Would the internet have made a difference? Probably. But would it have made a decisive difference? That's a much more interesting question, and one which is, of course, much more difficult to answer. I think that it would be a fair guess that were the internet available, Jews would have been making use of it, and not necessarily because of their socio-economic status which back then was, in most cases, significantly different from what it is today. When the printing press first appeared on the scene Jews were quick to make use of it, and they've done the same with the internet, and probably would have a hundred years ago. I don't know to what an extent they made use of the telegraph (it would be interesting to find out, but I don't know even where to look) but my guess is that a global people quickly found that they could make good use of that tool.

A mass migration of a people is dependent on many factors, and not the least of these is an accessible means of transportation. The slave trade was, after all, dependent on the ships to carry them, so transportation was available well before the Zionist movement began, but there's a difference between forced and voluntary travel, and I tend to doubt that an influx of immigrants would have been possible without a well organized world-wide infrastructure of passenger ships.

And let's not forget language. Essentially by default we know that the Jews of the world didn't speak a common language before the outset of the Zionist movement (had they spoken one, would there have been a need for the movement?). Eliezer Ben-Yehuda changed that, and did so only after coming to Palestine. Hebrew was read, however, by many, and of course Yiddish was the lingua franca of the Jews of Eastern Europe. But had the internet been around, would these languages have been functional on the web? Even today the web only speaks Hebrew through coercion. Would we have been capable of using a precursor to the web back then in Hebrew? And did we miss our chance to deal with that problem?

Go to: Virtual Zionism?