19 March 2026
Sabri Jiryis’s pioneering study of the foundations of Zionism is now available in English, thanks to his daughter, Fida Jiryis (pictured), who translated it from the Arabic. Fida’s own memoirs, recently published, also deserve a wide readership. Here is Nora Barrows-Friedman’s article about the books in the electronic intifada.
The foundations of Zionism, with Sabri Jiryis and Fida Jiryis
Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 14 March 2026
https://www.youtube.com/embed/yAZZnUyp1Q8?feature=oembed&“The history of Zionism is wide and complex, entwined in the history of many peoples and states, and extends over a relatively long period,” writes Palestinian scholar Sabri Jiryis.
His new 600-page book, The Foundations of Zionism, published by Ebb Books, is, as Jiryis writes, “the inner story of Zionism.”
Jiryis’ documentation incorporates detailed, primary sourced accounts of the emergence and spread of the Zionist ideology, the institutions that have assisted it, and its “efforts to control Palestine and the region, which culminated, in their first and primary phase, in the establishment of Israel.”
“I am part of this ideology,” he tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast. “I was 10 years old when this empire of Israel was established. And from the first day that this state was established, until today, I am following it closely in all aspects. So this is part of my life.”
Along with this new book, Jiryis is the author of The Arabs in Israel, published in 1966. In 2025, he was the recipient of the Arab Historian Award from the Union of Arab Historians.
Jiryis served in the Palestine Liberation Organization as director of its research center in Beirut. He was a member of the Palestine National Council and the Fatah advisory council, and he was an adviser to Yasser Arafat on Israeli affairs.
He joined The Electronic Intifada from his village of Fassouta in the Galilee, northern historic Palestine, along with his daughter, Fida Jiryis, to talk about his historical research and the current implications of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war on Iran.
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From the year 70 until around 1900, Jiryis estimates that only 50,000 Jewish people lived in Palestine. When anti-Jewish persecution emerged in pre-Soviet Russia, about two million Jews immigrated to the United States and only one percent of the immigrants came to Palestine.
“This Zionist movement is simply a colonialist movement, no more and no less,” he explains.
“And it couldn’t be otherwise, because it was formed and it was developed and it grew up in the second half of the 19th century. From 1850 to 1900 … it was the [time] of European colonialism.”
Jiryis says that the Zionist leaders wrote everything down.
“They were roaming around, their leaders in Europe, trying to make contacts with the princes and the kings and the rulers of Europe to ask them, to give them, to help them to make a state in Palestine, for the exchange that they will be agents for Europe to defend against the ‘savage’ Arabs or the ‘savage’ East.”
This is what they are still doing today in collaboration with the Trump administration, he notes.
“It’s so clear … They write it everywhere, in all of their writings. And there is something good about them, in fact, very good. There was not one single Zionist leader [who] didn’t leave anything in writing, either books or pamphlets or articles.”
He laughs, “they write too much, they talk too much. And I have passed over all those writings. I didn’t take the sources from somebody who is commenting on them – I read their own articles and books and pamphlets. And all of them – they say it this way. Just, it is a colonialist, imperialist movement, aggressive, exclusive. It just wants everything for itself. And that’s all.
“Exactly what it is”
In Beirut, where Jiryis and his family lived in the 1970s after he was forced to leave Palestine, he became the director of the Palestine Research Center which archived and documented Palestinian research and history.
The center was targeted for years by Israel, and in 1983, it was bombed and destroyed. Jiryis’ wife, Hanneh, who was also a researcher at the center, was killed in the attacks. He and the children moved to Cyprus, and then eventually returned to the Galilee.
“We were like pioneers in introducing Zionism and Israel to the Arab world and exposing what Zionism really is, without exaggeration, without falsifications, without mistakes; just exactly what it is,” he says.
Jiryis says that he is proud of the work that he and his colleagues did in the early days of the research center because it helped clarify the ideology of Zionism for those who were directly impacted by it.
He says that his daughter encouraged him to translate his work into English so that it could reach an even wider international audience.
“What struck me the most was in following the progression of the Zionist movement and finding out all this information, [in] this detail before reading my father’s book, I didn’t know the fact that in all of this time, [in] the way the Zionist movement came about, it completely ignored and didn’t see the presence of anybody else on this land,” Fida Jiryis says.
All of the Jewish immigration to the state, she adds, was set up “as though nobody existed in it.”
Fida translated The Foundations of Zionism and is the author of a memoir about her own childhood, Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home.
Looking at the various ways that Palestinians in Palestine and in exile are struggling for liberation, Fida says that she depends a lot on her father for hope.
“It feels like maybe this is the part of, or the start of, the big battle which will eventually determine the course of Zionism because it is impossible, it is simply unsustainable to continue as Israel is doing right now.”
The Foundations of Zionism and Stranger in My Own Land are available from the publishers or through the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem, which ships worldwide.
Watch the interview above, or listen to the audio via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or via the media player below.https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/soundcloud%3Atracks%3A2281409747%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-l6vvg9QvYV1&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true
