The Land of Israel and the State of Israel 
 

The primary element of commonality that has brought Jews together in heart, and now in body, is the promise of the Land.

 
  Zionism and the Bible 
 

Jews are a nation defined by their religion.  This concept is unique in today’s world.  However, it was common in the ancient world.  The Land of Israel is an integral part of the Jewish faith.  It is the hub around which the Jewish religion revolves.  Judaism without the Land of Israel and Jerusalem, it capital, is like a body without a heart.  Deeply ingrained in Jewish culture is the craving of Jews to regain sovereignty over Jerusalem (Zion is one of the names of Jerusalem) their ancient capital, and over the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people. This is true meaning of “Zionism”.  A political movement established by the turn of the 20th Century, aimed to meet this goal, has adopted this term as its name – the Zionist Movement.  

 

For Jewish adherents Zionism is a direct consequence of God’s explicit promise of the Land. In His reiterated Covenant with Abraham God states:

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.  (Genesis 17:7,8) 

 

The most extreme punishment with which the ancient Israelites were threatened exile from the land:

Therefore this is what the LORD says:… " Your land will be measured and divided up, and you yourself will die in an impure country. And Israel will certainly go into exile, away from their native land. (Amos 7:17)

 

Significantly, the very prophets who threaten the Jews with this fate also promise that God will restore them to Israel. An example of this is

Amos who prophesied:

I will bring back the captives of My people Israel; They shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; They shall plant vineyards and drink wine from them; They shall also make gardens and eat fruit from them. I will plant them in their land, And no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them," Says the LORD your God. (Amos 9:14,15).  

 

In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet of the Babylonian Jewish exile, we read:

And the nations will know that the people of Israel went into exile for their sin, because they were unfaithful to me… Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will now bring Jacob back from captivity and will have compassion on all the people of Israel, and I will be zealous for my holy name.  They will forget their shame and all the unfaithfulness they showed toward me when they lived in safety in their land with no one to make them afraid.  When I have brought them back from the nations and have gathered them from the countries of their enemies, I will show myself holy through them in the sight of many nations. Then they will know that I am the LORD their God, for though I sent them into exile among the nations, I will gather them to their own land, not leaving any behind.  I will no longer hide my face from them, for I will pour out my Spirit on the house of Israel, declares the Sovereign LORD.  (Ezekiel 39:23-29)

 
Different Face of Zionism
 

As manifested in these biblical prophetic writings, Zionism is obviously an intrinsic part of Judaism. To be anti-Zionist amounts, therefore, to be anti-Jewish, i.e., Judeophobic or anti-Semitic.  Yet anti-Zionism is not limited to hateful non-Jews, Muslims, anti-religious atheists as well as “liberal” and nominal Christians. There are also Jewish anti-Zionists. The most outspoken among them are atheistic anti-religious and anti-nationalistic Marxists and socialistic Universalists who defy Judaism and Jewish nationalism, and who unfortunately constitute a sizable political bloc in Israel. For them “Zionism” is a dirty word or at best an obsolete concept.   

 

Unique among the Jewish anti-Zionists are members of the minute ultra-orthodox Jewish sect in Jerusalem, which was referred to above, who regard Zionism as a secular political movement. These people seem not to understand what the whole fuss is all about.  Since they live in Jerusalem for generations, they are fulfilling the ancient Judaic commandment of living in the Land of Israel; already Rabbi Eleazar ben Shammua stated in Sifrei, the Midrash on Deuteronomy (2nd Century): “Residence in the land of Israel is equivalent to all commandments in the Torah.” 

 

So who needs “Zionism”? These ultra-orthodox Jews do not care about Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel; this they leave to the Days of the Messiah at the End of Days... Arafat, the sly Arab politician, who understands the political value of any anti-Zionist Jews, has been supporting them financially with handsome “donations” of tens of thousands of Dollars, as has been revealed in recently publicized documents seized in Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. 

