The 3 Stages of Zionism

In 1904, the Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin explained, “without ownership of the land, the land of Israel will never become Jewish.” Then he identified the three strategies for acquiring land: purchase, conquest and government requisition. Ussishkin was prescient, since this is precisely how the Zionist movement, and then the State of Israel, took control over the vast majority of the land of historic Palestine. This is a brief history of the 3 stages of Zionism, first purchase, then revolt and war, and finally state decree.

Let’s start with the first stage of Zionism. By 1914, Jews owned about 2% of Palestine and by 1948, they owned about 5.7%, or about 1.5 million dunams of Mandate Palestine's 26.3 million dunams. This strategy has continued to the present day, even if it has retreated significantly. The acquisition of land through purchase has been expensive and slow, and thus not especially attractive.

This brings us to the second stage of Zionism, conquest. The first and often forgotten period during which Zionists acquired land by conquest was from 1936-39. During this period, Palestinian Arabs engaged in open revolt against the British, known as the Great Arab Revolt. In their attempt to put down the uprising, the British trained, armed and supported Zionist paramilitary forces and allowed them to establish “security” outposts. 

The Zionists seized the opportunity to establish “facts on ground.” The Jewish settlers would arrive at a site and quickly build a watch tower and a few shacks with roofs in less than 24 hours in what was known as the “Tower and Stockade” method. Soon enough, the “security outposts” were developed into agricultural settlements. That’s how Zionists built 57 new settlements in the Galilee, Jordan Valley, center and south of the country. These rural settlements (see here) are home to tens of thousands of Israeli Jews today.

Then, during the 1948 War, Zionist forces, and then the State of Israel, conquered 78% of British Mandate Palestine, expelling 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in the process. The state then proceeded to confiscate the land formerly belonging to the refugees. A 1951 UN study arrived at 16.3M dunams, which included privately and communally owned land, while the UN official Sami Hadawi estimated 19M dunams. Most estimates, however, have tended to range from 4.2 to 6.6M dunams of land confiscated by Israel in the aftermath of the war. This was by far the single largest land acquisition in the history of Zionism.

Then, in June 1967, Israel conquered the remaining 22% of historic Palestine--the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Only this time, Israeli forces expelled a much smaller percentage of the Palestinian population, and thus had to embrace the third and final strategy for land acquisition: fiat decree.

The first decree, known as the Absentee Property Law (military order 58, issued on July 23, 1967), was similar to the 1950 Absentee Property Law used to take over Palestinian land after 1948. In 1967, the Israeli military defined “absentee property” as “property whose legal owner, or whoever is granted the power to control it by law, left the area prior to 7 June 1967 or subsequently. Israel’s State Comptroller reported during the first few years of the occupation, about 430,000 dunams, or 7.5% of the West Bank, was confiscated this way.

The second strategy was to declare land to be the property of a hostile state or body. Military Order 59, issued on July 31, 1967, declared any land or property belonging to a hostile state or to any arbitration body connected with a hostile state as state property.  By 1979, 687,000 dunams— some 13% of the West Bank—was confiscated this way.

The third strategy was to confiscate land for “public” [read: Jewish] needs. Israel has used this decree extensively to seize land needed for road construction to serve Israel’s illegal network of settlements. Today, most of these roads can only be accessed by Israelis, not the Palestinian population of the occupied territories, making them not public roads but apartheid roads.

The fourth strategy was to declare land as nature reserves. The Israeli military issued order 363 in December 1969 which imposes restrictions on the use of land for agriculture and grazing in areas defined as nature reserves. By 1985, 250,000 dunams (or 5% of the West Bank) was made into nature reserves and by 1997 that figure had increased to 340,000 dunams. In 2020, Israel created 7 more nature reserves and expanded 12 existing nature reserves to maintain Israeli control of the area. Then, in April 2022, Israel established its largest new West Bank nature reserve in nearly 3 decades, making another 22,000 dunams effectively off limits to Palestinians.

The fifth strategy was to confiscate the land for military purposes. From August 1967 to May 1975, Israel declared some 1.5M dunams of land – 26.6% of the West Bank – closed military zones. Much of this land was later converted into Jewish settlements. A 1979 Israeli Supreme Court decision forced the state to alter the strategy slightly: first the Palestinian land would be declared ‘state land,’ then it could be repurposed for Jewish settlement construction. From 1979 to 1992, this system was used to steal over 900,000 dunams of land, and then allocated almost exclusively to settlements. Today, there are 1.2M dunams (22% of the West Bank) that fall into this category of land.

Israel continues to use all three methods to take over Palestine. Jews continue to attempt to purchase land from Palestinians, the state continues to pass new laws and issue more decrees to confiscate more Palestinian land, and the Israeli military has already taken over at least 16% of Gaza’s land mass over the past 10 months through military conquest.