinctly Jewish version of the Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah, from the word sekhel, reason. Its champions, the maskilim, believed Judaism was fully compatible with reason, logic, and modern European culture. Which meant that Jews didn’t need to abandon Judaism, just refine it. Get secular educations. Integrate. Step out of the ghetto and into the wider world.

But the Haskalah wasn’t just a surface makeover. In his epic book about Moses Mendelson, historian Shmuel Feiner writes that at its core, the movement was an existential wager. Europe would accept the Jew if the Jew just… changed. Made himself a little less… you know, Jewy. 

As Judah Leib Gordon, a leading poet of the 19th-century Haskalah, put it: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home.” In essence: to gain acceptance in public life, Jews had to confine their Jewish identity to the private sphere. 

This often created a divided and fragile sense of self, but plenty of Jews signed on, hoping this was the end of the blood libel, of legalized discrimination, of social isolation and their neighbors’ disgust. They felt they were making a decent gamble. They’d leave their kippot at home if it meant the end of antisemitism.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Who saw that coming?

The more Jews integrated, the more their neighbors resented them. Because integration didn’t make Jews disappear. It just made them visible as competitors, economically and culturally.

The Enlightenment overhauled cultural norms, including antisemitism. Religion was out, science was in, and antisemitism got a makeover for the 19th century. Hating Jews for their religion was so passe. Hating Jews for their inherent racial inferiority, though – I mean, that’s just good science.

I wish I were joking, but I’m not. Race science recast Jews as inherently and unchangeably inferior, and no loyalty oath or baptismal font could wash away that kind of stain. 

Nerd corner alert: we owe the word antisemitism to exactly this kind of pseudo-scientific racism! In 1879, journalist Wilhelm Marr decided that the German word for Jew-hate – judenhass – was too old-timey, because it emphasized religion. But he was a man of science! He didn’t hate Jews because they prayed funny or killed Jesus. He hated Jews because they were racially inferior. So he repackaged a very old hatred under a new name: antisemitism. 

Marr either didn’t know or didn’t care that Semitic is a class of languages, not people. Hebrew is a Semitic language, but it isn’t spoken by “Semites,” because technically, there is no such thing as a “semite.” But antisemitism just sounded so modern and scientific. And so we owe Marr not just for the new name, but for the fact that to this very day, some profoundly annoying people claim they can’t be antisemitic because they’re Semites themselves. Friends, this is not a clever argument. But I digress.

If Emancipation had felt like a promise, the Dreyfus Affair shattered it completely.

By 1894, French Jews had been citizens for over a century. They served in the army, participated in public life, believed they belonged. And yet, when scandal erupted in the French army, suspicion immediately landed on a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Actual evidence didn’t matter. In the court of public opinion, the evidence was that Dreyfus was a Jew. 

Accused of treason, Dreyfus was publicly humiliated, stripped of rank, and condemned as a traitor, as crowds screamed “Death to the Jew.” Throughout the ordeal, he maintained his innocence and loyalty, shouting “Vive la France,” long live France, even as his country turned on him.

Among the screaming mob was a young Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl. Within a few years, he would convene the first Zionist Congress. Within a few decades, the Jewish people would have a state.

But we’ll get there.

Meanwhile, to the East, Jewish life looked very different. Forget accusations of dual loyalty, forget accusations of treason. The peasants of the Russian Empire had a more direct way of dealing with undesirables. Pogrom after pogrom ripped through the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine, killing tens of thousands. As historian Anita Shapira put it, this violence was a clear message: you are forever strangers in a strange land.

And so while Jews in Paris and Berlin put their faith in Enlightenment ideals, the Jews of Eastern Europe looked to the heavens instead. In the 18th century, a mystic known as the Ba’al Shem Tov sparked a spiritual revolution among the poorest and most battered Jews of the region. He taught that God could be found not only in books and scholarly debates, but in songs, stories, joy, and everyday life.

This movement became known as Hasidism.
As in, Hasidic.
As in, Williamsburg.
As in, amazing fur hats.

The Ba’al Shem Tov was the anti-elitist, emphasizing that what is in your heart matters just as much as what’s in your head. His movement was both mystical and accessible, teaching that anyone could cultivate an intimate relationship with God. That in fact, God didn’t demand strict rationality and asceticism, but joy. Ordinary Jews fell in love with Hasidism. The scholarly elite, uh, didn’t.

