This moment underscores how American political power now enables the Zionist project in ways the British Empire once structured, merging religious ideology, nationalist claims, and imperial capacity in a dangerous contemporary formula.
The Invention of a Political Faith
Zionism did not arise from the gas chambers of Europe. It was conceived decades earlier, in the salons and chancelleries of late-19th-century Europe, as a political solution to what elites called the “Jewish Question.”
Its principal architect, Theodor Herzl, was neither religious nor mystical. He was a secular nationalist who believed antisemitism was permanent and that Jews, like other Europeans, required a state of their own.
This was not Judaism speaking. Judaism is a religion with ethical and spiritual traditions rooted in diaspora life. Zionism was a modern nationalist project, borrowing the language of biblical promise while operating according to the logic of European colonialism. From the beginning, many religious Jews rejected it as a violation of divine will, while others feared it would endanger Jews by redefining them as a foreign nation everywhere else.
Empire Finds Its Instrument
When Britain entered the First World War against the Ottoman Empire in 1914, Palestine ceased to be a distant province and became an imperial prize. The proving ground for Zionism was not theology but empire.
In 1915, Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and member of the British War Cabinet, circulated a memorandum proposing British sponsorship of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His argument was nakedly political: Zionism could serve British strategic interests and, he claimed, mobilize Jewish influence in support of the war effort.
This logic culminated in the Balfour Declaration, a document that promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in a land where Jews were a small minority—while relegating the rights of the indigenous population to a footnote. Britain was not granting what it owned; it was promising what it intended to control.
The Warning Ignored
Inside the Cabinet, one man grasped the danger with clarity. Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the government, denounced Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.“
Montagu understood that transforming Judaism into a nationalist identity would fracture Jewish life and license injustice. He warned that Zionism would brand Jews as foreigners in their own countries and reduce Palestinians to foreigners in theirs. He foresaw a future in which citizenship would hinge on religion and where displacement would be reframed as destiny.
History would confirm his fears.
"I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews… Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test."
Colonial Logic and Population Management
Zionism appealed not only to Jewish nationalists but also to British imperial planners and Anglo-Jewish elites who feared the migration of impoverished Eastern European Jews into Britain. Palestine, under British control, offered a solution: redirect migration outward while entrenching imperial influence in the eastern Mediterranean.
This convergence of interests—imperial, evangelical, nationalist—was no accident. As historians such as Ilan Pappé and Rashid Khalidi have shown, Zionism was embedded within a settler-colonial framework from its inception. The presence of an indigenous population was not denied; it was treated as an obstacle to be managed.
Pragmatism Without Illusion: Zionism and Nazi Germany
The most morally revealing episode of political Zionism occurred in 1933 with the Haavara Agreement. As documented by Tony Greenstein in Zionism During the Holocaust, Zionist institutions negotiated with Nazi Germany to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine through the transfer of assets in German goods.
This was not ideological alignment. Nazism was genocidal and antisemitic; Zionism was a nationalist project. But both shared a short, clarifying sentence-term objective: Jews out of Europe, Jews into Palestine.
The agreement weakened the global anti-Nazi boycott and privileged state-building over collective Jewish resistance.
It was possible precisely because Zionism was political, not religious—and because ethics were subordinated to strategy.
From Dispossession to Doctrine
The consequences of this project were written early. Land acquisition, demographic engineering, and eventual mass displacement were not wartime improvisations but structural imperatives. The catastrophe Palestinians call the Nakba was not an aberration; it was the culmination of a century-old design.
What Montagu predicted—a state claiming democracy while denying rights on the basis of identity—has become institutionalized.
International bodies, including the International Court of Justice, now describe Israel’s occupation as unlawful.
The Present Is Not an Accident
What unfolds in Gaza today is not detached from this history. It is its continuation. A colonial project conceived in imperial arrogance, sanctified with religious language, and enforced through overwhelming power inevitably produces cycles of erasure and denial.
To acknowledge this is not antisemitism. Antisemitism is racism and must be confronted without equivocation. But conflating criticism of Zionism with hatred of Jews is itself a political weapon—one Herzl would have understood, and Montagu warned against.
Empire Recast: Christian Zionism and the American Mandate
The Unheeded Lesson
The tragedy is not only Palestinian. It is moral. A political project built on exclusion corrodes the ethics of those who defend it. Montagu saw this clearly in 1917. His warning was shelved, then buried, then forgotten.
History, however, has a way of resurfacing inconvenient truths.
The question is not whether Zionism can be criticized. It is about whether the world can finally remember what it was told—before the damage became irreversible.
Footnotes and Archival Sources
- Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (1896), original manifesto of political Zionism.
- Orthodox Jewish opposition to Zionism documented in contemporary rabbinic press; see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages.
- British declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire, 5 November 1914; War Office records, UK National Archives (WO 371/3891).
- Herbert Samuel Memorandum (1915), National Archives UK (CAB 23/43/33).
- Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917; Colonial Office records, UK National Archives (CO 323/192).
- Edwin Montagu Memorandum (20 August 1917), Records of the British War Cabinet, Public Records Office, London.
- British debates on Eastern European Jewish migration, Parliamentary Papers (1910–1914).
- Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.
- Ilan Pappé, A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict.
- Ilan Pappé, A Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.
- Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
- Tony Greenstein, Zionism During the Holocaust (2017); Haavara Agreement texts in the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
- Palestinian displacement in 1947–1948, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) (11 December 1948) and contemporary British Foreign Office files (FO 371/49326).
- The International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion declaring Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory (Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem) to be unlawful and demanding its rapid end. The Court stated Israel must dismantle settlements, provide reparations, and cease unlawful policies. (July 19, 2024)
- The International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the obligations of Israel as an occupying power (October 22, 2025)
About the Featured Image
The Promised Land Museum is proud to display in our digital and physical archive this letter signed by Albert Einstein in 1948.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a world-renown, German-born theoretical physicist who has described his relationship to the Jewish people as his “strongest human bond.” Einstein co-founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. He supported Jewish migration to Palestine, but he stood strongly against the creation of a Jewish nation-state.
In 1948, the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (AFFFI) (which represented the Stern Gang/LEHI) sought Einstein’s help in raising funds for their Jewish fighters. AFFFI Executive Director Shepard Rifkin explained in the letter above that when Stern Gang commander Benjamin Gepner asked him to reach out to Albert Einstein for the purposes of gaining propaganda and fundraising assistance, he responded: “Are you crazy? He is completely against violence!” Still, Rifkin wrote a letter to Albert Einstein asking for his help raising funds in America for arms.
Einstein refused with this letter that said “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it would be the Terrorist Organizations build up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those mislead and criminal people.”
