Five traditions
Which tradition
are you arguing from
Not what kind of Zionist you are. Where your arguments come from, which is a different question and a more interesting one. Five traditions, ten questions, and five men who each thought the other four were leading the Jewish people off a cliff.
10 questions · 40 answers · nothing is stored, counted or sent
Before you start
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
The questions
Ten of them, one at a time. Answering moves you on, and you can skip any question you have no view about. Every tradition is offered exactly 8 times across the 40 answers, one point each, nothing weighted, so nothing here is stacked and you can check that by counting. Where an answer sounds like something you would never say, that is the right reaction: it belongs to somebody else.
Your answers come from
The other four are underneath it, unabridged. That is not padding. The argument this page is making only works if you read at least one tradition you did not land on.
They only add up your answers, and adding up is all they do. Everything worth reading on this page is below, in full: five traditions, what each argued for, what each got right, and what each got wrong.
The five, in full
In the order they were founded, which is the only order that does not rank them. Each one is written by somebody taking it seriously, each one carries what it got wrong, and none of them is the right answer.
Where your answers come from
Cultural Zionism
1889 to now
The oldest of the five, and the one most people are arguing from without having been told.
- The person
- Ahad Ha’am, the pen name of Asher Zvi Ginsberg, 1856 to 1927
- The one text worth knowing
- “Truth from Eretz Israel”, 1891, and “This Is Not the Way”, 1889
If you have ever said that you care less about where the border runs than about what kind of country sits inside it, you were quoting somebody. This is him, and he said it first in 1889, which is seven years before Herzl and fifty-nine before the state.
What it argued for
That the movement had diagnosed the wrong illness. The problem of the Jews, meaning pogroms, exclusion and homelessness, was real, and a state might well solve it. Underneath it sat a second problem, the problem of Judaism, and a state would not touch that one. Emancipation was dissolving Jewish life in western Europe faster than any mob in the east, and a country full of Jews who were culturally indistinguishable from Austrians would have solved nothing worth the effort.
So the land was for a centre rather than a container. Not a place to put all the Jews, which he thought was arithmetically impossible in any case, but a small, excellent settlement where Hebrew was spoken, where Jewish thought was made, and whose output would carry back and revive Jewish life in the places most Jews were actually going to go on living. Quality before quantity, education before acreage, and slowly. His first published essay attacked the settlement societies of his own movement for doing it the other way round.
What it got right
Hebrew. The revival of a dead language into the ordinary speech of a country is the most complete single success in the entire Zionist record, it has no real parallel anywhere else, and it was this tradition’s programme more than anybody else’s.
And the Arabs. He went to Palestine in 1891, and came back and wrote that the country was not empty, that the Arabs living in it understood exactly what was intended and were not fooled by anyone, and that some of the settlers were treating them with hostility and cruelty and beating them without cause. That is thirty-two years before the Iron Wall and fifty-seven before the state. Scholars argue about how much weight the passage will bear, and it is a few paragraphs rather than a programme. It is still the earliest serious warning from inside the movement that how this was done would decide whether it deserved to work.
What it got wrong
The clock. His whole objection to political Zionism was that it was in a hurry and that haste would produce a shallow, borrowed sort of country. The answer to that objection is 1941. A cultural centre with no sovereignty could not have admitted a single refugee, and the people who needed admitting had about a decade. Gradualism was a luxury the century did not offer, and the men he called vulgar are the reason there was somewhere to go.
There is a harder thing to say about it. Cultural Zionism produced a magnificent critique and almost no institutions. It fought the machinery, and the machinery is what saved the lives. A tradition whose characteristic act is the objection has to be honest that somebody else was doing the building it objected to.
Who it fought with, and about what
Herzl, mostly, and with a contempt that reads oddly today. He went to the first congress at Basel in August 1897 and wrote afterwards that he had watched theatre, and that the rescue of the Jews was not going to arrive by diplomacy.
