On 29 August 1897, few of those gathered inside the Stadtcasino concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, could have known with certainty that they were witnessing a moment that, half a century later, would be viewed as the foundational seed of the Israeli occupation state.
Around 200 delegates from 17 countries attended the three-day congress at the invitation of Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl. It concluded with the establishment of the World Zionist Organisation and the adoption of the “Basel Program”, which declared that the aim of Zionism was “to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law”.
Why Basel and Not Munich?
Herzl’s original plan was to hold the congress in Munich, then a cultural centre of economically prosperous and socially integrated German Jewry.
However, the leaders of Munich’s Jewish community and its chief rabbi refused to host the event.
The objection was not technical or logistical, but fundamentally ideological. German Jews viewed Zionism as a threat to their social position. They had built their identity around the principle that they were “Germans first, Jews second”, and feared that calls for a separate “national homeland” could be used to question their national loyalty and reinforce accusations that European Jews possessed “dual loyalty”, according to American historian Gil Troy.
Faced with this opposition, Herzl moved the congress to Basel, a neutral Swiss city removed from the competing nationalist calculations of European states. This allowed the gathering to take place in an environment that did not provoke the same sensitivities.
A Parliament Without a State
One of the more striking features of the Basel Congress was Herzl’s effort to make it resemble a sovereign legislative body, despite representing neither a state nor a territory nor a politically unified population.
According to the Friends of Zion Museum, the gathering was convened as a “symbolic parliament” for those sympathetic to Zionist objectives.
It included public sessions, opening speeches, drafting committees, votes on resolutions, an elected presidency and an official record extending to around 200 pages. A 15-member executive committee and a smaller five-member administrative committee were also elected.
Herzl sought to manufacture institutional and procedural legitimacy before the movement possessed any actual territory or sovereignty to underpin it.
Shortly after the sessions ended, he famously wrote in his diary: “At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this aloud today, I would be met with universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will recognise it,” according to Segula, a magazine specialising in Jewish history.
Evening Dress and White Ties
Herzl insisted that delegates attend the opening session in full formal dress, including black evening suits, white ties and, in some cases, top hats, according to the Friends of Zion Museum.
When prominent British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill arrived in ordinary clothes, Herzl sent him back to his hotel to change before allowing him into the hall.
Herzl told his colleague Max Nordau that he wanted the delegates to regard the congress as “the most elevated and solemn ever”.
He was also aware that more than 20 journalists from the international press would be covering the event.
Herzl wanted the image transmitted to the outside world to present Jews as an organised and respectable political bloc worthy of negotiation by European and Ottoman governments, rather than merely as a persecuted community seeking protection.
Who Was in the Hall?
The composition of those attending reveals much about early Zionism as a movement that was, at its core, dominated by a European elite.
Of roughly 200 participants, only 69 were official delegates representing Zionist associations. The remainder attended in a personal capacity by invitation.
Ten non-Jews were present as observers without voting rights, including the English clergyman William Hechler.
Only 11 rabbis attended, and none held significant standing within Orthodox Jewish circles, which boycotted the congress altogether.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish participants were secular or culturally assimilated Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, including lawyers, doctors, journalists, academics and businessmen, rather than farmers or traditional rabbis.
A ‘State on Paper’
The most important practical outcome of the Basel Congress was the construction of an institutional framework for a future state.
This included a global organisation with elected leadership through the World Zionist Organization, a declared political programme through the Basel Program, a national symbol in the form of a blue-and-white flag bearing a six-pointed star, and an anthem, “Hatikvah”.
Further mechanisms emerged at subsequent congresses.
A financial settlement fund was established at the second congress in 1898. In 1901, the Keren Kayemeth fund, also known as the Jewish National Fund, was established to purchase land. The Anglo-Palestine Bank was later created to finance immigration.
Taken together, this structure, including symbolic currency, an executive apparatus, a financial arm and a recurring parliament that initially met annually and later every two years, functioned as something resembling a “virtual state” operating from exile.
It gradually accumulated resources and international legitimacy until these efforts were later translated into the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the 1947 partition resolution and the establishment of the occupation state in 1948.
Palestine Was Not the Only Territory Considered
Contrary to the widespread narrative that Palestine was always the sole and exclusive territorial objective, documents show that Herzl himself considered other geographical alternatives when Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II refused to grant settlement concessions.
Argentina was among the earliest options considered before the Basel Congress, partly because of Baron Hirsch’s settlement initiatives there.
Argentina later remained home to one of the largest Jewish communities outside “Israel” and the United States.
Uganda and Kenya were also proposed by the British government in 1903 as a temporary refuge for Eastern European Jews fleeing what was described as “Tsarist persecution”.
Herzl presented the proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel. It received the support of 295 delegates, while 178 opposed it.
The proposal caused a severe split within the Zionist movement. Opponents described it as a “betrayal” because it meant abandoning “Zion” itself.
The idea was ultimately dropped after Herzl’s death, with his successor Chaim Weizmann rejecting it.
The Sinai Peninsula was also considered as a project for Jewish settlement in northern Sinai before the Uganda proposal, but the plan failed because of water scarcity.
According to a secret document later revealed by Yedioth Ahronoth from the Central Zionist Archives, Herzl also considered settling Russian Jews in the Draa Valley in southwestern Morocco.
The proposal appeared in a confidential letter Herzl wrote in 1903 and was not widely known.
Population Transfer and Gaza
A number of historians, including Israeli historian Benny Morris of the “New Historians” school, have argued that the idea of “transfer”, meaning the removal of the Arab population from Palestine, was not marginal among leaders of the early Zionist movement.
They have cited statements by figures such as Yosef Weitz, director of the Land Department, who explicitly advocated “transferring the Arabs to neighbouring countries” as the only solution for creating a “Land of Israel” without Arabs, according to a research paper published through the Teach Palestine project.
Developments during the genocidal war on Gaza have also been linked to the “Allon Plan”, the “Eshkol Plan” and the “Dayan Plan” formulated in the decades following the 1967 war.
Those plans addressed demographic limits on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories through a combination of economic and settlement-related measures.
Despite this history, the contemporary official Zionist and Israeli narrative presents the Basel Program as an effort to establish “a national homeland secured under public law for a persecuted people facing an existential crisis in Europe”.
The texts of the First Zionist Congress themselves contained no explicit reference to removing the Arab population of Palestine, who were not a central subject of discussion among delegates during the three sessions held in 1897.