But here’s what’s critically important, especially for this series: the connection with the land of Israel. Both the Hasidim and their fiercest critics, the so-called misnagdim, or “opposers,” shared some spiritual DNA with their Kabbalistic forebears in 16th century Tzfat, including their deep longing for redemption and for the Land of Israel.

For some misnagdim, that longing translated into action. If redemption demanded a rigorous adherence to Jewish law, where better to live out those ideals than the Holy Land? Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, small groups of elite scholars made their way to Jerusalem and Safed, with the full encouragement of their leader, the Vilna Gaon, also known as the Gra.

If Hasidim and misnagdim were theological enemies, a third group of Jews brought them, if not together, then at least to the same side. Many enlightenment Jews, or maskilim, had been born into observant families, but turned away from the yeshiva and towards the university. They championed secular learning, reason, and full integration into European society. 

But they were still Jews, so they put a Jewish spin on Enlightenment ideas, immersing themselves in Jewish texts and Hebrew literature. As the cradle of Jewish civilization, the Land of Israel figured prominently in their scholarship. But the Land of Israel was Jewish history. Berlin, Vienna, the great cities of Europe – those were the Jewish future. Zion mattered. But Zion could be remade and renewed right here. 

Got all that? Yeah, it’s a lot. Let’s review. There were three major Jewish groups in Europe, and later in the Land of Israel, during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Hasidim trusted God.
Misnagdim trusted discipline and study.
Maskilim trusted reason and progress.

They disagreed fiercely about almost everything, conceptualizing their Jewish identity in very distinct ways. But deep down, they were all striving towards Zion, dreaming of a world in which the Jewish people could at last fulfill their purpose without the violent interference of their neighbors.

Together, they set the stage for a new question, one that rejected both total integration and total withdrawal from the secular world: What if the answer wasn’t fitting in, or praying harder… but going home?

II. Homeward Bound?

As we’ve seen over the past few episodes, political Zionism didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was rooted in centuries of Jewish ritual, poetry, and longing for Zion. It just needed a modern frame.

Enter: nationalism. As various ethnic groups began organizing around their  shared language, land, and identity, some Jews began to rethink exile not as a spiritual condition to be endured, but as a political problem with a political solution.

One of the first to make that leap was Moses Hess, a German Jewish philosopher and onetime comrade of Karl Marx. Where Marx rejected both nationalism and Judaism, Hess championed both. In 1862, he published Rome and Jerusalem, which argued that Judaism wasn’t merely a religion but a national identity. Which meant that like all other nations, Jews deserved sovereignty and self-rule.

Hess imagined a Jewish return to Zion as a moral project, not merely a desperate insurance policy for people trying to avoid being murdered by their neighbors. His vision of a Jewish society built on justice, cooperative labor, and spiritual renewal would one day be called Labor Zionism.

Hess’ ideas didn’t land with most of Western Europe’s wealthy, integrated Jews. Leave the salons and cafes of Paris and Berlin to rebuild a long-lost Jewish commonwealth in a swampy backwater in the middle of nowhere?

Get real.

But a generation later, a wealthy, assimilated, educated young journalist reached the exact same conclusion as Hess. And now, we come back to Herzl. Theodor Herzl was the model of a fully emancipated Jew – and yet he read the writing on the wall. In Der Judenstaat, he warned that emancipation and integration had failed. Catastrophe was coming for the Jews of Europe. Which meant Jewish sovereignty was not some distant ideal, but a necessity for any Jew who wanted to survive the 20th century.

But not every early Zionist was preaching doom and gloom. Some, like Ahad Ha’am, focused on the importance of a Jewish cultural revival. These cultural Zionists, as they came to be known, envisioned a Jewish spiritual renaissance in the Land of Israel, a renewal of the Hebrew language, Jewish scholarship, Jewish culture. Unlike Herzl, who pictured a Jewish state more or less indistinguishable from other Western European countries, Ahad Ha’am’s dreamed of a community – not necessarily even a state – that would remind the world what being Jewish actually meant. (In fact, his love of the Jewish nation inspired his pen name. Ahad Ha’am literally means “one of the people.” His birth name was Asher Ginsberg.)

