Murray Rothbard on the early Zionist movement

[W]hat was world Zionism?  Before the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettoes, and there emerged from ghetto life a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic (as well as religious) identity, with Yiddish as the common language (Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual).  After the French Revolution, the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life, and they then faced a choice of where to go from there.  One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment, chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow, parochial ghetto culture on behalf of assimilation into the culture and the environment of the Western world.  While assimilationism was clearly the rational course in America and Western Europe, this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe, where the ghetto walls still held.  In Eastern Europe, therefore, the Jews turned toward various movements for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity.  Most prevalent was Bundism, the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund, which advocated Jewish national self-determination, up to and including a Jewish state in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe.  (Thus, according to Bundism, the city of Vilna, in Eastern Europe, with a majority population of Jews, would be part of a newly-formed Jewish state.)  Another, less powerful, group of Jews, the Territorialist Movement, despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe, advocated preserving the Yiddish Jewish identity by forming Jewish colonies and communities (not states) in various unpopulated, virgin areas of the world. 

Given the conditions of European Jewry in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, all of these movements had a rational groundwork.  The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism, a movement which began blended with Jewish Territorialism.  But while the Territorialists simply wanted to preserve Jewish-Yiddish identity in a newly developed land of their own, Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone.  The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land, but already occupied by an Arab peasantry, meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism.  Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew. 

In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda for Jewish colonization, and the rejection of this offer by the Zionists polarized the Zionist and Territorialist movements, which previously had been fused together.  From then on, the Zionists would be committed to the blood-and-soil mystique of Palestine, and Palestine alone, while the Territorialists would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.  

Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest.

~ Murray Rothbard, ""War Guilt in the Middle East," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967

The first Aliya, early Jewish immigrants to
Ottoman Palestine, 1882-1903