Suffrage in Other Countries

Most other nations have enacted woman-suffrage legislation. By the 1980s women could vote virtually everywhere in the world, except for a few Muslim countries. Women who attained national leadership posts include prime ministers Golda Meir (Israel), Indira Gandhi (India), and Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan) and President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines.

Zionism, ['zaIqnIz(q)m] movement to unite the Jews [dZu:z] of the Diaspora and settle them in Palestine; it arose in the late 19th century and culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The movement's name is derived from Zion, the hill on which the Temple of Jerusalem was located.

In the 1700s the Haskalah (Hebrew for ‘enlightenment’) movement marked the beginning of a trend away from traditional religious orthodoxy and toward Jewish assimilation into European society. The achievement of political equality by European Jewry began in revolutionary France in 1791 and spread over most of Europe during the next several decades. Political emancipation proved to be a false dawn, however. In the second half of the 1800s anti-Semitic parties emerged in Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Russia, pogroms (anti-Jewish riots) spread across the country. Large numbers of Russian Jews migrated to the West, primarily to the United States. A smaller number went to Palestine, which was then under Turkish rule.

In 1896 Theodor ["TIq'dO:] Herzl, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist, published a book called The Jewish State, in which he analyzed the causes of anti-Semitism and proposed its cure, the creation of a Jewish state. In 1897 Herzl organized the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The congress formulated a program defining Zionism's goal as the creation ‘for the Jewish people of a home in Palestine secured by public law.’ The congress worked to establish branches in every country with a substantial Jewish population. Herzl made unsuccessful efforts to acquire land and financial backing for the new state.

During World War I (1914-1918), the British wooed the Zionists in order to secure strategic control over Palestine and to gain the support of world Jewry for the Allied cause. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 approved the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home for the Jewish people.’ After the war, Zionism faced a setback when Russian Jewry (the traditional source of Zionist migration) was sealed off by the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In addition, a dispute arose between the leader of American Zionism, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, and Russian-born chemist Dr. Chaim [haIm] Weizmann, the man credited with obtaining the Balfour Declaration. Weizmann's ‘synthetic [sIn'TetIk] Zionism,’ which advocated both political struggle and colonization, won out over Brandeis's pragmatic approach, which concentrated on colonization without reference to future nationhood.

During the British mandate over Palestine ['pxlIstaIn] (1920-1948), the number of Jewish settlers in Palestine grew from 50,000 to 600,000, most of whom were refugees of Nazi persecution in Europe. Coexistence between Jews and the Arabs of Palestine became an increasingly intractable problem. Recurrent riots in the 1920s culminated in full-scale rebellion from 1936 to 1939. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the British government changed its Palestine policy in an effort to appease the Arab world. It terminated Britain's commitment to Zionism, provided for the establishment of a Palestinian state within ten years, and limited additional entry into Palestine by Jews.

In 1942 Zionist leaders demanded that a Jewish state be created in western Palestine. The Holocaust ['hPlqkO:st] (systematic murder of European Jews by the Nazis ['nQ:tsIz]) convinced Western Jewry of the need for a Jewish state. In 1944 Zionist guerrillas began an armed revolt against British rule in Palestine. In 1948 the British mandate ended, and the Jews declared the independence of the new state of Israel. Relations between the new state and the Zionists proved problematic, however. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, insisted that Zionist leaders who chose to remain outside of Israel would have no say in Israel's policy decisions. During the 1970s a great deal of Zionist activity focused on Soviet Jews, who were finally allowed to emigrate in restricted numbers. A massive wave of immigration by Soviet Jews to Israel began in the late 1980s.

Zionism has been repeatedly denounced by Arab nations and their supporters as a ‘tool of imperialism.’ Zionists have emphasized that the movement has never rejected Arab self-determination. Zionism today is based on the support of two principles: the autonomy and safety of the state of Israel and the right of any Jew to settle there.