Mostly, though, these highfalutin visions didn’t convince Jews to become Zionists. Most became Zionists for the simple reason that they didn’t want to die on the business end of a Cossack’s bayonet. In 1882, the Russian Jewish physician Leon Pinsker argued that Jews would never be accepted in Europe. The days of pleading for tolerance were over. The only solution was to build Jewish power. 

In his pamphlet Autoemancipation, he wrote:

“To the living, the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.”

In 2,000 years, nothing had changed. It was time to try something different. It was time for the Jewish people to emancipate themselves – not by begging for scraps, but by taking control of their own destinies.

But innovation is hard. Imagination is hard. I hate to quote the antisemite Henry Ford, but this possibly-apocryphal line is just too good. Quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In other words, true innovation does not come from just improving an old model, but from finding the chutzpah to envision a different model entirely. When all you know are horses, it’s hard to imagine a car, until someone shows you a whole new world.

Sure, antisemitism was a problem. But many of the Jews of Europe were stuck in the old model. They simply couldn’t imagine a new solution. And the ones on offer – finding liberation by going backwards 2000 years – neither appealing nor convincing. Make the trek to Ottoman Palestine, to scratch out a living in a backwater choked with dust and malarial swamps?

No, thanks. They’d create solutions right here, where they already lived. Yes, their horse was slow. That didn’t mean they couldn’t find a faster one.

So instead of turning to Zionism, most of Europe’s nine to ten million Jews pursued other paths towards acceptance. If roughly 1-3% were Zionists, another 5-10% turned to socialism. Still a minority among Jews, but a bigger one than the crazy Zionists. In 1897, as Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress, a group of Socialist Jews issued their rebuttal.

They formed the General Jewish Labor Bund, which championed doykeit, “here-ness.” Instead of distracting himself with a pipe dream a million miles away, they would fight for justice in the here and now. And justice meant workers’ rights, Jewish cultural autonomy, and a thriving Diaspora Judaism. 

Tragically, history had other plans. Plans that Herzl, that prophet of disaster, could see from a mile away, even if others couldn’t.

Chapter III: The Herzl Story
History may be punctuated by tragedy, but it’s also got a sense of irony. Of all the early Zionists we’ve discussed so far, Herzl was perhaps the least likely to coalesce these crazy ideas into an effective political movement.

Born in 1860 into a wealthy, secular Jewish family, Herzl grew up with all the promises of emancipation. He had a first-rate education, non-Jewish friends, and an iron-clad conviction that antisemitism was a quirk of the past. 

But he could admit when he was wrong.

Maybe you’ve learned that Herzl was radicalized by the Dreyfus Affair, horrified by the Parisian mob shouting DEATH TO THE JEW. It’s a good story, one that Herzl himself played up for dramatic effect, but it’s probably not entirely true. As friend-of-the-podcast Haviv Rettig Gur has pointed out, Herzl had already encountered antisemitism and exclusion during his college years, despite his eagerness to assimilate. He was so devoted to the idea of integration that he even proposed that all Jews convert to Christianity en masse. Quickly, though, he realized that it didn’t matter what the Jews did or didn’t do. Antisemitism always finds a way to justify itself. Jews are too different. Jews don’t want to fit in. They’re Communists. No, capitalists. No, globalists. No, rootless cosmopolitans. 

Pick your century, pick your flavor of antisemitism. It doesn’t need to make sense. It is outside of Jewish behavior, a virus in the mind of the antisemite. And if antisemitism would always infect the great liberation movements, as Herzl suspected, then the Jew had only one option: self-rule. 

So he picked up his pen. In 1896, he wrote Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State or The Jews’ State, depending on your translation, arguing that wherever Jews lived in large numbers, antisemitism would follow. Unless they had their own state, Jews would remain trapped in an endless cycle of toleration, resentment, and persecution.

Herzl imagined a Jewish state that was modern, secular, and orderly, with all the accouterments of a normal country. Trains, parliaments, embassies, guys in suits making laws. Both a refuge and an escape from our role as history’s perpetual unwelcome guest.

A year later, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Jews gathered not to pray for redemption, but to plan it. The Congress had a single goal: to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, secured under public law.

Privately, Herzl was even bolder. In his diary he wrote, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be met with laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone will recognize it.” And he was right; fifty years later, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. Six months after that, Israel declared independence.

