Zionism—What Is It? Why Is It Getting Trashed?

T. Belman. No praise for Zionism can overcome the fact that Zionism is swimming upstream.  When Europe is trashing their culture and opening their doors to embrace millions of Muslims how can anyone make the case for Zionism which goes against the grain.  American Jews also reject Zionism and prefers their progressive values. Herzog and others in Israel are now arguing that Israel should take in Syrian refugees. The left reject the exclusivity of Zionism and prefers to be progressive and universal. Zionism looks selfish. This is a huge problem for Zionists.

By P David Hornik, PJ MEDIA

Among “elite” circles Zionism is a dirty word these days. When American Jewish reggae star Matisyahu was barred from performing at a Spanish music festival, it was on grounds that he was a “Zionist.” It was only after the Spanish government condemned this blatant case of discrimination that the festival reinvited the singer.

Blackballing Zionism, though, is not only a European phenomenon. Republican pollster Frank Luntz has been warning Israel that it is rapidly losing support among Democratic “opinion elites.” Almost half of them, he says, consider Israel a racist country. And as The Times of Israel reports:

Still more drastically, Luntz said the word “Zionism” could play no part in messaging designed to repair relations with US Democrats. There has to be an “end to the [use of the] word Zionism,” he said. “You can’t make the case if you use that word. If you are at Berkeley or Brown and start outlining a Zionist vision, you don’t get to make a case for Israel because they’ve already switched off.”

So, Zionism is that bad?

The term Zionism, of course, comes from the word Zion—which refers to a mountain in Jerusalem and also to the Land of Israel in general. The first words God ever says to Abraham—the first person identifiable as a Jew, then living in what is now Iraq—are: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee….” (Genesis 12:1).

The land—then called Canaan—is, of course, Zion, the Land of Israel. The attachment to Zion is not just “in” the Jewish DNA; it virtually is the Jewish DNA.

Zionism as a political movement began, however, in the 19th century. It was basically an intuition, which kept cropping up among deep-thinking Jews in various parts of Europe, that: European antisemitism remained virulent and incurable; Jews in Europe were in danger; and the only real solution was to return to Zion and establish a Jewish homeland there.

The idea was considered revolutionary, extravagant, even insane. And yet, for the Jews who were gripped by it, it was a powerful force. And in the early 1880s they started coming to Zion, to Ottoman-ruled Palestine, largely from Russia, Romania, and Galicia along with smaller numbers from Yemen. They settled in cities like Jerusalem and Jaffa, but more importantly—and more Zionistically—they founded colonies out in the desolate, barren land and turned them into flourishing farms.

It wasn’t for the fainthearted; malaria, harsh work conditions, and corrupt Ottoman overseers took their toll. But by 1914, just before World War I, there were about 90,000 Jews in Zion who formed a distinct community. This community suffered privation and Ottoman persecution during the war; but by the time it ended in 1918, Great Britain had wrested Palestine from the Turks and, led by a pro-Zionist prime minister and foreign secretary, pronounced itself in favor of a Jewish national home.

No, almost forty years earlier when the Zionists started coming, the land had not been empty; a preexisting Jewish population had been there, and an Arab population. When the Palestinian Arabs realized how serious the British (seemingly) and the Jews were about the Jewish national home, a violent conflict erupted that continues to this day.

Over the next two decades the Jewish population in Zion grew dramatically—and especially after the Nazis gained power and large numbers of German and Austrian Jews started arriving. What was taking shape was the phenomenon now known as the state of Israel—a Hebrew-speaking society with a vibrant Hebrew culture, universities, military forces, and so on. By 1939, at the brink of World War II, the Jewish community in Zion numbered about 400,000. Just at that point, with millions of Jews in Europe desperately needing to flee to it, the British authorities almost totally banned further Jewish immigration.

In November 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish side accepted the offer; the Palestinian and Arab side turned it down flat. The state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948; immediately finding itself at war with invading Arab armies seeking to destroy it, it prevailed in the war.

Zionism, then, was a movement to create a Jewish homeland (as it turned out, a state) in Zion that succeeded. If so, what does Zionism mean today?