When Herzl published his utopian novel in 1902, in which an Arab character thanks the Jews for the improvements, Ahad Ha’am reviewed it as a European fantasy with nothing Jewish in it, and Herzl sent Max Nordau to answer him in kind. Nordau’s reply was a personal demolition. The row ran for months through the Hebrew and German press, and it is still, recognisably, the argument.
And on all five of them
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
Where your answers come from
Liberal Zionism
1896 to now
Founded as political Zionism, and the tradition with the most descendants who would not recognise the ancestor.
- The person
- Theodor Herzl, 1860 to 1904
- The one text worth knowing
- Der Judenstaat, Vienna, February 1896
This is the tradition that built the furniture. Every faction on this page, including the three that despised Herzl, made its case inside an organisation he invented, at a congress he called, in a movement that did not exist until he wrote a pamphlet.
What it argued for
That the Jewish question was neither a social problem nor a religious one but a national one, and that national questions are settled by states, charters and public law. The method followed from the diagnosis: persuade a great power to grant a home that is legally secured, and everything else becomes possible. The Basel Programme of 30 August 1897 puts it in a single line, that Zionism seeks for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured under public law, and the phrase about public law was Herzl’s own compromise wording, drafted to hold together delegates who wanted something stronger and delegates who wanted something vaguer.
What he wanted at the far end was a normal country and an emphatically liberal one: constitutional, multilingual, technologically ambitious, secular in its public institutions, with civil rights for everybody living in it. His 1902 novel is a picture of that country, and the picture is a Vienna liberal’s.
What it got right
The diagnosis, which is the hardest thing to get right and the thing he is least credited with. He watched the Dreyfus trial in Paris and concluded that the emancipation bargain would not hold, and that where it broke it would break first and worst in the most advanced countries rather than the most backward. Every sophisticated person who told him this was hysterical was wrong, and the record of the following fifty years is not close.
And the machinery. Within two years of the pamphlet there was an annual congress, a bank and a national fund, which is why there was a movement rather than a mood. The liberal content survived into the founding document too: Israel’s declaration of 14 May 1948 undertakes to ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. That sentence is Herzl’s inheritance, and it is the standard the country’s own liberals have held it to ever since.
What it got wrong
The Arabs, comprehensively. The novel has a Muslim character who is asked whether the Jews have not harmed the Arabs and who replies by asking whether you would call a man a robber who takes nothing from you and brings you something instead. That is close to the whole of Herzl’s engagement with the question, and it is a fantasy of gratitude. He did not think a rival national movement was possible, and one was already forming.
The second failure has never been fixed. Liberal Zionism assumes that the international order which grants recognition will also defend it. It did not in 1937, it did not in 1947, and the tradition has spent every decade since being surprised by the same discovery. Herzl’s own last years make the point at his own expense: eight years of audiences with sultans, kaisers and ministers produced no charter from anybody, and in August 1903 he took a British East Africa proposal to the sixth congress because he had run out of alternatives. It carried on a vote to send an investigating commission, 295 to 178, and it very nearly broke the movement in half.
Who it fought with, and about what
Ahad Ha’am thought him a showman with nothing Jewish to show. His own eastern European base, the people with the most to lose, nearly walked out over East Africa. Labour and the Revisionists later agreed with each other about almost nothing except this: that waiting for a charter was a respectable way of doing nothing.
Its living descendants inherit the same position. This is the tradition of partition, of two states, of the equal rights clause, and of the officers’ letter of 7 March 1978, when 348 reserve officers and NCOs wrote to Menachem Begin to say that settlement beyond the Green Line and permanent rule over roughly a million Arabs would cost Israel its character, which is the letter Peace Now was founded on. It is also the tradition that both its neighbours have spent fifty years telling it is describing a world that does not exist.
And on all five of them
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
Where your answers come from
Religious Zionism
1902 to now
The largest living tradition of the five, and the one most often described by people who have never read a line of it.