But back to Herzl. Not everyone appreciated his vision. Many rabbis criticized his movement for preempting divine redemption, picking apart his Godless form of Judaism. As the scholar Yehuda Mirsky puts it in his book Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, many traditional Jewish leaders believed, quote, “the utterly deracinated and assimilated Viennese journalist [was] as far as one possibly could imagine from the traditional image of the Messiah.”

Meanwhile, cultural Zionists, like Ahad Ha’am, believed that Herzl’s model lacked cultural and spiritual substance. Even the survivalists were split, once Herzl introduced his so-called Uganda Plan.

In 1903, after a devastating wave of pogroms, including the notorious massacre in Kishinev, Herzl floated a controversial idea. Palestine was the ultimate goal, but could a temporary refuge elsewhere save lives in the meantime? When the British offered territory in East Africa, Herzl brought the proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress.

The reaction was explosive. The motion passed – narrowly – but nearly ripped the movement apart. Many delegates simply walked out in protest – including the Russian Jews, who faced the worst violence.

Not that it mattered. The Brits quickly rescinded the offer, and two years later, Seventh Zionist Congress rejected the proposal outright. Still, the question lingered: could Zionism exist without Zion?

Chapter IV: Zionism without Zion? 

For centuries, Jewish longing had been fixed on Zion. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Land of Israel was small, underdeveloped, and poor – a profoundly unlikely site for the modern Jewish revival.

But what if the Jews established their Zion elsewhere? A new Jerusalem for a new century?
A small minority, the Territorialists, broke away from the Zionist movement, arguing that safety mattered more than geography. They proposed alternatives all over the map: Argentina, Siberia, Cyprus, even Texas! And of course, East Africa, inspired by Herzl himself.

The movement’s most prominent voice – and founder – was the British writer Israel Zangwill, who established the Jewish Territorialist Organization in 1905. His argument was blunt and pragmatic. Forget history. Forget sentiment. Jews just needed somewhere safe to go. It was a utilitarian position, utterly pragmatic. It was also extremely unpopular.

Because it turned out that Zion wasn’t interchangeable. The Land of Israel wasn’t just a piece of territory. It was the center of Jewish memory, ritual, and identity. A Jewish national movement without Zion wasn’t really a national movement at all. It was exile, relocated. (By the way, others have tried – and failed – to make Territorialism happen. Including Stalin. We can’t get into it now, but check out the show notes on the “Jewish Autonomous Oblast” in Birobidzhan!)

It’s not super shocking that Stalin’s little experiment failed, considering how he felt about Jews. (Not good, if you’re wondering.) But even if Stalin had loved us, Zionism just doesn’t work without Zion. And historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi helps explain why. 

He distinguishes between history, which is analytical or observable, and memory, which is sacred and identity-forming. Zionism was not merely a response to persecution, but a product of thousands of years of collective memory. Jews had been looking towards Jerusalem since 586 BCE, and they weren’t going to change direction now, no matter how spacious or convenient Texas – or Uganda, or Birobidzhan – might be.

In some ways, though, the debate between the Territorialists and the traditionalists hasn’t gone away. It’s just been reframed, asking: is Israel a Jewish state, or simply a state where Jews live? And what is the difference?

But for many Jews, such questions were – and are – beside the point. Til now, we’ve told the well-worn story of political Zionism. But not all Zionism was political.

For some Jews, it was lived. A fact of life as obvious as breathing.

This flavor of Zionism rarely gets the attention it deserves. It isn’t showy or dramatic. It had no Congresses, no delegates, no political power. But it was Zionism all the same, so deeply entwined with Jewish life in some parts of the world that it didn’t need a name. In Baghdad and Casablanca, Salonika and Shiraz, in Jerusalem and Hebron, a different flavor of Zionism had always animated Jewish life.  

Chapter V: Another Side of the Story

So far, we’ve discussed almost every type of Zionism, paying special attention to the strands developed and tested in the European marketplace of ideas. But as Herzl was writing and Pinsker was warning, Jews elsewhere had their own relationship to Zion, and it was far from theoretical.

For simplicity, I’m going to refer to the Jews of Southwest Asia and North Africa as “Sephardic” and “Mizrahi,” even though these terms are imprecise, overlapping, and, in the case of Mizrahi, anachronistic. The terms are more familiar, and less annoying, than Southwest Asian and North African Jews.

