Wednesday's Read: A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1997)
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Walter Laqueur's A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel is a reprint of the 1972 original with a new preface. It's a long volume at 600 pages, sweeping and largely comprehensive in scope, covering the origins of the idea of Zionism out of the crucible of the European Enlightenment and its Jewish corollary, the haskalah; up through the rampant pogroms and emigrations out of the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; through the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate; World War II and Holocaust; and finally the end of the Mandate and the formal declaration of the independent State of Israel at midnight on May 14, 1948.

It is an important history, and, given the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the broader regional zeitgeist throughout the twentieth century, a vital one for students of the Middle East to understand. Laqueur highlights the fundamentally European locus of Israeli and Zionist origins; much of his discussion hinges around the primary political and ethical debates of major players throughout Europe and Russia, including Moses Mendelssohn, Leon Pinsker, Theodore Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, and others. In this sense, it is primarily a secular history, leaving out religious Zionism. In addition, although Laqueur doesn't avoid discussion of the Palestinian and Arab leaders by any stretch (they are covered in detail in Chapter 5, "The Unseen Question"), nevertheless the Arab players occupy a remarkably small spot on his stage, in some ways commensurate with the political power and influence they held with the Great Powers. In other words, in this largely social and political history of the origins of Zionism, it is quite clear that the existing Palestinian population and their concerns were considered ancillary by many of the early decision-makers, a reality that Laqueur considers unpardonable.

This is not a criticism of the overall work, whose primary intention is to sketch out the main personalities, ideas, and historical movements that coalesced to form the modern State of Israel.