This week on Gladio Free Europe, our friend Kevin came back on to discuss Zionism. In this episode we limited ourselves to mostly talking about Zionism as an ideology in the period before the foundation of the state of Israel. We explain the atmosphere in which Zionism came into being, namely the groundswell of romantic land-based nationalism which gripped Europe throughout the 19th century, as well as the material conditions and modes of thinking which made Zionism a mass movement. Also important to this story is the state of the Ottoman Empire, the so-called "Eastern Question", and the various national liberation movements waged by peoples who fought for independence from the empire. All of these phenomena made a great impression on some Jewish thinkers who, contrary to common perception, began to theorize proto-Zionist ideas some 50 years before Herzl arrived on the scene.

In this episode we look at the pre-Herzlian thinkers who are usually overshadowed by Herzl, Herzl himself, as well as the various strains of Zionism which formed a very eclectic ideological gamut. In addition to the very explicitly liberal conception of the Jewish state propagated by Herzl, there were people who took a very different approach. In contrast to the irreligious nature of Herzl himself, religious Zionists created a theological justification for the Zionist project and consequently wished to see a very different state emerge. The cultural Zionists were more interested in creating a base from which an authentic Jewish culture could emanate rather than supporting the formation of a state and backing mass migration. The labor Zionists, who would form the backbone of the Israeli state for nearly 30 years, were interested in creating a Zionism with a socialist ethos (with the former taking great precedence over the latter), which would naturally face mounting contradictions as their internationalist pretensions butted heads with the racist exigencies of Zionism. The revisionist Zionists, led by the much-reviled Ze'ev Jabotinsky, were distinguished by their militant posture, their liberal drawing from Italian fascism, and that the fate of the Jews must be taken into Jewish hands rather than expecting their project to be completed by their imperial backers, the British.

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