- The person
- Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, 1839 to 1915, who built it, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, 1865 to 1935, who gave it a theology
- The one text worth knowing
- Rav Kook, Orot, Jerusalem, 1920, and Rabbi Reines, Or Hadash al Zion, 1902
It contains two arguments that do not fit together, and that is not a weakness in the account. It is the reason this is the tradition with the most life left in it: both halves are still being fought over by people who pray in the same building.
What it argued for
Reines founded Mizrachi at a conference in Vilna in 1902, to put religious Jews inside a secular movement rather than in protest outside it, and his version was deliberately modest. He argued in print that Zionism had nothing whatever to do with the redemption: it was a rescue operation for Jews in danger, and dressing it up as messianic was a category error that would eventually get people killed. He backed Herzl’s East Africa proposal in 1903 for that exact reason, which is worth sitting with, because the founder of religious Zionism was prepared to accept a Jewish territory that was not the Land of Israel in order to save Jewish lives.
Rav Kook’s version was the opposite of that, and it is the one that carried. On his account the secular pioneers draining swamps in the Galilee were doing holy work whether or not they had the slightest idea of it, and the return itself, happening in ordinary history, by people who did not believe in it, was the beginning of something with religious weight. Both of those are religious Zionism. They point in different directions and the argument between them has never been settled.
What it got right
Kook’s central insight is not mysticism, it is a description of something that demonstrably happened: a movement can carry a meaning its own members do not intend and would deny. He was also, in his own moment, the one senior rabbinic figure who refused to write off the secular majority, at a time when almost the entire establishment around him was doing precisely that, and he paid for it.
And every attempt since to build a Jewish state with the Jewish religion left outside it has run into the problem he named. A state of Jews that is only a state has no answer to the question of why it had to be that particular piece of ground. Reines was right about something else, and it is the plainer point: the tradition’s first job was rescue, and it did that job.
What it got wrong
The line from Kook to the settlement movement runs through his son. On Independence Day 1967, a few weeks before the Six-Day War, Zvi Yehuda Kook preached at Merkaz HaRav and wept over Hebron, Shechem and Jericho lying outside the state. When they were taken that June his students read the sermon as prophecy, and in February 1974 they founded Gush Emunim. That is how a theology of patience became a programme of bulldozers.
The failure is precise, and it is not that people went and settled. It is presumption. The school’s own premise is that redemption is hidden, unfolding by a logic nobody alive is equipped to read, and its heirs then read it off one particular June and one particular set of borders and called that the timetable. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Orthodox Jew making an Orthodox argument, had the word for it: attaching holiness to a state and a stretch of ground is idolatry, a category error before it is ever a politics. That charge comes from inside, which is why it is the one this tradition has never answered comfortably. The second gap is older and larger: for a tradition that thinks about the land more carefully than any of the other four, it has thought about the people already living on it hardly at all.
Who it fought with, and about what
Almost everybody, in both directions at once. The haredi world went after Kook without mercy. Orot appeared in 1920, and that same year an anonymous pamphlet, Kol Ha-Shofar, carried a ban signed by Sonnenfeld, Diskin and others asking whether the book was to be deemed a sorcerer’s book. Rabbis ruled it forbidden to study. In 1921 opponents bought up the entire edition to keep it out of circulation and pasted the offending passages on the walls of Mea Shearim. On Purim 1932 he was burned in effigy by the youth of Agudat Yisrael.
From the other side, Labour treated religious Zionism as a coalition partner to be paid rather than an argument to be answered, and paid it: Ben-Gurion’s letter of 19 June 1947 to Agudat Yisrael, promising the Sabbath, kashrut, rabbinical jurisdiction over marriage and an autonomous religious school system, is the founding document of every argument Israel has had about religion and state since. And the tradition’s sharpest critic was an Orthodox Jew. Yeshayahu Leibowitz called the sacralising of the state and the land idolatry, in that word, and went on saying it for thirty years.
And on all five of them
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
Where your answers come from
Labour Zionism
1898 to 1977
Dated from Syrkin’s pamphlet to the first Israeli election Labour ever lost. The ideas did not stop in 1977. The governing did.
