People Who Count: Zionism, Demography, and Democracy in Mandate Palestine (McGill-Queen's Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Series)

The drive to establish a Jewish majority population became both a defining principle of Zionist thought and a central force influencing political strategy during the British Mandate in Palestine (1917-48).Enduring questions in Israeli politics find their roots in this period - questions about the perceived necessity of a Jewish majority, competing definitions of a Jewish state, tensions between Jewish identity and democratic governance, and the place of non-Jewish citizens within such a state. Challenging the assumption that the Zionist movement is inherently democratic, Nimrod Lin argues that Israeli democracy must be understood as an outcome of the Mandate period, when demographic supremacy and Zionist democratic ideology first became intertwined.He shows that in the 1920s and early 1930s Zionist leaders were remarkably flexible in envisioning a Jewish state, a pragmatism he ascribes less to ideology than to political weakness.By the mid-1930s, however, as persecution in Europe inten