ISRAEL IS 70 YEARS OLD

(part 2)

The Zionist movement

It’s important to understand that, from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem onward, the Jewish people were persecuted almost everywhere they went, not just under Roman paganism but under the often anti-Semitic version of Christianity that succeeded it. Throughout history, from the Dark Ages, later the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the Jews continued spreading out in search of peace, but found none.

Modern Israel springs from both religious and political sources. The Biblical promise of a land for the Jews and a return to the temple in Jerusalem were enshrined in Judaism and kept sustaining the Jewish identity through an exile of more than 19 centuries after the failed uprising against Rome. By the 1800's, fewer than 25,000 Jews still lived in their ancient homeland, and most of these were concentrated in Jerusalem, then a provincial stagnant place of the Ottoman Empire.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jews were largely targeted rioting as well as persecuted in areas that spread across the Russian Empire.

In 1896 Theodore Herzl, a Jewish political activist of Hungary and Austria, summarized the downtrodden condition of the Jews in his famously influential pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), stating:

“In countries where we have lived for centuries, we are still cried down as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering.”

The term "Zionism" was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, but it's Herzl that have been called the father of Zionism - the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Zion being the name for Jerusalem.

His passionate advocacy for a Jewish state was instrumental in what would shortly unfold. But to make his vision a reality required something more than ideals: his dream needed international political support.

As described above, it is safe to say that from inception Zionism advocated tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions - right, left, religious and secular - formed the Zionist movement and worked together toward a common goal.

That political support took a distinctive step forward more than 20 years after Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in the wake of political upheaval in World War I. By that time, the Muslim Ottoman Turks had ruled over the Holy Land for more than 500 years. Herzl’s proposal was to humbly petition the Turkish Sultan for the land or else purchase it from him, but the British defeat of the Ottomans in World War I changed the conversation - decidedly in favor of the Jews.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism came to include the movement for the development of the State of Israel and the protection of the Jewish nation in Israel through support for the Israel Defense Forces. (to be continued...)