- The person
- Ber Borochov, 1881 to 1917, for the theory, and David Ben-Gurion, 1886 to 1973, for the execution
- The one text worth knowing
- Ber Borochov, Our Platform, 1906
Nearly everything anybody can point at was built by this tradition, which is exactly why it is the one people forget is a tradition at all. It looks like the furniture rather than an argument, and it was an argument, and it won.
What it argued for
That the Jews of Europe were a people with no bottom to their society. Borochov’s picture was an inverted pyramid: almost nobody in the productive base, everybody stacked into trade, brokerage, moneylending and the professions, and a people arranged like that has no leverage anywhere, because it does not make anything that anyone needs. Nachman Syrkin had arrived somewhere similar from a different direction in 1898, on ethical rather than Marxist grounds, arguing that a Jewish state would have to be socialist or it would simply reproduce the same dependence in a warmer country.
What came out of it was not primarily a political programme. It was to go and do the work. Farm the land, lay the roads, load the ships, teach the children in Hebrew, and above all build the institutions before the state exists, so that when sovereignty arrives there is already something for it to govern. The Histadrut, founded in 1920, was a trade union, a health service, a bank, a construction company and a shadow government, in roughly that order of importance.
What it got right
The state arrived in 1948 with a working apparatus already underneath it, which is close to unique among the countries that came out of the end of empire. A labour federation, a health system, a school network, a defence force with a command structure, and a national language back in daily use by ordinary people. None of that was inevitable and none of it was luck. It was forty years of people deciding that the argument came second and the work came first.
Borochov’s diagnosis was also broadly right about what a people with no productive base can and cannot do for itself, and the thing the tradition is now least thanked for is the thing it did best: it made a society in which a Jew could be a farmer, a docker, a soldier and a plumber, at a point in history when that was not a normal sentence.
What it got wrong
Hebrew labour. The principle that Jewish enterprises should employ Jews came from a defensible place, because a settler economy running on cheap local wages would have reproduced exactly the plantation colonialism the movement insisted it was not. In practice it meant pickets and boycotts against Jewish farmers who hired Arabs, through the citrus groves in the 1920s and the building sites in the 1930s, and it wrote Arab workers out of a fast-growing economy at the one moment when a shared labour market might have built a constituency for living together. It is the single most damaging thing this tradition did, and the charge sheet against it is not written by its enemies. It is written by its own minutes.
And it believed for decades that development would settle the national question, that Arabs would come to read Zionist investment as a gain rather than as dispossession. It did not happen, and the evidence that it was not going to happen was on the table from the 1920s onwards.
Who it fought with, and about what
Jabotinsky, constantly and viciously. Ben-Gurion called him Vladimir Hitler. The two of them then negotiated a peace in London across sixteen meetings and signed agreements on 26 October 1934, and the Histadrut membership threw them out in a referendum in March 1935 by 15,227 votes to 10,187, which tells you how far the leadership was ahead of its own people or behind them, depending on your view.
In June 1948 the argument stopped being rhetorical. The Israeli army shelled the Altalena off the Tel Aviv shore rather than let the Irgun land weapons under its own flag, and when the firing stopped sixteen Irgun men and three soldiers were dead. It also fought Ahad Ha’am’s people for putting culture before facts on the ground, and it fought the religious parties over whether a state made by socialists could be a Jewish state, a fight it did not win so much as settle out of court in June 1947.
And on all five of them
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
Where your answers come from
Revisionist Zionism
1923 to now
The tradition people believe they are describing when they say Zionism, usually without having read the essay they are describing.
- The person
- Ze’ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1880 to 1940
- The one text worth knowing
- “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)”, published in Russian in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923
Almost everything said about this essay by people who have not read it is wrong in the same direction. It is not a call to drive anybody out. It is an argument that begins by conceding, in writing, more to the Arabs of Palestine than any of the other four traditions had conceded by 1923.
