What is CONTEMPORARY ZIONISM?

For nearly two thousand years of exile the Jewish people suffered terrible persecution at the hands of their host governments and peoples. In Arab/Islamic countries in both Africa and the lands of the east, Jews were relegated to second class status (Dhimmi in Arabic) where they were often victims of massacres and institutional (legal) humiliation.

In Ethiopia, Jews were designated landless foreigners (Falasha in Ge’ez), and suffered innumerable genocides, enslavements, and forced Baptisms. In Europe, Jews were hounded as Semitic foreigners for their Hebrew faith, culture, and appearance. Pogroms (massacres) in Europe were a regular occurrence, and until the Emancipation movement in the 18th century, most Jews throughout Western Europe were legally confined to Ghettos, prevented from holding certain jobs and also from owning land. Informed by the spirit of the 19th century rise of nationalism in Europe, a number of Jewish spiritual leaders and intellectuals responded to global anti-Semitism and the degraded and at-risk state of the Jewish people by advocating a return to their ancestral homeland: Zion.

In the 1840-60s Rabbis Yehudah Alkalai, Tzvi Hersch Kalischer, and Moshe Hess laid the ideological framework for motivating a mass return to Zion for the children of Israel in exile in based in both religious, socialist, and nationalist philosophical underpinnings.

Influenced by the teachings of Rabbi Alkalai and after witnessing French society (the birthplace of the Emancipation) both devolve and relapse into vicious anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, Binyamin Ze’ev (Theodor) Herzl wrote the “Jewish State” and began to rally Jewish leaders around the notion of a Hebrew Homeland as a solution to global anti-Semitism. Fourteen years earlier, after experiencing savage pogroms in Russia, Leon Pinsker likewise came to the conclusion that the answer to perpetual Jewish suffering in Europe was a Jewish return to national consciousness and self-determination. That Hebrew freedom can only be achieved through our own efforts; “auto-emancipation.”

The World Zionist Organization was established in 1897 at the First World Zionist Congress where Jewish leaders set out the movement’s short term goals in accomplishing a return to the Jewish people’s ancestral and indigenous homeland, as well as re-establishing Hebrew sovereignty there.

Jews fleeing from a pogrom in Europe. The Holocaust, while unprecedented in its speed and scale, was only the most recent genocide suffered by the Israelites in Europe. From the Spanish Inquisition to the hundreds of expulsions and pogroms, to the Cossack Massacre, even before the Holocaust began Jabotinsky and other Zionist thinkers knew that the Jewish wandering in Europe needed to end for the very safety and survival of the children of Israel.