Jews were subject to horrible persecutions in Europe, including a rather large-scale attempt to exterminate them. Of course, Israel later became a local imperialist state, backed by the global mega-imperialist, but still, there was a struggle against oppression at the origin.
Mat:
Edward Said stresses the importance of imperialist ideology in seeking the intellectual origins of Zionism. Anti-Jewish prejudice may have motivated Zionism, but the founders (all European) took the form, language, style, and philosophy of their movement from European imperialist ideology. Thus the non-European world was seen as backward, uncivilized, etc.
The essence of Zionism emerged before Herzl (the father of political zionism). Non-Jewish European colonialists put forward the idea of Jewish colonization of Palestine as an outpost for european interests guarding the routes to the east and suppressing Arab nationalism in the mid 19th century.
With its formal beginnings with Herzl, Zionism explicitly argued for support along these lines: they argued that Jewish colonization could offer strategic material advantages. In Germany, England, and elsewhere, Herzl and others argued that a Jewish state could open up markets for investment of European finance capital, markets for the sale of European goods, tap natural resources, harness cheap labor, open new commercial routes by land and sea, and provide an inexpensive military to protect it all. Most of these arguments are recorded in Herzl's diary: he was unabshed in his colonial, imperial outlook.
Herzl followed Cecil Rhodes' claim that social revolution could be nipped in the bud by encouraging the poor and dissatisfied to become colonists. As privileged white settlers in Africa or Asia they might well support imperialist counter revolution. Herzl believed this was especially applicable to Jewsih workers who supported revolutionary movements due to both class exploitation and anti-Jewish prejudice. He told the Grand Duke of Germany that a 'Jewish national home' would drain off the "surplus Jewish proletariat" from Europe. The Zionist economic elite in the 'First World' feared that the emigration of poor Eastern European and Russian Jews to Western Europe where they wouild compete for jobs with non-Jews would give rise to anti-Jewish prejudice that could prevent the complete assimilation of the Jewish economic elite into the European ruling class.
Herzl lured the Jewish middle class and small capitalist who were facing a tough time around the turn of the century with visions of their own domestic markets and domination over vast labor resources of Eastern European and other Jews. He also promised to 'rehabilitate' small capitals with favorable government policies, including "centralized labor agencies" with workers like "a body of troops." The settler working class would benefit by escaping competition from non-Jewish labor in Europe and Russia, and would form a workers' aristocracy in Palestine. As Jews in a Jewish State, members of the settler working class woiuld suppress competition from Arab labor with racist unions, intimidation, and terror. The state and Zionist elite would would grant privileges to the Jewish settlers to make them loyal.
Zionism was the Classical European Colonial solution to the "Jewish problem," rather than a specifically Jewish solution to the Jewish problem.
2 b cont.