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 intensified and the postwar international order collapsed, this flexibility hardened into the conviction that only a sovereign Jewish nation-state could secure the survival of the Zionist project. Palestinian rights – and the democratic character of the state itself – thus became tied to the demographic balance under Jewish rule. This axiom, which continues to shape Israeli politics, became foundational to Zionist political thought.
A groundbreaking political history, People Who Count fundamentally restructures our understanding of Zionist political thought and is indispensable for grasping the historical roots of today’s tensions between Jewish nationalism, democracy, and Palestinian rights in Israel.
