DaasYochid: From what you write, you proved my point. The words you quote are from a diary and it clearly shows that at the actual Congress, no demand for a State was made. Read the actual manifesto. This might have been a distant wish but the Congress and the world did not anticipate an independent state. How could they? “Palestine” was still part of the Ottoman empire and WW1 was still twenty years away. The dissolution of the three empires- ottoman, austria-hungary and russian- did change the face of Europe and the earth. BUt no one could have foreseen this at that time, Arab hostility had little to do with the idea of Zionism itself an much more to do with the influx of Jews fleeing pogroms and having been imbued -by Rabbonim and gedolim!-of the mitzvah of alyah and the re-building of ancient Israel.
As long as jews were servile and did not consist of a threat to them, they were allowed to live in Palestine.The dynamics of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when millions of Jews left Russia for safer havens, changed this. Even without the idea of political Zionism, there would have been a major backlash against the arrival of tens of thousands of jews in then “Palestine”. Zionism per se, had little to do with this. Its idea became the vessel of all the pent-up needs and feelings of Jews in Europe who were persecuted and harassed throughout Russia. And, ironically, it was mainly the religious Rabbonim in Russia who encouraged the alyah movement and the first mass alyah was in 1881 -named bilu,meaning Bais Yaakov Lechu Venelchu- It was only the beginning. The tragedy of that time was that secular Jews stole our idea and it made it theirs. We have been trying even since to bring it back to its rightful source. “lehachzir atoroh lejoshono”