Regardless of what we call them, these Jews did not see Zion as a metaphor or abstraction, but a physical address. They had relatives in the ancient Jewish cities of Jerusalem, Chevron, Tverya, and Tzfat, which had long been home to communities from Aleppo, Baghdad, Fez, Izmir, and beyond, and their connection to the land was practical, familial, devotional, and continuous.

Decades before Herzl was born, Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai – a Sephardic rabbi from Sarajevo – called for a return to Zion as both a fulfillment of prophecy and a practical necessity. In his 1834 book Shema Yisrael – “hear O Israel,” both a prayer and a directive – he advocated for Hebrew education, agricultural renewal, and even land purchases in Palestine. Alkalai’s ideas were rooted not in nationalism, but in a religious vision of redemption driven partially by human initiative.

Nathan Birnbaum may have invented the term Zionism in 1890, but earlier figures championed the movement well before it had a name. (Nerd corner alert: Birnbaum eventually became allergic to the project, aligning himself with the devoutly religious, anti-Zionist organization Agudas Yisroel. Check out our episode on the Neturei Karta for more on Orthodox anti-Zionism.) 

In the mid-19th century – right around the time that Americans were pushing westward and the French overthrowing yet another king – Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Aryeh Leon Bibas, then the Chief Rabbi of Corfu, Greece, was advocating for a return to the Land of Israel as a way to draw closer to the divine, inspired by the Jewish concept of teshuva. Teshuva is literally translated as “repentance,” but the word literally means “return.” And where some interpret this “return” as purely spiritual, Rabbi Bibas linked the two. How better to return to God than to come back to the land He had promised? In the last year of his life, Rabbi Bibas made his own return, settling in Hebron in 1852.

Of course, Rabbi Bibas was far from the only voice calling for return. In the late 19th century, entire Yemenite Jewish communities made their way to the Land of Israel, driven not by political theory or European nationalism, but by messianic faith. Hundreds walked for months across harsh terrain to reach Jerusalem. But when they arrived, they were met with suspicion. Could these dark-skinned newcomers in dusty robes really be Jews? No, decided both the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities of the Holy Land. So they excluded their Yemenite brothers from the established aid networks that supported Jerusalem’s Jews, even barring them from living in the city.

Undaunted, determined to get as close as possible to the holy city, these newcomers settled just outside Jerusalem’s walls, laying the foundations for the first Jewish neighborhoods of the so-called new city of Jerusalem.

It’s an ugly story, but it demonstrates the very real and prominent role of Zion in the Jewish imagination. To Yemenite Jews, Jerusalem was worth any sacrifice, while the city’s established Jewish communities guarded it zealously from “outsiders.” 

Eventually, all the established communities of the Holy Land – the ones who had literally never left, the ones who had returned after exile, Inquisition, persecution, or pilgrimage – would be largely sidelined by a Zionist movement shaped primarily by European assumptions about culture, class, and modernity.

As scholars like Ella Shohat have noted, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews often experienced Zionism as both deep belonging and deep displacement. Their connection to the land was not ideological or nationalist. It was lived, religious, and inherited. They did not need to rediscover Zion, because they had never left it.

The modern state was built largely by secular Ashkenazi Jews. But modern Zionism is not purely a European project. The Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who lived in the Holy Land for centuries were just as committed, just as rooted as their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters. And though their Zionism initially bore little resemblance to European political Zionism, their story reminds us that the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel has always been layered, diverse, and continuous. That complexity neither indicts nor excuses the early Zionist establishment. Consolidating an ancient, fractured people into a modern nation was always going to leave wounds.

And those wounds bring us to the final chapter of this episode, in which Zionism collided headfirst with the dreams and aspirations of another nation, in a conflict that shows no sign of resolution.

Chapter VI. The Roots of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1880 to 1948

Come on, you knew this was coming.

The Jewish people had never been alone in the Land of Israel. For centuries, the Holy Land was home to a mosaic of Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Druze, Jews of all stripes. Groups that sometimes fought and sometimes traded and often just lived quietly, side by side.

That reality didn’t disappear when Jewish immigrants began arriving in Palestine en masse in the 1880s.

The First Aliyah brought not just people, but a new national project. These Jews arrived not as pilgrims or temporary residents, but as a unified movement with long-term national ambitions. And while they were careful to purchase land legally, these transactions often displaced tenant farmers without compensation.

