The Zionist Movement: Documents

Theodor Herzl: On the Jewish State (Excerpts from: Der Judenstaat, 1896, Engl.)
Herzl was the founder of Zionism as a political movement. The first Zionist congress was convened by Herzl, a well-known Viennese journalist and playwrite, in 1897, following his own awakening (as a witness to French popular anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus trial) to the Jewish problem as a national question.

Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginzberg): Jewish State and Jewish Problem (1897)
Ginzberg responded to Herzl's Zionist call by trying to give it a cultural spin. At the center of the concern of this Eastern European intellectual was the need of the modern Jew to reconstruct Judaism as a national and spiritual identity. This cultural turn of Zionism was rejected by Herzl. One of the most important spokesmen of cultural Zionism in the West was Martin Buber.

The Balfour Declaration (1917) paved the way for British support of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

1919 Declaration of the Zionist Organization in anticipation of the peace conference, following the end of WWI (Authors: Nahum Sokolow and Chaim Weizmann).

Essay, describing the Zionist cause (Author: H. Sacher, Atlantic Monthly Magazine of July 1919).

Declaration of Israel's Independence, Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948