 
An ancient Passion for the Promised Land, their Homeland
 

In brief, Zionism was not invented in the First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897. Psalm 137 “Besides the streams of Babylon we sat and wept at the memory of Zion … Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither, may I never speak again, if I forget you!” is a twenty-five hundred years old Zionist expression. Nehemiah, who came to Jerusalem about 440 BCE, giving up a high position in the Persian court, was a Zionist and so was Hillel who emigrated from Mesopotamia four hundred years later. So was Judah Halevi, the philosopher-poet who wrote:

 

 “My heart is in the East and I am in the depths of the West… How can I fulfill the pledges and vows, when Zion is in the power of Edom and I am in the fetters of Arabia? It will be nothing for me to leave all the goodness of Spain. So good it will be to see the dust of the ruined sanctuary.”

 

Halevi immigrated to Israel in 1141 AD. The hundreds of Rabbis who immigrated to Israel in 1211, followed by Nahmanides is 1267, were all Zionists. And so were hundreds of other Jewish spiritual leaders and scholars and thousands of their followers who came to the Land of Israel over hundreds of years, long before the modern political Zionist movement was even conceived.  

 

The 1878 establishment of Petah Tikvah, the first “modern” agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel, later nicknamed “the mother of the settlements,” preceded Herzl’s political Zionism by more than a decade.  [Petah Tikvah is a sizable city today, northeast of Tel Aviv] The incipient Zionist movement was called in those days “Hov’vei Zion” (“those who love Zion”). Many early Zionists, until the end of the 19th Century, were simply pious, nonpolitical, religious Jews who felt they could best practice their faith in the Land of Zion. Some went primarily to pray, to study their religious books, and to await the arrival of the Messiah. Politics played little role in their thinking. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, Zionism came to have a political meaning:  Jews were members of a nation who struggled to have their own state.

 

Zionism is not a political movement aimed at establishing a homeland for homeless Jews.  It is not setting up a Jewish “reservation”, no matter on which continent (Grand Island, Uganda, or Tasmania). Even Theodore Herzl, the founder of the political Zionist movement, who came from a secular assimilatory background and was moved by the urgent need to find a home for Eastern European Jewish refugees, did not understand this early on. It became clear to him only when he needed popular Jewish support for his new movement. This is a very important point to remember because the enemies of Israel, especially academic socialists, are repeatedly claiming that the goal of Zionism was to find a home for European refugees of the Holocaust and to achieve this those Jews expelled the “poor,” native “Palestinian Arabs.” This is one of the “Big Lies” of the Arabs (the term Big Lie, often attributed to Goebbels the Nazi Minister of Information, generally means big, outrageous, ones that are so outlandish that people accept them as truths, while petty lies are more likely to be questioned). The fact is that Israel had absorbed ten times more Jewish refugees from Asian and North African Arab countries (about 800,000) than European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. 

 

Zionism and Messianism

 

There is a conceptual connection between Zionism, the desire of Jews to live in the Holy Land under Jewish sovereignty, and the concept of the Messiah, the anointed ideal Davidic king, who would rule over the Jews in their independent homeland. A longing for the Messiah existed in Judaism since the abolishment of the Davidic dynasty in the sixth Century BC. This yearning was, however, significantly augmented during the direct Roman rule of Judea after the death of Herod the Great (the father of Herod of the New Testament), when Judea lost its political independence utterly.  According to Josephus, there were during that period several charismatic Jews who were executed by the Romans guilty of sedition, for having been regarded by the people as the legendary anointed one. The Romans most probably regarded Jesus as another Jewish messiah – a Jew regarded by the masses as the legendary Davidic king. Hence we read in Matthew:

Meanwhile Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, "Are you the king of the Jews?" "Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied…. and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. "Hail, king of the Jews! … " they said. … Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.  (Matt 27:11, 28, 37)

 

At least from the standpoint of the Romans, Christianity seemed to have emerged as a political movement of Jewish masses, conceptually related to current political Zionism. Actually, Jewish leftists often refer to the observant Jews who currently live in the new towns and villages in Judea and Samaria as “messianic Jews.” In their eyes Jewish “Messianism” is a dirty, or at least obsolete word, just like “Zionism,” since these words express religion and nationalism, respectively. 