What it argued for
Two claims, and they can be separated. The first is about the Arabs, and it is not the one anybody expects. Jabotinsky wrote that they were a living people and not a rabble, that they loved their country in the ordinary way that peoples do, and that no native population anywhere in recorded history has consented to being settled by anybody, however generous the terms and however real the improvements. Every Zionist talking about mutual benefit was, on his account, either fooling himself or lying to somebody else.
The second follows from the first. If consent is unavailable now, then the only route to agreement is to make the Jewish position unbreakable, an iron wall the other side cannot get through, and then wait. He was explicit about what was on the far side of the waiting: not expulsion, but terms. Guarantees, equal rights, both peoples in the country. His draft constitution of 1934 had Hebrew and Arabic as equal languages and required that wherever the prime minister was a Jew the deputy premiership be offered to an Arab, and the reverse, and he had form on this, having helped write the Helsingfors programme of December 1906 demanding full national and cultural autonomy for minorities inside the Russian empire.
What it got right
The unpopular half has held. Nobody serious now argues that the Arab population of Palestine was going to be reconciled to Jewish sovereignty by hospitals, irrigation and rising wages, and Labour Zionism spent three decades assuming otherwise and building policy on it.
He was also right about the clock in a way that cost him his reputation at the time. From 8 September 1936 he was publicly pressing an evacuation plan to move a million and a half Jews out of Poland, the Baltics, Germany, Hungary and Romania within ten years, at a point when saying so in public got him called an alarmist by most of Jewish Poland’s leadership. And on 11 February 1937 he gave evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission in the House of Lords, arguing that the root of the problem was that Jews were a minority everywhere and a majority nowhere.
What it got wrong
The iron wall was a means with a stated end, and the movement that inherited it has kept the means for a hundred years and mislaid the end. His argument only works if there is a moment at which the wall has done its job and terms get offered. A doctrine of permanent deterrence with no second act is not his doctrine, it is the first half of it with the conclusion torn off, and his own text is the strongest evidence against the people who quote it.
He also had no answer to the situation Israel actually reached after 1967, which is a wall with the other population inside it rather than outside. And the evacuation plan has an uglier side that his admirers skip: the Polish government of the day welcomed it warmly, because it wanted fewer Jews in Poland, and Jewish opponents who said that a Jewish leader publicly agreeing with them was dangerous were not being stupid. Two things are true at once. He was right about what was coming, and he took help from people who wanted the Jews gone for their own reasons.
Who it fought with, and about what
Ben-Gurion above all, who called him Vladimir Hitler, and the two of them nonetheless negotiated agreements in London in October 1934 which the Histadrut membership voted down five months later. Revisionists were publicly accused of the murder of the Labour leader Chaim Arlosoroff in 1933, the men tried for it were acquitted, and the accusation poisoned the argument for a generation on both sides.
He founded the Union of Zionists-Revisionists in Paris in April 1925 and the Betar youth movement in 1923, and in 1935, having lost the argument inside the Zionist Organization, he put secession to his own membership in June and won it by 167,000 votes to 3,000, then founded a rival New Zionist Organization in Vienna that September. That is the fight in its purest form: not a disagreement about tactics but two organisations claiming the same nation.
And on all five of them
Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rav Kook, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky each believed the other four were leading the Jewish people somewhere dangerous. They said so in print, for decades, and twice the argument ended with Jews shooting at Jews. Every one of the five was a Zionist. That is the size of the word. Anybody who tells you it means one thing is telling you about themselves.
What this page is not doing
It is not telling you what to think, and it is not telling anybody else what you think either. It stores nothing, sends nothing and counts nothing, so nobody including us knows which answers you gave or that you were here. If you disagree with how one of these five has been described, the sources are under each one and you should take it up with them rather than with us.
Where the arguments themselves get made, at length and with the evidence, is the claims. Where they get used in a room, at work, at a meeting or in a reply, is the guides. The words that keep coming up are in the glossary.