Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe, seeking to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine. This region corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism and is central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration established Britain's support for the movement. In 1922, the Mandate for Palestine, governed by Britain, explicitly privileged Jewish settlers over the local Palestinian population. In 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. During the war, Israel expanded its territory to control over 78% of Mandatory Palestine. As a result of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, an estimated 160,000 of 870,000 Palestinians in the territory remained, forming a Palestinian minority in Israel.

Zionist views have varied over time and are not uniform, resulting in a variety of types of Zionism. The Zionist mainstream has historically included Liberal, Labor, Revisionist, and Cultural Zionism, while groups like Brit Shalom and Ihud have been dissident factions within the movement. Religious Zionism is a variant of Zionist ideology that brings together secular nationalism and religious conservatism. Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (who were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors. Opponents of Zionism often characterize it as a supremacist, colonialist, or racist ideology, or as a settler colonialist movement.

The word Zion itself derives from Mount Zion, which is a hill in Jerusalem and a term used in the Hebrew Bible. It has been used poetically as a synecdoche to refer to the Land of Israel since the period of the Babylonian Exile, with particular importance in Jewish messianic belief. The messianic conception of "Zion" was utilized by the Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who wrote Seeking Zion in 1862, a proto-Zionist text which was the first written work to demand that the Jews migrate en-masse to Palestine.

The first time the term "Zion" was associated with a mass movement was with the Hovevei Zion (lit. 'Lovers of Zion'), also known as the Hibbat Zion (lit. 'Love of Zion'), who came together at the 1884 Katowice Conference, inspired by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The first use of the term as an -ism is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, in an 1890 article in his periodical Selbst-Emancipation, itself named after Pinsker's pamphlet. Birnbaum used the term "Zionism" in reference to the activities of the Lovers of Zion. In 1893, Birnbaum published The National Rebirth of The Jewish People in its Own Land, which advocated for the Jews to migrate to Palestine. In the same year, Birnbaum founded "Zion: Union of Austrian Societies for the Colonization of Palestine and Syria", to carry out his proposals.

The paramount Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was unaware of Birnbaum's original usage of the term before popularizing the term "Zionism" himself. In Herzl's diary entries between 1895 and early 1896, he originally used the term "Zionist" to describe others, and not himself. Herzl used the term "Zionist" to describe those in the Lovers of Zion, who Herzl saw as fellow Jewish nationalists, but without a concrete plan. When Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, he used the term "Zionist" in the text, often in a critical light, to describe emigration advocates like the Lovers of Zion. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl called for the creation of a Jewish state, an idea which he claimed was "an ancient one" that he did not "discover". After the publication of Der Judenstaat, Birnbaum wrote a review of the book, attributing its success to the author proudly embracing Zionism, but also criticized the cultural proposals of Herzl. Birnbaum quickly struck up a correspondence with Herzl, and gave him a copy of The National Rebirth of The Jewish People in its Own Land, as a sort of Zionist education.

Herzl did not begin self-identifying as a "Zionist" until months after the publication of Der Judenstaat. Herzl's usage of "Zionism" was later popularized when convening the 1897 First Zionist Congress and the Zionist Organization founded there.