 

Going back to the Prophets, we read in the book of Zechariah who lived after the return of the exiles from Babylon:

This is what the LORD says: "I will return to Zion and dwell in Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the City of Truth, and the mountain of the LORD Almighty will be called the Holy Mountain."  This is what the LORD Almighty says: "Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with cane in hand because of his age.  The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there. (Zechariah 8:3-5)

On your excursion you will see the fulfillment of this Zionist prophecy. Zechariah then prophesied:

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, … He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the land. (Zechariah 9:9,10)

Here Zechariah expresses explicitly his messianic hopes for days to come.

 

Founding Fathers of Modern Political Zionism

 

Theodore Herzl (1860-1904):  In 1897, the Jewish world was electrified by the news of the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, when Theodore Herzl gave Zionism a “new face.”  While serving as the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper from 1890 to 1895, Herzl - an assimilated Jew of minimal Jewish commitment- was aroused by the increase of anti-Semitism in “liberal” France.  The “Dreyfus Case”- the trial and the public demand for “Death to the Jew”- prompted Herzl to draw the conclusion that the only feasible solution to the Jewish problem was a mass exodus of Jews from the countries of their torment and resettlement in a land of their own.  Then he discovered the Jewish tradition of Zionism and devoted the remainder of his life to the development and implementation of political Zionism starting with that congress in Basel.

 

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922): Ben Yehuda spearheaded the momentum for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. After immigrating to the Land of Israel in 1881, sixteen years before the First Zionist Congress, he pioneered Hebrew usage in home and school, coined thousands of new words, established two Hebrew language periodicals, co-initiated the Hebrew Language Committee (1890) and compiled several volumes of a 17-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, which was begun in 1910 and completed by his second wife and son in 1959.  One can see that the resurrection of Jewish culture in Israel by making the Hebrew language the daily language of the land, preceded the establishment of political Zionism, which eventually resulted in the establishment of the internationally recognized State of Israel.

 

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940): Historian, author and politician, and founder of a major faction of the Zionist movement that later evolved into the Likud party, had an incredible premonition or an outstanding historical insight of the impending Holocaust. He predicted this more than twenty years before it happened. Jabotinsky urged the mass emigration of Polish Jewry to Palestine (under the British Mandate in those days).

 

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952): Biochemist and politician, the first president of the State of Israel. Weizmann's scientific assistance to the Allied forces in World War I brought him into close contact with British leaders, enabling him to play a key role in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917 ­­ in which Britain committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. He laid the foundation stone of the Hebrew University and of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, later to become the Weizmann Institute, a driving force behind Israel's scientific research. In 1937, he made his home in Rehovot. Weizmann led the Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference at Versailles, and in 1920 became the president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and served as it president during the critical period 1935-1946. With the declaration of the State of Israel, Weizmann was chosen to serve as the first President of Israel. This role he filled until his death in 1952.

David Ben Gurion (1886 - 1973):  Having led the struggle to establish the State of Israel, Ben-Gurion became in May 1948 Prime Minister and Defense Minister. As a resolute Premier, he oversaw the establishment of the state's institutions, including the apolitical national IDF, after liquidating the political militias. He presided over various national projects aimed at the rapid development of the country and its population. In particular, he called for pioneering settlement in outlying areas, especially in the Negev. In late 1953, Ben-Gurion left the government and retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev. He returned to political life, after the Knesset elections in 1955, assuming the post of Defense Minister and later the premiership until his final retirement in 1963.

 

Is Zionism passé today?

