The Foundations of Zionism: An epic work of Palestinian scholarship now available in English

The Foundations of Zionism: An epic work of Palestinian scholarship now available in English Submitted by Hossam el-Hamalawy on Fri, 04/17/2026 - 08:34 Translated by his daughter Fidya, the landmark work by Sabri Jiryis arrives in English not as a museum piece, but as an important intervention Israeli flags atop the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the occupied West Bank, on 24 April 2023 (Mosab Shawer/AFP) Off First published in Arabic across two volumes in 1977 and 1986, and now translated and edited by his daughter Fida, The Foundations of Zionism is a major work of Palestinian historical scholarship by Sabri Jiryis that feels uncannily timely in 2026. It is a long, rigorous, often relentless book, and that is part of its value. Jiryis is not interested in offering a softened primer or a liberal-humanist fable about misunderstanding on both sides. He wants to explain how Zionism emerged, how it organised itself, how it embedded itself in Palestine, and how imperial power enabled that process.  In that sense, the book does something increasingly rare. It insists on structure, not sentiment.  Born in 1938, Jiryis is especially well placed to write such a history. He is a Palestinian scholar, lawyer and writer, a survivor of the Nakba as a child, a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later a leading figure in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).  In the PLO, he served as director of the Palestine Research Centre and adviser to Yasser Arafat on Israeli affairs.  His life matters to the authority of the book, not because personal experience substitutes for evidence, but because it shaped the questions he asked and the archive he assembled.  What is the Nakba? + Show - Hide The Nakba is one of the key events in modern Middle East history and one that has come to define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since. Also known as "The Catastrophe", it began in late 1947 and 1948, as the new state of Israel came into existence.  Palestinian women flee with their belongings during the Nakba (Creative commons) Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until it was captured by the UK at the end of World War One (1914-18).  The League of Nations - a forerunner of the UN - gave Britain a "mandate" over Palestine after the war, which did not take into account the wishes of the native Palestinian population.  The aim of such mandates was to bring about "the rendering of administrative assistance and advice" to native populations until they were deemed capable of standing alone as independent states.  What was the problem? The British Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration,  sent by  Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lord Walter Rothschild, a prominent member of the British Jewish community, in 1917. It pledged to establish "in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people", who made up less than 10 percent of the population at the time.  During the mandate years (1923-48), the UK facilitated the immigration of  European Jews to Palestine, increasing their population 10-fold, from 60,000 in the pre-Mandate era to 700,000 by 1948. They also trained, armed and supplied Zionist groups, and allowed them a degree of self-governance.  In contrast, the native Palestinian population, which rejected European Jewish immigration and called for independence, was violently suppressed. Arabs in Jerusalem protest against Jewish immigration in 1937 (AFP) The number of Jews arriving in Palestine from Europe and elsewhere increased in the wake of the Holocaust, which systemically targeted Jews and others, resulting in the deaths of more than 6m people. In February 1947, Britain announced it would terminate the mandate and turn the question of Palestine over to the newly formed United Nations.  The UN adopted a partition plan in November 1947, which divided Palestine into two parts: 55 percent would form a Jewish state, while 45 percent would create an Arab state.  Jerusalem would be kept under international control. But many argue that the plan did not take into account populations at the time. In addition, Jewish paramilitary groups produced a strategy to control the borders of the new territory, called Plan Dalet (below).  Some of their members would go on to become key Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin (prime minister 1992 - 1995), Ariel Sharon (prime minister 2001 - 2006) and Moshe Dayan  (minister of defence 1967 - 1974). In the weeks and months that followed, thousands of Palestinians were killed or driven from their homes and communities uprooted by Jewish paramilitary groups. Jews were also killed by Palestinian groups, if not in the same numbers. On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was unilaterally declared, a day before the British Mandate officially expired.  The new state had increased its share of historic Palestine from 55 percent to 78 percent. The remaining 22 percent was under Arab control.  Many of the Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes never returned to historic Palestine. Much of it is now the modern-day state of Israel. More than 70 years later, millions of their descendants live in dozens of refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and surrounding countries, including Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Many still keep the keys to the homes that they and their families were forced to leave. Nakba Day is now a key commemorative date in the Palestinian calendar. It is traditionally marked on 15 May, the date after Israeli independence was proclaimed in 1948. Some Palestinians also observe it on the day of Israeli independence celebrations, which itself changes from year to year due to variations in the Hebrew calendar. In the preface, he explains that his encounter with Zionism began under Israeli rule, and that after discovering the writings of Zionism’s founders in Hebrew, he set out to study the movement for a Palestinian readership.  He amassed Hebrew and English sources before going into exile in Lebanon, where the project took fuller shape.  Knowing the coloniser That intellectual trajectory gives the book its particular force. It is written from the standpoint of the colonised, but it is grounded in close reading of the coloniser’s own texts.  The main argument of The Foundations of Zionism is clear from the outset. Jiryis contends that Zionism was not the inevitable expression of a timeless Jewish national longing, nor simply a defensive response to European antisemitism.  Rather, it was a modern political ideology that emerged in specific 19th-century European conditions and developed in close alliance with colonial power.  At its core, the book follows the movement from its ideological precursors in Europe through to the early British Mandate for Palestine, tracing how a set of religious, cultural and nationalist currents were transformed into a settler-colonial project.  