What is Zionism?
Israel has always played a central role in culture and religion of the Jewish people. The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is over 3,000 years old. In ancient times, the Hebrew nation grew into a civilization with thriving political, cultural, and religious institutions steeped in the values of Judaism in the Land of Israel. The Hebrews established the Dynasty of David, built the Holy Temple, and wrote the canonical texts of Judaism in the Land.
In 135 C.E., Shimon Bar-Kokhba led a revolt against the Roman Empire which was occupying Israel at that time. The Romans squashed the resistance and exiled the Jewish people from their homeland. The Romans renamed the region Palaestina to wipe out the memory of the Jewish kingdom. While a small Jewish community remained in the land, most were forced abroad, and the Diaspora had begun. Jews in the Diaspora have had a consistent desire to return to the Land of Israel from then until today. They ask for the return to their homeland in each of their three daily prayers; they pray facing Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest city; and approximately half of their 613 commandments can only be fulfilled while in the Land of Israel.
There has been a consistent Jewish presence in the land since ancient times, at times larger and at times smaller. In the mid-1800s, Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, then under Ottoman rule, began to increase, and by 1864 Jews were once again the majority in their historic capital, Jerusalem. The rampant European anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century stressed the need for the Jewish people to return to their homeland and to establish a modern political Jewish state. Rallied by Theodor Herzl, the most influential Zionist leader of his day, Diaspora Jews began to turn dreams of a return to Zion into action. Successive waves of immigration brought hundreds of thousands of Jews back into the land. Pioneers from both Europe and the Middle-East purchased land and established settlements.
During the First World War, the Allies defeated the Ottoman Empire, and the Land of Israel fell into British control. In 1922, the League of Nations, recognizing the Jewish historical connection to the land, unanimously approved the Mandate for Palestine, which designated the entire region of Palestine, including Transjordan, as belonging to a future Jewish state. This solidified the Jewish historical rights to the land into legal right under international law. They entrusted the British to carry out this Mandate: to encourage and facilitate Jewish immigration and development of an autonomous Jewish political body. (The British later removed Transjordan from the Mandate and created and Arab state there, leaving only the land in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for the Jews.)
In the following decades, the Jewish establishment in the Land of Israel continued to grow and develop. On May 14, 1948, the day before the British Mandate was due to transfer to United Nations trusteeship, the State of Israel officially declared its independence and was recognized by many countries. Israel granted citizenship and equal rights to all Arabs living within its borders, and extended its hand in peace to its Arab neighbors. The surrounding Arab countries, however, did not recognize the young Jewish state, and immediately after its declaration of independence, Israel was attacked by Palestinian Arab militias and Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon with expressed intent of wiping out the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the creation of the state sparked increased antisemetism throughout the Arab world and between 1948 and 1951 Middle Eastern Jews along with Jewish refugees from Europe accounted for 700,000 new immigrants. By 1949, Israel proved victorious over the invading Arab armies, beginning the fulfillment of the two thousand year old Jewish hope to once again be a free nation in the Land of Israel.