 

Since the Jewish people have now an Internationally recognized state, though without Arab recognition, Herzl’s goal has been achieved. Is therefore political Zionism a thing of the past as leftist Israeli politicians and academician repeatedly claim?  Are therefore the World Zionist Organizations (WZO) and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) without a mission?  Are Zionists political dinosaurs? The answer is a definite NO! For one, as long as Israel is in existential danger, because the Arabs, based on Islamic religious premises, refuse to recognize the historical rights of the Jewish nation to their homeland, the State of Israel has not fully reached its Zionist goals. History seems to repeat itself. We read in the autobiography of Nehemiah:

All of them conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause a disturbance in it….  Our enemies said, "They will not know or see until we come among them, kill them and put a stop to the work. [cf. current Arab terrorism!] When the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times, "They will come up against us from every place where you may turn," then I stationed men in the lowest parts of the space behind the wall, the exposed places, and I stationed the people in families with their swords, spears and bows. When I saw their fear, I rose and spoke to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people: "Do not be afraid of them; remember the Lord who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives and your houses."….  From that day on, half of my contingent carried on the work while half of them held the spears, the shields, the bows and the breastplates; and the captains were behind the whole house of Judah.  Those who were rebuilding the wall and those who carried burdens took their load with one hand doing the work and the other holding a weapon.  As for the builders, each wore his sword girded at his side as he built, while the trumpeter stood near me.    I said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, "The work is great and extensive, and we are separated on the wall far from one another.  "At whatever place you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there. Our God will fight for us."  So we carried on the work with half of them holding spears from dawn until the stars appeared.  At that time I also said to the people, "Let each man with his servant spend the night within Jerusalem so that they may be a guard for us by night and a laborer by day." So neither I, my brothers, my contingent, nor the men of the guard who followed me, none of us removed our clothes, each took his weapon even to the water. (Nehemiah 4:8 – 17)

 

Does this not sound very familiar? When you visit the Israeli defense fence, please reread this 2500-year old passage. From the days of Nehemiah who layed the foundations for a resurrected independent Jerusalem that was in danger of being engulfed into a predominantly non-Jewish “binational” state (to use modern lingo), it took another 200 years until the Persian and then Greek-Egyptian province of Jahud became politically independent Judea after the Hashmonean revolt. Throughout the whole period of the Second Temple 520 BC to 70 AD Judea was dependent on the material and political support of the Babylonian and Egyptian Jewry. Zionism was at work then just as it is today. Zionism in the Jewish diaspora has always been and still is an integral essential part of global Judaism. As stated earlier, Nehemiah, whose autobiographical account we just read, was a genuine great Persian Zionist.  Nehemiah can be counted together with the founding fathers of modern political Zionism, we just discussed.  

 

Certain Israeli anti-religious intellectual atheists who wish to forget the historical process that led to the establishment of the Jewish state have created the term “post-Zionism”. Since that process is founded in Jewish faith it is not anymore “politically correct.

 

Zionism and colonialism

 

In your future debates on campus you will use the information gathered from this booklet and other writings as well as your personal observations from your trip, to defend the concept and premises of Zionism.  Forgetting the absurdity of the notorious “Zionism = racism,” you may still have to defend the “Zionism = Colonialism” equation. To address this argument let me extract passages form Dr. Anbar’s essay “We are not Colonialists” that was included in his book “Israel and its Future.” 

There is nothing in common between historic colonialism or even “neocolonialism” and the resettlement of the Land of Israel by Jews following the Zionist ideology. The Britannica defines colonialism as follows: “A political-economic phenomenon beginning about the year 1500 whereby various European nations discovered, conquered, settled, and exploited large areas of the world.” There are five characteristic elements in European colonialism:

 

1.  All colonial powers were motivated and driven by material profits to the mother country. Material gain could be achieved either by plundering the local treasures or by exploitation of local natural resources (including labor) and transferring them to the mother country, or by opening captive markets for products of the colonizing country.

2.  Conquest of colonies by military force; this was typical of traditional European colonialism (“gunboat diplomacy”).

3.  Maintaining the rule of the colonizing power over the local population by garrisons (i.e., revolving military units) generally under the command of colonial military governors.

