The Foundations of Zionism by Sabri Jiryis, originally published in 1977 and newly translated by Fida Jiryis in 2025.
Keywords: Israel, Palestine, Zionism, genocide
Academic, written for a wider audience
Discussion Questions
- How did Zionism originate?
- What were the early currents of Zionism, and were they fixated on Palestine?
- What was the relationship between Zionism and colonialism? Between Zionism and the Nazi regime?
- What is the nature of Zionism today, and how has its project unfolded?
- What are the repercussions of Zionism for Palestine, the Middle East, and the world?
Supplementary Materials and Resources
April 17, 2026: The Key Magazine (PalFest), Review by Nicholas Glastonbury
“For many of the earliest Zionist writers, there were no Palestinians in Palestine. Florid in their descriptions of Palestine as a millenarian utopia, they wrote barely a word about the people who had lived in that land for generations.”
What is Zionism? Sabri Jiryis traces its origins and evolution by Usman Butt for The New Arab
“What we find in the book is not a simple picture of what Zionism is and how history unfolded. Jiryis does not shy away from complexity, nuance and historically rooted analysis.”
Review by Ramona Wadi for Middle East Monitor
A witness to the 1948 Nakba in the village of Fassouta in the Galilee at the age of 10, and one of 160,000 Palestinians who remained, Palestinian author and researcher Sabri Jiryis later became involved al-Ard which sought the return of Palestinians and their land. Expelled to Safad after attempting to run for the 1965 Knesset elections, Jiryis started reading about the Zionist movement. It was while working in Lebanon at the Palestinian Research Centre that Jiryis turned his attention to researching the Zionist movement; this time with the realisation that Palestinians with no knowledge of Hebrew had no way of learning about the colonial ideology that dispossessed them.
August 20, 2026: Arab Center Washington DC, interview with Khalil Jahshan
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