A Palestinian’s View of Zionism
Sabri Jiryis’s The Foundations of Zionism is now available in English for the first time, translated and edited by his daughter Fida Jiryis. This edition features a new preface by the author and a new conclusion by the translator.
Originally published in Arabic across two volumes by the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, an institution Jiryis directed, this landmark work traces Zionism’s evolution from late 19th-century Europe through the early British Mandate in Palestine. The English version comes at a moment when debates over Zionism, settler colonialism, and Palestinian historical narratives have moved from the margins into mainstream international discourse. Jiryis’s extensive use of Hebrew-language sources allows him to examine Zionist history from the inside, drawing on the movement’s own writings, congress proceedings, and institutional documents.
Jiryis, born in Fassouta in the Galilee, argues that Zionism functioned fundamentally as a settler-colonial enterprise rather than as a conventional national liberation movement. Situating its rise within the broader context of European colonial expansion, he contends that many early Zionist leaders adopted conceptual frameworks strikingly similar to those employed by contemporary colonial movements. He points, for example, to recurring depictions of Palestine as economically stagnant and underdeveloped, in need of European modernization and “civilization.” Such language, he argues, mirrored the paternalistic rhetoric commonly used by European powers to justify settlement and political domination.
Particular attention is devoted to the Zionist movement’s institutional mechanisms for land acquisition and demographic transformation. Jiryis examines the role of organizations such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which purchased land to remain permanently under Jewish ownership and frequently prohibited its resale or lease to non-Jews. He argues that these policies were not incidental economic measures, but central components of a broader strategy aimed at establishing an exclusive settler society. In Jiryis’s analysis, systematic land acquisition and the creation of separate Jewish labor and agricultural institutions formed the economic foundation of the Zionist project.
Jiryis also challenges the portrayal of Zionism as the inevitable political expression of an uninterrupted Jewish national movement extending across two millennia. Rather than treating the movement as a direct continuation of ancient historical aspirations, he situates Zionism as a distinctly modern political ideology that emerged under specific European nationalist conditions in the late nineteenth century. By placing Zionism within this modern historical framework, he argues that its territorial claims were political and ideological constructions rather than the natural culmination of a continuous collective historical process.
A central theme of the book is the Zionist movement’s treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population. Drawing extensively from early Zionist writings and congress debates, Jiryis argues that Palestinian Arabs were frequently marginalized, ignored, or viewed primarily as an obstacle to settlement. This erasure of the indigenous population was not merely rhetorical, but a foundational element in constructing the legitimacy of the settler-colonial project.
While Jiryis’s interpretation overlaps with that of later scholars such as Ilan Pappé and Rashid Khalidi, particularly regarding the colonial dimensions of Zionist settlement, his work remains distinctive for both its early formulation and its extensive reliance on Hebrew-language Zionist sources. Unlike more conventional histories of Zionism, including those associated with historians such as Walter Laqueur, which tend to emphasize Zionism primarily as a response to European antisemitism and Jewish statelessness, Jiryis places the Palestinian experience and the structures of settlement at the center of his analysis.
In the volume's new conclusion, Fida Jiryis summarizes the conflict's up-to-date evolution and revisits the often-minimized significance of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement between Zionist organizations and Nazi Germany during the 1930s. She contends that the agreement played a major role not only in facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine but also in bolstering the economic and industrial infrastructure of the emerging Yishuv by transferring capital, commercial goods, and professional expertise. In her formulation, “if Britain was the party that laid the political and legal foundations for the national home, then Nazi Germany was the one that laid its economic and industrial foundations.” Whether readers fully accept this interpretation or not, the discussion raises important and highly uncomfortable questions about the international forces that materially enabled the development of the Zionist project in Palestine.
Best known for his influential book The Arabs in Israel, Jiryis brings to this study both legal expertise and decades of historical research. The publication of this English edition makes one of the most significant Palestinian historical critiques of Zionism accessible to a broader international readership.
The Foundations of Zionism constitutes a rigorously documented and intellectually consequential contribution to the ongoing debates over the historical origins and political character of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The only significant criticism concerns the physical design of the paperback edition itself. Compressing a 614-page scholarly work into an 8x5 pocket-sized format produces extremely small print that can make prolonged reading tiring, especially for older readers. Given the book's significance and seriousness, a larger, more reader-friendly edition would have been preferable.