Legally, these new immigrants were in the clear.
Morally, it wasn’t their responsibility to compensate the tenant farmers; that was for their Arab landlords to work out.
But practically, these distinctions didn’t really matter to the people who had just lost their homes. If I were them, I’d be resentful too. And it’s far easier to resent a stranger than the semi-feudal landlord who has owned your family’s land for decades.

After centuries of Ottoman rule, the Arabs of Palestine hadn’t quite developed a distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism, and at first, their response to Jewish immigrations was muddled and fragmented, more a rejection of Zionism than a coherent expression of their own nationalist ambitions.

But as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and European powers rushed in, the Arabs of Palestine began cultivating their own form of nationalism, fueled by anti-colonial sentiment and fear that this new Jewish population would soon displace them entirely.

And when fear collides with dueling nationalist ambitions, violence follows.

The riots began in 1920. Intensified with the Hebron massacre of 1929. And if anyone – Arab or Jew – maintained the delusion of peace or coexistence, the three-year Arab revolt of the late 1930s shattered it entirely, hollowing out Palestinian society and hardening Jewish resolve. We’ve covered these events in depth elsewhere. What matters here is that coexistence collapsed under the weight of competing national dreams.

All under the watch of the British.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, European powers rushed in to carve up its territory. To assuage the natives, they made promises they weren’t prepared to keep. 

In a series of letters to the Sharif of Mecca between 1915 and 1916, the Brits promised to recognize an independent Arab state somewhere in the region, though they never quite clarified its boundaries. A year later, they declared their support for “a Jewish national home in Palestine,” again, without committing to what that might look like.

When the victorious Allied powers formalized this commitment in 1920, they didn’t consult with either Jews or Arabs. (Though Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was in the room, a privilege not afforded to any Arab leaders.)

Only the UK, France, Italy, and Japan decided the fate of the patch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. So when the Brits officially assumed responsibility over Palestine in 1922, Palestine’s Arabs were understandably deeply concerned about what this meant for them.

At the same time, an increasingly extreme Arab leadership repeatedly incited its population to violence, drowning out or eliminating any moderate voices. And in one of the most baffling moves in history, the Brits actually enabled this extremism by appointing local rabble-rouser Haj Amin al-Husseini the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” a semi-made-up position that made him the most powerful non-Brit in Palestine. 

Throughout their brief and unsuccessful tenure as the ruling power in the Holy Land, the Brits tried to appease everyone, failing miserably.

Some Zionists favored working with the British. After all, they were in charge. It was only practical. But the more strictly they limited Jewish immigration, the angrier Palestine’s Jews became – especially after Hitler came to power in 1933, sending Europe’s Jews scrambling for any escape hatch. As the world’s doors slammed shut, the Brits blocked the entrance to the one place that actually wanted to absorb hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. 

After much debate about how to respond, the Zionist movement splintered – an ideological fissure that persists to this day. And representing the two sides of this growing disagreement were two men you’ve definitely heard of.

David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, was relentlessly pragmatic. He worked with the British when they served his interests, defied them when they didn’t, and never lost sight of his goal: building the institutions that would eventually form the backbone of a Jewish state. It was thanks to his persistence and pragmatism that the Yishuv built the schools, farms, militias, labor unions, and all the other infrastructure necessary for running a country. But Ben Gurion could be ruthless. He had no qualms about publicly savaging his rivals, even turning them over to the Brits if he had to.

And his bitterest rival, at least at first, was the Ukrainian-born firebrand Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Like Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky was intimidatingly competent and effective – the kind of guy who could write a novel, organize a militia, and build an enduring ideological movement before 10am.

That enduring ideology was known as Revisionist Zionism, a movement often described as “muscular” for its unapologetically assertive ethos. Where Ben-Gurion believed in diplomacy and slow institution-building, Jabotinsky saw delay and delusion. His 1923 essay The Iron Wall bluntly outlined his position: Arab opposition to Zionism wasn’t some misunderstanding to be cleared up over coffee and baklava. It was rational and profoundly human, because no nation cosigns its own displacement. And that meant it had to be resisted. Fiercely. Quote:

“It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously… Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”” End quote.