4.   Imposing the culture of the colonizing power (i.e., language, religion, legal system, etc.) on the local native population, generally by force.

5.   Export of surplus or undesirable populations of the colonizing power to certain colonial territories (e.g., Libya, Algeria, Australia).

 

As a result of the perpetual yearning of the Jewish people for the Land of Israel, Jewish communities existed there practically continuously since the destruction of the Second Temple to date, notwithstanding its destroyed or occupied capital. Obviously, there were Jewish communities in that land earlier. They were there since the emergence of the Judaic nation with its unique culture, about thirteen hundred years before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. The presence of Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Christian Crusaders and Muslim Ottomans in their homeland, did not prevent Jews from maintaining their presence their homeland.  It certainly did not reduce their aspiration to regain possession of their land and rebuild their ancient capital.

 

In the twentieth Century, those aspirations evolved from spiritual to political. The immigration of thousands of individual Jews, who followed the modern Zionist ideology, to the Land of Israel since the 1880’s, led to the establishment of a politically independent Jewish state in 1948 and to the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967.

 

Now where is the analogy with colonialism? The Jews who immigrated to the Land of Israel over the millennia never represented an alien colonizing power. French Jews who immigrated to the Land of Israel did not do this for the sake of France; Russian Jews did not represent the colonial ambitions of Russia; German Jews did not have the economic welfare of Germany in mind, and so on. The only remote analogy of the establishment of peaceful settlements (called colonies in those days) in another country by a persecuted minority is that of the Pilgrims in 1620; but even they had no historical claims to the land they made their new home.

 

Moreover, Jewish immigrants throughout the centuries did not grab land by force; they purchased it. Only the brutal War of Survival of 1948, which was launched by the Arabs, changed this trend, forcing the Israelis to confiscate Arab land in order to maintain their survival in a hostile region. Jews obviously did not plunder their own homeland for the benefit of any foreign colonial power. They did not impose Judaism on the local Arab population. The current practice of the Hebrew language by many Arabs is a matter of convenience for those who wish to maintain ties with the technologically advanced Israeli economy. Even in terms of globalization, the State of Israel is not a domineering force, certainly not when it comes to the local Arabs.

 

So where in the world did Israeli Jews practice colonialism in any sense? This is a myth disseminated by the same Arabs who claim that the existence of the Jewish temple in their ancient capital is a Zionist myth. My only remaining question is: Why do some Americans and even some Jews buy these incredible Arab claims?

 

Zionism and Christianity

 

Zionism is an integral part of Christianity as it is part of Judaism. To quote Michael J. Pragai who says it all:

Christianity without the Holy Land is unthinkable. Whether its roots are theological, historical, cultural, moral or geographic, they have one central source – the Holy Land, the historic Roman province of Palestine, the biblical land of Canaan, the land of the prophets and of Jesus the Nazarene, the land of the Hebrew patriarchs, the land that today is Israel. It was here, in this small, well-defined spot in the Roman Empire, the semi-autonomous province of Palestine, within the overwhelmingly Jewish population of that country, that the Christian faith had its beginnings.

 

Three or four hundred years later, in the third and fourth centuries, Christianity had spread beyond what – much later – was to become known as the Holy Land. But the land of Palestine, and Jerusalem at its centre, were still the geographic and spiritual foci of the entire Christian world. And although Christianity became a world religion with central authority in Rome, the Holy Land and Jerusalem have always maintained a very special place in the heart, mind and emotions of Christians everywhere and at all times.

 

The concrete link which has maintained that interest and turned it into a deep personal attachment to the Land, is and has always been, the Bible – the Holy Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testaments. They are the spiritual and cultural orbit within which Jesus of Nazareth moved and within which he constructed his view of the world around him, just as his contemporaries, Jews all of them, did at the time, and just as Jews have always done, wherever they have lived and whatever have been the circumstances of their clinging to life and to survival. (Michael J. Pragai, Faith and Fulfillment, Christians and the Return to the Promised Land, Vallentine Mitchell, 1985)

 

(to continue)