Michael Anbar had a really interesting essay on Zionism at Israel Insider that I just noticed, even though it’s several weeks old. It’s still timely. Zionism was not invented in the First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897. " 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). To fully understand the cultural meaning of Zionism, without knowing Jewish history, may not be trivial. Even Theodor Herzl, the founder of the 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.
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!" (Psalm 137) 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 Jewish 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, way before the modern political Zionist movement was even conceived. The 1878 establishment of Petach Tikva, the first "modern" agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel, preceded Herzl's political Zionism by more than a decade.
While modern political Zionism is of secular nature, its origins are deeply rooted in traditional Judaism. The traditional Jewish Passover Seder has ended with "Next year in Jerusalem" probably since the destruction of the Second Temple. Zionism is a characteristic manifestation of Jewish culture and not a political movement to solve the "Jewish problem." Zionism is definitely not looking for territory to settle displaced Jews, as claimed by the Arabs and even by some socialist Israeli "modern historians".
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There is just one kind of true Zionism imbedded in Jewish national culture. Zionism does mandate sovereignty over the Land of Israel, the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, including Jerusalem its capital. In any political settlement, the Palestinian Arabs and Arabs in the neighboring countries must recognize the Land of Israel as the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, with Jerusalem as its capital. This is what true Zionism is all about.
The creation of a demilitarized independent Arab state in parts of the Land of Israel, in order to alleviate conflicts between Arabs and Jews, is not in variance with Zionism, as long as Jews have the right to live anywhere within the Arab state as its citizens, just like Israeli Arabs have now the right to live anywhere within the Jewish state. Although there are those who would vehemently disagree with Anbar’s entire premise, I think he makes a good case. His last analogy stumbles, though, unless his intention is to limit residence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to those Jews who already live there. But I don’t necessarily see the need for that particular balance. Most Arabs have not spent the last 2,000 years saying “Next year in Acre†or weeping at the memory of Jaffa. And those few who have spent the last 54 years doing so have no more claim to my sympathies than those Egyptian Jews who were expelled from Cairo and Alexandria, or those Syrian Jews who fled Aleppo, or those Iraqi Jews who escaped from Baghdad.