The book follows the [Zionist] movement from its ideological precursors in Europe through to the early British Mandate in Palestine The chapter titles alone tell the story with admirable bluntness: early thinkers, early practitioners, Herzl and the Zionist Organisation, the Second Aliyah, the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate system, and finally the construction of the “Jewish National Home”.  Ultimately the core issue is not accidental migration or abstract political dreaming, but institution-building, land acquisition, labour strategy, imperial patronage and the deliberate remaking of Palestine.  Jiryis refuses simplistic origin stories. He begins far earlier than political Zionism proper, with the long history of Jewish life in Europe, the transformations within Judaism, the tensions between Rabbinate, Hasidism and Haskalah, and the uneven process by which Jews were emancipated or persecuted across the continent.  His argument is that Zionism emerged from this tangled modern history, especially in Eastern Europe, where oppression, segregation and social crisis created fertile ground for a movement that presented itself as a solution to the so-called “Jewish question”.  He shows, too, that Western Europe was not the same as Russia or Poland. In places where Jews had greater civil integration, Zionism initially found less support. Imperial patronage That is an important corrective to shallow accounts that treat Zionism as the natural or universal political expression of Jewish life.  For Jiryis, it was historically contingent, politically constructed and far from universally embraced.  In pictures: Life in Palestine from 1890 to 1937 Read More » From there, the book becomes sharper still. Jiryis argues that once Zionism turned towards Palestine, it could only advance through colonial sponsorship.  That is why the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate are so central to his account. He does not present Britain as a neutral broker that mishandled competing claims. He presents it as the imperial framework that made Zionist implantation possible.  This is where the book still cuts through today’s evasions. Jiryis shows that Zionism was not merely a nationalist movement that later became entangled with the empire. In Palestine, its success depended upon imperial protection, legal engineering, diplomatic support and the suppression of the indigenous population.  The conclusion to the English edition makes this even plainer by describing Zionism as having remained in the service of colonialism, first under Britain and later under US hegemony. Deep scholarship The sources used are a major part of why the book endures. Jiryis draws on a substantial range of Hebrew and English materials. He does not build his case from polemics alone.  The bibliography includes classic works of Jewish and Zionist history, Hebrew scholarship, English-language historical studies, British parliamentary papers, Mandate-era official documents, and publications by Palestinian political bodies such as the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestine Arab Congress and the Palestine Arab Delegation.  The breadth is striking. It means the book is not merely rebutting Zionist narratives from the outside. It is reconstructing the movement through its own literature, through imperial records, and through Palestinian documentary evidence that is too often marginalised in mainstream histories. Palestine 36: Annemarie Jacir’s epic is a lesson in anti-Hollywood history Read More » That said, this is not a neutralist academic monograph pretending to stand above the fray. It is partisan in the best sense: it knows that history is political and that archives are battlefields. The tone is unapologetic, and some readers trained in the rituals of liberal balance will find that disconcerting - and that is good. Books like this should be disconcerting. Jiryis is not trying to reassure readers who want to keep using abstract language about “conflict” while avoiding the actual mechanics of colonisation.  He names those mechanics. He traces their intellectual pedigree. He explains how ideas became institutions and how institutions became facts on the ground. If there is a limitation, it is mostly one of style rather than substance. The book can be dense, sometimes heavily descriptive, and occasionally more schematic than supple.  It is not elegant in the manner of more literary histories. But elegance is not the point. The achievement here is excavation and argument.  The heavy cost of scholarship Fida Jiryis’s role in this edition deserves special mention. The English volume is a carefully assembled edition of the earlier Arabic works, covering 1862 to 1923, with a newly written conclusion bringing the story into the present.  Her translator’s note frames the project as both scholarly and familial, rooted in the history of the Palestine Research Centre and the violence that marked that world, including the killing of her mother, Hanneh Shaheen, in the 1983 bombing of the centre.  That context gives the edition emotional weight, but it also clarifies the stakes. This book comes out of a Palestinian intellectual tradition that paid for knowledge production in blood.  This book comes out of a Palestinian intellectual tradition that paid for knowledge production in blood.  Why is it important to read such a historical text now, in 2026? Because the last few years have shattered the illusions that allowed many people to treat Palestine as a frozen dispute rather than an ongoing colonial reality.  The translator’s note says plainly that the English edition was completed in the wake of 7 October 2023 and the 2023-2025 genocide in Gaza, and the book’s new conclusion links the founding ideology of Zionism to the ongoing devastation of the region. Whether one agrees with every formulation or not, the point stands. We are living through a moment in which history is being fought over in real time.  In that context, returning to foundational texts is not antiquarianism. It is political necessity. Jiryis helps to explain how settler colonialism in Palestine was imagined, justified, organised and internationalised.  Without that history, contemporary debate becomes shallow very quickly. Palestinian citizens of Israel demonstrate in March 1976 in Nazareth during a strike to protest against the expropriation of land by the Israeli government (AFP) The Foundations of Zionism is, then, an indispensable book. It restores a major Palestinian voice to the English-language conversation and reminds readers that some of the strongest analyses of Zionism were produced not yesterday, but decades ago, often under conditions of exile, censorship and violence.  Its republication is worth celebrating because it widens the archive available to English readers and because it refuses the fashionable amnesia of the present.  In 2026, when so much commentary is hurried, moralistic and historically thin, Jiryis offers something better: a durable historical argument with documentary ballast and political clarity. Read it not because it is old, but because it remains painfully current.   The Foundations of Zionism by Sabri Jiryis is available for sale at Ebb Books Books Discover Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0