Zionism

The undeniable truth is that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Any objective reading of the history and ideology of Zionism makes it very clear that Zionism has nothing to do with 'settler-colonialism', 'Racism' or 'Facism' as the loathsome critics of Zionism and Israel repulsively charge.Zionist ideology holds that the Jews are a people or nation like any other, and should gather together in a single homeland. Zionism was self-consciously the Jewish analogue of Italian and German national liberation movements of the nineteenth century. The term "Zionism" was apparently coined in 1891 by the Austrian publicist Nathan Birnbaum, to describe the new ideology, but it was used retroactively to describe earlier efforts and ideas to return the Jews to their homeland for whatever reasons, and it is applied to Evangelical Christians who want people of the Jewish religion to return to Israel in order to hasten the second coming. "Christian Zionism" is also used to describe any Christian support for Israel.The Zionist movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, incorporating the ideas of early thinkers as well as the organization built by Hovevei Tziyon ("lovers of Zion"). I do not know where else in history that we have a people disposed from a land for two thousand years, scattered all over the world, who reconvene through an international movement and regain their homeland. I also can not recall any group suffering the violent and irrational hatred of so many nations as the Jews have. The many decisions from world leaders could have gone much differently if made a few years sooner or later. Jews did not initially support it broadly many prefered assimilation to their country of birth and some felt that the growing socialist movement provided a better answer to anti-Semitism. Even within the Zionist movement political infighting was strong. Yet the worst fears of those seeking a refuge from growing European anti-Semitism did not forsee the scope of the Holocaust, exterminating 6 millions out of the 7 millions Jews in Europe. This emboldened the survivors and motivated just barely enough world sympathy to formulate the creation of the Jewish state. The reaction of the Arabs was neither surprising or unique in the course of developing nations. This shows Zionism not as a righteous holy ordained movement, nor is it a an evil racist colonial movement as the modern Arab media prefers to portray it. It was a politically and diplomatically unique solution to a very serious and unique problem. That the success of the Zionist enterprise has not yet yielded the peace they so desperately seek, makes this work only an introduction, but a valuable source to those seeking to understand the volatile Middle East of the 21st century. There are many more chapters to be written.In 1946 David Ben-Gurion in his testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, he put forward the following paradigm for the Jewsih case "Our case, and I think you have just seen many such cases in Europe, is like that of the Jews who were forcibly expelled from their homes, which were then given to somebody else. Those homes changed hands and then after the Nazi defeat some Jewish owners came back and found their homes ocupied. In many cases they were not allowed to return to their homes. To make it more exact, I shall put it in this way. It is a large building, the building of our family, say fifty rooms. We were expelled from the house, our family was scattered, somebody else took it away and again it changed hands many times, and then we had to come back and we found some five rooms ocuppied by other people, the other rooms destroyed and uninhabitable from neglect. We said to these ocupants "We do not want to remove you, please stay where you are, we are going back into the uninhabitable rooms, we will repair them". And we did repair some of the rooms and resettle them.' The Jewish people returned to their ancient land which was of central importance to their faith and nation. While certain landmarks were of importance to the Christian and Islamic faiths, to only the Jews has Eretz Yisrael in it's entirety been central to their being.The Jews returned with malice to none, and with no intention to 'displace' or 'occupy' anyone, but were confronted with malice by the Arabs and British colonists begrudging the Jews the tiny corner of their ancient land. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and Israel is the home to a very large portion of the Jewish people.To oppose Zionism is to oppose a people's basic freedoms and human rights.