(Nerd corner alert: It might be weird for you to hear this language of “colonist” and “colonized.” Back in 1923, those words didn’t carry the same negative connotations they do now. In fact, they used to be fairly neutral terms, more or less on par with “immigrant.” For Jabotinsky and other early Zionists, the quote unquote colonization of Palestine merely referred to large-scale immigration and settlement of the land. It did not require or involve a metropole – a mother country pulling the strings and sending representatives to extract resources. Nor did it involve exploitation, or racial hierarchies, or forced labor, or violent missionizing, or any of the other terrible things that came to define old-school European colonialism.) 

But Jabotinsky’s wider point stood. He saw what Ben Gurion perhaps did not want to admit: to the Arabs of Palestine, these Jewish immigrants were coming to steal their home. And that is why The Iron Wall remains so powerful. More than a century ago, Jabotinsky saw the essential dilemma that continues to plague Palestinians and Israelis. The two populations were inherently at odds. Jews should not expect compromise or coexistence. It was only once they had established an “iron wall” of Jewish strength, that negotiations would become possible. 

To his critics, Jabotinsky was a dangerous militarist. To his followers, he was brutally honest. And to us, in the 21st century, he is disturbingly prescient.

Jabotinsky died in 1940, without seeing the full scale of the Holocaust or the birth of the Jewish state. I feel fairly confident that if he had lived, he would have encouraged a Jewish revolt against the British, whose strict immigration quotas sentenced countless Jews to the Nazi inferno. And he probably would not have been thrilled with the outcome of the 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine, which carved up the territory into strange, jagged shapes.

In fact, few Zionist leaders appreciated the UN proposal for their new borders. But they were practical. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s ever-pragmatic first president, captured the moment with his typical dry realism: we’ll take what we can get and build from there. It wasn’t the full dream of Zion restored… but it was international recognition of Jewish sovereignty, and that would have to do for now.

But Arab leadership rejected the plan outright. For them, partition was not compromise but capitulation, a colonial injustice stamped with global approval. The only dignified response was war.

The Arab rejection of the Jewish state forged a new kind of Zionism, erecting a scaffold of steel underneath the idealism and spiritual longing. The combination of diplomatic failures, historical trauma, geopolitical opportunity, and local resistance made Zionist ambition fierce and hungry, ready to defend itself to the death.

As Rashid Khalidi observes in The Iron Cage, the Palestinians were not simply overrun—they were outmaneuvered by a movement that had spent decades, if not centuries, preparing for this moment. The Zionist project arrived at the UN vote in 1947 with political institutions, paramilitary forces, international connections, and a clear—if internally debated—sense of purpose.

But their victory carried – CARRIES – a massive cost. Despite its achievements, its Iron Wall, its IRON DOME, the State of Israel has lived on the sword for nearly a century. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have become what my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib calls “a nation in waiting:” eternal refugees, their villages depopulated, their communities uprooted, their homeland lost.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was that none of this was inevitable. History could have shaken out differently.
It just… didn’t.
But while this tragedy can’t be reversed, it might, someday, somehow, be rectified. But that is a story for the future.

Epilogue

We’ve come a long way since episode one, tracing the long, uneven path toward Jewish sovereignty. After millennia of powerlessness, the Jewish people had finally won the right to shape their own destiny. And if they survived the 1948 War of Independence, they would face the new challenge of figuring out how to wield their unfamiliar power.

How do you rebuild after a genocide?
How do you absorb millions of immigrants into a tiny and impoverished country surrounded by enemies?
How do you unify dozens of Diaspora communities into a single, healthy national culture?
How do you establish a state that is both Jewish and democratic?

If these questions sound familiar, that’s because many of them linger into the present day, more pressing and immediate than ever.

In the next episode, we’ll look at how the early state tried to answer them. From refugee camps to absorption centers, from massive infrastructure projects to the rebirth of Hebrew culture, we’ll explore the tensions that defined Israel’s first decades, between secular and religious Jews, Ashkenazi elites and Mizrahi newcomers, Holocaust trauma and sabra swagger.

And we’ll begin to trace the policies that still shape Israel today, including the aftermath of 1967 and the return to Judea and Samaria – aka the West Bank – which reignited old debates with new and devastating force. As Hannah Arendt warned, founding a state is only the beginning. The harder task is preserving its soul.

Outro

Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.

This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Amir Tsemach, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week for Part 4.