It is often said that the Zionist movement has always been devoted to the idea of Jewish nationhood and deeply hostile to foreign rule. Yet before the creation of Israel in 1948, many influential Zionists imagined a future defined not by independence but by limited self-governance under the British Empire. In parallel, British bureaucrats and politicians increasingly came to view the Zionist project as compatible with their own imperial aspirations. The result was an unlikely alliance built on the dream of imperial federalism, which would unite multiple self-governing polities in a Commonwealth of Nations.
Arie Dubnov traces the rise and fall of this fraught British-Jewish collaboration from the late Victorian era to the Suez Crisis in 1956. During the interwar years, especially, Zionist and British visions of Jewish autonomy under empire came to anchor debates about the future of Palestine. Some, for example, sought to turn Palestine into a British dominion. Others imagined dividing it along the Swiss model of confederation, with Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cantons. These now-forgotten proposals were regarded as realistic, even promising, options at the time. During the late 1930s, however, the British began to repackage such visions into the idea of partition. At the same time, a new generation of revolutionary Zionist activists began to pivot fully toward the pursuit of Jewish nationhood.
Reconstructing the diplomatic gambits, political alliances, and colonial violence that undergirded these forgotten debates, Zionism Before Israel invites us to reconsider the influence of both nationalism and imperialism on the Zionist road to statehood.
